Shop Notes & Rambles
Welcome to the quieter corner of the shop — the place where sawdust settles, thoughts wander, and stories take shape. These rambles capture the rhythm of the work, the lessons learned, and the craft that holds it all together.
Shop Ramble Mailing List
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Shop Ramble Mailing List 〰️
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Cleaning the Shop, Living With Cancer
A shop reset during cancer recovery — clearing clutter, finding strength, and rediscovering the small grounding rituals that keep a woodworker standing. This Ramble explores resilience, healing, and the meaning of a clean slate.
Understanding Wood
Wood behaves the way it does because every board carries the memory of the tree it came from. Leaning trunks, shifting riverbanks, floodwater, wind pressure, scars, tension wood, compression wood — all of it becomes grain, movement, and character in the shop. This piece explains how trees grow, adapt, and survive, and why those hidden forces show up decades later when a woodworker planes a board and the wood reacts. Understanding wood begins with understanding the life it lived.
Recovery Ramble
Recovery slows life down, but it sharpens perspective. This Shop Ramble reflects on rebuilding after surgery, the future of a growing woodworking website, and the beginnings of a gallery that evolves alongside a cancer survivor’s craft — one room, one story, one tool at a time.
Old Machines, New Machines, and the Quiet Math of a Working Life
Every machine in a working shop carries its own math — the cost, the risk, the payoff, and the lessons learned. This Ramble looks at the old cast‑iron tools I rebuilt, the new machines that expanded what’s possible, and the decisions that shaped the way I work. From a tuned General 490 to a SuperMax drum sander to the Laguna Revo 24|36 that opened the door to bigger, more creative projects, it’s a story about choosing the right tools, understanding their limits, and letting them push the craft forward.
Shop Life
Shop life is a mix of smooth mornings and sudden chaos — lost tools, kickbacks, forgotten plans, and the small moments that shift a day from normal to “oh, fuck.” This Ramble looks at the humour, frustration, and timing that shape a working day, and the quiet skill of knowing when the day is done.
Mini Kitchen
A forgotten Coleman stove, a tailgate kitchen build, and a season of hard news shaped this Ramble. It’s a story about repair, distraction, memory, and the quiet work of staying steady when life shifts — how a small project became a lifeline, and how building kept me moving when the world felt still.