bandsaw safety, how I got started in sculpture...and woodwork...

My sculptural odyssey started when I was almost 30. I’d always liked going to art shows and museums, but it wasn’t until I went to one outdoor art show in the Norfolk VA and I saw a lady trying to sell what looked like junky tripe to me for 1-3k dollars, I began to think hmmm I think I could make nicer stuff than that!!!

So I splashed plaster all over our tiny apartment making life masks and body casts of wife, relatives, and friends, anybody who wasn't moving too quickly. I played with clay, cement, and other media..after several years we finally upgraded to a real house with a garage that became my workshop and then I started buying and borrowing woodworking tools. As  one of my woodworking spiritual fathers, Sam Maloof allegedly once said-‘if someone that had $15,000 to spend and wanted to get into woodworking and I had to tell them how to spend it, rather than sending them off to an artisan school I would say, take that money, buy yourself a shed ful of tools, experiment and teach yourself. ‘

Well, I didn’t do that back in 1996, but I did buy a cheap crappy bandsaw and a cheesy below-contractor -grade table saw that nearly separated me from my fingers several times. As one friend of mine said when I told him that I like to do woodworking…’Hmm, can’t have been at it long, you still have all your fingers!!’

That, in my humble yet highly biased opinion, is the most important thing to learn 1^st and foremost about woodworking, safe working procedures. Even a bandsaw, normally a very safe tool, can cut you seriously if you don’t follow basic safe working procedures, ie don’t have your hand in line with the blade as you are pushing, if you are cutting a small piece of wood and your hand is getting anywhere near the blade use a push stick, use extreme caution when cutting anything that has a  rounded shape as it can bind suddenly in the teeth and flip towards the blade in a violent fashion, as I have seen several times over the years. Again, if your hand is in line with the blade and it flips forward, you can easily lose a finger or 2. I’m way too vain and my fingers mean too much to me to be parted from them, I’m really attached to them..

Anyways, buying that crap bandsaw introduced me to how much fun it is to cut curves in wood. I made scads of folk toys for my son from a book my wife got me, I made a nice inlaid mirror for my wife..

My experimentation phase started when I got out of the Navy in 07. I had tragically decided that I was going to become the white boy known worldwide as the Caucasian tansu maker. Talk about  the tiniest nitch market conceivable, I mean, you would really have to intentionally ruminate and ponder and think about 'what is the tiniest market segment I could possibly aspire to make things for?' This reflects how much fondness I have, however, for those amazingly beautiful antique Japanese cabinets.. I further euphorically and misguidedly decided that additionally, I would teach myself to make the metal fittings, the drawer pulls, even the lock plates, I spent weeks and weeks screwing around with different apparatuses to try to make locks, to etch metal, tried to figure out how to blacksmith, how to make my own drawer pulls. What an amazing amount of wasted time, I think somebody must have been adding crack or LSD to my morning coffee, to make me think I could pull a business like that off. The only people who still actually buy tansu are Japanese people and they certainly won't buy any from a crazy wild-eyed hirsute white dude who is most definitely not descended from their sun god (IE, I'm not Japanese, since they are very Nippon-centric and deeply respect and value their own culture, it's gravely in doubt as to whether any of them would consider for even a second to buy from a non-Japanese...). YET it wasn’t wasted, I learned a lot…for example, I learned that I  intensely dislike cabinetry proper, real, regular cabinetry,  all those right angles and perfectly fitting joints stymie me and grind me down…I realize now that I’m much more comfortable doing the sculptural forms of woodwork, the really precise measuring and precision fitting of drawers to carcasses just isn’t my thing..So I spent almost a year fruitlessly heating and beating metal in my shop to the point of giving myself tendonitis in both arms, I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on equipment, tools, torches and blacksmith paraphernalia that now sit idle in my shop (but look really cool), and after a year we got to the end of the money saved...that feverish dream about tansu lasted several more years 'till I actually built  a couple of them, at which point I realized that it just...wasn't...going...to...happen...dang.

This is a decent one I made, I designed the steel work and did everything on this..incredible amount of work...