How Did You Get Introduced to Woodworking?

Allen Grimes

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Its funny when I think back about 6 or 7 years ago, not only did I not know anything about fine furniture, but I also hated the way wood looked. Now I study every piece of furniture I see just to see if I can get any useful ideas from it and I am constantly amazed at the true beauty of wood.

The thing is, I would never have gotten involved with woodworking at all if some furniture store didn't try to rip me off a few years ago. I went in looking for some kitchen cabinets and they gave me a good price only to double it right before I gave made the purchase. Obviously, I told the lady what I thought of her sneakiness before leaving the store, never to return. After that I decided, that I would buy a couple tools and build the cabinets myself, but just put it off and went without them a little while longer.

A few months later, my wife (girlfriend at the time) decided that she was tired of waiting for me to build her her kitchen cabinets so she took it upon herself to enroll me in a woodworking class so I could at least learn how to build them.

So I started going to the class, which was taught by the worst WW teacher known to man kind, but still I learned two very important things from him. 1 to appreciate wood and good craftsmanship and 2 you can hand plane all the way through a 2 inch board without ever achieving flatness if you don't have a properly tuned blade.

Anyway, it was then that I decided that I wanted to be a professional woodworker, but since my skill progression was going so slow, I was starting to lose hope until I went to the SMC and saw some of Shelly Bolster's work. The reason being, that when I saw her work the first thing that came to my mind was, "if that little old lady can build nice furniture, then so can I". Not to insult her, but that is honestly what I thought, and why I stuck with it.

Now I am still not as good as I want to be, but I have both the desire and confidence that I need to keep going, mostly due to the online WW community though, so I thought this post was relevant. If it wasn't for WW forums, who knows what boring and unrewarding job I'd be doing right now.

Sorry that this was so long, but if you bothered to read it all then thank you, and I'd love to hear your stories.(whether you've read it all or not)

Btw, I never did make those kitchen cabinets.:eek:
 
Thirty some odd years ago during a lunch at work, a friend asked if I thought that we could build a new garage on his property. Fortunately we had the help of another friend, an "old time carpenter" who helped us learn how little we knew. As all jobs do ... this one suffered from "feature creep". The garage was roughly 28 by 24 with roll-up doors on two sides and the usual entrance doors and windows for light.

By the time we finished the garage, we had started a 16 x 32 addition, a remodeled Living Room, Kitchen, Laundry, Cedar Closet and Power Room (all in an 1800ish farm house). Somewhere in the midst of all that we grabbed a few books and learned to build cabinets as well as all window and door trim and numerous built in shelving units.

Over the years there have been other "carpentry" projects, but at the same time more "cabinetry/furniture" projects began to appear on the horizon.

Now, with retirement looming, I am trying me hand at various furniture projects - on an unrelated/related note, I also picked up a General "Maxi" lathe which is threatening to push me into the abyss.
 
To be honest, I can't ever remember not wanting to work with wood. At school I can remember telling a careers advisor that I wanted to be a carpenter and being told "Oh no! Boys like you don't need to work with your hands". The problem is at 16 I wasn't equipped to deal with idiots like that, so I ended up working in a bank like they said I should and like my folks wanted. It then took me 24 years to get to the point where I was equipped to deal with idiots like that. In truth those years are more why I am "successful" than any woodworking ability so they were not wasted. I put successful in quotes because as far as I am concerned working wood and not being broke is successful. Working wood and being wealthy is just fantasy.
 
My roots in woodworking began pathetically in Junior High. I took shop
class and darn near flunked out. I planed a board so bad with a bench
plane that the instructor had to put it back on the table saw to get the
edges square again. That was not very encouraging. I had more of a
penchant for metal working and became a railroad machinist like my
Grandfather.

Being only 19, and about to get married, I knew I had to have a house.
I went to the bank to get a home loan but they said I did not have any
credit, so I cut my own logs, cut my own lumber on our sawmill and built
a "garage"until I could get enough money to build our real house. Doing
most of the work myself, I worked until midnight most nights building a
house for my bride. Somewhere along the way I learned that I liked building
with wood.

