WT374 – Woodworking Vacation

On today’s weekend show, we’re talking about woodworking away from home.

What Are We Talking About

Darth Rust asked:

I’m overseas for the rest of this year, what are some good ways to stay engaged in the craft, perhaps even be productive? I’ve brought sketchup and the honey-do list, a couple of books from Lost Art that I plan on reading in fine detail, I get the usual suspects of digital magazines, and I keep up on the podcasts and webcasts when time allows. It’s a remote region with as-of-yet no identifiable local guilds/clubs, or trees for that fact. So here’s your chance to shine, smart people, what else can be done to exploit the out-of-shop time that I’ve found?

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3 replies on “WT374 – Woodworking Vacation”

Since 2008 to present I’ve only been in the states for 3 years and not at the same time. Though the last 4 I’m able to have taken my shop with me. When I wasn’t able to have a shop, I spent my time studying other people’s work, looking at what they built, desk, chairs, joinery etc how I would have done it. I watched videos, read books, visited forums. Anything I could to learn new things and help develop my skills.

The last 4 years since I could have my shop, I tried different techniques, met and learned from different tradesman, used materials that we don’t have in the states. Took a couple of classes learned new or traditional finishing methods.

Basically anything to keep and develop my skills

I’ve been separated from my shop for the last 9 months and will be for the next 3 more at least. I keep myself in the Woodworking zone with back issues of FWW, Nick Offerman’s latest book, and YouTube.

I live away from home in a small house with a garage and finally started building a lightweight woodshop in the garage just to have a place to do simple stuff. A drill, a jigsaw, a basic drill press, and a friend with a small tablesaw and I’m making sawdust. It works for now…

When I was deployed to area with not a lot of trees, we would always have shipping crates, pallets, all the furniture that was broken for some reason and that was my source of materials for building furniture. Using a couple cheap Japanese holesaw’s nephew chisels a mallet and two wooden handle screws a few marking in measuring tools and you can build pretty much anything you need. A block plane sharpening stones and a router plane also come in very handy.

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