Carpentry—Rediscover Manhood #1

A few years ago I had experienced back pain, and the doctor said I wasn’t exercising enough. At that time, as a programmer, I had been sitting and typing in front of a screen for 10 hours a day. So I decided to do some manual labor. I remembered when I was a kid, Grandpa had built a wood cabin for me. And I loved it. I loved carpentry.

I started by making a few small gadgets. Then I figured it was difficult to do large-scale projects with just a screw driver and a chop saw. So I decided to build proper tools myself. The first tool I made is a sliding table saw. I worked on it on and off for several weeks.

I installed a pair of casters on one side of the table for mobility. But with a lock on the casters, it was also easy to fix the table in position ready for use.

Then I said to myself, why not upgrade it to a woodworking machine? I used laminate flooring. It took me two weeks to make this beast.

The mortise and tenon joints that I made with the jig

Now that I had the proper tools, I could finally make some Scandinavian-style furnitures! What about a shelf? As a programmer, the first thing I do was, of course, prototyping it in the computer.

While it took me more than 1 month to make the jig, it took me 3 hours to make 60 mortise and 60 tenon joints.

Well, after some efforts, I finished assembling the three shelves. They were strong and stable. I put them in the garage, and used them for storing miscellaneous materials. The satisfaction was indescribable.

Humanity spent many thousands of years handcrafting things. Yet for the past few decades citizens from modern societies spent less and less time doing so. Maybe we have something to learn from the ways of our forebears. Manhood, or masculinity, as I discovered, may be better understood from the cracking sound and rough texture of woods, than from reading its definition.

If you guys like it, I will write more posts about stuff that I have made ;)!