Week 2? How it all started? What's the format?

Week 2…after having confirmation of last week's blog being a GINORMOUS success read by a whopping 3 people (Hi to my fiancé, my mum and my most favourite photographer) I’ve decided to plunge into week 2 with more ramblings.

It’s been a weird week, both productive and slow which is always an odd balance, so here we go!

This week in the shop:

The short of it is I’ve done literally nothing productive…that’s not strictly true but it feels like it. I’m halfway through extending my workshop and while that’s taking shape it’s very much halted any and all work in the current workshop space.

It’s all positive steps to help ramp up what I can do and how I do it but this weird interim stage isn’t the best for me mentally as I do love being able to go and just get my head down working on whatever I have on the bench.

That being said, a lovely customer did come and collect some replacement bench slats I made for a memorial bench that’s been sitting for 20 years and was long overdue for some love. The original slats had become very rotten and 2 of them had fully snapped so it was both a pleasure and a challenge to remake them but also to replicate a beautiful engraving in tribute to their late husband and father.

Story Time:

I don’t really know where to start with story time, whether I try and go in some form of chronological order in time or if I just pluck stories out of the sky as and when they come to mind so we’ll see how things pan out but for now…I shall pluck.

This will likely lead to more stories down the line but something that was a bit of a hit with my recent March’s Meet The Maker post over on my socials was that I, before starting the Woodshop, was a drum builder. I did this for over 10 years officially with a few years before that just for fun. I started when I was 17, while I was at 6th form for my A-level ‘DT’ coursework I built a drum from scratch. Now when I say from scratch it was very much from scratch and was very much a terrible, unplayable drum…but we move. My dad helped me despite knowing nothing about drums but knowing everything about making and while it did resemble a drum and had all the hallmarks of a drum…again…it was far from something you’d want to play.

It was a casino-themed drum with poker table felt wrapped over the drum shell, I made the lugs on the side of the drum out of real poker chips that I sat and individually glued into stacks, drilled out, inserted a tube that I turned and hand threaded, flushed the back and fixed them to the drum. Again, I cannot stress enough…terrible.

Fast forward a year, I was refurbishing entry-level drum kits for friends that didn’t have the money to buy high-end kits but could slip me a little cash to cover materials and I really loved doing this as we ALL basically had the same drum kit (Peavey International II for those interested) so finally being able to have some identity in your drum kit was game-changing for us all.

Thinking back I did so many cool finishes for friends and even friends of friends. Some that spring to mind are the tartan drums, carbon fibre, Crayola themed racing stripes, the Swedish flag and my favourite was a crazy Van Halen inspired rainbow finish that just was a total ‘wing it’ job but came out SO good.

The moral of that story was that I was enjoying this work so much and charging far too little trying to help my friends out that I did so much of it that I started to afford raw parts to try and start building my own drums again…now with a little more knowledge and so I did. In 2010 I started JC Drums, my first company and my baby, which eventually grew to making drums for players in the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and probably more that I’ve forgotten but it was wild.

I’m sure I’ll drag up some more stories of those years if I manage to keep the blogging game up but we’ll see!

For now, I’ll leave it at that and perhaps it’s a bit corny to say but those years helping my friends and not charging what I should have but doing it for the love of it and to help them really helped me work on my skills in the workshop (my parents' garage) but also gave me a perspective that is still with me in that business can be fun, it doesn’t have to just be stress and chasing pounds at every turn. If you’re constantly just chasing the money you for sure burn out…and no-ones got time for that!

Until next time!

JC