Background

My father was a professional woodworker and carpenter who went on to earn his journey and master certificates. He passed on much of his love for wood, tools, carpentry and fine woodworking. As a military family we moved frequently. When my parents moved stateside, my father bought homes where we could add some sweat equity. I learned from him to build home additions, family rooms, play rooms, covered enclosed porches, a garage, workshops, a barn, and even a bomb shelter. My skills grew while spending many summers in Denver, Colorado helping my uncles build homes doing a little of everything. When we lived in areas where it was unsafe to leave our military bases, we spent much of our free time taking classes and using military woodshops where my father and I built most of our own furniture. Perhaps our most interesting project was rebuilding a 1938 Beechcraft Staggerwing five passenger biplane. Befroe finishing high school, I helped build five new houses, four rental cabins that I built mostly myself, plus my parent’s 5,000 square foot dream retirement home in Davis, CA including swimming pool.

After leaving home a junior in high school my woodworking and carpentry skills served me well and continued to grow. A referral from the cabins earned me a roofing job for the owner of a local hardware lumber store. His referrals and credit line launched me into helping a farm owner by building a wall sized entertainment center. He emigrated from Japan and appreciated the few oriental touches I added picked up while living in Japan. He wanted me to live on his farm as his personal woodworker and all around handyman. Although I declined far too busy with college and other activities, he constantly wanted me for more big projects and referred me to his friends. This was my first exposure to people who were not careless with money, but were willing to pay fairly for top quality work and insisted I put in whatever hours it took to do the job right.

Meanwhile, frustrated at not having any furniture and no power tools except a drill and circular saw after my parents left the area I bought and rebuilt a ShopSmith. My ShopSmith helped me slowly furnish my home. I built a massive waterbed set with bed, dresser, and nightstands all made of salvaged 8/4 Douglas fir. A burned ingrain with many coats of polyurethane became a theme that spilled over to my dining table made from a huge wooden cable spool with matching smaller spools that provided end and coffee tables. Making a matching entertainment center left all looking a little funny, so I matched a trim band on the walls and added wainscoting all around the kitchen, dining, and family rooms. Today it would be overpowering, but I feel the same about Laura Ashley. During the height of the hippie revolution, I made good money building and selling similar reclaimed wooden furniture.

With more work than I could possibly do, one of my friends I hired to help came back from a weekend trip telling me he volunteered us to refurbish a long abandoned old winery at Napa, California. After I stopped complaining about already being too busy, he explained this would pay us well, plus the new winery owner gave us the huge old redwood tanks, oak barrels, used brick, and much of the old hardware. I got little to no sleep for over six weeks, and stayed insanely busy the next six months turning those barrels into planters, building lots of the same picnic tables with benches and Adirondack rocking chairs, plus selling off the used brick and hardware. My buddy did well enough to make a down payment on a ranch in Arbuckle, California.

For sanity breaks I vanished on motorcycle rides and often scrounged a few pieces of interesting wood on each trip. On a ride I stumbled upon a crew taking out a long drive of old black walnut trees. They were chopping all up into 18” lengths to go to the owner for firewood. I talked the owner to instead let me have the bigger stuff in trade for $1,000 cash with his crew cutting all into 8’ 6” lengths. My tomato grower friend rented me his tractor trailer, crane, fork lift and crew in trade for some wood and my finally doing a couple of projects I kept putting off. We harvested about twenty trees, roughly eight full semi tractor trailer loads, plus a half dozen root balls. To get it milled I traded with the lumber supplier I met through my hardware store owner friend. That fellow wanted it all but got half in trade for covering all the transportation costs, milling, drying, and throwing in his then small wood inventory. After paying all off I got about 4000 board feet of black walnut, a dozen burl slabs to make into tables, plus about 1000 board feet of mostly hard rock maple with quite a few pieces of figured koa, purple heart, bubinga, zebrawood, tulipwood, redwood table slabs, and cocobolo. All told it cost me about ten weeks work and a couple of thousand dollars out of pocket that I really did not have to spend.

To recover my cash that lifetime wood supply went into fine woodworking gifts with too much going to local craftspeople in trade for some cash and mostly empty promises. My roommate treated me well making many big walnut slab tables then finally going off on his own making massive tables and chairs from an old railroad trestle bridge made of heavy huge redwood timbers. Once he moved on I found myself hiring local so called woodworkers for help. Although I enjoyed the woodworking and it paid well, I hated managing people with no work ethic, little skill, and no incentive to learn. It was about as much fun and productive as trying to herd cats. Having similar feelings from my equally successful pillow manufacturing business, I sold off both my woodshop and pillow business and stayed busy in school. The woodworking cost me money from being too trusting. I get to at least live with the good feeling that instead of all that fine wood going up in smoke, it became all kinds of nice desks, tables, chairs, wooden boxes, hand mirrors, kitchen cutting boards, rolling pins, chess tables, wooden lamps, bread boards, etc., hopefully treasures all still in use.

