By Joi-Marie McKenzie
Jim Totten walks into City Journey’s workroom wearing construction boots. His shirt is tucked into his teal uniform. It’s important to keep your shirt tucked in, he says, so it won’t get caught in a saw.
The workshop has a particular smell — a dusty mix of American Black Walnut, Mahogany and Myrtle. Totten, who is 48, prefers to work with solid woods. They’re the sturdiest when building dining room tables, chairs and headboards.
He walks to a stack of walnut in the workroom where the trunk of the tree has been sliced into boards. They stand upright, resting against the back wall. This shipment just came in from Groff and Groff Lumber Yard in Pennsylvania.
Behind his black-rimmed glasses, Totten analyzes the wood for knots and cracks. “We like it when it comes in like this,” he says as he rubs his dust-covered hands across the unfinished maple. He guesses that this tree did not survive its 100th birthday.
The wood, he explains, looks very serene. It doesn’t have any knots in it. Some people like the more rustic look, he explains. But most don’t.
Totten takes out his yellow measuring tape to compute how many boards it will take to create a dining room table. To build a 42 by 96 inch table, he’ll need to rough cut the wood against the grain to about 44 by 98 inches. He likes to have extra wood to work with. He can always sand it down later. Then he rips it, or cuts with the grain of the wood to ensure the boards are the correct length.
Totten turns on the planer to demonstrate how he measures a board’s thickness. As he explains, he starts to scream over the roar of the fast-spinning blades of the machine.
“As you ride it through, this can go up and down to set a certain thickness,” he says as he points to the machine.
To know when a board is smooth enough, Totten shares a trick of the trade: “We draw pencil all over it,” he says as he shows off a board covered in pencil. “When the pencil is gone you know you’ve hit your mark.” The board is smooth enough to sand.
Totten learned how to use each of these machines on the job. He took cabinet-making jobs and other furniture-making stints to make ends meet. Now, a foreman, it’s Totten’s job to teach every new guy who walks in how to use the machines and create one-of-a-kind pieces.
For six years, Totten was a third grade teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn Heights. He taught high school math there for another six. Now, instead of teaching children, he makes sure his carpenters don’t sand their fingers off with the edge sander.
“Matt did have to have three stitches a few months ago but no one has ever lost a finger,” he boasts.
With already a half-days work done, Totten will need to enlist the help of three helpers to glue the boards together. He will use a 48-inch clamp to put pressure on the wood to seal the pieces together.
Old work boots hang overhead in the workroom while the other guys sand, saw and cut. Totten has taught them all.
Leave a Reply