 The Shop(s)
The Store
The furniture and other larger items I make are custom made to order, and
operating a physical storefront just for pens would not currently be a winning
proposition for me, so my retail store is entirely online for the time being.
The Workshop
My workshop is currently located in the garage of my home. It's not big,
but it's big enough to tackle just about anything I can foresee building
anytime soon. I find that using hand tools can be a big space saver sometimes.
It reduces the number of large machines, jigs and patterns that I would otherwise
need to keep around in order to allow me to do some of the same jobs with
power tools that I currently accomplish with some rather simple hand tools.
The Business
At present, my woodworking business is a part-time affair, and the rest of
the time I work at a local specialty woodworking hardware store. I do hope
to be able to build the business into a full time venture, but given the
current economic and bureaucratic climate, that won't be happening this year.
Nevertheless, I strive to continue turning out top-quality products and customer
service, and to pursue the art of woodworking with a passion.
A double exposure of me in my shop, with a few favorite tools.
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The Woodworker
A group photo of the corporate office staff.
Well, there's Me, Myself, and I. That's about it; sort of a one-man show
here.
I have been a self-taught woodworker for over twenty years now, having learned
to work wood by reading books and magazines, then building skills and trying
out different techniques by making small projects and sample pieces. Since
I started out with a very small shop and only a couple of small power tools,
I initially concentrated on making small, carved boxes with hand tools, often
using wood gathered from local street and park trees that had been cut down.
My shop has grown, and I now have a nearly full complement of power tools.
I still enjoy using hand tools most of all, and, like the craftsmen of the
Arts and Crafts movement of the early 20th Century, I have found a balance
between using electrical and muscle power to produce tight-fitting joinery
and to get glass-smooth surfaces quickly. My shop space has grown, and so
have many of the projects I work on, which now include furniture, cabinets
and built-in furniture, accessories, boxes, and lathe-turned items such as
bowls, boxes, and fine writing instruments. I still like to use locally harvested
wood, but I often find myself running to the lumberyard instead of the lumber
stack on cabinet and furniture projects, due to the small dimensions of lumber
available from local trees.
One hobby that has come about as a result of my woodworking is my interest
in photography. What started out as a desire to get better pictures of my
projects for a portfolio soon developed into a hobby, while my hobby of
woodworking developed into a full-time passion for creating functional art
from wood. All of the photography on my website is my own (unless otherwise
noted), and now photography has become part of my own “fitness
program,” as I hike across the wild lands of Southern California
photographing landscapes and historical sites. Hiking and hand tools are
about the only exercise I seem to get these days…
Another hobby of mine is collecting woodworking-related information of all
sorts, much of which I add to my
Woodworking
Reference Library site in my free time. I've been building a database
of woods that may be used for woodworking over the last ten years, and so
far, I have collected information on over 1300 distinct tree species, with
more being added all the time. One day, I may find a way to post all this
information online for other woodworkers to use, but I don't currently have
the time or software to compile and upload a database that large. :-( |