Mark Hennebury
I too am self taught, but i read books and magazines and i tinkered. I learnt a lot, on my own in a small community with no direct mentor. But I had books by Krenov, nakashima, Maloof, Frid etc.. I built furniture that they had built and i learned what i could I took from them what worked and dropped what didn't and moved on.
I also got all of the industrial magazines like wood and wood products, Furniture digest etc..

One thing that i learned is not to trust what i read, not to accept that which was taught, not to assume that things are designed by people who knew what they were doing. I learned to learn by taking from all the sources available to me and testing and questioning them.

If people dont want to push the boundries, explore, and progress thats fine for them.

Its not for me, every job I did made me want to start the next one to try and do better.
Every tool or machine that i used i wanted to tune up and see how good it could do.

I started woodworking with nothing but handtools, tuning my handplanes, filing sawteeth, cutting all the mortises with my boxwood handles chisels and mallet. Eventually I got shop machinery thats really when things started to get frustrating: trying to understand them, trying to get them to work, trying to get people to sharpen the blades.

I have a thousand stories that you probably wouldn't believe;

I went to a woodworking machinery show, 10,000 visitors, 8 people were in the free seminar on wood structure giving by leading wood scientist.

I complained to a sharpening shop about my planer blades not being sharp his comment was "you dont want them too sharp they will get dull to quick"

I read wood and wood magazine every month, a particularly sad part was the Jerry metz column where woodworking plant managers would ask questions mostly about delaminations and warping of panel stock, Jerry usual answer was "did you check the moisture content" Aparrently you dont need to know anything about equilibrium moisture content to run a multi million dollar wood shop.

There was one article i read about a guy running a CNC router and calling the tooling salesman because the router was belching thick black smoke from the cut in a MDF board, when the salesman arrived and checked he noticed that the operator had not put an insert tip into the router bit. He didnt look or check , just called the salesman.

A man that worked in the lumber association promoting North American lumber sales in Japan, told me that the Japanese wont buy finished lumber from us because the dont trust us not to screw it up. I can completly understand that, when i get lumber delivered it often is thrown in the back of a truck and has gravel stuck in it. I can't joint or plane it until i have spent ages picking all of the grit out of it.

I tried to get a set of blades sharpend a few months back. These were blades for and old fashioned tenon machine, a Poitras, like a millbury. The cuttereheads have two large heavy knives about 5" x4" x 1/2" thick put in at a skew angle, so its a tricky job. The guy at the sharpening shop screwed them up I am not sure if it was two or three times, he just couldn't get his head round it, in the end I had to do them myself.

I tried to get a Japanese router bit sharpened to the quality that it was originally done, none of the four shops that i went to could do it. One man explained to me that it would take to setups, one rough grind and one secondary lapping. That would require twice the work and a very expensive lapping wheel..... and no one had ever asked before, their customers had been quite happy with the " rough" grind that they had be doing all along.

So how come you see Germany and Japan raising the bar and pushing the limits and North Americans dont. How come we dont need to know our trade, where is our pride? How come we can deliver dressed lumber dragged across the gravel, and send out "sharpened" planer blades that you couldn't slit your wrist with.
What is with this "good enough" stuff.

We marvel over the magnificient hand tools, and kitchen knives made by the great masters in Japan.
This exists because of a cultural attitude not just a personal one.

We wont have that if we dont raise the bar and demand more on and industry and an individual level.

I think that people have a duty to know their trade.

But then I come from a three class country where they need tradesmen to build nice homes for the rich, so they make sure that your value system is to take pride in doing good work. So my background is a part of my cultural imprint.