The Gentlemen's Lounge

The chain does not hold oil. The bar delivers it, and the bar is what clogs.

1. Engine off, chain brake on, and let it cool. Wear gloves — a dull-looking chain will still open your hand.
2. Fill the bar-oil reservoir every single time you fill fuel. The two tanks are sized to empty together. If you finish a tank of fuel with bar oil left over, the oiler is not delivering and that is the actual problem.
3. Use proper bar and chain oil. It is deliberately tacky so it clings to a chain moving at sixty feet per second. Motor oil is too thin, flings straight off, and used motor oil adds carcinogens to your garden.
4. Every few tanks, take the bar off. Scrape the groove out with a thin screwdriver or a stiff wire — it packs solid with wet sawdust — and clear the oil holes at the mounting end. Those holes are almost always the blockage.
5. Flip the bar over when you refit it. It wears on whichever rail faces down, and flipping doubles its life for no effort.
6. Test delivery: run the saw at speed with the tip a few inches from a pale stump or a piece of cardboard. Within thirty seconds it should throw a visible line of oil. No line, no cutting.
7. Check tension cold. You should be able to pull the drive links part-way out of the groove but not clear of it. A chain tensioned hot will be too tight when it cools.

Nearly every ruined bar was ruined by a blocked oil hole that took ninety seconds to clear.

Buy it thick, dry it properly, and own a thermometer. The rest is detail.

1. Buy at least an inch and a half thick. A thin steak cannot develop a crust before the middle overcooks, and no technique fixes that.
2. Salt either immediately before it hits the pan, or at least forty minutes ahead — uncovered in the fridge overnight is better still. The dead zone is five to thirty minutes, when the salt has pulled moisture out but not back in, and you are effectively steaming it.
3. Dry the surface with paper towel until it feels tacky. Moisture is the enemy of browning; a wet steak boils before it sears.
4. For a thick cut, reverse sear: low oven around 250°F until the centre is ten to fifteen degrees below target, rest it, then sear in a blazing cast-iron pan for sixty seconds a side.
5. Add butter, garlic and thyme only in the last minute, and baste. Butter added at the start is burnt butter by the end.
6. Pull at 120–125°F for rare, 130–135°F for medium rare, 140°F for medium. Carryover adds a few degrees while it rests.
7. Rest five to ten minutes. Cutting early dumps the juice on the board.
8. Slice against the grain, always, and on a board with a channel.

Poking it with your thumb is a party trick performed by men who own a thermometer and want you to think they don't.

Wood moves for the rest of its life. Design for that first and choose the species second.

1. Hardwood and softwood describe the tree, not the timber. Balsa is a hardwood. Yew is a softwood harder than plenty of hardwoods. If you care about denting, look up the Janka number instead.
2. Wood expands and contracts across the grain with humidity, and effectively not at all along it. A wide tabletop can move a quarter inch across the seasons. Every beginner's cracked panel is this fact, ignored.
3. Design so it can move: floating panels in frames, breadboard ends with elongated screw slots, tabletops fastened with buttons or figure-eights rather than glued to the base.
4. Quartersawn moves roughly half as much as flatsawn and stays flatter. It costs more and it is worth it for doors and wide tops.
5. Paint grade: poplar or pine. Cheap, easy, dents if you look at it.
6. Stain and clear: white oak is hard, affordable and classic. Walnut works beautifully and costs accordingly. Cherry is the pleasure of the group but darkens considerably with light over the first year — build knowing the piece you deliver is not the colour it will end up.
7. Maple is lovely and blotches horribly under stain. Use a conditioner, or dye it, or leave it clear.
8. Outdoors: cedar, teak, or white oak. Never red oak — its pores are open end to end and it will wick water like a bundle of straws.
9. Buy it rough and let it sit in your shop a week or two before milling. Timber acclimatises to your room, not the lumberyard's.

The expensive board is rarely the mistake. The mistake is gluing a wide panel down hard at both ends in August.

Decide in advance what would change your mind. If nothing would, you are not arguing, you are performing.

1. State his position back to him better than he stated it. If he says "yes, that's it exactly," you now own the frame and he is relaxed.
2. Argue against the strongest version of his case. Beating the weak version convinces nobody in the room, least of all him.
3. Concede the small points immediately and out loud. It costs nothing and it buys enormous credit for the one point you actually care about.
4. Make one argument. Not five. Five arguments signal that you don't fully trust any of them, and the room will attack the weakest.
5. Never open with the word "actually."
6. Volume is not evidence. Neither is repetition, speed, or being the last one talking.
7. If you notice you want to win rather than be right, the argument is already over and you are now defending yourself.
8. Let him have the last word. You are playing for the verdict of everyone else at the table, and they will give it to the man who did not need it.

The most persuasive sentence available to any man is "you're right, I hadn't thought of that." It costs almost nothing and it is remembered for years.

When a fire fails it is almost never the wood. It is air, or it is the flue.

1. Open the damper. Confirm it with your eyes, not your memory.
2. If the flue is stone cold it will push smoke back into the room. Roll a sheet of newspaper, light it, and hold it up near the damper for a minute to get the air moving the right way first.
3. Build it top-down: the largest splits on the bottom, medium on top of those, kindling above that, tinder on the very top. It burns downward into itself, needs no poking, and produces far less smoke than the usual pyramid.
4. Use seasoned wood — split and stacked six to twelve months, grey on the ends with visible cracks. Two pieces knocked together should clack, not thud.
5. Leave gaps. A tight stack of perfect wood will smoulder and die because nothing can breathe.
6. Burn hardwood by preference. Resinous softwood lays down creosote in the chimney, which is how houses catch fire in February.
7. Stop poking it.

