I turned 50 this year. What a year! It’s been a great half century! One does look at that, and think, “goodness, have I been alive for so long? I don’t feel like it!” But, one has. And one is thinking that either that means I am ‘over the hill,’ edging closer to death, or I am like one of my ancestors who lived to 103, and this is only the half way mark, roughly. That ancestor incidentally was born in 1799, and lived during three centuries. Not a possibility here, but there is time for a new manifestation of self. And I think it is the revelation of what I want to be when I grow up. Finally!
Yesterday a new shop tool arrived. Also, finally! It is a Lathe. It is a midi, or small-ish lathe, and instead of dealing with horrible limits, I decked it out to extend the bed and put a side workstation on it for bowl turning, and give it the form that allows it to do most everything I would need of it for a long, long time… hopefully. If not, then I guess I would be in the market for a larger one later. But I think that this one will do for now, and for a while, as I am a bit scared of these things anyhow. I have got a lot of safety to learn and common sense to establish.
That said, I set it up with the help of my eight year old daughter, and mounted a block of wood and got to turning. I only put in a small block, and started learning the feel of the skew. I also paused and watched videos on how to. We are lucky these days that such skills are passed along in video format at least, through the magic of YouTube!
There are some table legs in the shop I want to replicate. They are pretty easy looking, and could probably be done with a roughing gouge, skew, and a spindle gouge, with most of the work going to the skew. I think that learning to replicate them, then duplicate the replication three more times would put me on course for learning the work, and it would also put me on course for making the replication of the whole table, which I would like very much to do. I have a name all picked out for this project, as the table belonged to great-great-grandma Willa. So, Will’s Table it is!
With any luck, I will make me one, and then I will do it again a few times and sell those. And that! That is the goal! Take a good piece of old time furniture, replicate it with mostly hand tools, or with reasonably few power tools, and sell the replicas. I have the time to fit it into the current llama farm we already have going. I want to carry on with leatherworking, too. And these are the traditional crafts and skills I want to bring to the table, pardon me. There are lots of people in the homesteading movement doing similar things. I don’t want to look at them and think, ‘well, there they go! Why do it, when others are?’ I want to be a part of the movement. I want to make my unique contribution. Today is Friday. Today is the day I get started. Never mind the weekend. This is my homespun, self sustaining business model.
I expect that at some point, whenever I get my skills in place for a sale, I will have a section on this site called “The Woodshop,” or something like that. That is where I will show what I have done.
There. That’s a commitment.