Father's Day weekend. Sam came down from Portland. Hannah called to say she was sorry she couldn't make it — she's deep in a project at school and the materials don't pause. So it was me, Sam, Annie, and Riggs. I told Sam he was required to do a shop tour. I do this every year. He's twenty-eight. He's been doing the tour since he was small enough to stand under the bench. He did it again Sunday.
Tell you what — the tools in the shop are the closest thing I have to a written autobiography. Here's the abbreviated version, tool by tool.
The bench
Earl's bench. The base is original to the shop and predates me by about thirty years. The top I rebuilt in 2014 because the old one had a hundred and fifty years of saw kerfs in it and was no longer flat. The vise on the front is German, came over with a fella in Cornwall who's been dead twenty years and gave it to Earl in 1972. I've never seen another one like it.
The block plane
Mentioned this in the spring shop reset post. Came with the shop. Older than I am. Doesn't owe me anything.
The drill press, 1998
Bought it the second month I had my own shop. Annie had gotten me a gift certificate to the place on the way to Hartford. I added some money. We picked it up together. It's a Delta, single-phase, fourteen-inch swing. Twenty-eight years old. I've replaced the belts twice.
The Wadkin tablesaw, 2003
Used. Bought from an estate sale up in Massachusetts. Showed up needing a fence rebuild and a new motor mount. Sam was five years old and "helped" by sitting on it while I worked. There's a photograph of that on the corkboard. He's wearing a pair of safety goggles three sizes too big.
Hannah's bench
Hannah, when she was about seven, decided she needed her own bench. I built her a small one out of poplar. It's still in the corner, near the window. She painted it pink at age eight, and we never quite got it un-pink. It now holds the planer's tooling drawer. She's twenty-four. She's in grad school for art conservation. Her bench is now a tool storage rack. She's seen it. She doesn't mind.
The cordless drill, 2022
Talked about this one in the spring reset, too. Took me twenty years to admit cordless was real. The drill is a Milwaukee. It doesn't owe me anything either, and it's only four years old.
The dust collection, 2026
Sam helped run the conduit for it in March. The newest tool in the shop. Will outlast me. Wrote about it last week.
The chisels
Earl gave me his set of Stanley 750 chisels when I'd been with him three years. I've sharpened them eight or nine times each. Two of them are now an inch shorter than they were when he gave them to me. He's been gone twelve years. The chisels are still where he put them.
The miter saw
Bought new in 2011. Replaced in 2019. Replaced in 2024. The miter saw doesn't survive in this shop. I don't know why. Sam says it's because I run too many crown profiles and the bearings give up. He might be right. He keeps suggesting a Festool. I keep ignoring him.
What this is really about
The shop is a place I've been showing up to since 1998. Twenty-eight years next month. Sam was born in 1998 too — the same year I started. Hannah came in 2002. They've never known me without this shop.
I don't make a big deal out of Father's Day. Annie does. The kids call. We have dinner. The shop tour is the part that's mine. We walk out, we look at the same tools, we tell the same stories about each one with slight modifications every year, and then we go back inside and have dessert.
That's most of fatherhood, in a paragraph. The continuous showing up. The same stories. The slight modifications.
Riggs comes on the tour. He's not in any of the photographs because he's only four. But he'll be in next year's.