Hi Reagan,
I understand what you are saying. For my entire working life as a teacher of woodwork and metalwork, I often taught students who had no or little experience in working with their hands using tools and equipment. My job was to encourage them to try as quite often there was a fear of touching or using equipment or there was a confidence issue. Skills develop through repetition but the most difficult part is taking that first step. I?ll use the assembly of a bee hive frame as an example. The first one that you build takes a considerable amount of time. Mistakes will be made and from that we learn. The second one takes only two thirds of the time to assemble and looks much better than the first. By the time 20 frames are made, the skill level has improved considerably but more importantly there has been a growth in confidence. My students often said to me ?I can?t make that.? My reply was always the same. Looking at a project as a whole is often daunting. Breaking it down into very small steps removes the overwhelming feeling that stops you from taking the plunge. As Michael said, beekeepers are tinkerers. We are and always will be. I have noticed that you love cooking, making candles, beeswax wraps etc. This makes you a tinkerer as well. A saw, hammer and cordless drill are just a couple of extra accessories to add to the sewing box.
Thanks, Les. I guess that's true; I never really thought about it like that. I can definitely say, now that I am thinking about it, that the thing that is difficult for me with carpentry is a lack of knowledge regarding materials and tools, and what they do or how to use them effectively and safely (in the case of power tools). Before we moved to the mountains, we never had scrap lumber or other building materials around the house to just mess around with, since we used to live in suburbia. Now that we are country folks, we are slowly accumulating several piles of usable junk
and my sister has been able to use that to her advantage. I lean on her a lot whenever I need something built or fixed.
It's kind of funny how, as a natural book-learner, I could more easily follow a set of detailed instructions (which is really probably where I should start, where carpentry goes, with plans), but I have difficulty envisioning something I haven't previously encountered. My sister can look at something, say her goats have destroyed something and it needs to be rebuilt better or stronger, and she can invent a new solution. Now I could read a book on the subject, and I could understand and remember all the solutions I read about, and, with the right tools, apply them in the appropriate situation, but it would be very difficult for me to stand there and come up with something the world, or at least I, had never seen before to solve the problem. I can't generate something new, I can only search the mental filing cabinet for relevant information. And that's not to say I couldn't learn to think more outside the box with practice, but it's a muscle I have flexed very little in my life so far, so it seems daunting. But like my piano teacher used to say, "slow it down and break it down", and it's much easier to learn.
