Hmmm. I don't seem to have appeared in the archive after my first feeble attemp
t
at a bio,
so here goes again.
Hi. I'm Ron Wilson and I uh, well, I don't like power tools.
In the imaginary world, I've been through a collection of careers, including
photography, engineering, training,
marketing and technical journalism, wherein I seem to have become stuck, at
least for the last 15 years.
None of this quite prepared me for the epiphany in the real world a couple of
years ago when I inherited
some of my dad's beat-up woodworking tools, messed around a bit, and some of my
8th-grade shop class
started to come back to me. (Especially the part where the shop teacher showed
his two stubs
of fingers and told us to stay away from the t**l*saw.)
I tend to get into things before I understand the implications. For instance,
deciding that if I needed tongue
and groove battens for the ceiling on my boat, I should make some planes. Still
learning from that one,
although I am making the battens now, and I never caved in and bought a tailed
router.
My most scarce resource is time. So I still don't have many projects underway o
r
done, and my skill level
with the tools is about where, in the just old days, I'd be the apprentice who
mostly gets to sweep up the
floor and keep the stove burning. But I have learned a lot from reading and
playing with things. The list is
wonderful for that.
The big danger for me is letting my book-learning get too far ahead of my
experience. When that happens
I (a) start thinking I know a lot more about this than I do, and (b) start
looking for tools I don't need and
can't use yet. I know that just over the lip of that gentle slope is the
irreversible slide down to the guy who
has one of everything Stanley and Sorbey ever made and would never dream of
making anything with any
of them. Don't want to end up there. So I keep butchering wood, and try to
restrain my tool acquisitions
to things I actually need now.
ron wilson
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