How old are you and are you passing on a woodworking legacy?

[jack duren]

I won't be passing it on but.....................My daughter seems to like the DIY crap and I'm becoming afraid she will become a victim of a power tool accident if I don't get involved... I found out her husband which I trust let her use the miter saw, but she's still my daughter...

[mreza Salav]

I'm 40. My grandpa got me a small real hand saw when I was 7. I started making stuff with that and a hammer and a hand drill my father had in an old wooden tool box. Had no teacher and learned stuff on my own. At age 8 built a boat (bent wood after soaking in a large basin used for washing clothes!). Took it to school as a craft but nobody believed I made it (even my teacher). My mother had kept that boat and gave it to me last year.
Now I am a professor of Math/Comp. Science and fairly successful in my career. Built our own house a couple of years ago and am also building a couple of houses now (designed and prepared the plans, manage the contracts, fix their errors, etc) as I get bored doing only one job. I've been doing all sorts of things (fixing things, making things, etc). Have two little kids. Too early to get them interested in any of the stuff I do.

[Craig Shewmake]

I'm 61 and and just starting my legacy!

[Ole Anderson]

Pushing 70. Two boys, one shows no interest, the other knows how to use most of my tools, and has his own chop saw and contractor saw, but for home improvement work, not ww projects.

[Rick Alexander]

59 at the end of this month. I'm a chemist by trade and WW'er by hobby - tool collector may be a better description lately. My son is a professional musician - has been since 15 years old and as a result was always afraid to injure himself in the shop. I hate it because the guy is super talented in about anything he ever tried and he's something I'm not - and that's creative. I can copy things - or follow a plan but I'm just not that creative. Maybe later in life after my two grand daughters grow up he'll be interested but right now - not at all. Too bad - I've spent most of my adult life acquiring or upgrading my shop to where it's so much more fun to work in now. Having the right tool makes such a difference. For now - it's just a selfish man cave for me.

[Ted Reischl]

I am 67. No one in my family would know what to do with the tools other than my brother in law, but he has a nice shop too and really does not need anything. He might be interested in the CNC machine, but that is about it. He is 10 years younger so by the time I kick the bucket he may not be interested at all. We were at their place last weekend and he has a decent crescent band saw (at least I think it is a crescent but it was buried in his "barn" and I was not in the mood to wrestle a bunch of stuff out of the way to see what it really is) that he would give me, but I already have a bandsaw that works just fine and am not interested in rehabbing it at all because even if I did fix it all up I would not have a place for it.

Told my wife that if I croak, just sell the stuff off and have given her an idea of what it is all worth. Heck, so what if some woodworker gets a great deal? I have gotten really good deals, so why not someone else? It is not like we are building some huge monument to our existences and need money to erect an obelisk.

[Brian Henderson]

Told my wife that if I croak, just sell the stuff off and have given her an idea of what it is all worth. Heck, so what if some woodworker gets a great deal? I have gotten really good deals, so why not someone else? It is not like we are building some huge monument to our existences and need money to erect an obelisk.

Good point. This is something I've seen in other hobbies and I really don't get it. I couldn't care less if my kids take up my hobbies. I don't care if I pass along anything that I enjoy doing to someone else. I do it because I enjoy doing it. That's it. When I drop dead, I really don't care what happens to my various collections and hobbies. Light them on fire for all I care. I didn't do any of it because I wanted to make a buck or have a legacy, I did it because it was enjoyable for me. If someone wants to continue on from where I left off, fine. If not, that's fine too. So what if some of these hobbies go the way of the dinosaur? Did that stop you from having fun while you were engaged in it? Was your enjoyment somehow lessened because your kids didn't walk in your footsteps?

Honestly, I just don't get it.

[Ted Reischl]

Good point. This is something I've seen in other hobbies and I really don't get it. I couldn't care less if my kids take up my hobbies. I don't care if I pass along anything that I enjoy doing to someone else. I do it because I enjoy doing it. That's it. When I drop dead, I really don't care what happens to my various collections and hobbies. Light them on fire for all I care. I didn't do any of it because I wanted to make a buck or have a legacy, I did it because it was enjoyable for me. If someone wants to continue on from where I left off, fine. If not, that's fine too. So what if some of these hobbies go the way of the dinosaur? Did that stop you from having fun while you were engaged in it? Was your enjoyment somehow lessened because your kids didn't walk in your footsteps?

