Plus Woodworking

I’m looking for something to do, so I’m writing.

It’s funny; to relax, I do something most people hate. Most people would lose their minds if someone said, “I need 1800 words in an hour.” To me, it’s like asking a cat to go sit in a box. Behind a keyboard is my natural location.

I thought it might be fun to tell about a few Youtube channels I like. They’re all related to tools in one way or another. I’ll do it in reverse order of how much they thrill me.

14. AvE. This guy is Canadian. To me, that means, “American in denial.” When the jihadis come screaming over the tundra from Siberia, he’ll start crying for American tanks to defend him; you just wait.

He lives somewhere near the North Pole, and he has no end of tools. I don’t know what he does for a living, but he seems to know absolutely everything about the tool world. Maybe he’s a mechanical engineer. Maybe he’s one of Santa’s elves, and he was discharged for using profanity.

One of his neat activities is taking tools apart to see if they’re made well. He looks at the quality of the plastic and tests the melting point with a soldering iron. He comments on the switches and fasteners. He checks the machining. It’s all great info. You can learn a ton from this guy. He is very, very smart.

Problem: his personality is so obnoxious it’s almost unbearable. He makes one infantile sexual joke after another. It’s like he has spent his life collecting prurient and scatological expressions. It never stops. It’s like his brain quit maturing at the age of three. It’s like listening to the internal monologue of a serial killer.

I can’t believe he’s married. Maybe he’s a different person around his wife.

I can stand him in short bursts, but I wouldn’t want to watch two videos in a row.

Here’s a video. I’m sure it’s filthy. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

13. Wortheffort. This man runs some sort of school for woodworkers. I don’t know what the deal is. Maybe he’s a preacher or a social worker. He has a beautiful shop and some nice tools, and he clearly knows what he’s doing. If you want to bone up on woodworking, Wortheffort is a good choice.

There are videos that tell about his school, but I don’t watch them, because I don’t care.

His personality can be a little grating, but it’s not too bad.

12. Stumpy Nubs. The name is a little disturbing, and he lives up to it. In one of his videos, you can see his blood all over one of his projects. He’s a woodworker, and he has a mountain of videos. Lots of projects. Lots of expert info. Here is a video, chosen randomly.

11. The Wood Whisperer. This young man does fairly orthodox woodworking, relying a lot on standard power tools such as the table saw and band saw. Manufacturers give him free stuff to use. I don’t know if that affects his judgment. He doesn’t seem to have the transcendent expertise of some of the other Youtubers, but he does good work.

10. The English Woodworker. You’ll enjoy this man’s videos. He has an excellent presentation style. He is passionate. He is interesting to listen to. So why is he so low on my list? Simple. He went to a pay model. He has a few great videos on Youtube, but he started putting things behind a pay wall, and the price was not reasonable. He needs to lower prices or get a Patreon page to bring in income.

6. Baconsoda. This man is nuts. He’s Irish, so maybe it’s not entirely his fault. He’s a woodturner. He has a number of nice projects. Unfortunately, he has like 9,000 videos about other less-interesting things, like his potato garden, which he seems to find very exciting.

I did say he was Irish.

9. Robbiethewoodturner. See if you can guess what his hobby is. He’s another Irishman. Either that, or he has a horrible speech impediment.

He makes neat items on the lathe. Maybe not the most dynamic host on earth.

8. The Tiny Trailer Workshop. When I feel bad about being eccentric, I think about this guy, and I realize things could be a lot worse.

He’s a blast. He lives in the woods somewhere, and he has a tiny trailer with a little wood lathe in it. He composes his own music, and he uses it to score his videos. He makes all sorts of weird things. Sometimes they fall apart. Who cares? He has a lot of fun.

7. Carl Jacobson. Woodturner. He does meticulously turned pieces that show there is more to woodturning that cutting out bowls and slapping shellac on them. Very creative.

Now I’ll start writing about the people in my top tier.

6. Mike Waldt. I enjoy this man’s work more than the other woodturners. When he started, he wasn’t the most amazing woodturner around, but he turned that into a strength. He began shooting video as a beginner, and he kept chronicling his work as he matured and got better tools. His work is very good now. He talks a great deal about tools and methods, so if you want to try woodturning, he’s a good man to watch.

He developed Bell’s Palsy after he started making videos, and you can watch him as he gradually recovers.

5. Abom79. He runs the Booth Machine Shop in Pensacola. He’s a third-generation machinist. He welds, too.

He’s a real machinist, which means he feeds his family using machine tools. He takes real jobs.

He has some nice old tools, and some of his videos are about fixing them up. He has a 27-video playlist in which he makes a parking attachment for a K&T horizontal mill, which is possibly the coolest mill in existence. Don’t ask me what a parking attachment is. Just watch.

He makes mistakes; I wouldn’t say he’s a top-flight machinist. But he’s honest about his errors, and he’s patient with viewers.

