He started cabinetmaking school in 1957, then made his own wooden planes

A former boatyard worker who came to cabinetmaking late and taught hundreds.

By Made Over Weekend · 5 min read

James Krenov was born on October 31, 1920, in Wellen, a Chukchee village on the Arctic Circle in Siberia. As a small boy he spent almost two years with his grandfather in Shanghai. His mother then took a teaching job that brought the family to remote villages in Alaska, and later they settled in Seattle.

In Seattle he worked at the Jensen Motor Boat yard, a place that built and fixed yachts, and he sailed small boats on Puget Sound. During the Second World War he worked as a Russian interpreter. In 1947 he moved to Sweden, and in 1951 he married Britta.

Furniture came late. A display of cabinetmaking in a Stockholm shop led him to the workshop of Carl Malmsten, and in 1957 he entered Malmsten's two year program. After he finished, he set up a small shop in the basement of his home. One of his commissions was a box for a ceramics collection that belonged to King Gustav of Sweden.

How it was built

Krenov's cabinets were small and careful, often made of pear wood, and built around the grain and color of each board. He wrote five books about his way of working, starting with A Cabinetmaker's Notebook in the 1970s. In 1981 the first class of a new furniture program at College of the Redwoods in Fort Bragg, California, helped finish its building. He taught there until 2002 and mentored hundreds of students.

He made his own hand planes from wood and taught students to make theirs for more than twenty years. He called the plane the cabinetmaker's violin. In his last two years, as his eyesight failed, he kept making planes, working largely by feel. He closed his shop in June 2009 and died on September 9, 2009, at 88.

What it teaches a weekend woodworker

You do not need a perfect shop to work like Krenov. You need one tool that cuts well. Take any hand plane, old or new. Tape a sheet of sandpaper to something truly flat, like a piece of glass or a cast iron table, and rub the sole until the scratch pattern covers it evenly. Then hone the blade on a stone until it is sharp all the way across. Set it for a very thin cut and push it along the edge of a scrap board. When you get a long, thin shaving, you will feel what he meant.

Krenov was born in 1920 and did not start cabinetmaking school until 1957, and he still taught hundreds. Pick one small project for this weekend, a box or a little shelf, and finish it with a plane you tuned yourself.