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Woodworking is more than a hobby for me. It's a passion, a way of expressing myself and a bid for immortality. Here are some of the pieces I've created over the last 14 years.
....and this is the back of the tool chest.
Now remember, I got into this rather late in life; after all, I was 51 when I picked up my first hammer. And this type of thing is not taught; this is strictly trial and error, and I made plenty of errors - but I'm not showing you those.
I suppose you've seen the boat over in the main site, so let me show you what I decided to do next. Now understand, this was all pretty new to me.
I started out by just cutting straight lines and re-assembling things into a pattern that pleased me, so I ended up with a lot of chess boards. Good practice, though.
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Actually, I ended up making about 40 chessboards; everyone I knew got a chessboard. I stopped people in the street and gave them one.
You must understand, most of the time involved in making something is spent setting up your equipment and tools and making sure you're making the right cut. Unlike Norm Abrams, I don't have assistants setting up my saw with a dado blade or my router with different bits; it's something that you must do yourself, and it must be done precisely.
But once you have the equipment set up properly, it's takes no time at all to cut 10 or 12 extra pieces, because you know you're going to need them. Just remember, measure twice.....cut once.
So I continued cutting straight lines and moving stuff around and re-arranging things just to see what they looked like. Then I began experimenting; turning things this way and that way; cutting at various angles and re-arranging, just to get different looks.
I began turning them into boxes, then tables, then anything else that needed a lid on it, because lids could be turned into chessboards.
And then, of course, I needed something to carry all these sets around in, so I made this carrying case. Now the interesting thing about this is, when you look at it from the right, you see my first name, but if you move to the left, you see my last name. But looking straight at it, you see gibberish. (Still a lot of straight lines, but moved around a bit.)
This is a little hard to describe without drawing you a picture, but basically it's achieved by using triangle shaped pieces, much like the billboards that change from one ad to another. You can only see one side of the triangle from the right, the other side from the left and the third side is attached to the box.
(Just experimenting, if you know what I mean.)
The back of the carrying case is essentially a chessboard with a little variation.....put together to resemble bricks. Makes for an interesting conversation piece and gets people asking questions about woodworking in general.
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