init

Around a year ago I needed a new hobby. I had tried picking up guitar (many guitars), but I wasn't sticking with it.

I needed something physical that would (eventually) get me out of the house.

Around mid-April, I found the Harvey Benton guitar kits, and thought it'd be a fun project for the children and I. And it was! We decided on a Gideon the Ninth theme - a book I had loved since it came out, and the children had grafted onto as well. We designed, tested, failed, learned how to kind of spray paint things, tried again, and make a guitar that worked (that of course none of us could really play.)

A friend had been doing woodworking for a while, and posting his progress on Discord. I had never been a particularly crafty person, but it tickled something in my brain. We didn't have shop class when I was in high school, I had never made anything out of wood - just a lot of computers.

So during the Guitar the Ninth project, I picked up a Bora Centipede folding work table, which turned out to be okay until it wasn't. I decided early on I wanted to focus on hand tools as much as possible. I didn't like the noise of the machines, or the mess. I got a Stanley no 5 type 13 Jack Plane on eBay, stones, and watched far too much YouTube learning how to sharpen and tune it.

It was important to me to approach this hobby with the right attitude, which I had not done trying to learn the guitar. I had played alto sax for seven years up through high school, and weirdly a lot of pressure from marching band made it difficult to enjoy it. (I hope someday I can get over that!) Taking this up I decided the process here was for me, and that it was explicitly a place where I was allowed to make mistakes and learn at my own pace. A philosophy completely antithetical to my entire career (or parenting!) which had both been about learning on the fly under pressure.

Trying to hand plane, or saw, on the Centipede was difficult. The table racks terribly under horizontal forces, and starts walking away from you. It's a fine assembly table, and can hold a lot of weight, but it's not a workbench. The screws that hold the table to the legs don't screw particularly well and fall out when it is least convenient for them to do so.

I learned things like "work holding is safety" and have a few new scars to show for it.

I started out on our deck, but there was no cover, and of course the weather controls if you can do your hobby or not. Eventually I started looking around for a space to rent, but my spouse suggested I build something in my office closet - wisely to see if I actually stuck with it at all, before signing a lease.

Over the course of a few weeks I converted the closet into a small woodshop.

Over the summer and fall I acquired a lot of tools but hadn't really built anything useful yet. I did need somewhere to put the tools, though, so I decided my first project would be a saw till. That went ... ok.

As time went on, I outgrew the closet space, and luckily rented a corner in an actual workshop in North Philly, where I'm still making a lot of shop furniture and vaguely useful things for the house that don't still look great but haven't yet fallen apart.

The woodshop has all the big machines you might want, but I never use them. I like the quiet work of the hand tools. Spending all day fighting with computers has left me with a likely stereotypical desire to just quietly make a thing with my hands.

This blog is going to detail my progress in building things; a log of my many mistakes - and hopefully over time more useful and interesting objects.