The very beginning of a tool set

I sincerely hope that one day i will read this post and laugh, if not heartily, at least a little.

This is the embarrassing post where i lift the skirt and show you exactly what i mean when i say, 'a small collection of tools.'  I just bought a few for a component of the kitchen remodel, and it seems to me that now is the moment to lay it all out and prove that i am, in fact, a rank beginner.

I just bought what I would characterize as a starter set of chisels from footprint in the UK (three chisels, a two-grit oil stone and a honing guide in a crappy plastic case), and a Stanley (UK) rabbet (rebate) plane (the 12-978, to be precise).  I thought about burying these purchases somewhere deeper in this post, but this weekend, i am going to put a wooden sash in a window and attach some home center decorative molding to edge the tile back splash.  I bought these tools because i think i will need them to trim and fit some square (and squared off) boards into some irregular spaces.

Here are most of the rest of my woodworking tools (in descending order of my pride of ownership):
A Stanley 607 jointer plane (ca. 1930, bought recently from Patrick Leach)
A Stanley #4 (also from Patrick Leach, similar vintage)
A Sargent-made (as far as my limited research and knowledge can tell) craftsman-labeled #5 size jack plane.
A Millers falls, 10-inch sweep, ratcheting bit brace.
Then comes the precipitous fall to tools i picked up before i decided to be a wood worker:
An 8-inch circular saw.
A Stanley "fat max" handsaw (home center special, about 26 inches long; it leaves a wider kerf than the circular saw's included all-purpose blade).
A pair of 9-inch clamps.
4 I-beam style 2x4 saw horses that i made myself for a garage shelving project at the last house.
A 24-inch framing square.
A 24-inch level.
A cordless drill with a really cheap set of drill bits, about 1/3 of which i have snapped off.
A metric and imperial socket wrench set.
A mix and match set of screw drivers.

...
You get the idea.

I don't have a proper saw, I don't have a bench (more on that soon), I don't have a mallet, i don't have a lot of basic tools, but I'm fired up. I'll build what i can, buy what i have to and slowly start creeping toward competence

- TDD

The daunting nature of following up a manifesto

So when one writes a manifesto-esque declaration of intention, it turns out to be a little daunting to follow it up with minutia about the slow progression from intention to action.  I contemplated what to write next, as if throngs of readers were hitting refresh in my blog waiting to see my grand entrance onto the stage of master woodworkers. It turns out, no one's read these words but me (I am as shocked as the internet historian who will one-day stumble across the great Dietrich’s early writings).  For now, at least, I'm gazing at my own navel, struck dumb by my own over-stated ambitions.  So let's keep this plain.

I have begun to divide my list of projects into the quick-and-dirty; those that need to get done to fill an immediate need, and the slow-and-deliberate; those that i want to study, ponder, plan, revise, and ponder again.  No doubt, I'll tend to discuss the latter more here, out of embarrassment regarding the former as much as a surplus of material regarding the latter.  Nevertheless, here are a few of my 'just need to get done' items:

- Dog dish holder for the lab-hound mix, she's too tall and too fussy to eat off the floor.
- Fence and gate for the downhill side of our yard (the neighbors have a fence, but it's so low relative to our yard that the afore-mentioned lab-hound mix could jump it in a few spots if she were motivated to do so, rather than paralyzingly frightened of the neighbors’ pack of wild pre-teens). I’m not even sure this qualifies as woodworking, sure I’ll cut a few boards, and attach some to each other, but I’m not planning on finishing, using joinery or even drilling pilot holes for any of my fasteners.
- Steps for the dachshund to get to the raised grass area in the backyard (seeing a theme yet?).
- workbench... not ‘the workbench’ just a workbench, so I can get started on some real projects using something that holds work better than the five pound cheap, swedish-made table my brother gave me under the misnomer ‘assembly table.’ It may have served that purpose in his shop, but that doesn’t mean that beyond the walls of said shop it maintains that title.
- garage shelving - to hold all the crap we stockpile in our garage away from the space I think of as my workshop-in-waiting
- crawl space door - the old one is rotted out and decrepit. I’m lucky it didn’t trap our electrician down there when we were working on the kitchen. Then again, all he would have had to do to escape is look at it crossly and it would have crumbled under the weight of his stare.

