Shop Time

In June and July, I went to Europe (Ireland, Scotland, and France) for vacation. It was a lot of fun but it certainly threw off my writing habit. I’ve been trying to put out one article each month with a target release date of the first Wednesday of each month. Usually I try to have an article lined up so I can just post it while I’m writing the next one with the hopes that I’ll some day have a enough lined up to start posting more frequently.

Another barrier to writing that I’ve experienced recently is woodworking. I recently started building my own furniture with the aim to have a farm table that’s big enough to have more guests eat comfortably at our house before my wife’s birthday. With focusing on this project I haven’t left much time for writing, so I thought I’d write a little bit about the table, and how I’m trying to get this done.

The plan was to go to a big box store to get lumber and some of the materials I hadn’t yet gathered while my wife was out travelling. Then try to get everything done while she was out, so she could come home to a newly furnished dining room. I definitely bit off more than I could chew.

By the time she got home, I had gotten as far as assembling and sanding the table. I hadn’t stained it, nor had I coated it in poly-urethane to protect the softwood that I’m using. Part of the slowness was of course inexperience, and the other part was trying to do this with limited use of power tools.

I mainly wanted to avoid powered saws. I’m incredibly afraid of them, and since I don’t have one, I’d have to justify adding that to the cost of the build. So I opted to use hand saws, which not only slowed things down, but also heightened the learning curve, because it’s not easy to get a straight cut with hand tools. I tried different styles of saws and techniques including a Japanese pull saw. Ultimately, I ended up using my Grandpa Erwin’s old miter box to keep my cuts straight.

There are at least 40 cuts in this entire project (I think I may have done some extras to cut out pieces of the lumber that I didn’t want like a break, pit, loose knot). It almost took the entire series of cuts and a month of practice to gain skill and speed. I think I started out taking about 15 minutes to go from measuring to finished cut, and now I’m under 10 minutes. The final round of 7 cuts that I needed to do get all of the benches done took me about an hour.

I still have a lot of work to do on this project, so I’ve decided to try and do small chunks of the work each day where I don’t commute. That way Friday through Monday I can spend an hour of the work in the morning when it’s relatively cool, and get this done before the month ends. I started conceptually calling this my “Shop Time”. I’m hoping that maybe once I’m done with this furniture project I can start using that time to get other projects done.