One of my favorite podcasts is Mack McKinney’s “The Way of the Galoot”.  Mack (aka: The WoodShepherd) has a wit and wisdom that are priceless.  He’s a true galoot, through and through, but a brilliant one at that!  Check out his blog here.

Last week’s “Way of the Galoot” podcast was dedicated to the workbench.  A subject that is near and dear to my heart (you’ll see why soon!).  Having made the decision to devote my home shop to hand tools, the need for a decent workbench is has become a primary concern.  Here’s why.

… It’s not a workbench, it’s a cheapo dining room table and here it is in all its glory!

At least it has appliances.  Yes, I consider the cutting board an appliance – I have to, the table top is made of the softest wood I have ever seen.  I use the cutting board for chisel chopping and other slicing and dicing duties.

Where all the magic happens

And check out these sweet joints.  Yeah, I did `em myself.  

Who needs mortises when you have zinc plated screws?

Man, you skip out on a blog for a few months and what do you get?  I’ll tell you what you get:  You get outed by The WoodWhisperer during a live WoodTalk Online event, that’s what!

 Here’s what happened.  I left Marc and Matt at WTO a voice mail regarding sharpening plane irons and they played it on-air (on-internet?) during the live show.  Way cool!  

“… wait a minute, he didn’t?  Did he just mention my blog?  The blog I haven’t updated since before November? CRAP!”

While I love the free promotion, I am shamed by the fact that I haven’t added anything in such a long time.  The hafwit has been slummin’ in slacker town.  

I hereby resolve to post more content.  Just please don’t hold your breath!

  Pete

What’s new: 

Nothing! This, in itself, is not new.  2008 has been a real bust as far as woodworking is concerned at Camp Hafwit. So much so that it is starting to concern me.  More and more, I wonder if I can even call myself a woodworker.  Instead, I should call myself a ‘woodworking tool upgrader’ because that is the majority of any woodworking related activity I have performed.  Sure, there were a couple of seminars I attended (Gary Rogowski’s visit to my local Woodcraft was awesome!) and I haven’t missed an episode of “The Woodwright’s Shop” but for the most part, all I have done is gather more tools and read about and watch things about woodworking.  I am a woodworker! I mean it, I am!

Without going into too much detail, I’ve just been too darn busy.  I wish I could say my lack of shop time has been due to burn-out, but I think it is burn-out on things outside the shop that are preventing me from going inside.  Work is going great, but I spent the majority of the year working anywhere from 50-70 hours a week which left precious little time for anything else. It’s starting to slow down now that the summer and the election is over and the economy is grinding to a halt. The result should be more time for the shop, right? Not so fast.  Now we are moving into the holiday season.  Again, more commitments and responsibilities.

“Well you have enough time to blog about it. Why don’t you spend that time in the shop!” you say.  You’re right. I should.  That is, if I had a shop…

For those of you who don’t know, my shop is actually my father-in-law’s shop.  I have full 24/7 access to it but its 10 miles from my house. 

“So?”

Well, it’s 10 miles from my wife and kids.  After being away at work for 10-12 hours a day, the family needs to see Dad once in a while and I need to see them.  Plus, I don’t want to have to plan or schedule my time in the shop. I want to be able to get up from the couch and walk into the garage and start doing something whenever the urge hits, not just when it’s convenient. That way the kids could come in and ‘help’ if they want (Our 4 year old, Sam loves to pound nails and use the Yankee drill) and I could be there, at home, which is where I want to be in the first place.

Again you ask “So? Do something about it!”  Well, I intend to but I can’t leave my father-in-law with an empty shop.  So here’s my plan; a hand-tool only shop.  What do you think about that?

Give up power tools and become a Neanderthal? Not on your life! However, I do think I have become far too dependent on the table saw, band saw, chop saw, router, drill press, jointer, and planer.  I have all the necessary tools and ability (sans expertise) to get the same results by hand that these corded tools get.  Plus Lie-Nielsen and Veritas have made a small fortune from me this year. It’s time I start justifying my hand-tool collection’s existence.