Honestly, I just don't get it.

I hear ya Brian. I start laughing every time I see a magazine article that states "Build an heirloom...blah, blah, blah" Glad my folks did not do that! Would have made it difficult to toss out or give away the stuff I did not want when they passed away! Would have laid a guilt trip on me. Just think, he could have built some Victorian piece and told me it was an heirloom, and then expect it to be sitting in my house with nothing else matching it. I have seen homes like that. Sheesh.

Frankly, I think it is like a bunch of old guys sitting around fussing over their own mortality. Same guys you see sitting around talking about how prices are soooo out of hand, how things only cost a fraction back in the day. Of course, they were only working for a fraction back then too.

[Harold Balzonia]

The pragmatists have arrived at the party.... I'm 49 and my ten year old girls are interested in what I do but not enough to sit and really learn. They will sit a watch for a while, ask a couple questions and move on their way. They create all kinds of other things and maybe they will get into some craft later on or maybe not.

The way I see it, if they know how to change the oil in their car, how to swap a circuit breaker, how to sharpen a knife, how to drive a manual transmission, how to put an idiot in a submission hold, how to laugh at what's funny, how to solve a scientific problem, and how to care for other people, I've left my legacy.

What I go out of my way to make sure they know is what is the difference between something made/crafted by hand and something put together with cam nuts and particle board.

i have been known to take my girls to a local Porsche or Bentley showroom and let them see and feel the difference between these highest quality items and my chevy Tahoe. I play them the Beatles constantly and explain why "Eleanor Rigby" is better than whatever throwaway "boom-boom-boom" stuff is being played when we walk past some junk store in the mall. And I've taken the time to let them play with whatever machines they want to play with (of course, highly supervised). My girls have cut strips on my powermatic table saw, made circles on the big band saw, held every sander I own, and they can't get enough of the air gun on the compressor....

my kids know that the world is a better place as long as people are still building things with their hands and getting dirty. That's all I care about in regards to my legacy.

[Matthew Hutchinson477]

As I'm only 26 and recently into woodworking with any seriousness, I'll offer a perspective from the other side. Hopefully it has some influence on how a lot of you...older fellers...think about the subject.

My grandfather, who passed away a little over two years ago, was a priest and an avid woodworker. Growing up I sometimes forgot which order those things went in. I can't say exactly how he got into it but he had a dedicated woodworking shop both when I was a kid and when my father was a kid, so his passion had a lot of depth and a long timeline. I wish I could tell some story about how much better people used to be with their hands and how keen their craftsman's senses were based on my grandfather but that simply wouldn't be true. Though he was productive, he never progressed past amateur in all honesty. He produced some decent work but nothing like a lot of the items posted by some members here. Being a priest he never had much money so most of his tools were cheap--he bought quite a bit of tools that I'd consider junk in all reality. If he felt something to be important enough to warrant a little more investment he'd go for whatever Dewalt or Craftsman offered but that was high quality by his standards. Nevertheless, he wasn't in it to impress anyone or anything like that--he just enjoyed the craft. Most of the furniture he made has outlasted him and will probably outlast the next generation at least. Virtually everyone he was close with has something he made with his name on it, and some of those items will be around long after the last person who knew my grandfather dies. Not a bad way to spend your free time.

