(12-05-2019, 03:55 PM)DCarr10760 Wrote: Reading over the very interesting thread "Back in the day" has got me thinking about my journey as a hobbyist woodworker.  Like a lot of us here, I'm getting up there in age (pushing 60).  I took shop in school and enjoyed it.  In my 20's I worked in the trades, and learned a lot from watching the old timers, who would share secrets and techniques if you were patient and respectful.  Back in the late 1970s you could still go to a hardware store and buy serviceable tools.  I was left some things by my Father and Grandfather, other things I acquired from Sears, or the Silvo catalog as I needed them.  Remember the Silvo tool catalog?  It was the grownups equivalent to the Sears Christmas wish book.   

I went back to College in my late 20's and got a work study job at the school wood shop.  Hampshire College maintained a small work shop with basic power and hand tools for student use.  My job was to show the students how to avoid chopping off body parts while they made shelves for their dorm rooms or made bongs and pipe parts.  The shop had books and early copies of FWW.  But it also had recent Woodcraft and Garrett Wade catalogs.  Man, I poured over those pretty tools! My first purchase was a set of Woodcraft Bench Chisels, an ECE wedged block plane, a Tyzac-Turner dovetail saw, and a German draw knife.  With those tools and a few others, collected along the way, I built blanket chests, cabinets, chests of drawers, and all sorts of things.  My bench was a pair of saw horses and a solid core door.  Eventually I bought a small hobby bench from Sjobergs with shoulder and tail vise with wooden screws! (I still use it 35 years later).  

I worked building things all of my free time.  I couldn't afford the fancy tools I saw in FWW, but I made do with what I had and added new things when I had a windfall or could justify getting a special tool for a project (carving tools come to mind).  But despite having some instruction early on, I was mostly self-taught, learning by reading and looking at furniture made by masters.

Then came the internet.  I joined the Old Tool List and stumbled across all the forums.  My recollection of the forums was that it was 70% talk about tools, both finding old tools in the wild and restoring them and also the new tool offerings by LN, LV, and later everybody else.  Only 25% was about using these tools to build things.  But I got swept up in the tool talk.  As I got older I could afford some of the shiny tools I drooled over decades earlier.  I bought thousands of dollars of tools, special numbered edition planes from LN, handmade planes from Clark & Williams, saws from Mike Wenzloff and every month a box of stuff came from Patrick Leach.  I was sort of out of control.  

About this time (ten years ago) I stopped making things except tool boxes and shop fittings.  I sort of lost my way.  Fortunately, fate intervened and I was sidelined with a brain tumor and a difficult operation and recovery.  I'm fine now, but for a couple of years I really wasn't fine.  I stopped doing everything as a woodworker except some home renovation.  But then, last August, I got divorced and had to move out of the house and shop I'd been in for 20+ years.  I've had to move all of my tools and equipment, lumber and supplies, into a storage unit.  Now I'm in a small one-bedroom apartment that has a tiny room that I can use as a hand tool only shop.  I moved in the small 48-inch Sjobergs bench and am building a Dutch tool chest.  When I need a tool for some aspect of the build, I go to the storage unit and get it, clean it, sharpen it and will put it in the chest when I am done.  I have a few other projects lined-up when the chest is finished and I will fill it with only the tools I actually use.  I am considering selling all the rest of the tools that I own, once I have the user "set" completed.  Then I'll focus on building things.  I'll post some pictures as I go along, once I figure out how to do that.

So that's my story.  What is yours?

(12-05-2019, 03:55 PM)DCarr10760 Wrote:  
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I went back to College in my late 20's and got a work study job at the school wood shop.  Hampshire College maintained a small work shop with basic power and hand tools for student use.  My job was to show the students how to avoid chopping off body parts while they made shelves for their dorm rooms or made bongs and pipe parts.  The shop had books and early copies of FWW.  But it also had recent Woodcraft and Garrett Wade catalogs.  Man, I poured over those pretty tools! My first purchase was a set of Woodcraft Bench Chisels, an ECE wedged block plane, a Tyzac-Turner dovetail saw, and a German draw knife.  With those tools and a few others, collected along the way, I built blanket chests, cabinets, chests of drawers, and all sorts of things.  My bench was a pair of saw horses and a solid core door.  Eventually I bought a small hobby bench from Sjobergs with shoulder and tail vise with wooden screws! (I still use it 35 years later).  
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(12-05-2019, 09:33 PM)toolmiser Wrote:  I also have a pile or two of tools, that I should start thinning out.  At least get down to multiple's of two.