Carpentry
I have loved woodworking since I was young. When I was six, my grandfather took me out to cut bamboo and make simple things from it by hand. It was basic work, but it was my first taste of making something with my hands, and it stayed with me. In middle school, my shop teacher introduced me to carpentry. Working in a real shop showed me that wood could be shaped into something both useful and lasting, and I kept building from there. This cutting board is one of my favorite projects. I made it from maple and reclaimed pine floorboards, two woods with different colors and textures. Setting them side by side let each one stand out against the other. Both are porous, so to seal the gaps I mixed tree sap with leftover pine sawdust and used the paste as filler. That meant the project’s own scraps went back into the piece instead of into the trash. For the center, I used the natural grain as a guide and burned it to create the appearance of a pair of eyes, so the board looks like it’s watching you. I like working with the character of the wood instead of forcing it into a design, and I let the grain suggest where the burn should go. Details like this give each piece a personality, and they’re a big part of why I enjoy making things by hand.
Hand Tools and Precision
When I returned to carpentry in middle school, I took a different approach. The first time, I relied on machines. This time I leaned into hand tools, because I was drawn to the precision that comes from human skill. With a hand tool, every cut depends on your own eye, your own hand, and your own patience. No fence or guide does the work for you, so a straight line is something you earn, and a crooked one is something you answer for. That changed how I worked. I slowed down, marked my lines carefully, and thought through each cut before making it. Mistakes were easy to see and hard to hide, which pushed me to measure twice and trust my own control. Over time, I learned how grain direction affects a blade, how different woods respond to pressure, and how small adjustments make a big difference.
I still appreciate the accuracy of power tools, and a perfect cut from a table saw is as satisfying as ever. But working by hand gave me a different kind of satisfaction, because the precision is mine. It shaped the way I approach every project.
This sailboat is modeled after the 420s I sailed during middle school. The 420 is a two-person dinghy, so I built the piece from a boat I knew by feel, from the hull’s shape to how the sail sits on it. Turning something I had sailed into something I could build in wood gave me a different view of the boat, because I had to understand how it was put together and not only how it handled on the water
This model is based on a seaworthy biplane. I chose it because of how the real aircraft came about: a concept model was built first, and when the plane went into production, it was built entirely out of wood. That made it a natural subject for a carpentry piece, since the original was a woodworking project as well as an engineering one. Building the model let me study how the aircraft was put together, piece by piece.
This is one of the blanks I made for my rings I turn on the lathe which as you can see got stuck on the clamps somehow.
Glueing down my cutting board, I couldn’t take any chances that this would shift by even a micrometer