Making Things that Mean Something

An introduction to The Bench

THE BENCH | The Brass Resonance

I didn't set out to become someone with a 3D printer.

That's probably how most of these things start — not with a grand vision, but with a problem. A practical, embarrassingly small problem. In my case, it was a pen stand. I had accumulated — collected is maybe too dignified a word — a small pile of fountain pens that deserved better than rolling around on my desk, knocking into ink bottles and living in general chaos. I'd looked at pen stands. They were either too expensive, too flimsy, or designed for a kind of collector I am not.

So I printed one. Gold and gray, because that's what I had loaded.

And here's the thing I didn't expect: making it mattered. Not just having it — making it. There was something that happened in the space between designing a thing and watching it come out layer by layer that I've been sitting with ever since.

But that was just the beginning.

The second project is the one I'm prouder of. I play around with a plethora of stringed instruments — and every one of them takes a different pick. Different thickness, different feel, different purpose. For a long time my picks lived in a small pile of quiet disorder on the corner of my desk, exactly where they didn't belong. I couldn't just download a solution for that. So I designed one — working through the geometry myself, modeling it, adjusting it, printing a test, adjusting again — until I had something that holds every pick in my collection at the right angle, sorted by thickness, ready to grab. It's a small thing. It also represents more iteration and problem-solving than most things I've made in my life.

It sits on my desk next to my cello method book, which feels exactly right.*

And then there's the cross on the wall.

It hangs in our office — which is also our music room, our project room, the place where the printer runs and the instruments live and the ink bottles accumulate. Navy and gold and white, a mandala blooming from the center, layers of detail that only resolved themselves fully once it was finished and on the wall. It watches over all of it. The making and the practicing and the writing. I didn't design it, but I chose it deliberately, and I hung it there deliberately, and I think that matters.

We were made to make. It's not a coincidence that the first thing God does in the opening pages of Scripture is create — and that He made us in that image. Something resonates when I make things that doesn't resonate any other way. Even when the thing is functional and small and printed in gold PLA. Maybe especially then.

That's what I want this space to be about.

The Bench is the newest corner of The Brass Resonance — a place to write about making things, and what making does to a person. It will be practical sometimes. Reflective sometimes. Occasionally theological in ways I didn't plan. It will involve a printer, a Cricut, a growing collection of ink, and at least six different kinds of picks.

Pull up a chair.

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* The instruments live over in The Strings, if you want the full picture.

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