My Journey in Writing, Ranting, and Woodworking

One revelation since the beginning of my woodworking journey, is that sometimes you just need to suck it up and get after it.  I goof around, trying ideas out on scrap, experiment with different methods to accomplish the task, under the guise of learning.  This behavior leads to really lengthy projects that progress at a snails pace.  At the moment that I was done with work for the day, I walked down to the basement, grabbed a nice piece of walnut, and began.

The walnut was clamped to the workbench, with a guide for my circular saw.  A quick pass on one side gave me a straight edge.  I flipped it around cut the other side.  Both ends were trimmed flush with my router and Freud 2 inch flush trim bit.  Next the board was cut in half, giving me two 12 inch sections.  I checked them against each other and found that they were very close to identical.  I quick pass with the router again and I had the feet for my jig.

Getting to this point was easy.  It is amazing how many times I have made things difficult.  Today I was efficient.  This was a new experience and it was more delightful than answering the door and finding a super model delivering a sausage pizza.  The other night I got to the same point with some oak, but then the debacle began when I started goofing around with my chisel.  So I marked the notch I needed to cut out.  I clamped both boards into the vice and made three quick cuts with the cross cut blade on my Japanese handsaw.

Why 3 cuts you say?  That is a good question.  I could have messed around with just two, but I reasoned that if I cut a small notch out, near the edge that had the tab broken off, I would avoid that problem.  So I used the same technique one uses when removing the waste on a dovetail.  This took almost no time at all, and I had two pieces of wood that only needed a bit of cutting with the coping saw.

I could have tried to remove the remaining waste with just one cut across the length of the marked area, but I decided that little steps would be good.  So every little bit, when my shoulder was getting tired, I would take the Japanese hand saw and cut off the progress.  This created a nice little pile of small chunks of walnut.  I found this to be fun and it did let me practice a dozen or so cuts.  So I was goofing around a little bit, but mostly I was just making sure that I was moving steadily towards my goal.

This is a project that should have taken two days at most, and I am sure a more experience woodworker would have done it in an hour.  But I am not a more experience woodworker, and now that I am close to getting the first two parts of the jig completed, I am feeling rather proud.  The next step on the feet is to spend a ridiculous amount of time sanding, shaping and generally futzing around with them.  I do love experimenting, but today it was important to get past the terrible tab blunder, to cleans my sole of the shame of that blunder.  I feel better and now I am going to get back to work, or eat some popcorn, or quite possibly, I may do both.