Enter my father, who grew up with an avid woodworker for a dad, a tough Nebraska farm girl for a mom, and an uncanny natural aptitude for anything mechanical. Through my father's youth much of his free time was occupied by woodworking and cars, and he spent summers putting his aptitude to use doing construction, working on the family farm in Nebraska, or functioning as the de facto mechanic for a combine team. Unlike my grandfather, who grew up wealthy but deliberately chose a life devoid of it due to many of the vices he so disliked in the wealthy Philadelphia community he grew up in, my father was influenced by the fact that his parents were always tight on money and never had any sense of financial freedom. He didn't want to be constrained by that himself so he busted his ass through college in three years and got into medical school. Long story short, when it came time to decide on a specialty he gravitated towards surgery pretty quickly. As he'll readily admit, his aptitude for fixing mechanical problems and love of hobbies like woodworking were the primary drivers of the decision. In other words, woodworking played a significant part in my dad deciding he wanted to be a surgeon. And it turned out to be one of the best decisions he ever made. He loved it and was very good at it. Even today, in his late 50's, his passion for his career only grows and his skill has given him an impressive reputation. He averages 2-3 times the number of surgeries of the average surgeon, completes risky procedures like ruptured aortic aneurisms in as little as 45 minutes, and consistently has higher success rates than others. I don't say this to brag (well, maybe a little) but to illustrate that this career has been an incredibly good fit for him, and he owes at least some of his skill to his upbringing that included a lot of woodworking.

Now onto me. Growing up with a surgeon for a father made me a little sour on the idea of "ambitious careers" given the amount of stress and crazy workloads I saw growing up. I grew up with a different mindset and I care a lot more about free time and not working 80 hour weeks than my father did. I just so happened to inherit my father's mechanical aptitude gene so much of my upbringing was spent doing the same things my father did--taking things apart for fun, building things, and emulating my dad. I vividly remember, at age 6, watching him reject on offer from a contractor to build a room above our garage because he could do it himself. He fixed everything himself, and I admired that trait. After getting interested in cars while working in a mechanic shop in high school, I subsequently became disinterested in cars when I realized how expensive they were. I did a little bit of woodworking and it was always fun, but it was on the periphery for me. It wasn't exciting or fast-paced enough. Then a couple years ago I found myself stuck with a garage full of my grandfather's tools, and no one else was gonna use them. In hindsight it seems both random and natural that I progressed to where I am today--random given the fact that I didn't deliberately get into woodworking and natural given that it fits my criteria for a good hobby very well. Long story short (just realized how long I've been rambling) I started out using my grandfather's old tools to fix things and do some minor housework. But my curiosity kept pushing me to learn more. This was compounded by the fact that my grandfather did have a few antique hand tools that I didn't even know how to classify at the time. Out of pure curiosity I looked up how to set up a hand plane one day and by that point I was hooked. I absolutely loved the aesthetics of it, the history behind the tools, and the fine skill involved.

Now, despite having little money and living a lifestyle that requires frequent moving, I haul a small crate of old hand tools around. I still don't know what the hell I'm doing with them sometimes but I'm having a lot of fun learning. As it turns out I'm on the same career path as my father now so my time is limited but I'm in no rush. I know this hobby will be with me for life. I feel like I'm upholding a tradition that has tied my family together to some extent, and I'm keeping alive a skill that seems pretty rare and unappreciated in my generation. I see my grandfather's old furniture in my dad's house, or the mahogany letterbox my father used when he was in medical school, and I can't think of a better way to pass something on to others. I could go on but that's probably enough for now. Point is, I hope everyone here makes an effort to pass on this craft. I'm incredibly thankful that my father and grandfather did for me.

[Johanna Johanson]

I am not sure that the woodworking legacy is dying quite yet; I am convinced that many are starting later in life, after they settle down.

Many of us started serious woodworking (as opposed to the household maintenance type) after we got much older because we could not afford good tools when we were younger and were too busy just staying afloat.

[Tim M Tuttle]

I turn 39 next week and just got into wwing a few months ago and have made very little thus far but have spent plenty. I think I might enjoy shopping for tools more than actually using them. No kids and dont plan on any in the future. I am going to try and document all the work I do for posting around the internet, maybe even YouTube, and that will be it as far as a legacy in wwing goes.

[Joshua Bass]

I am 37 and just picking this hobby up. My grandfather and his brother were big time woodworkers, but sadly I never cared to learn from them when I was younger. I really wish I had picked this up sooner

[Don Orr]

I'm 58 and have no children or other family. I have a nice shop with lots of tools-lucky. I do belong to and help with our local woodworking club and hope to donate my tools and wood to them when I pass on. They have an annual tool and lumber auction to support their educational fund.

[Greg Hines, MD]

I am 47, and building a shop. I have no children, but do make gifts for my nephews.

Doc