It’s a cloudy morning in front of what used to be the Spa City’s Children’s Museum. Board members, volunteers, and local officials have gathered for the grand opening of the Saratoga Joinery – a place to saw and be seen.
Founder John Haller says getting going took longer than expected.
“It’s gonna be a neat addition to the community. We have a plan, as we’ve learned, everything changes. So, we’re going to listen to what people want and see how we can add value to the community over time. But, we’re open,” said Haller.
Inside the 8,700-square-foot community-centered space, board member Eric Diem explains the layout.
“Basically, the joinery is set up into two rooms – two floors two rooms. This is the power tool room. Upstairs is a classroom, we’ll go up there, and a bench room. Bench room in woodworking parlance is typically hand tools—chisels, planes, hand sanding, less noisy, more zen-like. This is the noise making room,” Said Diem.
The bottom floor is, without a doubt, built to be noisy.
Top-of-the-line table saws, band saws, milling tools, and a jointer, are spaced out across the first floor, connected by a hanging system of vents that vacuum sawdust as it’s made at each station.
With mandatory safety lessons given to each newcomer, and rules and safety checklists hung up throughout the facility, Diem jokes that for each finger lost the joinery would lose dozens of members, so it’s best to avoid any accidents.
“So, table saw injuries account for a majority of injuries in woodworking. So, these are both Sawstops, Sawstops have technology built in, the only one sold in this country, where it’s got flesh-sensing. So, if somebody does hit their finger on it, the blade drops down and gets stopped in a millisecond. So, it’s really phenomenal. So, safety is our number one issue here, we quickly will become unpopular if we’re not safe,” said Diem.
Dave Floyd is a retired elementary school teacher turned joinery volunteer who is decades into his woodworking hobby. Posing with a handmade sign crafted from a cherry tree he cut down during the pandemic, Floyd says there’s value in sharing creative space.
“Oh it’s fantastic. Every time I walk in the door I learn something. You know, one person has a great saying of, ‘there’s not a right way of doing things, there’s different ways of doing things.’ And how I might have cut this is one way, but someone else might say ‘oh I never thought of trying that,’ so every time I walk in the door, something new,” said Floyd.
With a roughly half-a-million-dollar budget for its first year of operation, Haller says, membership fees need to be subsidized.
“This is an expensive place to run, and if we priced memberships to cover our expenses, it would be out of reach of the people we’re trying to attract to this space. So, we want new people, people that don’t have exposure to woodworking to get involved,” explained Haller. “And the second thing is we really want to be a value to the community, so we want to do community projects. The best thing about being a not for profit is we get these amazing people that want to help us out. So, we have just people knocking on the door, people that come in here and they ask, ‘I love this place, how can I help?’”
The joinery is already making a local impact, having signed on to reconstruct the latticework of 65 Phila, a historic downtown home that was nearly demolished.
In addition to increasing memberships and community projects, Haller says he’ll be measuring the long-term success of the joinery by its educational impact.
“We are going to run classes. So, how many classes we can run and the enrollment in classes. So, we hope that we’re gonna have teachers that people love and there’s word of mouth and they have multiple classes so people are going to sign up because they like the teachers. We have a lot of capacity to run classes,” said Haller.
