Things We Make
Welcome to the Things We Make section of our website. This section is mainly about things we make in our woodworking shop, although there may be some other entries down the road that do not come from the woodshop. I have done woodworking here and there over the years, but never consistently in part because I lived in apartments for many years with no access to shop tools. It started in junior high school back in the 1960s with a wonderful shop teacher. The first entry in this section is about a bench I made back then. There is still much for me to learn and now that I am mostly retired and have a nice heated shop in my basement I hope to do a lot more. We will very likely sell some of these pieces if someone is interested. For what it’s worth, I’m planning to work primarily with local indigenous wood rather than buying exotic wood from far away rain forests. For me there is great satisfaction staying local. I have bought some interesting lumber and slabs from local harvesters and of course have my own saw mill as well. Forrest Gump’s saying about “life is a box of chocolate… you never know what you’re going to get” perfectly describes the business of sawing logs. Any log can reveal remarkable hidden treasures as well as hazards like nails and bolts that destroy saw blades. There is an entry in this section about a bench I just made (April 2022) from a maple tree that I cut down on this property. It is one of the most beautiful pieces of Ambrosia maple I’ve ever seen and the fact that it came off my land makes it much more meaningful.
Ambrosia Maple Bench
In the summer of 2021 my new portable sawmill arrived. It took three of us a long nine hour day to put it together. I knew I wasn’t going to get to use it much that summer as I was engrossed in a couple of other large, time sensitive projects. Months earlier I had cut...
A Shop Class Bench
I took wood shop classes starting in junior high school back in the 1960s. I really enjoyed it; we had a wonderful shop teacher named Dana Hinckley. Mr. Hinckley had been a Maine backwoods guide for many years. I think he was in his 50s, always dressed in matching...