For now, that’s it on the ‘quick and dirty’ list. We’ve got some 2x4s and a sheet plus a little bit of plywood that will probably take care of most of it. Bought some fencing materials a while back before we got lost in the land of the kitchen remodel. It’ll be ugly, sure, but now that I’m looking at it through my new I want to be a woodworker goggles, hopefully I can learn a thing or two about the materials and apply some of what I’ve been learning to make lasting quick and dirty pieces of crap.

- TDD

To Build by Hand (and to blog about it):

So, a little about me. I’ve taken a meandering path through life. I went to college to be a biologist, but organic chemistry never lined up in my head, and I spent all my study time tinkering with computers in the dorms, so I walked out with a computer science degree (and a philosophy minor cause I’m either a deep thinker or a bullshitter, depending on whether you ask me or my wife). Staring down a future of cubicles and the dot-com crash, I decided that the coding gigs that paid the bills during college were no place for me after college, so I got into law school but deferred a year to intern/work in politics in the State Capitol (that’s in CA, if you haven’t cyberstalked me and figured that out yet).

When I started law school, I thought I wanted to be an IP lawyer, then I thought I wanted to do social justice/human rights work, I spent so much effort teetering about what I wanted to do, I neglected to do anything that would actually line me up for a career after law school. So I took the bar exam, and while I was waiting the 3.5 months it takes the state bar to score our tests, I volunteered for a Congressional campaign. That turned into a paid gig, my guy won, which turned into a paid staffing gig in Washington, D.C. That wasn’t really the life for me, but I met my wife and brought her back to California with me (which wasn’t a hard sell, she grew up here too, our hometowns were about a 45-minute drive from one-another).

I tried out small-firm practice (basically solo lawyering with neighbors, the way the practice I joined was set up), it turns out I wasn’t really skilled at asking for money from people who have bigger problems than me and I come to care about, so the small firm/solo clientele got some decent, nearly free representation, and I got a life lesson on basic economics: when your clients don’t feed the business, the business doesn’t feed you.

I got married right around the time I lost that job. Actually, I lost that job the day I came back to work after my honeymoon. It was a rocky road. My wife also lost a job, then another one, while I was unemployed (she actually got back on the horse twice while I was still fumbling around trying to find a paycheck). We took turns keeping each other together and falling apart, it wasn’t pretty. We decided to relocate close to San Francisco, which had better job prospects (at least for me) than the Sacramento area where we had been. After a short (eternity) living with our parents, we had both landed decent jobs in the bay area and we bought a house in Oakland.

Something about buying that house triggered something in my brain: I didn’t just want to be handy (I am, for a computer nerd), I wanted to be a craftsman. I wanted to build things that made this house our home. I wanted to build the table my children would eat at, I wanted to design furniture to fit into the nooks and crannies of our life, to make our living space functional, enjoyable and hopefully a little more beautiful.

So I started to read.

First it was online, magazines, forums, blogs, anything that talked about woodworking. My wife got me a beginning woodworking book. Then I stumbled upon Jim Tolpin’s The New Traditional Woodworker and I fell in love with the notion of hand tools. I wanted to feel that connection with my work, to push the steel through the wood and leave behind something I could be proud of (or at least not ashamed of). Then I read Chris Schwarz’ The Anarchist’s Tool Chest.

Here’s where the story gets rolling... because here’s where it stops being a story and starts getting real. I’ve read those books. I have a very small collection of hand tools. I have no stock. I have no workshop. I have a dream. I have ambition.

This blog is a chronicle of my journey into handtool woodworking. I’m sure there will be some ‘cheating’ at the beginning. There’s stuff we’ll just need, and I’d rather build a piece of shit, learn a little about wood, and replace it later than buy some plastic-wrapped particle board shit and replace that later.

--TDD