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A change in woodworking habit and environment

4K views 17 replies 10 participants last post by  jbertelson 
#1 ·
Changes to the environment

I have had a number of changes in my life over the course of the last year. I was a little spoiled over the last five years with a job that I could work from home and a schedule that allowed a somewhat normal pattern of sleep. I have been adjusting to the midnight shift and a couple hour drive each day. I don't expect much sympathy here, I am grateful that I am still gainfully employed :)

But it has caused me to have to reassess how I spend time on my hobby. Kiids, relationships, work, house maintenances, etc. all have their place and importance, but a hobby helps inject a little energy back into your life and helps take your mind off some of the daily troubles and worries that we all go through. To be honest, I can be a real jerk if I don't have a little "me" time now and again.

I looked at my schedule, and I pretty much have 3-4 days a month I can call my own. Even on those days, much of that time is to take care of things that slip by the other 26+ days. I needed a different routine, something that allows me a little escape but does not let me get too carried away where responsibilities suffer. In order to have this time, though, it was going to have to be productive. My shop situation at the time involved almost 30-40 minutes of scooting things around in order for me to perform a task, followed by 30-40 minutes of the same to do something else.

My shop is in my basement. When I purchased the house, the basement was already filled with a variety of goodies and left overs. When I first started the hobby, I could set up shop in about a quarter of it. That moved to 50 percent and, with tool purchases over the last year, it was going to have to move to around 75%. If I can only work for an hour in a day, 2/3s of that time can't involve setup.

So… It was time to get rid of the dishes, old furniture, used cans of paint, mangled boards, and a very strange plywood camel used by someone in the past as a Christmas decoration. Family does mean well. They see a guy living alone in a large house and they want to "help." Add to that, the reputation of being a "woodworker" and you will get some of the strangest assortments of "useful" items imaginable. I was able to give about half of that away and the other half went to the garbage. After about a month of heavy loads, I bought a significant amount of shop space. I have work flow again and most of my benchtop and stationary tools are setup without the need to shuffle.

I have no before pics, but took a few while in the process. It looks chaotic, but in reality I have enough space to even setup a finishing station on the other side. I couldn't do that before.







So now I can move from TS to bandsaw to scrollsaw to lathe to planer to router to two workbenches without much fuss. I know where everything is at and I don't have to trip over things in order to get to them.

Clutter in the environment was only half the problem. The other half is clutter in the brain. I will go over that in my next blog.

David
 
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#2 ·
first thing i noticed david

you can get to the tools

that makes working more productive
and enjoyable

good for you

now for the brain clutter …...
 
#3 ·
I can relate totally. I just said the other day to my wife, "I can't believe 2 people can have so much crap"... Time for some clutter cleanup on my side also. I think the brain part is too far gone fer me tho… :)
 
#6 ·
Looks good, David. Having a large amount of setup every time is a real pain.

I have a little setup in my vacation home shop, meaning, I have to pull out one car, and will then set up an auxillary table with two 1'x6' torsion boxes that can be used separately or together. I have started the torsion boxes. I don't have a table saw because of the space, and will try to make do with a plunge saw and band saw. I think this will be workable.

I managed to get decent lighting set up, and put in a 240 V circuit for a space heater that works quite well. So that little shop is getting somewhere.
At home, the shop has been idle for nearly 6 months, not including some minor items, while I deal with work stuff. I have reduced my presence here at LJ's until I get the work situation under control. Hopefully soon.

Later….....
 
#7 ·
Brain clutter and a new mindset

In the last article, I talked about cleaning up my work environment to allow for shorter setup times and more ready access to the machines and items in my workshop.

But that is only part of the battle.

I experienced some personal loss this last year that really took the wind out of my sails. I won't get into all of that here, some already know what I am talking about and we will just suffice with that. I found it difficult to get motivated again but shop cleaning is a good way to clean the cobwebs out of your head as well as out of your shop. The challenge I had to face was how to organize my time with this different schedule. Part of it was coming to some conclusions of what kind of woodworker I was.

I am a hobbyist. I got a great deal of slack one time for trying to outline the difference between the artist/craftsman and the hobbyist. It isn't about the quality of the work. Both can be equally talented and original. What makes the difference, to me, is the sacrifices that are required in pursuit of this craft. Family and responsibilities, in my case, are never going to be required to take a hit for my work. They already took hits on my education and take hits with my current employment. When push comes to shove, my hobby is the thing that has to take the back burner when events in life happen. Simple as that. At the same time, my hobby helps keep me sane and I really don't want to go long periods of time without that stress relief. The answer, for me is to grant myself the shop time, but in small increments (except during my days off with time to putter) on a daily basis.

How does this work? And what are the benefits?

In the past, i would look forward to my long excursions in the shop. The problem was that I would try to finish my projects as fast as I could because I didn't know when I would get another chance to finish what I started. So the mindset started becoming "project" instead of "process." I wasn't thinking clearly about each step. Each time I sat down to do a task, I was thinking about the next task and not the process at hand. Obviously this leads to stupid mistakes, crappy finishes, and a less than stellar project. I would always hate that feeling of having something unfinished and it was making my work suffer. Now, I approach the shop with the mindset of completing a step in the project but not the project itself.

I will give you an example. I am working on a quilt box from a plan that is in a Woodsmith magazine I received a couple years ago. Basically, you complete a box shell, cut slots for the lid, bottom, and substrate, assemble the base, cut off the lid, and glue up a pattern of squares and diamonds to make patterns on the substrate for the lid. It makes a quilted pattern, hence the name. It has a number of steps. Rather than trying to complete a number of them in one visit to the shop, I just concentrate on one. The first day, I milled and cut to size a cherry board for the base. The second day I cut the required slots. The third day, I rounded over the board, and the fourth day I cut the miters. I only spent about an hour each day. Some tasks should only take about 15 minutes. I used that extra time to make sure that the 15 minute task was done right. Extra measuring, more anal tool setup, etc. As a result, the steps are more satisfying and I leave the shop with the feeling of completing something rather than leaving an item unfinished. And, at the end of the week, I made progress on a project where I would have normally did nothing in the shop except look at a piece of Cherry and dream of the day when I can use it.

Progress so far on current project (box is upside down) -



So that is the current mindest and should lead to more successful completions to come.

Thank you all for reading,

David
 
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