12. Keith Rucker. He’s a volunteer at Georgia’s agricultural museum in Tifton. He collects old machines and gets them working again. He calls it restoration; sometimes it’s more like a paint job. Whatever. It’s pretty cool.

He has a barn-sized workshop at his house. He had it built. It isn’t air conditioned, so it proves he’s dedicated.

Last time I watched him, he was working on an old Monarch lathe the size of a VW bus.

His interests are very wide-ranging. He does trains, wood machines, metal machines…you name it. He is no noob. He knows some stuff.

His delivery has a halting quality which can get on your nerves, but still fun to watch.

4. Paul Sellers. You like wood? You like hand tools? This is your guy. He’s an expert woodworker with a passion for teaching. He seems to know how to do almost everything, and he is happy to pass it all on to you.

Some of the stuff he covers: refurbishing saw blades, sharpening plane irons. making bench dogs, building workbenches, hand-tool joinery, and using planes.

3. Oxtoolco. This is Tom Lipton’s channel. Tom Lipton has what may be the greatest machining job on earth; he works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, better known as “the Berkeley Lab.” Berkeley U. has one of the nation’s top physics departments. They do lots of government-funded research. Big money means big toys and no brakes. I saw a video in which he gave another vlogger a tour, and I was flabbergasted by the size of the facility and the battery of megadollar tools it has.

He has his own shop as well. I’m not sure if it’s a business; I get the impression that it doesn’t make money. It makes my stomach hurt to look at it. It’s huge. It’s clean. It’s airy. I want it.

I don’t know too much about him, but he seems to be about as good as a machinist can get.

He doesn’t actually understand the purpose of some of the things he builds for the lab. He says sometimes they’ll run an experiment that lasts a few nanoseconds, and afterward, the physicists will look really happy. That means he did okay.

Here’s a great video in which he refurbishes a priceless family heirloom to get his mother off his back.

3. Tubalcain. Also known as Mrpete222, Tubalcain is a retired shop teacher. That means he will make you nervous. He has the archtypal crusty shop teacher voice. In fact, he has nearly the same voice as the actor from the old Lite Beer commercials. I think he’s the same guy. He’s just undercover.

Tubalcain has a nearly ideal life. He wanders around to auctions, buying used tools with his retirement money. Then he puts them in his shop and makes videos. He also buys and restores old tractors. Teaching must pay pretty good.

He machines, and he also makes his own castings. He doesn’t have any interest in woodworking. He calls woodworkers “wood butchers.”

If there is some simple machining task you don’t know how to do, chances are, Tubalcain has a video for you. Just make sure you sit up straight and wipe that smirk off your face.

Here’s another one:

I’m up to my second-favorite vlogger.

2. NYCNC. This is a channel run by John Saunders, a young man who didn’t know anything about machining ten years ago. He lived in an apartment in New York, and he wanted to make and sell an invention. Starting from zero, he learned about tools, and he started manufacturing.

Eventually, he was able to expand. He moved to Ohio and got a gigantic shop. It kills me to see it in videos. There’s so much room, you could roller skate.

He has a Tormach mill, and the Tormach CNC company is one of his sponsors. He makes all sorts of interesting stuff.

Why is he my second-favorite tool vlogger? For one thing, he went from ignorance to professional machinist in ten years. I’ve been fooling with tools as long as he has, and I’ve accomplished squat. For another thing, he has a great attitude. He loves what he does, and he loves teaching other people about it. There are better machinists out there, to be sure, but how many started in an apartment, ten years ago, from scratch?

For some reason, he reminds me of Bridget Fonda. Very distracting. Once you get that in your head, you keep seeing it over and over.

1. Keith Fenner. This man is the king.

As proprietor of Turn Wright Machine Works in Massachusetts, Keith Fenner does all sorts of machining and welding work for companies involved in various maritime pursuits. He makes and fixes prop shafts. He fixes rudders. He repairs cutless bearings. He puts new ears on backhoe buckets and line-bores them so they fit. He made his own gigantic purple wheeled log splitter. He made his own 50-ton press, with a chain-driven elevation adjustor you won’t believe.

His main tools are old junk, but he’s so good, it doesn’t matter. He has an old Clausing lathe and a belt-drive drill press which must be twelve feet tall. He also has a K&T horizontal mill which he repaired himself after he bought it. He has a CNC plasma table he put together.

There is nothing this man can’t do. If you bring him a cast iron pump housing with a big chunk missing, he can put new metal into it and machine it back to original specs. I am in awe of his capabilities.

I haven’t seen him do woodworking. Maybe it’s beneath him.

That’s it. That’s my Youtube tool pantheon. I hope you check some of these guys out.

The main thing is this: I feel much better now that I’ve written this. I spent three hours today dealing with a cable guy who literally knew three words of English (he didn’t know what “remote” meant), and I needed to get my mind off it.

Enjoy.