The Friend Who Revolutionized My Thinking

[Music] so [Music] there are some questions that show up on the channel a lot consistently but there aren't many that show up more often than who is the guy in the chair who's the guy smoking the pipe who's your friend is that your dad well we're going to kind of pull back the veil on that a little bit here today and introduce you to my friend ken jordan not my dad but a very good friend how long have we known each other kenny oh it's been about 12 years or so something maybe a little more i got my i got the blacksmith tools 15 years ago and it was about a year after that yeah you came out to see if you had heard that i had them i would say it was probably three years after i met you that i was out here for the first time perhaps maybe 12 years ago and i got my introduction to green and green architecture at the jordan house that's his house which is i will assert and defend to anyone who objects the finest example of green and green architecture north of berkeley california where those of you in berkeley if you're interested could find the thorsen house the northernmost house still standing that was built or designed by charles and henry greene now before we dive into the details of his life and this property i have to explain to you why he's not speaking for himself much it's because six years ago he had a stroke a dandy stroke and it took almost all of his speech for a while before that he would have had no trouble speaking for himself and immediately following the stroke we'll say more about that moving forward but this answers why you don't see him helping me in the videos he would give his right arm to help me in the videos but the stroke already took his right arm which is why he doesn't help me let me show you around this property so the first thing that needed to be built when they started to develop this property with the vision that they had of green and green architecture in a green and green home was the shop because you've got to have a shop to do the kind of work that he knew was going to have to be done so let me just show you what a green and green style workshop looks like [Music] so once ken and elena found each other and found this site it became time to decide and to build and develop the place that they had found to live and the first thing of course that you've got to build when you've determined to build a nice house and you're a carpenter is a shop and it was about my third visit to this site perhaps into this shop that the surroundings here and the details of the of the construction and the quality and the craft and the tools began to revolutionize my thinking about craft this shop and i don't know how familiar you are with shops or what you can pick up from the footage that is in the background here but it just oozes attention to detail i can remember walking in here and seeing this workbench and thinking that i've seen pictures of benches like that and i've read about them but now i have a chance to get my hand on one and that began to change my thinking about allowable tolerances or at least the value of perfect as an allowable tolerance when you can afford it as part of the process of moving up here and you and elena deciding what kind of a house to build what kind of a house had you been intending to build sort of for your long-term residency well i i thought i thought it would be great to build a victorian because it would the woodwork the chance to work the wood ken is as profound an appreciator of wood as anybody i've ever met in fact this property dave van slick says is a shrine to wood and he wanted to build a victorian his bride elena a doctor on the other hand wanted a contemporary house and so the twain shall never meet right except they they combined their taste and their interests and their aesthetic and their flexibility to pick green and green you're standing in a green and green shop right now green and green architectural motifs are everywhere for instance a cloud lift motif shows up everywhere in green and green structures and in the jordan house and the jordan shop there are large and bulky tenons there are dovetails that project and are pillowed there's there's a bulk to the woodwork and a presentation of the wood that is not artificial but rather for instance a scarf joint let me show you this scarf joint stay right there kenny i'm going to show you a scarf joint in the shop that you can't see very well because of the wood that's stored here but in the house you'll be able to see them clearly can you get a look at that nate can you see that how those beams overlap are are mitered together in the ends and held together with a locking tenon that's a gorgeous thing and it is at once an ornament and a structural detail those kinds of things are everywhere let's look back over at this cloud lift motif as we go through this his house look for this element descending or ascending layers in a pleasing proportion this is sort of an oriental element isn't it and charles and henry greene ken tells me developed an appreciation for the orient which they combined in their architecture at the world's fair in the early part of the 20th century and it is part of what enabled them to develop a new architectural style green and green architecture is recognized by the american architectural association as its own style now that's an accomplishment so before we leave the shop to the house i have never had the chance to touch a table like a workbench like this right there's no hardware on these drawers okay there's no hardware on these drawers and there are some of them have hundreds of pounds of tools in them and they operate perfectly smoothly the dovetails on the end the perfection of the the grain on the white oak this little sliding rest you know for joining a board on the edge it's just this is not the top this is a project that he has going but this is why i never intend to build a workbench out of wood because i can't build something like this and i would rather have in my mind what a perfect workbench looks like than build something that is just a weak sauce little sister second cousin to something like this but it's just it's a pleasure to even be close to to something that came from somebody i know that's built like this so i don't want to be over the top here but i'm going to take you into the house and show you where i really began to understand that there was a whole nother level of carpentry and craft that would be accessible if you were willing to invest the time to understand it and to get the skills in your hands to do it and then find somebody who can afford to pay you the money it would take for the time that has to be invested to do it but one of the first things that made me begin to re-examine some of my assumptions was when he pointed out to me that he made this door this door assembly he made all the doors in this house i'm not going to point out any more of them because you'll see them as they go by but this door is jatoba and walnut listen to this can you hear that i don't think i had ever heard anything quite like that but come on in so right away green and green shows up the cloud lift green and green were were um known for the big houses the fancy houses the gamble house the help me out kenny what's the name