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Thanks guys!
Hairy- yeah for a while when I was growing up I was big into EDC, knives, and outdoorsy survival type stuff. This just became a good moniker to go by, haha.
RyanGi- I love woodworking but haven’t had all that much experience with it relative to some of you. I grew up in a city apartment so obviously didn’t have the typical woodworking accessibility that comes with a garage or basement workshop. I was always crafty though, and loved my infrequent experiences in proper woodshop environments. Few years back my father set up a very small basement workshop and the two of us began using it for around the house DIY projects. Those have all been more ‘brute force projects’- larger scale, without milling and squaring lumber, so by no means fine woodworking. That’s the story of the photo in my profile pic- my father and I started keeping bees, so I built that platform we keep the hives on. It’s built on 6x6’s and I’d be willing to bet it wouldn’t budge under the weight of a pickup truck. But no precision the way dovetailing and mortise-tenon requires. Along the way, in college I pursued engineering. I absolutely LOVE working on knee & bedmills, both manual and CNC operations in my machining classes always put a smile on my face. That familiarized me with what precision manufacturing could look like, as well as giving me a solid background in metalworking.
As for what my big thing is though? For the past 7 ish years I’ve been obsessed with spearfishing. And given all that experience and my passion for engineering, I believe I can build a speargun that has some beneficial design characteristics that aren’t available in any preexisting spearguns. This has combined my passions for engineering, woodworking, and spearfishing in one big ball. I’ve spent hundreds of hours planning it out at this point- designing each component in solidworks, figuring out materials, consulting with speargun manufacturers, etc. and so I feel ready to pursue it. So far, it has caused me to purchase a planer, a jointer, and a lathe. I think it will also force me to buy a new router table since my current one is warped and just overall not great- so I’ve been looking at the Incra LS system.
In the process of getting new tools for the speargun project, it’s also led me to ask the question “well if I have this thing, what else could I use it for?” And the reality is that the three/four tools I mentioned above open me up to countless different rabbit holes. For instance, I enjoyed using a metal lathe and I can already tell I might get hooked on other wood turning projects. It definitely doesn't help that between the speargun project requiring precision and my personal philosophy adhering to ‘buy once cry once’ I happen to be buying nice versions of these tools. It’d be one thing if I bought one of those alarmingly cheap benchtop lathes off amazon but I got a nice Rikon- the second I unboxed it and realized just how high quality of a tool I now own, it made me realize “yeah outside of the speargun project I’m now going to want to find other excuses to use this thing”. Same is definitely true of the planer/jointer capabilities- I got the Lux Cut III head for my planer, so why not make some kinda cool end grain cutting board? And I struggle to fathom how much of a rabbit hole I’ll go down if I get the incra and have all the project tutorials it comes with… But I’m getting ahead of myself…
Hairy- yeah for a while when I was growing up I was big into EDC, knives, and outdoorsy survival type stuff. This just became a good moniker to go by, haha.
RyanGi- I love woodworking but haven’t had all that much experience with it relative to some of you. I grew up in a city apartment so obviously didn’t have the typical woodworking accessibility that comes with a garage or basement workshop. I was always crafty though, and loved my infrequent experiences in proper woodshop environments. Few years back my father set up a very small basement workshop and the two of us began using it for around the house DIY projects. Those have all been more ‘brute force projects’- larger scale, without milling and squaring lumber, so by no means fine woodworking. That’s the story of the photo in my profile pic- my father and I started keeping bees, so I built that platform we keep the hives on. It’s built on 6x6’s and I’d be willing to bet it wouldn’t budge under the weight of a pickup truck. But no precision the way dovetailing and mortise-tenon requires. Along the way, in college I pursued engineering. I absolutely LOVE working on knee & bedmills, both manual and CNC operations in my machining classes always put a smile on my face. That familiarized me with what precision manufacturing could look like, as well as giving me a solid background in metalworking.
As for what my big thing is though? For the past 7 ish years I’ve been obsessed with spearfishing. And given all that experience and my passion for engineering, I believe I can build a speargun that has some beneficial design characteristics that aren’t available in any preexisting spearguns. This has combined my passions for engineering, woodworking, and spearfishing in one big ball. I’ve spent hundreds of hours planning it out at this point- designing each component in solidworks, figuring out materials, consulting with speargun manufacturers, etc. and so I feel ready to pursue it. So far, it has caused me to purchase a planer, a jointer, and a lathe. I think it will also force me to buy a new router table since my current one is warped and just overall not great- so I’ve been looking at the Incra LS system.
In the process of getting new tools for the speargun project, it’s also led me to ask the question “well if I have this thing, what else could I use it for?” And the reality is that the three/four tools I mentioned above open me up to countless different rabbit holes. For instance, I enjoyed using a metal lathe and I can already tell I might get hooked on other wood turning projects. It definitely doesn't help that between the speargun project requiring precision and my personal philosophy adhering to ‘buy once cry once’ I happen to be buying nice versions of these tools. It’d be one thing if I bought one of those alarmingly cheap benchtop lathes off amazon but I got a nice Rikon- the second I unboxed it and realized just how high quality of a tool I now own, it made me realize “yeah outside of the speargun project I’m now going to want to find other excuses to use this thing”. Same is definitely true of the planer/jointer capabilities- I got the Lux Cut III head for my planer, so why not make some kinda cool end grain cutting board? And I struggle to fathom how much of a rabbit hole I’ll go down if I get the incra and have all the project tutorials it comes with… But I’m getting ahead of myself…
