Madeleine Chapman: crafting wood while the world burns

As the editor of The Spinoff for four years, I spent most days solving problems, and I was very good at it. They were brain problems, not physical problems, and execution was the easy part (usually involving deleting a paragraph, changing the tense, making a phone call or typing an email). It was hard work, no doubt about it, but it was also all in my head. And working in a ‘clever’ industry means learning a lot of shortcuts.

Didn’t get the juicy detail you thought you would? Change the angle and pretend it was never the goal. Can’t say something for legal reasons? Delicately select your words and structure to make a point without defaming anyone. Angry reader? A well-crafted email almost always placates them. I learned to write my way out of most problems.

Last November, I left that editor role and moved with my partner to Whangārei. One of the reasons was to get out of our own heads after years spent working ‘clever’ jobs in central Auckland. And it worked. I still write for a living and solve problems within that, but my brain has had a lovely rest, including from the 24/7 news cycle that consumes every editor.

Except now I have a problem that I can’t solve.

Two years ago, I took up woodworking as a hobby because I needed something physical to do that would get me offline. It’s the best decision I ever made and I’ve spent hours in the workshop making picture frames or fixing old stools or designing furniture.  

At the end of last year, right around when I was leaving my job, I bumped into a friend who mentioned in passing that they were looking to buy a selu – a traditional Sāmoan comb with intricate designs, made from a single, thin piece of wood. I immediately dived into the research and found surprisingly little on selu and how they were traditionally crafted. At the time I found no handmade hardwood selu for sale, so I figured I’d make one myself.

And that’s when I came across the simple problem that has utterly stumped me: how to cut a basic shape into thin wood.

Such a simple concept and yet, months later, I’m still figuring it out. I can cut the outer edges easily enough with a saw and chisels. And even the teeth are surprisingly easy to shape with a scroll saw. But those internal cuts have proven impossible, and despite repeated search queries online, I’ve found no solutions. Turns out not many people have needed to cut a triangle into the middle of a thin piece of hardwood.

Just the other day I spent four hours in the workshop trying out more methods. I tried drilling tiny holes into each corner and chiselling out the rest – the wood split with the force of the chisel. I tried drilling bigger holes and filing them into triangles – the wood splintered on the back from the pressure of the drill bit. I tried using a Dremel, which nearly worked but had a brutalist effect where fine cuts are needed.

This thin piece of wood continues to haunt me. If I don’t figure this out, I simply can’t make a selu. There’s no shortcut or workaround or clever wording to get me out of this one. And I’ve never been happier.

I think I know how it could be done – a very tedious and slow process using a scroll saw, which I will attempt next – but the fact that I still cannot figure out how Sāmoans in the late 1800s crafted these combs is thrilling. I’ve found no modern practitioners of traditional selu (although there are some made using a laser cutter, which is a different kind of clever) and no record of tools or materials used back then.

They figured it out, though, and if it takes me the rest of this year to solve my one simple problem, it’ll be a year well spent.