Very well, here it is...my first post. It's taken me a little bit to get the confidence needed to crank this out but there's been some interest from my good friends on this subject and I'm happy to see that someone other than myself is interested in my progress and/or misfortunes.
As the site title suggests, I am hoping to focus on my woodworking projects with a few other things going on around here in life. With a title like "Beer 'n Lathing", I'm pretty sure that I will have to try my luck with brewing at some point in the future. That should be interesting, as I'm normally on the other end of the bottle.
More importantly, I recently discovered that there are dedicated woodworkers out there that work only with hand tools. This was a concept that was simply unfathomable to me as most of us have only known power tools most of our lives. I never even heard of Roy Underhill until a few weeks ago thanks to Dan's Shop. I remember looking at a saw years ago and thinking, "How in the heck am I supposed to make a tree house with this?"
Well, I'm not interested in tree houses anymore...that may change as the kids get older, but I am still interested in trying my hand at the "old" ways. While researching 'St. Roy', I heard him quote, "This is the weapon of a
Jedi Knight. Not as clumsy or as random as a blaster.
An elegant weapon for a more civilized time." I knew at that very moment, that this was something I was interested in pursuing. I constantly look at the work I've done in the past and think that my work is a little sloppy, more than a little honestly. Maybe if I slow down and take my time, I can learn how to effectively use the tools of bygone generations like so many other woodworkers of this generation.
I'm not saying that I'm going to quit 'cold turkey', I just made a cabinet for my lathe, but maybe I can try to at least combine some of the more historic methods with some of the more current ones and improve my skills in the mean time. I'm definitely not ready to get rid of any of my current power tools, but I will learn to cut down on them and maybe one day be confident enough to take the final step to working sans-electrons.
A la prochiene.
