Saint John’s Abbey formally approves the construction of a new facility to serve as the future home of Saint John’s Abbey Woodworking and Abbey Organ Builders.

The Benedictines have a long tradition in pipe organ building. Learn why Collegeville may be the ideal place to continue this storied craft.

A reading table for the Saint John’s Bible, at home and in place.

Ten months after its launch, here is an update on the Abbey Woodworking Capital Project, The Work of Our Hands.

Read about the next big thing for Abbey Woodworking: the building of a new Woodshop and the incorporation Pasi Organ Builders.

In a time of social distancing, see how the creation of a circular table gives us hope that we will be able to gather again in the not-so-distant future.

After 37 years in at Abbey Woodworking, Michael Roske enters a well-earned retirement. Here is our tribute to a craftsman whose legacy will influence the Shop for decades to come.

Brother Ansgar was not an academic. He never gave a formal lecture or taught a class or published a book. All the same, or perhaps because of it, he was a rare bird in our community. He planted trees.

Saint John’s Abbey Woodworking has supported the arts for years – literally; but, here’s the difference: we do it with wood!

Abbot John Klassen, O.S.B shares a reflection on the spirituality of woodworking.

For the past 160 years, the forests of Saint John’s Abbey have provided our shop with its wood. What are we doing to ensure that these forests stay healthy and are able to provide this resource well into the future?

Every tree has a history. We just happen to know more about the history of some trees than others. Take, for instance, the silver maple that we used for a table crafted in the shop this month.

How many organ pipes does it take to fill a semi-trailer?  By our calculations, roughly 2,687. That’s how many pipes rolled into Collegeville last month in a packed semi-trailer from Roy, Washington (home of Pasi Organ Builders).  These are the pipes destined for the long-awaited Saint John’s pipe organ expansion.

As a shop of experienced craftsmen, Abbey Woodworking is able take on a wide variety of projects: everything from chairs, to doors, to beds, to baseball bats.  Yes, even baseball bats!  We recently uncovered a newspaper article which features Br. Hubert Schneider O.S.B. and Abbey Woodworking’s time as a bat factory for Johnnie baseball.  In this month’s post you will find the article from the Saint Cloud Daily Times, dated May 18, 1945.  Enjoy!

Over the past few months, the Woodshop has been slowly filling up.  Not with the typical chairs or tables, but with organ pipes…enormous, wooden organ pipes!  Ranging in length from 17 to 32 feet and weighing up to 850 pounds, these pipes will provide the foundational notes for the expanded organ in the Saint John’s Abbey and University Church.  

At Saint John’s, Woodworking and Carpentry are two independent departments working out of separate shops.  While the woodworkers craft furniture for campus in the Woodshop, the carpenters typically work on-site constructing frames, pouring concrete, installing fixtures, and making any host of repairs.  However, there is the occasional project that blurs the lines between woodworking and carpentry.  The Music Wall was such a project.

Trends may come and go, but people tend to hold on to good furniture.  Whether it be for its fine craftsmanship, unique design or even sentimental value, you likely have furniture in your own home that you cherish above the rest…pieces that you hope to pass on someday.  This fall, a former student stopped by our shop with such a piece of furniture.

Design is always a factor in furniture making.  So when people ask us, “How do you come up with a good design?” We often joke, “Prayer and fasting.” But to be honest, it comes most often through trial and error; trying new materials, testing ideas, making prototypes and believing in the statement, “I’ll know it, when I see it.”

Early Abbots of Saint John’s may have been concerned about safety had they heard that students were laboring in the Abbey Woodworking Shop.  Not to mention the potential influence that rowdy students might have on impressionable monks! Yet today we have a constant flow of students in and out of the shop between classes.  These students are interested in trading in the rigors of the intellectual life for the opportunity to work with their hands…if only for a few hours at a time.  

While our blog typically focuses on the pieces being crafted at Abbey Woodworking, this month we take a pause to highlight the work being done at another Benedictine woodshop...it just so happens that this woodshop is halfway around the world.