Sorry I'm a bit late with this month's "Ides" question, but it's not too late. I am going to go back to the beginning with this one:
How did you get started in woodworking (turning, hand tools, etc.)?
As usual, we will harvest your responses, boil them down to their barest essence, and send them off to Woodworker West magazine for our next bimonthly "News & Views" column.
>I took woodworking in 4H in 4th through 8th grade. When I was 12 my father bought me a Sears table top model jigsaw and I have been making sawdust for the past 55 years.
>Merit badges require JUST ENOUGH to either turn you off or get ya' hooked on a subject. Later I was re-infected in the Saudi Arabian desert. Man there aint nuth'n out there but old busted up skids and crates. VERY challenging materials ! Now I can build anything with anything.
>I also started a a little H'er and like my father 'HAD' a love for old houses and repairing, rebuilding, rerepairing, remoleding... I bought a new house so I could do some WW'n WO/ a 'Re..' in front of it.
>Back in the late 60's when you had to build your entire car. No kits back then. All you got was a rule book wheels and axles. I won best designed steering by using tubing to route the cable instead of pullies which were the standard for the day. The shell was laminated strips as you would make a cedar strip canoe. WOW now the memories are flooding back :)
>I actually started as an auto mechanic.I always loved tools and gadjets and tinkering.After a few too many years I realized that wrenching wasn't fun anymore. Too much pain and too much tedium.I shifted my interest into carpentry.Started building and fixing wooden things for a living.As I learned the carpentry trade I discovered I really enjoyed the finer points of woodworking.So now as I ply my trade as a carpenter/handyman I gravitate closer and closer to my true love-woodworking.Hopefully I can eventually make a living off it exclusively.---Jack
Like most of the males of my generation, I took shop class (we had to back in the early 1960's) in junior high, and made some tables for my parents. The teacher really didn't care much about those of us who weren't already advanced workers, so he guided me into power-jointing and power-planing mahogany tops and putting on those tapered screw-the-leg-into-a-metal-plate legs. When we broke up my parents' house last year, I got those and have turned them into lumber again (decent, though dull, mahogany). So I didn't really start then.
I got interested in it in the 1970's, when, coincidentally, I had children and we moved into our old house. My woodworking started out as carpentry and quickly, inexpensively made rough furniture for my son and then sons - tables for them to play on, cheap bookcases, etc. I got interested in woodturning after I bought a little Duro lathe for $10 at the dump, but it vibrated so badly that I gave up after a while (though among my project tools now is a heavy Craftsman lathe made by Clausing, that promises to be better when I get time to get it mounted up).
My taste, though not my talent, has grown more refined since.
>My Dad was a sawmill guy and built his own small stud sawmills. I started taking notice of how he built them when I was about nine years old. With a coping saw and a hammer and small finishing nails I attempted to build miniature sawmills out of wood scraps that I found at a nearby wood shop. I liked working with soft pine because the nails didn't split it like with harder woods.
When I was in the ninth grade my math teacher told the class that he would give us an A for every hour we put into building a 1/4" to the foot house. It had to include the plans. So that's about all I did in that class. I built a complete model house using balsa wood, studed up the walls and framed the entire house including the complicated hip roof due to all the jogs around the perimeter. At the end of the school year, my math teacher gave me a D on my report card. I reminded him about the A he promised. He said, yeah, but you didn't do anything all year. I said, yeah but you promised us an A for each hour building a house. I must have had at least a hundred hours in that thing. He was so disgusted he grabbed my report card and scribbled a huge A on it and tossed it back at me saying, you didn't learn anything but here's your damned A.
In later years, much later years, I built the house we live in now. This time I designed the rooms bigger and a simple roof line. I never did learn calculus or trig but I get by. I've often wondered if that teacher ever built his own house.
