by admin | June 21, 2012 5:54 pm
Have thy tools ready. God will find thee work.
— Charles Kingsley
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My tools have returned home. The woodshop soon will be operational. It is a small space, what was once a single-car garage. But it is adequate for my purposes, even if it requires wheeling tools about — depending on what I’m building. But there’s a good cross breeze. My old shop fan keeps the air stirring. The main concern is not making too much noise and alienating our neighbors. I might have to plane rough-cut lumber out at my brother-in-law’s country home to avoid noise complaints. We’ll see.
Man, I’ve missed these tools, these old friends. They have been housed in my son-in-law’s Houston shop for nearly two years. That means they are now dusty and rusty, through no fault of his. There is no way to avoid this in Houston’s vaunted humidity. First step, now that I have survived pulling a beat-up U-Haul trailer through north Houston and back Behind the Pine Curtain, will be a thorough cleaning. Steel wool and WD-40 work wonders on most pieces of equipment with metal parts.
The table saw needs leveling and fine tuning to make sure the blade is absolutely perpendicular to the table at zero degrees. I will have to remove the jointer blades and sharpen them, which means I have to remember where I put the sharpener. Same with the planer’s blades. The band saw no doubt needs adjustment as well. That’s a couple of days worth of work just getting the tools shined up and in good working order. I look forward to it.
Besides the tools, I hauled back five large boxes of clamps, jigs, blades and other accessories collected over the past 15 years of building furniture for family and friends. Most of the jigs were homemade for a particular project, perhaps to hold down a piece at a strange angle while routing a decorative groove into it. Re-educating myself on how to use all this stuff is part of the fun.
That is where two of these boxes, covered in sawdust and falling apart at the bottom, come in handy. They are filled with woodworking magazines, tool manuals and how-to books. For about five years after first getting started, I subscribed to every woodworking magazine out there — from Fine Woodworking to Shop Notes, Wood to Woodsmith. After five years, I realized I had collected enough magazines to provide project plans for the rest of my days, so I quit subscribing. The entire woodworking publishing industry plunged into mourning, but I was running out of storage space.
Woodworking once provided a way to relieve the stress of my day job. Now perhaps it will relieve the stress — largely self-imposed — of not having a day job for the first time in more than four decades. It takes getting used to, not having to be at work every day. Somehow my days remain busy and filled with plenty to do — modest amounts of freelance work, taking an online course in what will likely become at least a part-time day job, combining households, and working on our new house to help make it a home. Now I can add woodworking to my non-paying endeavors. Already there are a couple of projects lined up for others.
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My father made his living as a sign painter in Longview. When we drove around town, he would point out signs that he had painted — a Weller and Water billboard out on Estes Parkway comes to mind, some of the original signs at Safety City on Cotton Street, an apartment complex on Fourth, and so forth. He took a quiet satisfaction in seeing his work, something substantial and concrete out there in the world.
I know now that feeling, even as I see the flaws in the furniture I built, which fills this study — the desk on which I’m writing this, the Morris chair where I read, the prairie sofa that serves as Nap Central. When I visit my daughters and see them using a bookcase or dining room table I built with these tools, it is that same feeling of quiet satisfaction— and relief that the furniture hasn’t fallen apart in the ensuring years.
These words are ephemeral, fleeting passages soon forgotten. The furniture will outlive me in a substantive way that anything I have ever written in 40 years cannot surpass. That is one of the reasons I build things, even though I am painfully slow and not particularly talented.
Besides, I just love making a racket.
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