the thorsen house the blacker house so green and green working up and down the california coast finally got the opportunity to begin to design mansions the gamble house as in proctor and gamble there were other big names early 20th century families who decided that those two brothers were the ones that needed to design their homes and ken acquainted himself with all of those once he and elena decided that green and green was the style this house the jordan house that we're standing in right now has a lot of the elements of the gamble house but these are the elements that repeat kind of wherever you go throughout the world of green and green including stained glass designed by ken embellished by rendered and improved by marion shiel a local stained glass artist there's stained glass in the formal dining room that you'll get a look at designed by elena and so they both have their fingerprints deeply embedded all over this house but they once they had settled on this and once they determined to be true to the style wanted to incorporate many of the native hardwoods of southwestern oregon you're going to see things here that i don't know that anybody has reproduced anywhere else out of the local native hardwoods you know one of the cliches that is as true as any is that imitation is a sincerest form of flattery right and since there is almost nothing new under the sun it is entirely valid to imitate something beautiful this stairway is very it's an accurate reproduction of the stairway system in the gamble house which is the property of the university of southern california open to the public sort of on a museum basis can port over that property absorbed the details bought the books got behind the ribbons got his nose into the crevices and understood as much as he could about the woodwork itself by sort of handling the woodwork itself but look what he's done here so first of all it's not entirely native oregon hardwoods it is oregon black walnut with jatoba what a happy wedding that is look at these book match black walnut panels you've got to go through a lot of lumber even from a local specialty sawmill as a prime example of sort of a circumstance of history at the time that ken and elaine were building this house gary coleman had a business here called all native hardwoods and he was eking a living out of sawing local hardwood logs into high quality local hardwood lumber planing drying providing and he and ken found kindred spirits in each other and ken plagued his life to find these beautiful boards out of what gary was creating and can recognize them and brought them home and look what he's done with them now what am i standing on here kenny this is oregon white oak clear vertical grain white oak quarter sawn up against the black walnut so the combination of the white oak the black walnut the jatoba is you know it's just how do you even describe it can you see how this is layered can you see how this now this center how this center layer is proud perfectly even perfectly radiused i walked into this house and i had no idea previously that anything like this could be done but i'll tell you right now where i'm standing what the real accomplishment is you see this railing it's simple it's clean it's elegant it's black walnut the standards the standoffs are simple clean elegant he did this after his stroke how do you do that with one hand functional on the other hand barely functional though still strong but elena helped him he has learned to craft again at a high level never mind the fact that the stroke darn near took everything so now we're in the dining room this is an english walnut room these panels are english walnut now english walnut around here is even harder to find in significant size than black walnut but ken ferreted it out you see this board this beautiful this beautiful trim board english walnut you can't find an english walnut board clean and straight and nice and figured that's 13 and a half feet long or whatever this is so instead of just putting a butt joint or a beveled joint he put that beautiful scarf joint in here is there any more elegant way to join two boards the answer to that question is no here's the other significant stained glass rendering in the house this one designed by elena rendered by marion scheel this one very nearly died in early premature and violent death this one fell out and was caught is that right it fell into the room yes yeah visualize that you're in here working you're excited to see what your imagination has created when it's rendered by someone who really knows how and it's standing up to be evaluated and it topples into the room but it's caught that who can count that anything but a miracle so anyhow we have english walnut with ebony dowels some of which are missing but ken's still on that he's learned to do that even with with his uh the limitations which are rapidly becoming no limitations at all there are coffered ceilings that are trimmed with that's there's there's myrtle wood isn't that myrtlewood up there kenny no that's more walnut getting over into the sap but highly figured yes who imagined english walnut could be that figured and still straight enough to use all right let's go look at another piece or two but you begin to see why this changed my thinking so this is sort of their white oak living room they're white oak and and masonry living room all right this is another oregon species that happens in other places but can you see this pattern this is called fleck all right and it happens in some species when they are really accurately quarter-sawn when the grain approaches vertical grain configuration which is roughly 90 degrees to the long axis of the board you get this fantastic random impossible to duplicate grain pattern and there's a lot of it in this room because we have white oak in here but have a look at this masonry so ken did the masonry in the entrance into this house and he started the masonry in these fireplaces but understanding that a man's reach can exceed his grasp he pulled back and had two robersons come in roberson's is a big masonry name around here and it was hudsle and his dad and they did this piece of work in two days think of that now i've used gary roberson a lot in my contracting here in in roseburg and the whole robuston clan are top-notch great masons and i don't know if they ever did anything classier than this or not but good job roberson's you ever seen a prettier box than this okay so ken made this did you make that hardware kenny yes yeah including the hardware including the hardware and yeah the box is great but look what it holds did i mention that ken likes tools yes very much ken has a trap line in roseburg four or five antique stores and second hand stores and he checks them regularly with great success and when i got a look at the inside of this chest i never thought about old carpentry tools in the same way yeah since they're pretty nice to get they're pretty nice to get so this pretty cool tool right try to make it after you've built a house like this and you've had a stroke try to make it when you're right-handed but all you can use is your left hand and a little bit of your right hand including the strapping including drilling and countersinking the holes including all of it a caulking mallet from