The Un-American Woodshop.

That title is both inaccurate and unfair. There is something definitely American in the wholehearted embrace of whizbang technology in Scott Phillips' The American Woodshop. And there is nothing at all unpatriotic about the show or its host. They are both Red-White-and-Blue through and through. But, man, both the show and the host annoy me until the cows come home driving a tricked-out Caddy SUV.

Some of it is born of envy, I happily admit. The man's workshop probably cost three or four times more than my house to build. The woodworking machinery alone probably is worth more than my house right now. There is nothing un-American about envy, either. But what really turns me green is the waste.

I have a rum gut, so it doesn't take much to get me queasy. The way this guy runs through wood is truly American. He takes some beautiful salvaged wood, wood that is a century or more from the tree, and turns it into pure crap. And he just tosses away enough wood to make any other woodworker cry.

On one show he took a 6X6 walnut beam, saved from a demolished 19th Century barn -- (so the real dimensions were almost at the nominal),  and planed it down to four-by. Then what did he do? He chopped it into foot-long lengths, and shaved off the outer half-inch of each block to make the sides and ends for some walnut drawers! And threw away the rest. He couldn't make eight sides from one block? No, of course not. That would be both economical and sensible. That's pretty bad, isn't it? Don't get your bowel strangulated. There's worse. How did he make the drawers? Dovetails perhaps? Box joints? Nope. Super Glue.

Speaking of dovetails. The gauge of a workman's skill is his dovetails. That's one of the maxims of woodworking. They print it on T-shirts. So, it's practically a tenet. You know that Scott Phillips is about to sin against it with all his might whenever he recites it religiously. Craftsmen make dovetails with a saw and chisels. Some do it by eye, others do the layout with a bevel and square. I'm no master carpenter. My dovetails always have irregularities, and sometime even a gap that needs to be filled with a sliver of wood. But they are honest, hand-made, workmanlike dovetails. Scott Phillips does them with a thousand dollar jig and a power router. The only skill involved in making his dovetails is in locking down the wood in the jig.

Give me Roy Underhill any day. He might be a fundamentalist, but his work is authentic, in every sense.