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. [laughing] 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. [smile]
