05/13/2026
BREAKING EDGES
I’ll be hanging these doors soon, and this is the final step before finishing any wooden object before varnishing or painting. The old carpenter who taught me this, Chuck, (more on Chuck later), when I was 14, said that the guys on the painting gang would yell at me if I didn’t “break the edges”, and if course I didn’t know what he meant. Chuck wanted me to round over all the sharp edges on the bookcases we had just built, and indeed, Russel Jones and Frank Gunther, the painters did indeed immediately run their hands over it to check that I’d done a decent job of it when they came to pick it up. I don’t think people do this anymore, but it really helps get a good solid coating on the corners where you need it most. Looks a lot better too.
Chuck, whose last name is lost to me after 47 years, was our lead carpenter when I worked at Dixmont State Hospital in the late 70s. Dixmont was an ancient mental hospital, and it was everything you might imagine it was.
Chuck was German, a pretty nice guy, and Chuck had a scar all the way diagonally across his face. I didn’t notice it at first, I was a kid, and Chuck was an old guy who I didn’t want to stare at, but that scar went from his forehead across one eye over his nose and his other cheek. The sides of it didn’t line up exactly, but it was pretty faded by then so it wasn’t super noticeable. One day I asked Chuck what happened, and he told me how when he was in the army, just out of boot camp, him and his buddies went down to Tijuana, got drunk and got in a knife fight, and Chuck had taken a good slice all across his face. His buddies dragged him back to the base and the dr sewed it up, a little crooked, and there it was, for the rest of his life, crooked like that, and no sandpaper was going to help, but luckily his wife wasn’t on the painting gang and she didn’t care🤭
