How I started

[Packard]

Born of necessity back in the early 1980s.  Prior to that time, I had an electric drill, a Craftsman circular saw and a Craftsman jig saw, and I had done a couple of handyman fixits. 

I was getting ready to open my picture framing shop, I needed back room fixtures made.  I got pricing from $4,000.00 to $6,500.00.  It seemed steep to me, but it was not the deal breaker.

The deal breaker was none of the quotes gave faster delivery than 3 to 4 months.  Which in my mind could easily become 4 to 5 months.

Rent for retail space ran from about $2,800.00 per month to about $3,500.00 per month in strip malls back then.  That meant that I would be paying rent on a business that could not function for at least 3 or 4 months.  That could come to $14,000.00.  In today’s dollars about $45,000.00 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

So I bought a table saw and made a bunch of modular back room pieces of my own design.

That went well enough that I decided to produce the design counter too.  Also modular.  So when I finally signed a lease, I had a few small pieces to make along with counter tops.

Counter tops in frame shops are typically carpet covered sheets of flat stock. 

The net result:  I was able to open up (with a banner) before the front sign arrived.  Just 2 - 3 weeks as I recall.

My construction was rather rudimentary, mostly butt joints with glue and screws.  I was able to hide the screws (usually) under the counter tops. 

Looking back, these were overbuilt but robust.  The back room pieces are exceedingly heavy.  Made from 3/4” particle board with a 3/4” back, top, sides and bottoms, glued and screwed.  These stood up to 7 years of steady daily use, and they are now in my basement seeing infrequent use. 

The modular design was a good idea. These pieces are still rock solid 37 years after being built. 

Before I move, I will offer them up to some local frame shops for free. I’ve gotten glimpses of their back rooms and some of them could make good use of the fixtures. 

I should also mention that I am 100% self-taught, learning initially from the manufacturers’ owners manuals, then books and magazine articles.  Though I learned about kick-back first hand (and painfully).  Continued education from the Internet remains on-going. 

 

[sancho57]

I started  after i got married and had my first child , bought a fixer townhouse/condo. It needed alot of work and just starting out with a new fam on a single income in Calif i didnt have the money to pay someone to do it for me. talking to a friend who told me why not do it your self. He said their is a college near me that has all the classes sort of a pre apprenticeship 4 year program. So I started with wood working, then cabinet making , residential electrical , plumbinbg etc etc.

I started buying woodworking tools but was always limited space wise. Which eventually led me to festool.
that was in 1994. I have been pretty much going strong since.

 

[rmwarren]

Dad (mentor #1) was a framing & finish carpenter back when the carpenter's union built houses (60's-70's Nevada) so there were always tools around and stuff being built. That man was a true craftsman, I recall him driving me nuts while making sure the shed roof he was helping me repair on my first home was square down to an eighth. Learned later this was actually really important.

One Friday around my 8th year dad brought a backhoe home for the weekend. Down came the carport attached to the small cinder block rancher and a 4'-5' basement replaced it. Concrete truck arrived on another Saturday and, with his buddy Jim (high school teacher) he poured the footings, laid block for the basement walls (Coors/PBR cans acted as filler), poured/finished the floor. Second story became 2 large bedrooms and the semi-basement was a game room. The basement was faced with stone he hauled back from trips to central Nevada to help Grandpa with his mining claims.

Later he builds Mahogony kitchen cabinets using a Skil 77. Once he told me that I could have a plane of my own from the several stored in the tool room, I went looking for something with wings.

Junior/senior high school offered elective drafting/metal/wood shop, in that order. Beat learning something useless like English or science.

@ 18 years a friend's father (mentor #2, a Pan Am 747 pilot/hobby of rebuilding wrecked vehicles) traded manual labor for car parts and assistance. Dug footing in caliche, pulled nails from used lumber, moved a lot of stuff around & learned how to straighten car frames, diagnose engines (poorly) pull them out and put them back in.

First real job around 19 years the company owner (mentor #3) was an industrial renaissance man where nothing was outside the range of doable. Learned to weld, run wiring, design stuff, lots of various skills. Once we pulled a 40' 20K GVW flatbed out to a friend's mine in the hills near Lida Junction NV and the three of us hand loaded the frame and siding for a 20KSF/20' tall Butler building that was laying disassembled on the ground, hauled it back to later use. The Egyptians had nothing on us, lever & fulcrum.

Fast forward to the first years of marriage, we built a 20' by 30' roof over a brick-in-sand outdoor patio off the rear of the house. Next year we jacked up the roof, pulled the bricks, dug and poured concrete footings/slab, set the roof back down. The following year we joined the two with walls, insulated, installed plumbing, electrical, drywall etc. and my FIL moved into his suite. BTW, that was the best thing that ever happened to our marriage, love that man & he lives with us ~25 years later.

My takeaway is that I was unbelievably fortunate to have the mentors I did at the times I did, as at no point in my formative years was there anyone that said to me "you can't do that yourself". The opposite actually, they just did things, setting a lifelong example, and I thought that was just the way everyone approached the universe. I'm not really expert at anything, and I can overthink the simplest task, but for the most part nothing seems out of reach.

RMW

 

[Alanbach]

My parents were both born in NYC in 1919 and 1923 and were both definitely children of the depression era. They were not handy at all and hired tradesmen to do everything. From a super young age I knew that I didn’t like that. When I was a little boy I would follow the plumber and the handyman around the house. I enjoyed learning how things came apart and went back together. Tools and how to use them just made sense to me. By the time I met my wife in 1981 I was handy but not talented. We bought our first home in the mid eighties and we had more ideas than we had money. My wife wanted the terrible Formica counters in our first home replaced so we got a quote. It was way more than we had so I bought a router, a circular saw, some plywood, new laminate (it was the eighties), etc. and got to work. It came out great and we ended up buying tools to do another project, then another and another. I set up shop in our two car garage and have never stopped since. Forty years plus later we are on out third house and the garage is still not for cars!

 

[manwithtools]

My parents were depression era children and never had much extra, but we lived a solid lower middle class life. I would use my dad's tools and his rule was they needed to be picked up, cleaned and put away when done. I ignored this rule a few too many times inn my early youth and thereby lost the privilege to those tools. That was when I was about 12. I then had to supply my own tools if I wanted to work on a bicycle or later on cars. I was and am a car nut, so more tools were in order, I also discovered early on that cheap tools were a false economy.

My whole family was DIY out of necessity. We never paid anyone do do anything that I can recall. I started work as a carpenter at 18 and then later got interested in cabinet making, built our kitchen cabinets in our old home at 25, soon was making them for others. This Old House and then New Yankee Workshop increased my interest and then I found Fine Woodworking. Opened my own cabinet shop and then built a couple of custom log homes over the next 4 years. Soon I found that turning a hobby into a business was not a good idea (I also had a full time job as an engineer at the same time), I needed to make some choices. I soured on wood working for a number of years but never stopped DIY on our houses.

I returned to wood working a couple of times over the years and moist recently about 4 years ago got serious about making it a hobby again. Upped my game with a bunch of Festool equipment, most recently added a Shaper Origin. Have a laser engraver, CNC mill, 3D printer and now I'm retired and looking forward to building my dream shop.