Slowly I began buying woodworking tools as I needed them. First a radial
arm saw, and then some routers, drills and the like. As I gained more
tools, my skills got better and I began to build more complicated wooden
items.

It was not until my grandfather began to pass down his woodworking
tools, that I got into model making. It was really by chance. He built
wooden toys, by patterns and by the thousands. I wanted the creativity of
building something more unique, more detailed than children toys.

As I began to bring home his tools one by one, I found with each one I
could expand the complexities, and get more detailed. When I began to
use his band saw and scroll saw with skill, I built my first wooden model. A
dual tired timberjack skidder.

By my recent standards, it was not much, simple really. I sold it to a friend
for twenty five dollars. It was then that I realized I could make money with
these models.

Since then, I have worked on hundreds of hundreds
of models. The earliest ones were simple models, but people in the
community began to ask for them. Mostly heavy equipment operators that
spent most of their lives in these machines. Bucket loaders, screens,
skidders, graders and trucks were built at a rather fast pace. Too fast for
much detail at first, but I was also learning.

Slowly my skills developed until what they are today. Each model I
complete is more detailed then the first, each showing more pride and skill.

Of course I do more than models. I have done an array of projects, but
my main love is building highly detailed wooden models. As my heart is in that,
I doubt that main focus will ever change. I also enjoy building unique wooden
toolboxes.

As for my house, well I never did build the "real house". The garage
became too nice to turn back into a garage, so I still live in it, slowly
making the home more respectable with each home improvement project.
Like my woodworking ability, it has progressed slowly.
 
I grew up in a remote isolated town (Hearst Ontario) in the 1940s. There and then almost every family had to do their own carpentry and “cabinet making”. Certainly everyone in my family participated. When we moved to much more built up Southern Ontario when I was 13, I was surprised to learn that this was not the norm.

In Hearst, we lived part of the year in an apartment over our hardware store and my bedroom was at the farthest end of the living quarters right next to the workshop. Often, in the early morning, I would be slip into the workshop even before breakfast and “help” my dad or mum on some project.

So, in my memory, I have always done wooodworking, just as I have always breathed, walked, talked, and eaten.
 
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My first real training in woodworking was in high school when I took a carpentry class. I didn't really know the difference between carpentry and woodworking -- I thought they were the same -- but we designed and tried to build little scale house models with 2 x 2 material we ripped down from 2 x 4s. I never did finish the class, due to some issues I had with one of the other kids in the class. (He was a bully preventing me and my shop partner from getting our stuff done, but the teacher and principal wouldn't intervene, since he was on the football team, and we were just a couple of longhairs. We both simply bailed on the class about 6 weeks before the end of the semester.) Despite learning virtually nothing about carpentry, I did learn the basic operation of the main power tools, and in the course of a semester, the teacher realized I was paying attention, so he tended to let me use tools unsupervised more than many of the other kids. That was enough to get me bitten by the bug, and I took the "real" woodworking class for the next couple of semesters.

Then for my last year of high school, I changed schools to one that had no woodshop, but by then I'd started going to my granddad's to use his shop. He had a tablesaw and bandsaw, and the usual assortment of hand-held power tools. I built a few things in the first few years after high school, but they were all related to my guitar gear in one way or another. After my granddad died, I inherited all of his tools, but they ended up in storage due to my lack of a place to set them up.

When I moved to California 16 years ago, I couldn't bring the tablesaw and bandsaw with me due to lack of space, but I left them with a good family friend as a "long-term loan". About that same time, he started building custom homes and cabins for a living, and he's gotten a lot of use out of Granddad's tools.

About 6 or 7 years ago, I started acquiring tools for use out here in Cali. Started with a $100 Skil benchtop tablesaw and a comparable Delta CMS, but didn't really use them to make anything other than shelves. The house I was living in at the time didn't really have room to set up a shop. When LOML and I moved in together and bought our current house, all of a sudden I had a 2-car garage with tons of built-in storage, so I immediately commandeered it for a shop. About three years ago, after a couple scary incidents with the cheap tablesaw and my limited experience, I decided it was time to buy a better saw. About the same time, I discovered woodworking forums, online tool catalogs, and a couple local sources for hardwoods. It's been a rapid downhill slide ever since then.

