This video is almost an hour long, but it’s well worth your time.

I often point out that woodworking videos on the intertunnel seem fairly strange to me, and occasionally infuriating. Pretty much everyone’s making ugly things in weird ways. There’s a generational divide that enters into it that I more or less understand. Younger fellers are much more interested in auto restorations than house renovations. When I was a kid, the local handy guy would have a table saw, an radial arm saw, and maybe a router in their basement. And lots of baby food jars full of wood screws, of course. Today’s handy feller down the street is much more likely to have a MIG welder and an angle grinder and an engine dolly in his garage. My own son is constantly fixing his elderly car rather than having it fixed, for example. I fix my car because I have to. He likes doing it.

I think the general idea people share about the modern economy is that everything is going to be available and disposable. I doubt it. I think more people should learn how to rely on their own mettle to restore their own metal, and many other things that have been discarded without a second thought. Not just because you might have to, although that’s possible. Because you want to is just as good.