This poll is about learning about the various experiences of our members.  It is meant to be fun.  This is not about marketing.  Maybe just on my end to see if I really should be called old.  Seriously, have some fun with this and tell how you got into this after voting.

Thanks,

Peter

Jeff,

Thank you.  This is exactly what I hoped for.  This is just fun.

Peter

A quick look at the avatar gives a clue.  Guess on photo date is Christmas day 1959 or 1960.

Found its way into my veins when I was about 8 years old doing projects with my dad.  

Received tools for gifts from my dad as long as I can remember.  I think he was vicariously buying for himself.  Helped him on rehab and building and furniture projects.  Still have a number of those early tools - 40+ years ago.

And now buying for myself...  more expensive but just as satisfying.

neil

When I was a kid, my Dad's woodworking shop was right next to my bedroom and one of the two doors out of my bedroom led directly to a short hall into the shop.  It was usually, but not always locked.  At night, some of the sawdust from the shop must have permeated into my veins.  Anyway, I can remember "helping" my father in the shop when I was 5 and I am now 67.  So, the answer for me is 62 years.

Like many of you probably, my dad was the influence in my life that sparked my interest.  He built some furniture but mostly custom cabinets when I was a kid.  I remember being around it from a young age and the smell of the sawdust.  I guess we all have certain scents that remind of us our childhood.  I would sometimes go with him to on installs.  I remember a couple of installs in particular when I was in my teens when I was actually old enough to be useful.    In 1990, my parents had a house custom built and my dad built all of the kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities.  I was able to help out and spend some time in the shop by then.  Guess I had it in my blood from a young age.  Making sawdust is always better for me when he's right there with me.

He and I finished off the basement in my house in Virginia about a year before I moved to Indy.  Hardly even got to enjoy it before the move.  Guess it's about time to start finishing off the basement in this house with winter creeping up on us.  Seems like it might be a good project to start.

Thanks for the thread, Peter.

Started building wooden airplanes that had a very high descend rate when I was around 10 My grandpa had some really cool chisels, saws and a HUGE wooden workbench I liked to play with. I think that was when I got interested....
6 years later at 16, I started going to woodworking trade school. Learned a lot! The first year was just handtools alone and LOTS of cheap labor work... hated it, but again, it shaped my skills!
Was working on and off in the woodworking industry....
Now after 20 years I'm running my own business for almost three years now and for the last three months it is just going nuts and it is not looking to slow down anytime soon In other words, I'm very happy at the moment and are really enjoying working with my festools every day.

Cheers,
Andreas

I'm not a carpenter but a large portion of my family members were carpenter's.  I'm told my last name "Braid" originated from Scotland where a large distribution of Braids were carpenters.

My great uncles ran a woodworking shop that was chock full of old equipment, they were emploed for years by film making companies that paid them to make sets for movies.  Seeing as they very tight fisted individuals they had the attitude of "if its not broke don't fix it" so they kept all their ancient machinery in good working order, unfortunatly most of the gear was so unsafe that they couldn't hire other employees for they would be working in a very unsafe environoment.  Only one is alive today and has been donating most of the tools and equipment to museums and such, although alot of the handtools are still in storage I should see if I can snap a few pics.

I studied networking and electrical work, and accounting, and currently economics (almost a part time career student).  I contract low-voltage electrical work and lately have been doing mostly home/commercial automation and control systems, from this has stemmed the need for alot of custom A/V installations.  I use to hire carpenters to install my TV lifts, motorized arms and other items that required alot of custom work but nothing was ever "just" how I wanted this so I decided to take more of the carpentry/metal work on myself to speed things up and make things how I wanted them.

I'm not good enough to do nice trim work so I leave that to the pros, but I'm slowly expanding into the relm of woodwork, chip by chip.

Growing up I had no interest in woodworking.  I watched mom do projects.  Dad was never allowed near tools.  It was a good thing.  Took shop class in junior high school for one year.  Hated it.  In 1983 I was playing darts with a co-worker and enjoying something that would have been right at home in a Festool beer stein when one of his neighbors came over and asked me if I wanted a part time job.  I was working full time as a stocker in a grocery store and had time in the afternoons.  Started cleaning up construction sites and installing shoe molding, locksets, mirrors, towel bars, etc.  After 6 months I quit my grocery store job and went to work full time.  Over the next five years I got the opportunity to learn from an excellent trim carpenter tricks that he had learned.  Other trades would teach me things because I was willing to learn and I often did their punchlist items.

