The Joiner's Bench · Episode 9: Welcome, Alex

And Then There Were Two

Everything changes in Episode 9. After eight solo episodes, Steven brings on Alex Baum — a Joinery member and self-described "stay-at-home dad Monday through Friday" — as co-host. They talk about where beginners get stuck, why YouTube only gets you so far, and what it means to build something for someone who actually loves it.

About Alex Army medic and National Guard veteran (17 years, retired), with a background in public affairs, photography, and videography. He's been a Joinery member for about nine months and is currently building a basement bar and cabinet set — an ambitious first large project.

Topics covered

• Alex's proudest build: a cheese board in olive wood, wenge, and maple made as a Christmas gift
• The prototype mindset — why "consider this a practice run" is the single best thing a beginner can do
• "Don't fall in love with the wood" — and why it matters
• YouTube woodworking: great for inspiration, limited as instruction
• Recommended channels/resources: Shaper Origin tutorials at shaper.com; Sledge Tool (Festool instructor)
• Mark Adams School of Woodworking — Stephen's annual retreat and ongoing recommendation
• Why shared shops change everything for beginners
• What's coming: parallel projects where both hosts build the same thing and compare notes

Contact / Questions Send questions for either host to thejoinery@thejoinery.club — we'll answer them on air.

Transcript

Steven 0:13

This is the Joiners Bench. I'm Steven Ricks. If you've been listening for the first eight episodes, you know that it has been me talking at you about woodworking, talking to you about woodworking, for 20-30 minutes every couple of weeks. Today that changes. I'm bringing on Alex Baum, a member at the Joinery, to co-host with me. Why? Because honestly, I was getting tired of hearing my own voice. And more importantly, I think the conversations that happen between a beginner and someone who's been doing this for 40 years are more interesting than me lecturing about dovetails. So let's see if this works. Alex, how's it going?

Alex 0:50

Why don't you tell us about yourself? Yeah, it's it's going great. I'm happy to be here and to have this going again. So quick little background on me. I was an army medic, uh, National Guard for 17 years, retired last year, and I have a background in public affairs, photography, videography, and Monday to Friday, 9 to 5, I'm a stay-at-home Dan. Wow.

Steven 1:18

That's great. So you've got your mind wandering during those times of like, what can I do with my hands, probably. So yeah, that so how long have you been at the joinery actually?

Alex 1:28

Yeah, it's been right around a year, I think, maybe nine months, something like that.

Steven 1:35

Okay. Yeah, good. For those of you that don't remember or didn't listen to the earlier episodes, the joinery is a shared shop. I call it a gym membership for woodworkers that I started about uh two and a half years ago now. It's been going really, really well. And a lot of what we talk about in this podcast not only revolves around a shared shop, but also how you can apply those same techniques at home and things like that. And I think the benefit is, especially as an owner of a place like this, is I get to see all different types of personalities. We've taught almost 300 people the introduction to woodworking course. Oh, wow. And so we've seen it all. And one thing that I've learned is that anybody can do woodworking if they set their mind to it. And there is definitely levels to that. But so speaking of that, where do you think two two questions for you? Yeah. And I'm gonna start with where do you want to go with woodworking? Like what if you could build, what would be your ideal project or your like goal project?

Alex 2:31

Man, uh right now it's it's home improvement. So I'm building a bar in my basement. Bar is a home improvement, only to Wisconsin. The whole cabinets to go along with it. So it's an ambitious project, I'd call it, especially. That's a big one. Coming from nearly nothing to that.

Steven 2:50

Yeah. What have you so then the second question is what have you built in your the last nine months that you're extremely proud of?

Alex 2:59

I for Christmas I made a cheese slicing board, and I'm really happy with how it turned out. Now it's a cutting board, so it is pretty simple all in all, but I used some very odd woods. I used olive wood, wenge, I think some maple that I had left over, and another one that I'm forgetting, but it was it took some problem solving that I wasn't expecting to get everything to the same width and height, I should say. And then also trying to work with the not very good instructions on the cheese cutting kit. But it turned out beautiful. The person that received the gift totally loved it. And yeah, definitely proud of it.

Steven 3:45

Yeah, that's the best part too, right? When when you make something specifically for somebody and they get it and enjoy it, that's kind of that's that's the pinnacle of it. It doesn't matter what what the project is or how big the project is or how complicated it was. It's do is it useful? Do people like it? Do they enjoy it? That kind of thing. So yeah. So if there was a skill that you would want to learn that you don't know already, what do you think that would be? And that you that can be in the form of like either a skill or even just a project, if you don't.

