Thread: Who was your Woodworking Mentor?

Yeah the old man , he had a talent that I will be luckie if I can come close to , he was a jack ( pun here as his name was john ) of all trades but a quallified carpenter.
Could not only weild a plane but could lay bricks faster straighter etc etc than most brickies, built both his last two homes, ( though he had cheep labour from his sons ) with all the fittings, we did up several houses together and his ability with unpowered hand tools amased me, unfortunately I lost him far too early but what he did pass on to me was a love of wood and how there is just nothing better than wood with just a great oil or polish finish, he hated to see painted skirtings, door frames, picture rails etc etc
Mentor yes he was certainly that but also a role model a man of his word and a handshake was his bond , how times have changed and not always for the better. Guess i'll miss him my old man.

I can't think of any one particular person but one place that inspired from a very young age me a lot was the workshop on a "estate" of a retired british naval officer who lived just out of Busselton in the 1950s and 60s. I had a school friend whose dad was the caretaker and I used to go over to this place to play. The workshop was used exclusively by the "Admiral" (I don't think he was really an Admiral) and was bigger than and had more tools and machines in it than our highschool woodshop. I was allowed to look in but only from the outside. My friend wanted to play footy but I really only visited him to look through the windows of this workshop. I never saw the admiral or anyone else working in that workshop but it still brings has that air of being a magic place about it. The admiral died and the estate was bulldozed about 20 years ago to make way for beachside development - someone got some might nice tools and machines out of that place when it went - I wish I was around at that time.

My uncle was a selftaught carpenter but did not really have a love of wood although he did leave me more than half his hand tools when he returned to Europe in 1967. I still have most of them and have restored quite a few. My uncle was more of man about short cuts and smart ways of doing than true technique. I used his tools to set myself up a little workshop at home and have kept up the ww interest ever since .

My old high shool ww teacher was not inspirational but was very clever at doing lots of ww things and I learned a lot from him. I still have and used (used it just today) the marking gauge I made in second year of high school.

I spent 4 summers as a uni student working with a concrete formwork team on city high rise buildings. Most were wood butchers but there ws still lots to learn from these guys about big construction.

That's it really. My dad was a timber faller for 14 years and that's where my interest in chainsaws and milling probably stems from. He was a true greenie even back then and lost his job because he would not cut down trees unmarked by the forestry dept that the mill owner he worked for insisted he cut down. He was more of a serviceable rather than a fine woodworker as such - he would round me and my brothers up to help him make a gate or fence or chicken or woodshed etc - there was always something on the go. Some of his constructions had a heath robinson air about then - but then again, so do some of mine ).

this man inspired me , by a chance visit to his house and still does. the finest woodworker in australia, without question.
www.artistarno.com

Funny you asked. I just started a similar thread on another forum. I am pretty much self taught. Like most US woodworkers I watched Norm Abrams on TV and said I could do that! My dad had the ability but did very little. Looking back he could have been a great craftsman but just didn't have the interest. So I am pretty must self taught. Here is what I posted elsewhere.
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My mother in law asked me a question yesterday that made me think. I was showing her my progress on my sisters wine cabinet. She was looking at it and said "Where did you learn to do this??" It kind of caught me off guard and my best answer was "from books and magazines".

The more I thought about it I realized that up to two years ago I had never really built anything furniture wise. For many years I have wanted to and knew I could. I have bought books, read, studied. Did some basic woodworking and fair amount of carpentry building our 3 homes. I did get serious about turning for year till we moved and I lost my shop for 7 years.

Now in the house 2 years and I have an (almost) fully equipped shop. I am building furniture for our house. And I have just taught myself from reading book and magazines.

My old man is not much of a woodworker, his talents lie in other areas. My Grandfather was a carpenter and builder. He and his brother made wooden toys for Coles when they were young men and he ran a sawmill during the war. Unfortunately he died when I was about 16, so I never really got to know him as an adult. I have some of his tools.

When I was about 20 I decided I was going to make an electric guitar. I'd made few furniture items already but they were pretty basic. I went to the local custom furniture place to get some timber and there I met an elderly chap who was building a house lot of furniture in preparation for moving to QLD to retire. His name was John Moffat.

Anyway, over the next couple of months I spent a lot of time over there after work (which was when he was always in there working away after the employees had knocked off) and he taught me a lot of things about working with wood.

I guess he is gone now because that was 1984 and he would have been over 70 then. But he is the one who I would say was my mentor in the early days.

In recent times, I would point to certain individuals on this forum, one of whom reminds me of John Moffat - but I wont embarrass them by naming them

Well my father I would have to say .While not a tradesman he is a self doer .He built his house ,made some of the bricks as well ,he had a brick making machine (hand operated) and a hand operated cement mixer and made the bricks fom cement 6 or 8 at atime.I guess his mentor was his Father who was a bricklayer .
My Father has made many pieces of furniture with limited tools ,from lounge suites to coffee tables and book cases.his basic woodworking knowledge was the same as mine ,what I learnt in school.
The rest is experience ,making mistakes and reading from this forum.