Started getting Fine Woodworking, Wood, and  Fine Homebuilding magazines early in this period and dreamed of doing woodworking as a hobby.  I'm still kinda dreaming about woodworking as a hobby.  Professionally I started back up as a carpenter in 2000 and have been doing that ever since.  Most of my work is exterior and pretty boring, but there are spurts of interior trim work and an occasional cabinet job that comes along to motivate me.  I don't have shop space readily available, so I tend to limit the scope of my projects due to weather and temporary storage space.

Peter

Well, my dad a disabled wwII vet, was 50 when I was born, and we did not get a lot of time together. He was a carpenter as wall all his 9 brothers.  The family build most of the houses in my town including the one i lived in.  It had oak 2x4 studs.  So I guess it is part of my dna. I got as much knoledge from him as I could in the short time we had till he passed at 69. One of my most prized posessions is his old oak level and a skil worm drive saw that weighs a ton, and I still use.  I really fell in love with it when I took a shop class in high school (remember when they had those).  My instructor, Gus Santolla, was a tough old bird, but I was bit at that point.  I did construction in college to make money and appreciate what goes into building a house. My real passion is furniture. I'm only a hobbyist, but I idea of a good week-end is in my shop making sawdust.   I hope to retire and make furniture for side money.  I still get a kick when someone admires one of my pieces in my home and says "how much to make that for me" and when I tell them, I get an "OH", and then the conversation usually changes.  I hope to have the ability to do this for a long time.   

In my case, it's not about having only sawdust running through my veins. It's there, together with iron dust, stone, plastic and more exotic stuff like capacitors, computer code, music, drawings and poetry. And a sniff of paint of course. I'm not a real woodworker in the way that I dedicate my life to creating furniture or doing carpentry, but it's just that I like to create ALL things I can imagine and fix all stuff that is broken. Doesn't matter if it's a stationary object like a chair or a house, I also like working with/on machines like cars, computers, electronics, and whatever.

I was raised in a body shop so I learned to work with tools as soon as I was old enough to lift them. When I was 7 or 8, I couldn't do any real work on the body of the cars yet like sanding, grinding or welding, but I could use a screwdriver to disassemble the lights, the mirrors, the grill etc. One thing led to another. My father wasn't really keen on wood, he preferred working with cars, but I got a taste of wood as soon as I was old enough to bring a hammer and nails to build tree cabins to play in with my friends. I live just 2 miles from the sea and we have a lot of dunes around us with forestry. They are also littered with German bunkers from WW2 to protect Hitler from you big bad Americans.   So there was ample opportunity and material to build secret hide-outs with my friends.

Next to that I had a myriad of toys. My favourite toys were Lego and FischerTechnik. Everybody knows what Lego is and what you can do with it, but FisherTechnik is less known, and today, it's hardly sold anymore. FisherTechnik is made by the same company that makes the well known Fisher plugs. Just like Festool, another German quality company. I always loved making stuff with Lego and then let my fantasy loose and play that I was some hero in another universe. Great stuff and I spend many hours buildings all kinds of spaceships and machines with it. Lego was the fantasy and social toy. Me and my brother had a lot and we always had hordes of friends over to play with it.

FisherTechnik on the other hand was more technical. I was always building that stuff on my own because now one else had it or understood it. For instance, it had real electronics you could build yourself, connecting transistors and capacitors and chips on special motherboards. It also had an elaborate pneumatics system with a REAL compressor. Festool used to be called Festo before the year 2000, and now they still have an industrial pneumatics line under that name . That was the stuff you could build with FisherTechnik too. Lego came with a line of programmable robots later on, well, FisherTechnik was about 15 years earlier with it. It never had the mass appeal Lego had though.

So all this really hooked me into building stuff. Jigs, machines, buildings, you name it.  I grew up expecting I would take over my father's body shop and was always working there when I had some time. My younger brother never expressed any real interest in it. When I had to go to college after high school I of course choose for something technical. Mechanical engineer. Very quickly I decided to take side courses in Electrical engineering. Learning to build machines and computers at the same time. All very interesting. But I must say, I never put my heart in it for the 100% needed, because I always had in mind I'd take over my father's body shop.

