Custom Woodworking showcases interior timber.

• Author: Noyes, Leslie Barber
• Position: Alaskan Wood Products - Company profile

Custom Woodworking Showcases Interior Timber

ALASKA'S TREES ARE CRAFTED into functional works of art under the care and guidance of John Manthei and Kent Pyne, co-owners of Custom Woodworking in Fairbanks. Memories of a childhood woodworking hobby drew Manthei into creating the year-round, valued-added wood products business that has been promoting the use of Alaskan birch since 1972.

Utilizing Alaskan hardwoods to produce more than 40 percent of their work, Manthei and Pyne design and build customized cabinets, furniture, architectural fixtures, and objects d'art ranging from a halibut-shaped jewelry box for a marine scientist to an elegant birch box purchased by the Alaska Contemporary Art Bank.

Growing up in Milwaukee, Wis., Manthei learned woodworking in grade school and did some custom woodworking for pay in high school. But the young carpenter felt he needed to go to college and become a botanist to earn a "real living." A botany degree from the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh earned Manthei a job as a biology technician at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. He drove north to the woods of Interior Alaska in 1969.

It took Manthei less than a year of tramping around marshes in ardent pursuit of science to realize that while four years of botany might occupy his mind, woodworking was ingrained in his heart. But could he make a living at it? Manthei's conservative financial sense fenced once more with his woodworking dream. Not to be foiled again, Manthei decided he could take the risk by keeping his university job on a part-time basis.

A little more than a year after coming to Alaska, Manthei opened a part-time woodworking business in a small workshop located off Chena Ridge Road outside Fairbanks. Within less than a year, he had quit his university job to devote himself full-time to building cabinets, doors, windows and furniture. Today, Custom Woodworking grosses an average of $80,000 a year and keeps the equivalent of nearly three people employed full time.

A couple years after Manthei opened his doors, the steady increase in demand for his products led him to hire Kent Pyne. Pyne, then a teenager who had grown up in Fairbanks, was already successfully capitalizing on his own childhood woodworking hobby when he impressed Manthei with both his woodworking skills and his business savvy. "At his young age, he had already done more woodworking jobs than I had," exclaims Manthei. Pyne became a co-owner of Custom Woodworking in 1985.

The firm had used Alaskan wood from the start. Ironically, the budding success of Custom Woodworking risked being stunted by a local lack of the hardwoods it needed and by the high cost of importing them.

"When I started the business, there were no hardwood...