The Vietnam War ripped me out of college and my medical school scholarship, plus good old liberal U refused to let me or any other vet return to school. I dropped out, went to work as a computer technician for California State University, at Sacramento, took the little money left and bought a large tomato ranch where I leased most of my land to a professional grower to farm. This was one of those put it all on the line and hope the dice rolled in my favor. Land was cheap, so five good seasons and I owned all free and clear, otherwise I went bust. Plus, the home came with a fully stocked woodshop of all Delta commercial equipment and big motor generator to supply the required three-phase power. The weather was good, but living way out in the country alone while working thirty miles away left my home unwatched. Thieves cleaned all out including my claw footed bathtub and all the tools. I decided that was not where I wanted to be so quickly moved on into an apartment then tiny house in Sacramento.

With serious space and cash problems, I replaced my stolen tools with another basket case ShopSmith Model 500. That ShopSmith was nothing like the nice commercial Delta tools I had been using, but with patience and careful setup, plus lots of staying organized, it was plenty good enough for hobbyist use especially with some upgrades. I also bought my first commercial dust collector, a small 1.5 hp unit made by Cincinnati Fan that sat on a 55-gallon drum and had a big felt bag that sat off to the side. It made all the difference in the world, but I still coughed up a storm while making my furniture out of redwood. I added a downdraft table and portable dust collection hood, but still had dust everywhere in my tiny rented home. To add to my small technician salary I did a little side carpentry work, mostly doing interior renovations for my girl friend’s father who owned quite a bit of property around the Sacramento area. Those efforts helped launch two what are national franchises, but in spite of my doing much of the design work, I was only paid labor and made nothing from the expansions.

With full access to the university machine shop, it did not take me long to build up that ShopSmith with needed bigger and better quill bearings, bigger table, larger motor, built in router side table, extension in feed and out feed tables, and a drawer tool chest that sat under the quill. A professor friend who watched me make those upgrades finally talked me into selling him my unit. As is often the case in academia, he immediately claimed credit for my upgrades and sent off a long list of proposed changes to ShopSmith. I hope they never paid him, but not long after they came out with the Model 510 that was a twin to my upgraded units but built out of nicely cast aluminum and metal instead of all the surplus and wooden parts I used. I’m surprised they did not offer the integral tool cabinet and instead stayed with their board that held all the accessories. Still, I was happy because I made enough off that first sale to replace it with another “fixer” that came with most of all the ShopSmith power tool accessories. I rebuilt and enhanced that unit then sold it as I did a couple of more eventually having enough to buy an almost new ShopSmith 510 with all the accessories. Other than a full set of mostly Makita and Porter Cable hand held power tools, that ShopSmith became my mainstay tool in helping to rebuild a number of homes, some apartment buildings, and most of my furniture.

In spite of my almost pure hatred for academia, I found myself drafted to help teach classes at CSU Sacramento and not long after also for UC Davis because my increasing computer design skills were in high demand. I promoted out of my technical job to programmer, senior programmer, analyst, manager, section chief, bureau chief, division chief, then acting director working for the California Governor’s Office fixing troubled State agencies.

As the work became ever more intense, my woodworking became ever more important as a way to burn off some of the energy and frustration from work. My wife surprised me supporting my “woodworking habit” letting me upgrade to a 12" Inca Joiner-Planer, Inca table saw, RBI scroll saw, Delta 14" band saw, and an inexpensive drill press. That was more than we could really fit into our garage, so with two infant children we upgraded homes and having one built with a custom oversized three-car garage where I put all on wheels and turned that whole garage into a quickly setup workshop. With my wife very pleased at the cabinets, furniture, and other projects, she supported my continued workshop tool expansion. Unfortunately, at night my garage had to do double duty storing cars because our homeowner association rules required parking our cars in at night. Still, my collection continued to grow adding a pair of Robland combination machine separates, a big DeWalt radial arm saw I refurbished, and just about every nice hand held power tool, clamp and accessory a person could want, plus getting big time spoiled with a full set of the Bridge City Tools with all their squares, etc. Our extended families all expected their special woodworking gifts and my wife’s family always came through for me with my annual subscription for Fine Woodworking Magazine. For years my woodworking stabilized turning out a few pieces of furniture every year, a few things for the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, a few things for the schools, and of course lots of Christmas gifts.

In 1990 a minor ankle surgery post surgery infection almost cost me my foot and left me legally disabled only able to stand or walk for a bit. Rather than give up my woodworking, I bought a good stool and shifted to doing projects I could most do sitting. In 1995 my woodworking again nearly came to a near halt when a bad sinus infection turned into near terminal pneumonia. Concerned because my ear, nose and throat surgeon recommended better dust collection, I did a number of dust collector upgrades, but my sinuses never really settled enough to do more than a very little woodworking after. A second and third round of pneumonia took away my tools and got me started on fixing dust collection back in 1999. In 2001 my daughter started driving, and the big tank we bought to help protect her took my tool's spot. My tools got stacked on top of each other too tightly to even use. We joked that my tools earned their doctorate before me because they were piled higher and deeper (PhD). A hernia problem stopped me from moving them around. HTH finally came out with a set of the rolling stands that fit the Robland separates. They were not cheap, but work well. After losing most of four years, I finally restarted some limited woodworking in late 2004. The only recent big effort was a Boy Scout Eagle project building a set of display shelves for the little tykes’ portion of our library so they can see the heavily pictured books for them to check out. Anyhow, I’ve rambled on far too long.