Sean C. Morgan
In a case of real-life foreshadowing, Kody Marvin was the Tin Woodman in the Sweet Home High School’s production of the “Wizard of Oz.”
“But he’s got a heart,” said his girlfriend, Naomi Martinez.
And that heart is wrapped up in the woods. After graduating from Sweet Home High School in 1998, Marvin, now 38, quickly went to work setting chokers. Nearly 11 years ago, he decided he needed a hobby, wood working.
Today, in addition to logging, he’s a fine woods craftsman, carefully inlaying designs into tables and fusing blocks of exotic woods into cutting boards, for example. His tables sell for thousands of dollars, and his cutting boards for hundreds.
“My whole life revolves around wood,” he said. “I love working in the woods, coming home and doing my woodworking and being with my family.”
Marvin moved to Sweet Home from Lebanon at age 11. After working a while for Jim Cota, setting chokers, following his graduation, he moved to Alaska to work a couple of times before returning to Sweet Home to settle. Today, he again works for Cota at THI, Inc., as a timber faller.
Marvin’s interest in woodworking began with his son, Kaden, 10.
“When he was born, I was like, I need a hobby,” Marvin said. “I wanted to keep myself occupied and busy.”
He quickly thought about becoming a third-generation slingshot maker, and he started working with wood, producing slingshots for his father and his son.
“I came out from the shed with a big old block of walnut,” Marvin said. He had a scroll saw and a couple of sanders. That was about it for his tools.
“It’s taken me close to 11 years to accumulate what I’ve got.”
When he started, he said, “I had no idea what I was doing.”
A lot of pieces came from a lot of trial and error, he said. He consulted a fine woodworking magazine and followed instructions step by step to make a chair using metal hardware. He followed more magazine projects “and then it got to the point, I didn’t want to build exactly what they’re doing.”
Since then, he’s made everything from boxes, urns and chairs to cutting boards and tables.
He sells a lot of his work through Facebook, word of mouth and through Lumberjocks, a sort of Facebook for woodworkers.
Among his most memorable pieces was an urn commissioned by a Southern Oregon woman through the Lumberjocks site. Her father was a pilot during World War II and the Vietnam War. He is buried in the Arlington National Cemetery, and she requested Marvin make an urn in his honor.
His other work has gone all over the country, and pieces have even found their way to Africa.
“A lot of people just text me or message me,” Marvin said, but he doesn’t do a lot of work that way. “A lot of people are blown away by the prices at first. But do you want Wal-Mart or IKEA?”
He recently sold a table for $4,000. He recently finished one that will sell for $5,000. The tabletop features an inlaid wooden stem and leaves fashioned with zebra wood. The table has no metal hardware. Precise wooden joints hold the table together, which makes it sturdier and more durable.
The process is painstaking. For a table, Marvin uses a machine to plane and level a burl. From there, he goes through the process of measuring and shaping the wood – letting the wood itself dictate the final shape.
He doesn’t take requests too often, not to make items in specific ways, he said. When he does, “I find myself forming wood to do what it doesn’t want to do. I let the wood tell me what it wants to do.”
As his piece nears completion, he creates the inlays. For those, he’ll rough out a drawing of what he wants before the intensive and time-consuming process of digging out the shape, about a quarter-inch deep. He then must measure and cut exactly the pieces that go into the inlay.
The stem and leaves on his recent table probably took him about three days to finish, Marvin said. The table itself took maybe 300 hours to complete.
Knowing how much time it takes, he’s not sure it’s worth it, monetarily, he said, but that’s fine as far as he’s concerned. He just does it for fun.
His woodworking has paid off on the romance front as well. Martinez said she met Marvin because of his woodworking.
“I love it, just the different kinds of wood and everything he can do to it,” she said. She had been talking with a mutual friend about woodworking, who showed Martinez photos. She contacted Marvin through Facebook.
“I enjoy doing it,” Marvin said. “I love doing it. It keeps me out of trouble. It keeps me busy, and it makes me think. Some pieces, you’ve got to put a lot of thought into it (especially with the joinery). I love it. That’s going to be my retirement. When I get old, I’ll just keep woodworking.”