The Slightly Confused Woodworker

Around fifteen months ago, maybe a month after published my last post on this account, I found out that even Captain America isn’t invincible. It was a pretty tough year, and I will leave it at that.

In the meanwhile, I made a few changes. My table saw is gone, not for philosophical reasons, but because it was too large and heavy for me to continue to use, and it was taking up valuable space in my garage. I gave away around half of my woodworking hand tools, and I may give away more, and perhaps I may even sell a few. This is not to say that I have given up on woodworking…far from it. I still have enough tools to make most of the things out of wood that I may want to make now or in the future. But for the past year I have done very little in the way of furniture making or tool restoration, save for some basic upkeep such as cleaning and sharpening. For that reason, I have not written a blog post about woodworking, or tools, in quite a long time.

The last post I wrote on this blog, which apparently detailed my attempts at restoring a vintage leather tool pouch, ironically had a mostly happy ending. I remember spending weeks trying to get that old pouch cleaned up and looking decent again. While the appearance aspect wasn’t crazy difficult, getting the funky smell out of it was a challenge to say the least. I scrubbed it with saddle soap a half dozen times. I placed teabags inside of the pockets and let them sit for a few weeks….I then placed homemade baking soda teabags inside the pockets and let them sit for a few weeks more. I used odor reducing sprays specially designed for leather. All of my efforts were only partially successful.

Eventually I patched the holes in the pouch, not perfectly I will add, but enough to where they are not noticeable. At some point in April of 2024, I hung the pouch in an open window in my garage to continue to air it out…then things happened that caused me to forget about it….and there it sat, dangling for almost seven months. Strangely enough, the open window treatment did the trick, and the pouch no longer has any odor at all, save for the faint scent of a few coats of mink oil, which I added when I was satisfied that the pouch was as clean as I could possibly achieve.

So I may attempt a blog post or two over the next few months. I’ve been messing around a little here and there, trying to get back into the swing of things. I made a few boxes…just to see if I still had it…and I was disappointed in some ways, and happy in others. Like sitting down at the piano for the first time in a long time, or picking up a guitar after many years, it will likely be quite a while before I feel somewhat comfortable again. But before I do anything in earnest, I will have to reorganize my garage to make it conducive to using woodworking tools again, because right now it is not even close. Until then, I am still here, a little worse for wear, but still here.