Alex 4:19

I would love to get better at working on small things. So my my uh we'll say degree in woodworking comes from hours and hours and hours of YouTube, and that's a lot of furniture making. But the things I found myself actually creating with my hands are smaller, like knife handles or like dollhouse kind of furniture, I suppose. And there I haven't found a good set of instructions on getting down to that that level of precision, I'd say. Okay. Yeah. Is that what attracts you to that, the precision of it, or no, it's just that my daughter loves playing with her Barbies, and so it was a cool thing to give her.

Steven 5:10

Yeah. Again, it all comes back to people and what we're doing it for, which is again, I think one of the best parts about this hobby is it it's I had a years back, I was into a couple different hobbies, but we were driving in from Madison to Milwaukee, and my wife was going with me. I was going particularly to go to two places one, the ham radio store, and two, Rockler. And we're driving, we're having this conversation, and my wife says to me, I don't like this ham radio thing. And I was like, What's wrong with ham radio? And she said, I don't really get anything from it. At least with the woodworking, you make things for me and make things for around the house. And I I instantly, I don't even think we went to the ham radio store that day. I was like, okay, I need to capitalize on this and spend all my money on woodworking. I'll never get questioned about that. So yeah, it's a it's an interesting dilemma. Well, do you have some questions for me? Do you have anything?

Alex 6:01

Oh what now I know you've you've got given a ton of background here in the the past several episodes. What is your number? And I'm gonna back up a little bit. So I'm not new to woodworking, yet I still do feel very new. What is a piece of advice you'd give to somebody in my excuse me, in my field? Yeah, yeah.

Steven 6:31

Well, and I I would say that I don't consider myself I I still consider myself new too. I think that's I think it's one of the other great things about woodworking is there's always so much to learn. But a piece of advice I think is or I'll I'll say it in this way, I think things that always held me back was the the fear of ruining the wood.

Alex 6:53

Yeah.

Steven 6:53

And that came from a couple of different levels. One is as you know, I was a young married couple raising a family, very similar to you. Money wasn't free-flowing. And wood, depending on how you get it, can be expensive, or if you're lucky enough to know people that have it and you can get it, or if you're doing small stuff, you can use scraps. That's good too. But I always tended to to you know go to a lumber yard and buy my wood. And as a result, even when I bought the cheapest stuff that I could afford, it was still expensive. And so then there was this mental block of okay, make sure everything's in line before you make this cut. And then inevitably you would screw up because you were focused so much on not screwing up. So one of the things that I tell people is consider every first project a prototype and approach it from that aspect of I don't have to get this right. And in my experience, anyway, 90% of the time when you get to the end of that, you're like, I don't need to make another one. This one looks pretty good, right? Or maybe you do, because maybe the prototype you do in a lesser quality or less expensive wood, and you want to ultimately make it out of something very expensive, which doesn't fail you either, because it's like once you've built one, then you have the confidence to build the second one. But I think it's I think it's that. I think it's have the confidence to jump into it. Do all the mind voodoo that you've got to do to yourself to break free. It's one of the first things we talk about in class is consider this a prototype. Don't fall in love with the wood, is the other one that I like to say a lot. We tend to, no matter what it is, we see a piece of wood, we pick it up, and we fall in love with that knot or that grain. And then three cuts into it, we've messed up, and now we're like really upset that we messed up about it. And, you know, as you progress, you will get to the point where you will do a piece because of the piece of wood. You'll be standing in front of a piece of wood and say, oh, that looks like a, you know, a guitar body, or that looks like a whatever. And you're gonna you're gonna do that. But if by that point, you've experienced enough that you you kind of get the hang of it. But the nervousness never goes away about it. So yeah, I would say just do it. Just get out there and do it. And I do believe, I'm a little biased in this, but I think wherever you're at, find a shared shop, find a makerspace. One of the beautiful things about here at the joinery is there's so many people of all different skill levels, and they're all very willing to help. And I will say you don't find that all the time in a makerspace, but find one and and find one that has that kind of attitude. And then then there's nothing you can't do because you just you ask on their forum or in the shop, hey, I want to make a jewelry box, and somebody's gonna volunteer to help you make that jewelry box. So yeah, get help. Going back to your YouTube, you know, YouTube is great, it is awesome. I would say that the problem with YouTube is they're doing it for a reason and they're keeping it entertaining. Yep. And and there's a lot often that's left out in those. And so you can learn a lot, and I've learned a lot from YouTube. And they're at the same time, there are a lot of very good instructional, you know, tool-centric. Like if you go to shaper.com for the shaper origin, their instructions and their how they make stuff is incredible. Sledge tool from he's an instructor for Fest Tool, but he's got his own channel. He's another very, very good one. There are so there are there, what I'm saying is not a blanket statement, but a lot of them are for entertainment and not for getting you to instruct it. And so there's oftentimes left out. And then the flip side of that is those are oftentimes people who s are self-taught or learned on YouTube, and they may not know all the tricks of the trade and things like that. And what I always tell people here is that like I was formerly trained by people who made a living doing woodworking. And so I don't know all the cool, quick gimmick things, but I know how to be efficient in a shop and how to make the right cuts and the right tools to go do that. And I think there's something to learning that in the background, and you only get that from people who have been there and done it and do it a lot. So again, use YouTube, get it, have it have it get you excited like it did for you, but then find someplace to go get that knowledge that that extends that further.