the boat building industry for hundreds of years first one you've ever seen isn't it so just a couple of more details because there's there's no end and perhaps we'll do this again someday and show you some more the details in this beautiful house but this is already a long video and we have a couple more items of really sort of crowning significance about about the rest of his interests and sort of how he's recovered but this is what in any other circumstance would be understood to be a chinese puzzle the way these pieces lace and penetrate and penetrate and penetrate and stop with the cloud lift motif where they need it and the and the beautifully matched species and the fact that these two pieces had to be dyed not stained but died because there was too much sapwood intruding and the color was not consistent and it wasn't pleasing to the jordans and so look what he did you get close to this and you get your hands on it and you think i'm going to go home and bury all my woodworking tools and go to work at home depot because i could never do something like this and i have to content myself with the things that i can do now having said that one of the things that i learned is that a good understanding of allowable tolerances is important if you're going to be able to actually work because the number of people that could afford this is small the fact that ken did all the work it was still hard to afford just because of the time and the labor and the material and and and and and without that capacity to do these things it couldn't be done so i i learned one of the things that i learned is that in a lot of cases my understanding of productivity and tolerances was exactly right but i will always be grateful that i learned that there was a whole next level that i can approach and think about one of the characteristics of green and green properties that are still extant that have been preserved is that they all are surrounded by beautiful gardens a lot of rock work a lot of species a lot of water so once ken and elena nailed down the house once they were in it and it was significantly and substantially finished he turned his attention they turned their attention to the grounds now they didn't know much about about gardens or botany or cultivars or maples or conifers but boy they do now i don't know how long it took them probably about 20 years they've been at it the gardens are now beginning to approach something like maturity there are hundreds of cultivars here i learned that word from ken it speaks to different strains of different plants and prior to his stroke he knew the names of everyone the common name for instance this is a trident maple asher acer help me out ken acer bergerianum and he knew the names formal and common for every one of them this acer bergerianum is about three feet tall on the same day that he planted this tree he planted that acer bergiri on them but he decided they decided that they would turn this into a bonsai a sure brazilian look at it think of it hundreds of tons of rock and terraces all placed by ken and elena with the odd helper now and then but conceived and executed and funded and put in place the evidence of the accomplishment in their conifer gardens is this they visited a lot of conifer gardens in the eastern part of the united states and in europe and once those people became aware of stonehenge as they have named their property now the people from those parts of the world touring the west coast stop in here to get a look at the jordan's gardens they're on the map and for good reason we're in their garage now once the house was done and they lived here for a little while and the gardens were significantly started ken's interest shifted to machine tools machine work he was sick of wood and after a five-minute negotiation elena says they decided that she could park out in the park in the driveway and he could fill the garage with machine tools here's his 25 drill press which he restored to perfection here's a beautiful little shaper which was one of the most recent additions here's a three axis three axis i think milling machine he has lathes he has grinders he has metal saws he turned his attention to machine work and pretty soon machine components started to show up in the house and in the shop and in the crafts and the things that he made for other people after machining that box is checked he became interested in blacksmithing so after the house was built after the gardens were in after the machine tools were in the shop and in the garage now shop and he knew how to use them having become acquainted with some of us who were being sort of either deeply already invested in blacksmithing or being pulled in that direction he was intrigued by and started to dive into blacksmithing himself i was with you cy and i were with you at a blacksmithing conference when you bought this rat hole anvil it's a beauty if you look close you'll see it has very few hammer marks two reasons he's a careful guy with a hammer and he had the stroke we're back to the shop because as i wrap this up i want to explain to you where ken's true accomplishment has happened six years ago he and elena were reading he used to love to read he's got a fine library in there and he's read a lot of them unlike my library but and so they were reading and he looked up and said to elena i can't read and he got up and he went to bed and he woke up having had a stroke a real stroke he could only put two or three words together he couldn't use his right arm he really couldn't walk everything that had been most important to him was gone about two years later he called me up he's starting to get speech back and in his halting voice he let me know that there was a wood lathe coming up that had come up at an auction and he'd bought it and could i bring my truck and my crane and load it up and bring it home and we did nice powermatic lathe didn't work at the time he got an electric electrician friend to fix it we unloaded it with a truck we pulled it up here it was a little tricky we got it in the shop and i thought well that's the end of that and then he starts producing billy clubs like lots of them and they're perfect and he starts producing wooden marlin spikes and he starts producing handles for the antique tools that he's restoring and he just won't take no for an answer now that was at this point probably four years ago but in the intervening four years it's coming back look at this clamp that he's making for our leather worker friend steve harris red hawk maker you've seen his stuff he makes our aprons when ken makes something he makes it including that brass knob including working this including finishing the wood work that he didn't get done in the house 15 years ago when he should have but didn't and it gave me a chance to participate a little bit so i'll just tell you this i'll tell you that if that stroke would have happened to me i would have spent the rest of my life feeling sorry for myself instead of coming back into craft and into productivity and never saying anything about woe is me or self-pity and that that refusal to quit that refusal to feel sorry for himself that refusal to lay down in the road is the true accomplishment of ken jordan thank you for watching and keep up the good work [Music] you

