Found Dreaming

TOOL BUILDERS! Give it up. Come to your senses before it's too late. Building tools is a dangerous obsession. Worse than women and strong drink. I have to confess, I am a reformed tool-making junkie. Old age has helped. When you face the almost-empty top half of the hourglass, you start to ration yo...

Your tool-making puts mine to shame.

Richard

Me too.

R

That was what killed the boat yard business. My liability insurance in 1967 was 65 dollars a year. It would be more than that a day now. And OSHA wanted us to build handrails along the scaffolds we placed around hauled out boats to paint them. A scaffold consisted of some 2 x 12's on what we called ...

Fascinating stuff. Keep it coming, but only if you want to. When I had a big sculpture studio in California, I spent as much time making tools as i did making sculpture. I first acquired the habit back when i was in the wooden boat-building business. After the early 1960's you pretty much could no l...

I too loved to work with cherry. I used it a lot in boat work. I was something of a collector of various woods. I lived in the country, back when the land around the Chesapeake hadn't yet been damaged (destroyed) and turned into resorts by the developers. I combed the countryside for logs and trees:...

Thank God such people still exist. Good work, Jerry.

Richard

Fantastic stuff. I am doubly appreciative, both for the beauty of your work, and as an old time wood boat builder, I have made and used similar planes. After using a wooden plane, a commercial steel faced plane feels like I'm using an ax. Being from Virginia, I had cherry and black locust available ...

Really great! You must have been a great father when they were kids. You still are.

Richard

I have been writing a novel and playing nurse to my wife who has been bedridden for six weeks, laid low by a serious case of pneumonia. I turned 80 in August. I appear to enjoy disgustingly good health.

Let us see those drums. Under construction photographs would be interesting.

Richard