Alex 11:20

Oh, yeah. And I've I've definitely witnessed that on both ends here already at the joinery of going to somebody else and going to you. Actually, there's a project that I still haven't finished, and I need more help from Jan, but that I was like, I just don't can't quite figure out how to make these fit. It's a really odd arrangement. So I knew I could receive help. And then also I've had members come up to me of hey, how do you use the router? Or how can I keep these pieces of plywood at 90 while I while I glue them together? And it it's really reassuring that there's that confidence all across the board, across the members.

Steven 12:03

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it really is. I'm not a people person, which is shocking to everybody that knows me because I talk and talk and talk and talk, which is why I guess I have a podcast too. But I really the thing that I enjoy the most about this, secondarily from all the cool tools that we have, yeah, is the people, because I do see that in it, and is it has taken, you know, it was kind of rough in the beginning years. There were a lot of people that are just kind of like users of the shop. And now we've kind of manifested, I guess, a community that is very helpful and and does that. So it's great. And so I I encourage everybody to find that. And every major community has something like that. Sometimes they're a little harder to find, or they're harder to find the good ones, but they but they exist. So yeah, highly, highly encouraged it. All right.

Speaker 12:54

Did you have another one for me? Have you been in as you were kind of coming up in the craft, were you ever in a kind of community like this or a community different from this? Yeah. No.

unknown 13:09

Okay.

Steven 13:10

So yeah, I think I've maybe hit on some of this, maybe, or uh maybe I wrote a blog post on this, but I mean, I I my dad was, I called him an industrial woodworker. If it could be bolted and screwed together, that's what he did. And we had, you know, I grew up at the time where Sears was the place to buy tools, and so we had every Craftsman table saw, we had a radio arm saw that yeah, just scared the death out of me even then. And we just did projects together, and we we did, I never considered it fine furniture making. In fact, it it was one of those things where that we had a craftsman table saw and it would not cut a straight line for the life of me. And we I finally stumbled into a woodcraft and found them, and they turned me on to the Biesmeyer, you know, T Square fence, and all of a sudden our our Rockwall craftsman table saw was cutting straight, and I thought that was a miracle. But no, it wasn't until we I mean I grew up in Texas, and about 27, 28 years ago now we moved here to Wisconsin, and my wife gave me, and I hear this a lot from my members too, about their wife got them into this place. My wife got me a gift certificate for the Mark Adams School of Woodworking. And so I went one summer, and I think I've been back every summer since. Oh wow. And so I guess if there is a community, that's it. Although it's not the same people when you go every time. It was for the longest time, it was the same shop assistants and shop managers, so I had relationships with all those people, but no, really not. I tried, you know, here in Madison, we had, I mean, the Woodturner's Guild has always gone pretty well, and I was a member of that for a little while. Okay. There never really was a substantial woodworking uh club or anything. I think there is one, but I'm not sure how often they meet. And so no, I never really got into something like that. I wish that I had. And in fact, the story I was gonna tell that actually the first class I took was at Woodcraft, and it wasn't great. You know, it was and they they they're all of the map, right? Of what they were. But, you know, I left. I was one of those people that when I left, I was like, well, you know what? I learned actually two good skills, and that was worth the money for it. And that's the way I kind of approach going to classes now, too, is if you learn one or two things, then you got your money's worth because they're usually pretty fairly priced. You know, I would say at the Mark Adams School, I walk away just flooded with information and knowledge, even to this day. And it's it's well worth the price and the trip to go down there. And there are schools all over the country that are like Mark Adams that offer the same programs, and so that's another good tip for people. It's also I looked at it as my yearly retreat. It was the yeah, and when I first started going down there, I stayed in the bed and breakfast, so there was no internet, there was no, you know, and it was like it really, and I I even got a room that didn't have TV and stuff in it, so it was like I was journaling and reading at night and woodworking during the day, and it was great. I love that kind of thing. So yeah, very cool.