There you have it. I will become the “Home Hand Tool Woodworker”.  I welcome any thoughts or comments.  Am I an idiot, or genius?  Let me know.

Meanwhile, I’ll be in traffic listening to a woodworking podcast or going through the TIVO looking for Roy Underhill.

The Splintered Board.

Last week, Rick Waters of “The Splintered Board Podcast” had some pretty wonderful things to say about an ugly old Stanley plane I sent him in episode 25 “Surprise, Surprise, Surprise”.

Thank you, Rick!  You are too kind and I hope you get some use out of the boat anchor!

“The Splintered Board Podcast” is one of the regular podcasts I refuse to miss.  Rick’s insight and fresh perspective on woodworking are extremely timely and valuable.  Well worth a listen!

You can also find Rick co-hosting “The Sawdust Chronicles” podcast with his good friend Erik Pearson.  Recently these men have been featuring conversations with both amateur and professional woodworkers who are active in the Digital Woodworking arenas.  Check it out on iTunes or here.

Let’s start off with me telling you a little something about myself.  In 1982, I was 12 years old and beginning seventh grade at Tahoma Jr. High School here in western Washington (the state!). This was the Big Time; in seventh grade, you had 6 different classes with 6 different teachers and two of those classes were electives.  I chose “Introduction to drafting” and “7^th grade wood shop” as my two elective classes.  Drafting because I liked to draw and wood shop… well, because it sounded cool and most of my friends were doing it. Plus, I hated sports and it made my dad happy to see me take (err… make that ‘fake’) an interest in something other than watching Starblazers or He-man cartoons.  See, my dad was a carpenter and my lack of interest in everything that wasn’t science fiction always concerned him. So wood shop was win-win; I got to hang out with my friends and look at girls, and Dad was happy with the thought that he and I may actually have a common interest.

Drafting was easy but I sucked at woodworking… I still had one leg in childhood (wanting to go home and ride my BMX bike and play with Lego’s) and the other firmly planted in adolescence (staring at girls).  I was geeky, fat, uncoordinated, starting to get pimples, and was way more interested in how my hair was feathered than actually making or building anything.  Woodshop was really just a way to hang out with my friends during school.  

The only things I produced during that entire first quarter in Wood Shop were a walnut and oak pencil holder and a letter opener out of fir. Yes, a letter opener out of fir!  I wish I could say that walnut and oak were just too hard for my young hands to work with a rasp and that that is why I chose the softer fir for the letter opener, but honestly, I spent my shop fee on candy. The shop teacher, Mr. Dawson, was disgusted at my confession but gave me a chunk of an old fir 2×4 to keep working until I could pay him back with my lunch money.  It took me all semester to pay him back!

Seventh grade, I thought, had filled my requisite quota of woodworking and I didn’t pick it up again until after I had graduated from High School.

After graduation, I went to work for my Dad as a laborer.  All I did was move lumber from one end of the jobsite to another, carry it up countless flights of stairs and pull more nails than I care to admit. It was hard work and I hated it, but eventually he let me start to nail things together and use the circ saw.  Building things was much cooler than just hauling materials around.

My first voluntary “woodworking” project was speaker boxes for my pickup.  I had spent my entire paycheck on a set of Jensen 6×9 coaxial speakers and needed a place to mount them.  A couple partial sheets of ACX and some indoor/outdoor carpet, and several boxes of sheet-rock screws and “EUREKA!” I had conceived, designed and constructed something with my own skills (lacking as they were).  The boxes were way too big (I had to move my seat forward a couple of inches and the speakers still fired directly into the back of the seats) and made the speakers sound horrible, but they looked great.  I was so proud that I made a set for by buddy’s truck.  He used them for all of two days then built his own because they were so large he couldn’t fit behind the steering wheel.

So there you have it, I finally started to dig woodworking.