Every time I see the friend I "loaned" my granddad's tools to, he asks if I'm ready to take the saws away from him (even though now I have better ones here in California). If and when this friend gets where he can't use the tools, I'll take them back. The TS is a Yates American M-1701 combination machine (saw, jointer, and disk sander). It's not a great machine, but it's fairly rare, so I don't intend to let it get too far out of the family. ;)

Wait, I just realized you asked how I got started, not my whole woodworking history. Oh well, too late, I typed it already. :p
 
My Dad !!!

When my dad was in high school he flunked Latin, so he had to take something. That turned out to be woodshop.

When I was about 7 Dad built me a farm with a barn, silo and sections of white fence with grass painted at the base of each post.

Later in life my dad built toys and sold they at the Southern Highlands crafts guild each year. I help build the toys on his Delta/Rockwell contractor saw, a bandsaw and a great old 12" disk sander.

So I learned to appreciate wood, fiber and natural materials. I Love WOOD !!!

My dad told me before he died a couple of years ago, one his scariest moments was when I was 13 and called him at his office to ask if I could use the tablesaw. He said OK.

I have always had a shop of some kind. In the 1970's I fixed worked on my car all the time.

About 5 years ago, I got really disgusted about my tools and not really having a workbench, so I started working in my basement to create a shop.

Well, it has come a long way with many twists and turns.

I have built shop stuff for the last 4 years and have almost completed my 1st real piece of furniture. I have been in the computer programming business for the pas 35 years. With woodworking, I actually get to complete something.

My shop is getting in really great shape and I plan to start building more furniture, boxes and small mission style clocks over the next few years. Hopefully when I get to 65 ( 6 years from now ) I will have a business for retirement.

As all of y'all know I enjoy documenting my efforts by posting pictures in web albums. You can check them out here. http://picasaweb.google.com/bartee
 
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allen, this is a good thread and i`ll get back to it in a while.....it`ll take a bit to one-finger out a reply:rolleyes:
 
I think I might have related this story already, but one of my first real "memories" as a child was one Saturday morning, in our "New" house, in Prince George BC, my Dad did not like that he could not see the TV from the dining room, to watch Hockey Night in Canada, so he went down to the lumber yard, got some nice clear 2x6s and a 2x10, and then he took out his Skill saw, and cut a great big hole in the wall between the living room and the dining room :eek: He used the 2x6s to frame in around the top and sides of the hole, and the 2x10 for the bottom, kind of a counter.

I was SHOCKED and AMAZED to say the least! :thumb:

Then there was my Grandfather, Grampa Loyst, he was a good electrical contractor, but his hobby was woodworking. He made some VERY nice pieces that are all still floating around the family.

Cheers!
 
okay....i guess i was about 7-8 and my father undertook remodling our house, the exterior, while we where living there, doing all the work himself...so i was a gopher...i remember him making quick toys out of off-cuts for my brothers-n-sisters, and i remember getting in big trouble for swiping lumber to build a playhouse down by the creek:eek:...bicycle jumping ramps, forts, building "stuff" instead of buying it was the choice if any of us wanted "stuff". and it wasn`t just wood, modifying a schwinn lemoncrate to be a chopper with extended forks, banana seat and homemade twisted metal sissybar are all from the same era....
skip to moving from the burbs to the country when i was 12......we had no money, if something broke we fixed it, if we needed something we built it..
first construction job at 14, carrying hod........it was easier than bucking hay in august and smelled better than shoveling out stalls, plus it paid better:D.....i guess i`ve been building "stuff" most of my life....it`s never occured to me that something can`t be done:eek:.....you just work harder...
 
My father always had a workshop in the garage. I remember as a little guy helping him with things like ripping boards on the radial arm saw or holding the ends of long boards as they were being crosscut.

