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28289 james lawson <jlawson@m...> 1997‑10‑12 bio
Jim Lawson - Coming Out

I am only 60, but I'm told that I am big for my age. I teach at Yuba
College, a California community college outside of Sacramento.  I've taught
at various levels from junior high to university for these last thirty some
years. When I'm not teaching, or thinking about teaching, I think about
wood, boats, or wooden boats. My first love is hand tools; I grew up in
tenements outside Providence, RI, where the only edged tools in my social
circles were switchblades. (Some of them can be made to take a fairly good
edge, incidentally.)  Through my growing up years, any project that I could
work on had to be portable and require no investment in tools or space. So
I carved - signs, figures - I was, and remain, ungifted but relentless.
I've made dumploads of furniture from 2x4's, Mechanix Illustrated projex,
and boats that could be disposed of without a pang on anyone's part.  In
the last few years - my God, ten? fifteen? twenty? - I've been hanging out
with John DeLapp.  I am  learning to slow down, buy the very best tools to
do the job, and expect and work consistently to a far higher standard of
work than my rushed, impatient nature normally impels me toward.

I say that I am not a collector.  Apparently, this is not true. I say it ,
with a weaselly little chuckle, every time I buy another plane,  measuring
implement,  chisel, or practically any other damn rust-encrusted thing that
strikes my fancy.  I already have a perfectly good plane that I can do most
of my work with.  What do I want with another, or the other 15 or so that I
have hanging on the shop wall?  And I want more.  I am looking for a nice
#55 spokeshave under every rock and tree stump in the yard. No luck so far.

One of my ongoing projects is building really nice dovetailed boxes to put
my stuff in and a Studley type box for above the workbench. Lots of stuff
going into my side of the garage, not a whole lot coming out.  I am kind of
thinking about building a canoe version of the skiff that DeLapp designed
originally for me and Sunny, my wife. That boat is called Natoma, and,
since plans were published, a lot of them have been built around the
country, but this will be the first canoe version that I know of. Planning.

That's me, in what my Dad would have called a nutshell.

Jim l



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