After that, my Dad and I would trade small power tools on holidays and birthdays. Usually sanders (we never had enough sanders!) or Makita cordless tools and spend the odd weekend either making small gifts for my mom and sisters or refinishing some piece of whatever my mom had found at an auction or antique store. It wasn’t great work, but I did learn a lot from my dad and always considered it to be somewhat of a hobby. Sadly, my Dad died in 1999 and it had been some time since we had done any sort of woodworking so anything I learned from him was quickly unlearned to make room for other things.  It wasn’t until 2003 when my father-in-law, Bill, suggested that he and I make a cradle for my soon to be born son that I got back into it. That was the turning point for me.  I had a new child and a reason to continue woodworking.

See, woodworking was (and still is) different this time around.  It’s less about material wants, but more about self-worth and pride. It’s about teaching my children to work with their hands. It’s about problem solving. It’s about being part of a community and passing knowledge on. It’s about maturity and it’s about having a legacy, however small it may be.

When my parents died, they left a lifelong collection of things. Many of these things were valuable (both monetarily and sentimentally), but most of it was just “stuff”.  Of those ‘things’, there is one item that reminds me of my parents love and serves as a metaphor for what woodworking means to me.  It’s a small chair my dad made for me when I was three.  It’s nothing special, just a plain chair assembled from four pieces of some hardwood with butt-joints and dowels that features two cowboy boots jig-sawn into the back.  It’s my son’s chair now and more often than not, it’s a garage (or launching pad) for hot-wheels and Lego’s, or a step stool for my wife or daughter. Whatever its current line of duty, it will always be the chair my dad made for me and my most treasured possession.

Follow up to my last post.

Thank you for all of the emails and comments I received about my first post.  I know, I know… enough with the smart-aleck remarks about our woodworking brothers & sisters.  Really, I just wanted to make it clear that I think these people (among others I neglected to list) are the true superstars and celebrities of the digital woodworking world and I wanted to express my genuine appreciation and admiration, although it came out in a less than comical way.

I offer my sincere apologies if I offended anyone of them.

In regards to the Britney comment; no I don’t have the desire or required lack of underwear to make an ass of myself in front of paparazzi… I might if I had the opportunity, but that is beside the point.  You’ll just have to wait and see what happens.

- Pete

11/18-2008:

Just an aside.  By no means did I mean to imply that the chair my father made is more important than anything in my life. My wife, Kate, and our kids (Sam, Maeve, and Georgia) are.  What I meant to say was that of all the things I have from my parents, this is the one that is most important to me.

… besides, my iPod is way more valuable.

Well, here it goes…

I can’t stand it anymore!  If I sit for one more minute and let this new social woodworking world pass me by I’m going to explode.  It would kill me if in 5 years Marc Spagnuolo and Matt Vanderlist had their own woodworking shows on DIY or HGTV (with spin-offs on Fine Living) and I (we!) could no longer correspond with them as a result of their growing celebrity.  They would have so many fans (and stalkers, most likely!) and receive so much email that their agents or assistants would have to keep them at arms-length from their adoring public; they would just be too busy and too important to stay in touch with us little people. 

Don’t fool yourselves; the WoodWhisperer and Matt’s Basement Workshop aren’t the only ones.  Dave Noftz, Shannon Rogers, and Rick and Erik from The Sawdust Chronicles will go the same way! They’ll all move to Cincinnati or Boston (the new New York and Hollywood of the woodworking elite) and get about town in their chauffeured, ladder-racked, dually crew-cab pickups  with tinted windows and be seen at all the best Woodcraft and Rockler stores.  Neil Lamens will be their design consultant and Tommy MacDonald will be their personal trainer and coach.

Sipping champagne from coffee mugs shaped like routers, they’ll all forget their roots and thumb their noses at those of us who didn’t get in on the ground floor. That can’t happen! I want their secret personal email addresses that only a select few know about.  I want to be one of the people whose email they still read and respond to.  I want to become one with the Schwarz!

So here it is.  I am tossing my hat into the ring.  Be warned; I may become the new Britney of the woodworking world!

- Pete