When my grandparents moved to be close to us, my grandfather's tools were added to the shop. My grandfather would sit at his bench chewing on his pipe (Borkum Riff--I can still conjure up that smell) and working at some project. Wooden trains or cars or repairing toys broken by the "brats' at the daycare/preschool he made stuff for.

I now have my dad's 1932 W-T drill press which makes a unique sound that always reminds me of that workshop. Sometimes I turn it on just to listen to it. ;)
 
That's a tough question for me to answer. I can't say that I was ever really "introduced" to wood working. My father was a professional cabinet and furniture maker but he never 'introduced' me to the process. In later years, as a historical reenactor, I started making all sorts of things for use in my reenacting because that was part of the experience of learning how folks had to do things on their own 'back then'. I used a lot Neanderthal tools, mainly a knife, awl, drawknife, etc. Later I had a (very) limited shop. It included a hand crank antique drill press which I used almost exclusively until a few years ago; a clamp on thingy that held a corded 1/4" drill as a drill press. But mainly I used that as a kinda lathe to make things like ramrod tips from brass for my muzzle loading rifles. Broken files were my cutting tools. I would also make powderhorn stoppers on it and other items as the need arose. I enjoyed the process of making things myself and eventually bought a lathe, my infamous Grizzly G1067Z. But just about the very day I bought it, my wife said we were going to buy a house (we were in a rental). That took almost two years and it wasn't until we were in the new digs that I opened the carton and set up the lathe. I enjoyed making things from git-go but quickly learned that I didn't know squat about woodworking. Words like 'joining' and 'tenons' were foreign to me. And, now, I consider myself still at the beginning stages of learning those skills. But, I'm having fun and occasionally make something I'm not ashamed of.
 
My grandpa and dad owned a construction company while I was growing up so I was around the smell of sawdust most of my life. I don't remember how old I was, probably 5 or 6 when my grandpa gave my brother and I some lumber, nails and a hammer as a christmas present. We were both in heavan, our own hammer!! My dad has given both of us and my sister a new tool almost every year since. About 4 years ago I received my grandpa's homemade lathe. I played with it for awhile, but about 6 months ago I got bit hard by the abyss. The rest is history.

Back to working for my family's construction co....when I got a little older I started cleaning up jobsites. The crew would have some fun with me almost everyday. The best one was when they told me to move a pile of concrete form lumber from one side of a house being built to the other. I did it and then my dad came to the site and he ask why the lumber was moved. I bit my tongue and didn't say anything and just moved it back. They didn't give me such a hard time after that.
 
I don't know?? This really made me think on the answer and I don't know. My dad could have been a great wood worker. Grew up son of a dirt farmer. I am sure they did everything themselves but my Grandfather died when I was young so I don't remember much about him.

My father built a few things. A gun cabinet. Worked on the house some. I have a rifle he modified and built a new stock for. But he was a Hospital Administrator and Lab Tech at the Hospital before that. Didn't do much with his hands, but he could. He could have been very good at it if he had wanted too. Maybe he inspired me? But I don't know.

I remember him carving fishing lures one summer. I carved some (toy) knives me and the neighbor kids played with. That my earliest woodworking memory. By the time I got married I had a strong interest in building furniture. I keep trying to build a shop and did a few things along the way. The interest never died even though I could never seem to get that shop built.

It's taken all these years to get a shop and tools so I can FINALLY pursue that dream. Good question!
 
I grew up around a lot of tools, mostly in my grandfather's garage. My father and an uncle I stayed with frequently also had an assortment of tools that I learned to use at an early age. I helped with some basic carpentry -- they didn't really do any "fancy" cabinetry, just basic shop boxes.

Woodshop was offered when I was in the ninth grade, so I signed up for it. That opened up a different world for me with projects that actually had plans and a real finish! I built a lamp for my mom, a speaker box to match a "hi-fi" my parents had and turned a nut dish with a central pedestal to hold the nutcracker and picks. After that, I messed around a little bit at home occasionally but never did anything truly worthwhile.

After I was married and kids came along, I'd do the occasional item for a child -- mostly toy type things. The most involved thing I built during those years was a rocking airplane -- wanted my kid to have something out of the ordinary, not the usual rocking horse!

