Fred Bauer threatens to retire from his finished carpentry shop in northeastern Ann Arbor but at the opening bell the following day he's in the shop stoking the pot-belly stove.

"You don't have to be smart to do what I do," Fred states, pointing to several on-going projects that nearly surround him. "You just have to know what the hell you are doing!"

A month ago the frank-speaking German had his first shop accident with a saw in his 60 years in business. He lost just a small tip of his left-hand thumb but beside the pain, it was like a loyal dog, for an inexplicable reason, suddenly bitting him.

Just down Plymouth Road from Fred's shop in the hamlet of Dixboro, another love affair with nature's wood evolved over the years. Arthur Christian Reiff- who built his house and his shop next-door- possessed the same God-given talent that Fred enjoys. He passed away in 1984.

Grandpa Reiff was blessed with two inherent qualities in custom wood working. Show him a three-dimensional photograph of a piece of furniture and he would custom build it using the photo for reference. And Grandpa had the unique talent to modify or custom build shop equipment to better answer a need. For instance, he fashioned a wood frame for his sander that lowered from the ceiling (rather than from below) to sand long planks of wood.

"My son, Robert, showed me a beautiful picture out of a magazine of a stunning settee that he and Dorothy (Robert's wife) asked me to build it for them. Of course, he happened to mention the settee in the photograph was too wide for a space in their home. It was to be narrower than depicted," Grandpa Reiff recalled.

Many wood craftsmen would walk away from such a challenge especially without any plans to follow but not Grandpa Reiff. And if the customer "modifes" the dimensions that don't exist, it doesn't seem to faze the veteran woodworker. "I finished the settee, it fit in the space they had planned and both my son and Dorothy felt it was lovely!" Grandpa exclaimed proudly.

Other ambitious projects he completed was the building of the cabinetry for three pipe organs, including precise openings for the stops.

Fred Bauer also built pieces of furniture minus any formal plans but he feels his niche is in repair.

"A young fella came into the shop earlier this month with an antique chair that someone had damaged when they sat in it. A leg of the chair was fractured in two places. I told him the leg would have to be replaced," Fred said.

"He was heart-broken because he thought the new leg would not resemble the detail of the fractured leg. When he came to pick it up, he and his wife both marveled at the repaired chair since it appeared exactly as it did before it was fractured."

>"Yeah, old Freddy can still surprise a few people with what I can do with wood," he said proudly.

It's a pleasureable experience to hear the stories that wood craftsmen love to tell. You could not leave Grandpa Reiff 's shop without learning about a slice of his life. Fred Bauer's saga of 84 years is centered in his shop where he learned to measure a person's character as he would a fine piece of wood. - Dale Leslie