I am an American citizen and have never been to the states of my birth. I am a self-proclaimed dork. I like to use my imagination and creativity to make things, and I am a proud American who can’t wait to visit my loved ones.
Of course, making things is one of my favorite hobbies. I’ve been creating things for over 20 years and have made over 3,000 items in that time. What I have done and what I always do is add a bit of detail and personalization to the item. This is an example of one of my favorites, a wooden American Flag.
I’ve used some of my wood stuff in all of my projects. There is just something about the way it is shaped and sized that allows for that extra touch of detail. This is an example of the first flag I made on my last day at work. It was one of those things I was afraid I would forget.
At my new job as an assistant project manager I have to make one hundred different projects a day. Most of them involve cutting and assembling wood pieces, so it is common for me to have to chop or saw a piece of wood in the middle of a project to make sure it is square. As an aid to my day job I try to keep a list of all the wood items I have made and have cut and assembled.
The most common mistakes I make are chopping the wrong piece of wood, cutting the wrong wood, and making a mistake in the wood glue. It is common for these mistakes to also be mistakes in my lists of wood items.
Because I am an amateur wood-cutting hobbyist, I have come to learn that even though I am an excellent wood-chopper and a good craftsman, I am also an amateur and not a professional wood-chopper. As long as I am properly prepared, I can achieve almost anything.
My first wood-chopping mistake occurred when I picked up my first piece of wood. I had gotten my tree up in it’s final size and had started trimming to the last piece. I was almost at the last piece when I started noticing a large piece of wood that was notched in it’s sides. I sawed it off and I was good to go. But I was still left with a half-finished tree and the half-finished tree was still not the right size.
This is an easy one: you can’t really make a tree smaller than it already is. That means you have to use a whole lot of saws to cut off the limbs, which is kind of cool, but also pretty dangerous. Wood is a very hard substance to cut with a saw that doesn’t just cut it off from the ends, it has to cut it down in such a way that it doesn’t just fall apart.
Cutting wood is not something you should be doing without some sort of helper. The whole point of woodworking is to make things. Cutting off your fingers or arms is not the same as cutting them off and having them work someplace else. There are different kinds of saws, all with different techniques. One of the most popular are the hand saws, which are basically small saws with a handwheel. They don’t have any cutting teeth.
Most of us can do a quick self assessment of the types of wood we want to cut, and its not hard to tell which ones are the most popular. The average person can easily tell the difference between a piece of pine and an oak, but most can tell the difference between an apple wood and a bamboo. Most people can tell the difference between a piece of maple and a birch, but people with specific skill sets can do the same thing.
