Whether its building a brand new piece of furniture to customer specifications or restoring an antique chair that’s 220 years old, Jim Cox wants to make sure the job is done right the first time.

“With new furniture my main focus is to give the customer something that will one day become an antique — something that will still be in use a hundred years from now,” Cox said.

Cox’s business, Clean Shavings Woodworking, is only 10 years old, but he has already earned a reputation among Coulee Region home and business owners — as well as artists — as a master craftsman. Cox and his wife moved to West Salem in 1999. He began working full time on his woodworking about a year later.

“Now I don’t know what else I’d do,” he said. “We like it here — people have been nice to us.”

At first Cox concentrated mainly on custom-made quality furniture. That was a natural direction for him since, before moving to West Salem, Cox worked for a Manitowoc firm that made tabletops out of rare and beautiful woods. Of the highest quality, they sold for $35,000 to $40,000 each. Customers included the Pentagon, the White House and Bill Gates.

Besides learning how to work with some of the finest woods in the world, Cox said he learned a lot about a commitment to excellence. “If we had one little scratch it had to be redone — no matter how many weeks we’d spent on the project. Whatever you do, you need to take pride in your work because, if you don’t want to do your job right, somebody else will.”

Cox likes the process of planning what a piece of furniture will look like. “I enjoy working from a blueprint and any new furniture I make gets a lifetime guarantee,” he said. “I will contribute my own ideas, but I’ll work with customers. If they have a $200 budget I’ll find the best wood I can for that price.”

Using his creativity is the attraction when Cox builds new furniture. “I enjoy pushing the envelope of designs by making something just a little bit different,” he said. “Anybody can make a jewelry box, but curves or 3-D effects are what I enjoy.”

Cox said the strangest request he ever had was when he was asked to design a coffin for a dog. “And the woman who asked me to do it showed up to pick it up riding a Harley,” he added.

During the first few years of his business Cox said about 75 percent of his work was building custom furniture and 25 percent was restoration of old furniture. Today, those percentages have reversed. “Restoration gives me a lot of pleasure. It’s funny how much money people will spend on restoration,” he said. “Lots of time it would be much cheaper to buy new, but then the new stuff would not have the same sentimental value.”

He also mentions something he calls the “craftsman’s advantage.” Today, he said, “people are looking more at quality than quantity. My business has been really good. The biggest thing is letting people know you are out there. Sometimes it’s hard to compete with overseas manufacturers, but I wonder what happens when you have a problem with your furniture. When you work with a craftsman you shake their hand. People like to meet with the person who made their product.”

Doing restoration work on chairs that people buy at auctions or antique stores has become a big part of Cox’s job. “I make parts if I can’t find them. I spend a lot of time with a lathe. There’s not many people doing what I do — or many who even want to! Most of those people who did are dead now,” he said with a laugh.

Recently, Cox has been taking on the job of restoring office furniture. “New office furniture is not cheap. For about a fourth of the cost of new furniture I can make things look new again,” he said. For jobs like that, Cox will usually have to work on site.

Regularly donating time to high school and middle school kids is also a part of Cox’s life. “I try to show them what you can do and build with your hands. Working with your hands in any way is getting to be a lost art,” he said.

When Cox was in high school, he had a brush with death that changed his outlook on life. About a week before his senior graduation he was involved in an accident at a small manufacturing plant. A 55-gallon drum that everyone thought was filled with water (inside was a flammable naptha cleaning solution) exploded when a welding torch got a little too close

Thrown 30 feet by the blast, Cox suffered third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body. He got his high school diploma in the hospital and it took years for him to recover. He said the determination it took for him to recover has helped him realize the importance of setting goals as well as reminding him that you can’t take things for granted.

Before he moved to West Salem he worked as an emergency medical technician and it appears he soon will be doing so again. He has just signed up for an EMT course at WWTC that will enable him to become a one of West Salem’s First Responders.

“I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “I was given a second chance in life, so I figure I owe somebody.”