It starts an hour north of Pittsburgh

We grew up in Mercer County, Pennsylvania — farm fields and old mill towns, about an hour north of the city. Both of us went to Hickory High School. Both of us have been building things since before we were allowed to touch the good tools.

Not a hobby somebody picked up later in life. Just always. Take it apart, work out why it does what it does, put it back together a little better than it was. That was most of our childhood, and neither of us ever really stopped.

One of us eventually headed south and set up a shop in Raleigh. The other stayed close to home, outside Pittsburgh. Six hundred miles apart now — and we still build the same way, because we learned it in the same garage.

Somebody up the line was a craftsman

The family story goes that a great-grandfather — or maybe a great-great, the details get thinner the further back you reach — was a genuinely skilled craftsman. Nobody has the paperwork. Nobody has his tools. What we have is a rumor and a strong suspicion.

The suspicion is that something got handed down. Because neither of us can explain it any other way.

We see things in three dimensions

Hand either of us a problem and we see the finished thing before we see a drawing of it. The joinery. Which way the grain has to run. How the load travels down through the base and into the floor. Where it's going to move in ten years once the humidity has had its way with it.

Rotate it. Look underneath. Check the back.

It's a useful way to be built and we're grateful for it. We'd still steer you away from venturing too far into either of our heads — it gets crowded up there, and not much is filed where you'd expect to find it.

We don't just see how a thing looks. We see how it works, and why.

One of us is a little better at it

One of us is a little better at this than the other. He's the older one, a fact he has never once allowed the younger one to forget.

The younger one is nice about it these days — which is a considerable improvement on how disagreements of this kind were settled growing up.

We're not going to tell you which is which. Look at the work and draw your own conclusions.

What it means when you find it

The mark goes on the underside. You won't spot it from across the room — you'll find it the first time you move the piece, or years from now when you're wiping it down.

Two C's locked together, with a rule set between them. The rule is the whole point. Nothing leaves either shop that hasn't been measured, checked, and then measured again.

If a piece carries this mark, one of us built it. Not a subcontractor. Not a factory. Not a machine left running on its own. Us.

That's the entire promise, and it's a short one.

• PlacementStamped into the underside of every finished piece
• Shop 01Raleigh, North Carolina — Keef's bench
• Shop 02Mercer County, Pennsylvania — [BROTHER'S NAME]'s bench
• SignedBy the brother who built it, and dated
• Since[YEAR]

Two benches, six hundred miles apart

Same standards, same mark, two very different drives to work.