About 10 years ago, I finally got the nerve to branch out and build something with material other than cheap pine. The first item in this new category was a hanger for an antique quilt my wife got from her grandmother. I built it with cherry and finished it with a rub-on poly. That one project got me going toward bigger things.

As my confidence grew, I began designing and building more advanced projects. The toughest part for me was learning the patience it takes to finish a project properly. Now that I'm retired, I hope to do even more -- that is, if I ever get my shop finished!

Check my website for some of the things I've built and let me know what you think.

:)
 
No real woodworking genes in my family. My grandfather (a dairy farmer) repaired broken furniture during the winter months for the extended family. His 'shop' was a windowless hut with a dirt floor, equipped with a few hand tools. He brought his glue-ups into the kitchen (huge room with a wood cooking stove).

When I am about 6-7 he set me to making 'pine curlie-ques' with a handplane. I finally filled an entire bucket, learning along the way to fettle the plane and plane perpendicular edges. Only tools were a vise, handplane, and try square. Mywork was validated when he took the bucket of plane shavings into the house and gave them to my grandmother for fire starters for her wood stove. The seed was planted.

Of course I grew up in the era that girls were not permitted to go to woodshop in school. But I collected cheap tools and muddled along with the help of Popular Mechanics magazine - mostly dreaming. I always got into big trouble using the tools given to my brothers who had little interest in using them. After school I started buying tools. What a help a woodworking forums would have been. But that was before you-know-who 'invented' the Internet. :rofl:

In the late '80's I started woodworking classes in a community college. By the middle '90's I was a full-time woodworker and back teaching at that same community college. That led to demonstrating at woodworking shows around the country, writing a book, and then speaking at home remodeling/improvement/garden shows. An auto accident forced the closure of my business and I moved to Arizona to "retire." That led me to enter seminary to follow another passion. Along the way I acquired a Jet mini-lathe, took a few classes on turning, and started that slippery slope.:D

Good question!
 
Wow, this thread really took off. I didn't expect so many great answers, right off the bat and each one was almost as long as mine.

Well, I've read them all so far, and it is really interesting to see all the different stories. Kinda lets me get to know you guys a little better, at least as woodworkers(Carol I include you as one of the guys as well, not because woodworking is a guy thing, but because all the cool girls are guys too).

Thank you all for your great replies, I'll be looking forward to reading more.
 
It's another long story

Some of you may already know this, but here goes:

When I was a little girl, my dad did lots of woodworking in our garage with a clunky table saw, a jig saw, and a lot of hand tools. I "helped" him out a lot with holding things and just watching. When he and his best friend built a boat--that actually floated--I thought he was the smartest person in the whole world.

Then I married, and my first spouse wasn't a woodworker at all--no knowledge, no interest. In fact, I had to explain to him what toggle bolts were to hang things on the drywall walls of our house. I'm still not sure that he knew what end of a hammer to hold.

Then, about 25 years ago, I stumbled into woodworking in earnest. Shortly after LOML and I married, I learned that if I wanted to spend any quality time with him, I was going to have to do it in the garage (which was our shop then). I started out just holding stuff, catching as he cut stuff on the table saw. I progressed to stripping and refinishing some furniture, then reassembling, started doing a lot of finishing. As the years have passed, we have been able to earn real money from our woodworking and it is now going to be our retirement business.

About a year ago I decided that I wanted to learn to turn (after a couple of prior decisions that didn't pan out). LOML bought me a minilathe and I started with pens, and I really have the bug now. I do the turning and hubby does all the rest, with my help. Our house is full of furniture and built-ins that we have designed and built and the list still isn't finished.

We also have a laser "arm" to our business and we have an advantage over some other laserists in that LOML can make the plaques we laser and sell and we don't have to buy already-finished stuff like 1/8" birch ply already finished--just buy the big sheets, cut it down, and finish it ourselves.

I love woodworking!!

Nancy (104 days)
 
(Carol I include you as one of the guys as well, not because woodworking is a guy thing, but because all the cool girls are guys too).

I'm flattered -- I think! :)
 
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