Blogging about my hobbies
I’ve been wanting about doing a bit of blogging about my hobbies, specifically woodworking, as I learn more about hand tool woodworking. Over the winter holidays I bought a year subscription to The Hand Tool School by Shannon Rogers.
The site has a series of semesters that bring you from very little woodworking knowledge and minimal tools, with every project building upon the skills from the previous. There are also an unreal amount of supplementary videos covering specific skills (planing, sawing, sharpening, etc). With all of that here is the first project of the Orientation Semester.
Orientation Semester Project One: Workbench
This first project was a great start showing basic marking and measuring skills and lots of mortise and tenon joinery (the base for many pieces of furniture). I had never cut a mortise and tenon before outside of one very sloppy wooden mallet years ago. There are some kinda sloppy joints, but they have been holding great for the last few weeks and the bench is incredibly sturdy.
I think the biggest thing I learned was how important it will be for future projects to have better milled lumber. Working straight off of big box store lumber without making sure it was straight made for a lot more joint clean up. The biggest upside of this project is it gave me a ton of practice using chisels and saws and really got me much more comfortable with those two tools specifically
Next up will be Project Two: Sloyd Hooks. Keep an eye out for my next post about those in a few(ish) weeks.