Mr. Mower,
I have the perfect chair. Thank you for such great craftmanship. It has been admired by many."
-- Monika from Maryland

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Chuck,

Thank you so much for the time that
you spent with me last Sunday. It was a delight to meet you and to
witness first hand a true craftsman at work. It certainly gave me an
entirely new perspective on working with wood. It was so interesting
to watch you split a piece of oak out of a log, dimension it, and then
draw it down to the correct diameter and shape for a spindle. If you
had told me prior to watching you that this procedure would yield a
finished component for a Windsor chair in a relatively short period of
time, I would have been very skeptical. However it certainly works and
your finished product is not only authentic, but also very beautiful.

My shop, my typical finished products
and my expertise are quite different. Where you work almost entirely
with hand tools, I rely almost entirely on power tools. I have often
marveled at those who, like you, are able to work with and have
mastered hand tools. It seems to me that my finished product would be
enhanced if I had more flexibility to utilize them instead of always
turning to a power tool. Case in point is the way I make drawers. My
joinery for all corners is a dovetail joint, but rather than hand
cutting them, I always use my dovetail jig and a router with a dovetail
bit. To the vast majority of the public, they inspect my drawers and
comment on my "craftsmanship", but to the really trained or
knowledgeable, they would easily be able to distinguish between a
"hand-cut" dovetail joint and my machine-cut dovetail. Unfortunately I
have never learned nor perfected a hand-cut dovetail, so I can not even
offer that to the truly discerning customer...

Thanks again for your time, your
demonstration, your philosophy, your insight and your anecdotes. I
would love to have the opportunity to spend much more time with you.

I look forward to hearing from you,

Dave from Washington

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