Click the link at right to listen to a narrated slideshow of photos detailing the life and work of Kevin Kauffunger.
Making a table and a career
When designing his coffee table, Kevin Kauffunger was guided more by what he wanted to learn than by what he already knew. At 30, with experience in carpentry, cabinetmaking, and millwork, he had a desire to go deeper. “I wanted a Parris Island woodworking experience,” he said, “in a place that would be obsessive about the craft.”
In September of 2005 he drove west from his home in Pittsburgh to Fort Bragg, Calif., a small coastal town several hours north of San Francisco where James Krenov founded the College of the Redwoods program in fine woodworking in 1981. Kauffunger was seeking an immersion experience, a sort of boot camp for craft, and he found it in Ft. Bragg. For nine months he and two dozen other students spent most of their waking hours obsessed with every detail of what were learning and doing at the school. Although Krenov retired from teaching several years ago, Kauffunger found the program completely imbued with his approach to cabinetmaking.
The table pictured above was Kauffunger’s first major project at the school, and he used it as a vehicle for refining hand-tool skills. The fluted Douglas-fir drawer fronts offered a tutorial in planemaking: He custom-made a narrow, Krenov-style wooden plane with a convex sole. By the way, the drawers can be opened on either side of the table. The table also provided a seminar on hand-cut dovetails—100 in all. And the 8/4 plank of Bulgarian walnut for the carcase presented lessons in resawing.
Even after it was done, the table had something to impart. On the drive home from the humid Pacific Northwest, Kauffunger visited bone-dry Zion National Park. When he unpacked the car in Pittsburgh, he found that the table’s flatsawn top had curled up at the edges. Kauffunger accepted the mishap as another piece of his education.
About the artist
As an undergraduate at Penn State, Kauffunger majored in economics-not the sort of degree that typically leads straight to a career in fine furnituremaking. But Kauffunger had always been as interested in creating art and craft as in crunching numbers. After college he spent his 20s doing carpentry, making windows and doors for old houses, building museum exhibits, and doing cabinetwork. Then he began to build furniture and that triggered a desire to learn the finer points of the craft.
Since finishing the program and moving back to Pittsburgh, Kauffunger has been working for a tool company, a job that keeps him on the road much of the time. He currently rents bench space in a cabinet shop and gets there as often as he can. Just recently, he and his girlfriend bought an old house in the heart of the city and acquired with it a two-car garage. That garage will be a shop before you can say James Krenov.
From Fine Woodworking #193
Photo: David Welter