A man who rearranges a fire every ninety seconds is not tending it. He is interrupting it.

A dull knife is the dangerous one. It needs force, and force is what slips.

1. Understand the two jobs. A honing rod realigns an edge that has rolled over and does not remove metal; a stone removes metal and creates a new edge. Hone often, sharpen rarely.
2. Use a whetstone: around 1000 grit to establish the edge, 4000 or higher to refine it. Soak it if it is a soaking stone.
3. Hold a consistent angle — roughly 15° for Japanese steel, 20° for most Western knives. Two stacked coins under the spine is close enough to start.
4. Work one side only until you can feel a burr along the entire length of the opposite edge. Drag a fingertip across it, never along it.
5. The burr is the whole point. No burr means you have not reached the edge and are simply polishing the side of the blade.
6. Now do the other side until the burr flips over. Then alternate light passes to remove it, and finish on a strop or the back of a leather belt.
7. Test on paper: it should slice cleanly through a held sheet without tearing.
8. Throw away the pull-through carbide gadget. It does not sharpen, it tears metal out of your knife.

Most people who say their knives won't take an edge are lifting the spine on the return stroke without knowing it.

Ninety seconds, one story, and know your last line before you stand up.

1. Stand. Everyone else stays seated. That is how the room knows it has started.
2. Learn your first line and your last line by heart. Improvise everything between them and you will sound natural rather than recited.
3. Tell one specific story. A list of adjectives about what a great guy he is tells the room nothing and could be about anyone.
4. Ninety seconds. Every toast that has ever gone wrong went wrong by going long.
5. Never roast a man who has no right of reply. Nothing about exes, nothing about money, and nothing that happened after one in the morning.
6. Raise your glass on the final line, say his name, and sit down immediately.
7. Do not read it off your phone.
8. Drink afterwards. If you don't drink, raise the glass anyway — the gesture is the toast, not the contents.

The champion pours first and therefore speaks first. This is a burden disguised as a privilege, and he should keep it short.

Cream feeds the leather, wax makes it shine. They are different products doing different jobs.

1. Brush the dirt off first with a horsehair brush, then wipe with a barely damp cloth and let them dry.
2. Work cream polish in with a cloth or dauber, especially into the welt and the creases. Leave it ten minutes and brush it out hard. This is the part that keeps the leather alive.
3. Wax comes after, and only where you want shine: the toe and the heel counter, which are stiffened and hold a mirror.
4. For a mirror toe, wrap a soft cloth tight over two fingers, take up a very little wax and a single drop of water, and work in small circles. Build many thin layers. Thick wax hazes and cracks.
5. Cedar shoe trees the moment you take them off. They absorb the day's moisture and hold the shape while the leather dries.
6. Never wear the same pair two days running. Leather needs a full day to dry out.
7. Rotate three pairs and they will outlast five worn carelessly.

Nobody in the room will be able to say why you look better put together than they do. It is the shoes. It is always the shoes.

The man who loses well is remembered considerably longer than the man who wins badly.

1. Congratulate him within the hour, while it still costs you something. Tomorrow is too late and everyone knows why.
2. Name the specific thing he did well — the waiver claim in week nine, the trade nobody liked at the time. Generic congratulation reads as resentment in a jacket.
3. Do not list your injuries. Every team had injuries, including his.
4. Do not use the word "if" about anything that happened this season.
5. Say one sentence, mean it, and then change the subject yourself. Do not make him change it for you.
6. Go and examine your own decisions later, alone, where the exercise is actually useful.
7. Then buy the man a drink.

Second place is the cruellest finish in the league and there is a pour prescribed for it. Take the pour. Skip the speech.

The soup is not the problem. Your nose is the problem.

1. Open both tins before you start. The pause between them is where men fail, and a man fumbling a ring-pull with a tin of soup already inside him is a man who is about to stop.
2. Fold the lids fully back or take them off the premises. That cut edge is genuinely sharp and you are about to tip it against your mouth at speed.
3. Eat something small an hour beforehand. Not a meal. An empty stomach makes it far harder to keep down, and a full one leaves it nowhere to go.
4. Stand. Standing gives a straighter run than sitting, and sitting gives you time to think about what you are doing.
5. Keep your chin level. Throwing your head back feels athletic and actually narrows your throat — competitive eaters keep the chin down, and they have thought about this more than you have.
6. Breathe out first, then do not breathe in through your nose until it is over. Most of what you believe is taste is smell arriving from the back of your throat. Close that route and you have removed the larger half of the problem.
7. Swallow in long continuous pulls rather than sips. The gag reflex lives at the back of the tongue, so the object is to go past it rather than across it. Contact time is the enemy.
8. If there are solids in it, chew them. This is the single point where speed will genuinely hurt you.
9. Go straight into the second tin. No conferring, no inspecting, no reading the label, no discussion of what is in it.
10. Stay upright for ten minutes afterwards, and take water slowly rather than in one gulp.

The league chooses the flavour and will not be negotiated with. A man haggling over the tin has already conceded the part that actually stung, which is that he finished twelfth.