Doing something time consuming and fraught with problem solving is a great way to switch off.
Slow fermentation bread making is very popular.
Woodworking is my go to. Wood is dynamic. In the grand scheme of things, even hardwood is a soft material. It moves by non trivial amounts with the seasons. Timber/lumber has jargon and standards over which one can geek out, and that’s before you get into any of the tools. Knots and shakes make you stop and think. Grain patterns have to be taken into account when visualizing the finished piece. There’s a lot to think about.
Then, when you’re set up, there’s just as much leg work as there is problem solving work. I’ve spent 10 hours over the past few days just sanding up some barn dried oak getting ready for constructing a rustic garden table. Outdoor furniture should ideally avoid any of the finer arts of joinery, as the wood movement wouldn’t allow it. This is great news — I’m as much a joinery fine artist as I am a leet coder, so it suits me.
Hand and power tools, packed carefully into stacking boxes with a set of castors on the base, allow you to move tools out of the way when not in use. Hand working with pull saws and a miter jig is a great way to get started, especially indoors. Power tools in 2020 have excellent dust extraction. It’s tractable to use them indoors for hours and only have a single pan of dust to tidy up, as any of the Festool hipsters will gladly tell you. If you have outdoor space, you can just wheel your entire workshop in and out of the French doors in between rain showers.
And when it’s pissing it down for days on end, that’s when you go play on Sketchup to create next week’s grand design, taking regular breaks every hour or so to lift and fold your sourdough.
It’s not all hand work though. Power sanders and finishing sanders exist. We poo-pooed random orbital sanders in the 90s but modern ones are much better.
You can fine tune the dimensions of material almost like one would with a belt sander, as well as use them to finish a surface.
Even with power tools, sanding a large piece (eg, a bookshelf or a desk) can be a long, slow and dusty process.
(The first time I did a large project I just hit it quickly with some 120 grit sandpaper, and it was fine but as time goes on I spend more and more time using more and more grits of sandpaper, and that delicious smooth you get is almost addictive.)
Slow fermentation bread making is very popular.
Woodworking is my go to. Wood is dynamic. In the grand scheme of things, even hardwood is a soft material. It moves by non trivial amounts with the seasons. Timber/lumber has jargon and standards over which one can geek out, and that’s before you get into any of the tools. Knots and shakes make you stop and think. Grain patterns have to be taken into account when visualizing the finished piece. There’s a lot to think about.
Then, when you’re set up, there’s just as much leg work as there is problem solving work. I’ve spent 10 hours over the past few days just sanding up some barn dried oak getting ready for constructing a rustic garden table. Outdoor furniture should ideally avoid any of the finer arts of joinery, as the wood movement wouldn’t allow it. This is great news — I’m as much a joinery fine artist as I am a leet coder, so it suits me.
Hand and power tools, packed carefully into stacking boxes with a set of castors on the base, allow you to move tools out of the way when not in use. Hand working with pull saws and a miter jig is a great way to get started, especially indoors. Power tools in 2020 have excellent dust extraction. It’s tractable to use them indoors for hours and only have a single pan of dust to tidy up, as any of the Festool hipsters will gladly tell you. If you have outdoor space, you can just wheel your entire workshop in and out of the French doors in between rain showers.
And when it’s pissing it down for days on end, that’s when you go play on Sketchup to create next week’s grand design, taking regular breaks every hour or so to lift and fold your sourdough.