Alex 16:10

Yeah, it's one thing I really appreciate about woodworking, and it's hard to put into words, but maybe it's that like kind of earthly connection where you're working with this thing that grew out of the earth and taking the big thing and making it smaller with sharp items, and I don't know. I guess it's a grounding, really grounding thing I found.

Steven 16:32

Yeah, oh yeah. I mean it it's it's it's amazing. Community is so good. Well, let's see, what else do we have here on our list that we can talk about? So I think what we want from this podcast going forward is not just this kind of question and answer thing, but I think we have some fun things planned if we if we move. We're trying this out, we're gonna see how it works. If we have fun with it, number one, if people actually listen and enjoy it, that's number two. Yeah. But you know, we can going forward, I think the the dynamic of having somebody newer to woodworking and somebody a little longer in the tooth, I guess, and kind of that that play back and forth. And also I think it gives us a good opportunity for not just me experiencing through beginners, but you can kind of add some insight into like what are issues that you're struggling with? How can I help you with those things? I might even find things that I learned from you during this whole process because I'm always I'm always looking for new skills and new things to do. But then there's some other fun things that we can do. One idea is to to have a project that we pick, you know, a small box or something, and we both go out and try doing it our way and then come back and compare notes on the podcast and things like that. So I think there's some fun things we can we can do with that.

Alex 17:52

The different projects and kind of the experience that will bring. Something I've struggled with here being out of the shop for a little while, things going on at home, is with inspiration and knowing what project do I want to do next? What do I want to try doing? So this definitely gives a an excuse to get back in the shop for one, you know, get make some sawdust, and also I don't have to think of what I'm going to make.

Steven 18:18

Yeah. And you know, speaking of that, that is one of the number one questions that we get here. Or are like when people leave, when I ask the question of like, what is there something we could do different? They're like, no, I just didn't know what to build. And I so I think that is a common problem. And so that will be good to do on the podcast of like get those things out. What are some of those ideas? And and also make sure that it's that you know, all this stuff is attainable. It doesn't matter how how advanced it is, you can you can build a very complex trick door cabinet, you know, and it it you can do it. It's just time and patience, right? Oh yeah. So yeah, that'll be another benefit to this. And and hopefully that'll spur me on to get out in the shop more too, because I've always talked about that. I just don't get as much time making things as I would like. So yeah, I'm excited that this kind of gives us that opportunity to go do those things. And yeah, and I would say to the general listening public, if you've got questions for either one of us, you can well for right now you can send it to the joinery at the joinery.club. You can I don't know, at some point we'll get some social media out there where they can ask questions. But right now, just send us an email and we'll we'll get it. If you have questions for one of us that you'd like to have on air, you could you can send that as well. And we'll do that.

Alex 19:31

But any last parting thoughts or just really I am excited that this podcast is going again and being able to have this these conversations. I I truly am excited for this and for what's to come.

Steven 19:46

Aaron Powell Yeah, and it was funny, because you just told me too before we started this that you went back and listened to the first eight again, which even I haven't done, and you still found them enjoyable the second time, which is thank you for saying that. That's that's an incredible thing. But yeah, I mean that's why we're doing this too, is like to give some inspiration to people and or even just 30 minutes of chilling out and listening to something that you enjoy, hopefully, and and we'll go from there. So all right. Well, this has been the Joiners Bench now with Alex Baum and me, Steven Ricks. The next episode will be in about two weeks. We'll both report on our projects and what we're doing in the shop. And I'm sure Alex will have more questions for me, and I bet I will have some more questions for him. So thanks again for listening.