Cheers
Kev

My father wasn't into woodworking or any other craft as a hobby. The first time I became interested in any form of woodworking was after I saw a model of a cathedral made solely of matchsticks. I think I was about 16 at the time. Space in our home, which at the time was a caravan, was very limited so I took to making models of farm wagons and things like that.
When I came to Australia 7 years later my work took me all over the place and I was travelling all the time so limited my woodworking to small stuff that I could make with hand tools. The only electric tool I had was an electric drill.
I remember seeing a box that one of my customers had made and decided to make my mother a small sewing box out of Cedar.
I got the timber from a sawmill just outside of Gloucester, NSW and set about making it. I lined it on the inside with some red satin sort of material and french polished it. I covered the lid with sea shells I had collected. That was back in the mid 60s.
Sadly mum passed away 2 years ago but I still have the box somewhere.
It stood the test of time quite well.
I stopped traveling around in 1987 and started a business in Sydney so I was able to invest in some woodworking tools including a MK3 Triton bought in 1993 which I still have. I went on to make larger objects, cabinets, chests of drawers etc and went on from there.

I had a couple of influences when i was young. My father wasn't much of a woodworker/craftsman as such but if something needed fixing around the house/car/boat he could always cobble something togther.

My biggest influence would have to be my next door neighbour when i was a kid. He was the forman at the sheet metal factory across the road. When he wasn't at work he was making stuff for himself or someone else. I learn't an amazing amount of stuff from him. We built trailers, watertanks(out of old packing sheets of tin rolled through a corogating machine then rivetted and soldered together), table saws, boats, pool tables..... the list is endless. Although there wasn't a great deal of woodworking involved the attitude and attention to detail he taught me I will never forget. There was a well worn bath from our house to his. The thing I will remember most was that he was willing to show me how and why he did things and would let me have a go. If I stuffed it up, that was ok he would show me again. I guess thats one thing i didn't get from him.....patience.

My other great influence was my uncle. He was a carpenter when houses were built from hardwood and most profiles were hand cut or planed. What he could do with a Plane, Hand saw, chisel and an oil stone was amazing. I still get him to come down and fix my casement windows.... a plane here, a whack there and all is well again. I have inheritted a lot of his tools now and he always gives them the once over to make sure I'm looking after them.

My father, uncle and neighbour were all great mates as well, they could all fish, drink and tell the funniest stories. I could sit and listen to then all day.

cheers

Michael.

My mentor(s):

1. My dad - he repaired, renovated and generally maintained our family home for the 40 years from the purchase (when I was 4 y.o.) until his death. He built desks, kitchen cabinets , book cases, and entertainment benches. He taught me what tools should be used for which job. He inculcated the view that you can do anything yourself, if you give enough thought on how to do it. I was first his spectator, then his labourer and finally his colleague on major projects - our two major effors were levelling a wooden floor (7 meters x 4 metres of tallowwood) that had been a verandah to take out the slope and re-roofing and guttering the back of the house (involved handling 10 metre lengths of corrugated Zincalume onto the roof and screwing the b*ggers down).
2. My woodwork teacher in 1st form at high school - he taught me about sharpening and that, having spent all that time getting the tool sharp, you mustn't cut yourself, because the blood dulls the edge and rusts the blade - he had been a PoW in Changi and not even 13 or 14 y.o. boys could phase him!!!

We grew up in the bush so my Dad & my Uncles & my Grandfather all had to be 'jack-of-all-trades' handy-men to survive.

That ability rubbed off on me & really helped me in a lot of ways in life, even in my computer work as a problem solver.

When I was at high school in Longreach in the early '70s, I had a manual arts teacher called Graham Hendy.
He taught Woodwork, Metalwork & Tech Drawing.
I really loved those subjects the way he taught them.

Later, when I took up Woodturning, I guess most of my early influence came from Richard Raffan.

Mentors - well, I've finally figured out that I don't have one special mentor, I actually have a very large number, starting with the male members of my family, progressing to local woodworker friends and extending to include many members here on the forum.

I wish I'd now spent more time with my Grandad and Father in their sheds

Mine was my father, although he did not specialise in wood work, more he knew a little about a lot (wood work included). Mind you he was also an expert in a number of fields being a qualified fitter and turner, and an engineer.

He was a cranky old bast_rd though, if you got it wrong, he tended to throw the nearest thing to his hand at you . I did learn to duck fast initially, but later, not getting it wrong in the first place. Unfortunately I have inherited his intollerance of people when they get it wrong, but i am happy to say I don't throw things or hit out like he did, I just cranky.

My mentor? Believe it or not, www.woodworkforums.com.au!

(It's worth having a lok at

I guess my father showed me that you can make most things if you try. He never had a power tool, but built a boat and lots of furniture, and was quite a handy builder.

Les Miller was my first good woodwork teacher, and later, Tom harrington at Sturt, who both taught me the importance of patience and being an asspain perfectionist.