Channel: Essential Craftsman

Views: 656,939

Keywords: anvil, forge, blacksmith, forging, craftsman, mentor, trades, tradesman, career, smith, carpetner, builder, wisdom, workbench, fabricate, tools, tool, tips, trick, hacks, protip, Green and Green, Stroke, Green and Green architecture, woodworking, Green and Green Workshop, woodworking bench, Green and Green motif, tenons, dovetails, scarf joint, cloud motif, architectural style

Id: q8LerObhzlE

Length: 26min 7sec (1567 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/GrotusMaximus]

This entire channel is full of great stuff.

[u/CodeOfKonami]

Essential Craftsman is the mother fucking SHIT.

[u/lathedog]

Props to Ken for getting back up to that level of activity after a stroke - I think most of us would be defeated by that. Good lesson in that.

[u/KillroysGhost]

Essential Craftsman is basically the kind Grandpa of this sub

[u/DunkFunk]

I've been watching this guy's videos for a couple years now and somehow must have missed this one. I also always wondered who the guy smoking a pipe was- now I know. I'll admit I teared up a bit when he introduced him in the beginning segment.

[u/tearfueledkarma]

Kenny is one hell of a wood wizard.. people don't understand how fucking hard some of that is.

[u/asmrhead]

I thought this fit with this subreddit's stated goal ("This subreddit is a celebration of quality and perfection in nuance of skill.") very well.

Scott from the Essential Craftsman channel goes through and appreciates the architectural details and craftsmanship of a beautiful home. It's not a style I would choose personally but it was entertaining seeing someone gush over quality woodworking.

[u/KooterMcGaven]

Goodness I love this video. I live in a town that is growing exponentially and these moderately sized $500K - $750K houses are being built at a very poor quality and just slapped together with little integrity. Seeing this is like the complete other side of the spectrum and it's so refreshing.

[u/NYMoneyz]

Hey Scotty! Fucking live this guys channel he does such a good job of explaining his thought process, while being a fantastic teacher. This guy is living the dream!