By that time it wasn't just a 'body shop' anymore, because we also transgressed into paint spraying industrial stuff like air ducts, machine housings   and scissor lifts. And furniture. Most of the furniture was industrial series work like CD towers, but at one point we got work from a very exclusive furniture company. That specific company was run by 2 woodworkers, and they made very special designs and very expensive tables that would cost about 4000 euros a piece. This sort of furniture, although not this specific table, which I just pulled of the net as an example to give you an idea. But they wanted us to spray all kinds of special designs on those tables, an honour that befell to me, since there was nobody else in the company who could do that.

Well, and that was the moment I really fell in love with furniture, and wood. Working on those tables was a joy I never felt before because I felt I really did something special, something artistic. Something that would be appreciated by people who really knew what they where talking about. With cars, there's no artistry. "oh, how nice, it's all yellow, it's all red, it's all black". Of course people are happy the car they had looks really nice again. With the industry stuff nobody ever gave a  how it really looked. With the industry all that matters is that it won't rust away the next 5 years. But with this expensive furniture, I felt like a Michelangelo, working for Popes and Kings.

And I really wished I could make such a table myself, from the ground up, and not just spray some pictures on it. So whenever I got the chance later on, I started to form stuff out of wood.

Unfortunately the whole idea of taking over my father's business went sour at some point, because we got troubles in the family, my parents divorced after 27 years of marriage and the family was split up. My father behaved kind of badly and both me and my brother severed contact with him. Shortly after my father's business went broke.

Since then I've just been building stuff on my own. Fixing the house since it was in a bad shape and nobody's really done anything about it in 30 years. Study went down the drain because I realised being an engineer is not building stuff but more designing stuff. I didn't like it at all that all I had to do was work on paper, doing calculations and drawing designs. I wanted to really build things with my own hands, like I've always done.

So no more spray painting for me, no more designing, no more electronics, I just worked in the local harbour for 10 years, loading and unloading ships. Until I got sick of it. Of the work itself and how people (the bosses) treat you in that business.

But I did keep on building stuff, painting and repairing stuff. People around me started to notice and asked me if I could do jobs for them. So now I'm always doing these jobs.  

 
 

 

I grew up in a farming family.  You needed to know how to do most everything.
Spent a lot of my time growing up at my Dad's parents house, right across the field from home.
I can't remember how many sheds (for bucket storage, grandpa had a thing for buckets, as do I), dog houses, etc.

Grandpa was a farmer, carpenter, coon hunter, free mason, custodian and several other things over the course of his life.
I guess he got me hooked on building things. 

I have worked in welding shops, still enjoy that, did foundation work (basements, slabs, flat work and stamped), I was a custodian for 1 1/2 years (where grandpa retired from), pretty much been building things all my life.

My Dad is not real handy with houses, he was a mechanic for 27 years, straghtened frames.  I saw him take two cars, one good front, one good back and make one good car out of them.  I can also spin wrenches with the best of them.

So, thanks Gramps, where ever you are.

OMG! Fischer Technik! I almost forgot about it... That stuff was amazing. We constructed cranes, trucks, bridges and many other cool structures. I also had a lot of Lego, but didn't really like it as there was never the right colored piece and therefore my creations looked totally wrong 

Anyhow, thanks!

Thanks to everyone so far for their great stories!  But, with over 7,000 members...

We want More Stories!

My earliest memory...I was around five years old (32 years ago then) with my grand-pap in his basement where he would make the parts for his Lionel train collection. I was the 'collector and holder' of the parts  He'd use different joinery techniques...and I'd be amazed that the various boards just fit into each other...no screws or anything...HOW AMAZING to me. It was almost like magic.

Then to see all the work together as a completely operating train station, country scene, etc. my little mind there was just in awe!!

Fast forward to my teen years (early 80s)...no woodworking. Home computers were coming of age and that had 100% of my attention. Well, that and girls too 

I came full circle and picked up woodworking because my interest in computers led me to make my own acrylic computer cases and accessories. I needed tools to cut and bend the acrylics. Cutting acrylics led to me to a certain EZ system...and from there, I eventually discovered the Festool system. 

Rey