038. Wywiad: Paul-Marcel z HalfInchShy.com cz. 1

Hello to all carpentery fans.

Today is a special chapter!

I hope that you will share my enthusiasm

because I finalize an exclusive

an exclusive interview

only for our portal domidrewno.pl

with a great carpenter

a great video webcaster

and an excellent hockey player

And now some of you

already know who I am going to talk with

Please welcome :) Paul-Marcel from HalfInchShy.com

Hi, I'm Paul-Marcel

so one night I was just minding my own business
looking at some referral URLs that were

coming into my web site and I noticed Domidrewno.pl
was on the list

and I'm thinking...

What's this? Why am I getting hits from this site?

so I went to go browse the site

and Google Chrome suggested
"do you want automatic translations from Polish?"

and I thought, "That is a great idea!"

so I went ahead and browsed it

it's a woodworking site and carpentry site
put together by Jarek Ostaszewski

and it's got

a number of articles on all sorts of different aspects of

both carpentry and woodworking that are currently being done

in Poland.

You know I was just going there to snoop and
the next thing you know I was there for

two hours in Google Translate reading
a number of older articles

that are out there. Now he's been expanding
in adding some video lately

of course Google Translate doesn't
work for video so I just

watch the pictures.

So a little later, Jarek contacted me
earlier this week and asked if we could do

just the simple interview. so

that's what we're gonna do today

Let's start.

Welcome Paul!Don't worry, our questions are a piece of cake:)

On the begining please tell us where the idea for HalfInchShy.com came form?

And if carpentery is only your hobby

or perhaps professional work?

For me, I'm not pro, I'm an amateur and this
is my hobby. My day job is as a software

engineer and to be honest there's a lot
of aspects about that I find very

intriguing as well so

so it isn't like

I'm hoping to get rid of software
engineering so I can do this full time

and I actually like both.

And also there's a certain benefit to
keeping something that you really like

to do as a hobby because then you
can explore things on your own

in your own way on your own time

without having the constraints of
needing to make a profit in order to eat

dinner the next day

so uh... for me this is

likely going to stay a hobby for a long time;
maybe I'll end up doing some of it 'pro' later

perhaps after I retire something like that but

that's a long way away.

Now the original idea for Half-Inch Shy

was because when I first got started in
woodworking, I sort of fell into it

the way it's fairly common around here in the
US: people start remodeling their house and

then along the way ended up running
into Marc Spagnuolo's site

TheWoodWhisperer.com.

I happen to be on a business trip so
I was very bored in my hotel

so I ended up just plowing through a
number of his videos, and this is very early

on in his career.

Now from there that sort of ignited some
interest in all of this and to be

honest, I learn almost all my
fundamentals from Marc

and his site. I also talked to him

through email and online a little bit...
turns out that he's actually here in

Phoenix; I'm in Chandler, which is in the
southern part of Phoenix Arizona and

he's in the north

western portion of the city. From there,
I got some other mentors online like

Charles Neil; he's actually been
my mentor more recently

with some of his builds in his guild

but in all honesty you learn from
all of these people online

so very much so my education has
come from the online community

and some of the friendships that I have
made through the online community

so in making my site what I want
to do is mostly when I'd do

builds I would

do builds online to be a fun
way to sort of get some

feedback you know see if people are
interested in it if you get yourself

stuck on something maybe somebody will offer
another way of doing it or something

I thought it would be kind of interesting to

turn something that generally is a
solitary thing like me been working in

my shop is pretty solitary

but when you include these videos and you
put them out onto the web then suddenly

you have a lot of people talking
to you about it and asking you

questions or offering different

perspectives on what you could be doing.

Now for the name of my site Half-Inch Shy

we have to go back to a little story with my dad.

see when I first started it was all that
remodeling and he came over to help because

he likes just hanging out with me... we
got along great... we were more best friends

than anything else

and it didn't matter how many times I
measured with that tape... I could

measure five times and add three inches,
I swear, and I'd go cut it and come up a

half inch shy

every time is was amazing consistency I
was consistently exactly a half inch shy

so my dad would just

fall to the floor laughing

every time and I'd storm off so mad because

I failed again!

it was only appropriate that I had
to call my site a half-inch shy.

that's where the name came from.
It will forever immortalize my

inability to be able to read one of
these accurately when framing a house

Paul what was your first piece of ferniture

which you put in your house?

Now the very first piece of furniture for my house

was also a very easy

this is also when I was getting very
much into woodworking initially

so I have a poster-style bed

in my master bedroom so

I made a step; typically they all have
steps beside them. It's kind of a

customary look so I thought that's a
nice simple enough project to make

so I made it out of

using Lacewood, which is also sometimes called Silky Oak

and a few other names; sometimes Leopardwood,
if it's a different subspecies

and the side panels here this is actually
two pieces glued together and I'm

actually pretty happy that this glue up
came out really nice... it's hard to

find the joint.

For a first piece when you don't know
what the heck you're doing!

This piece here is Morado a very very hard wood

this piece here is actually...

it's a piece that you can buy already pre-cut like
this CNCed but then I toned and textured it

but this is one of the very first pieces
ever made that's a piece of normal

furniture that goes in my house.
As you can tell it was long before I had a

planer

since all these pieces are pretty thick

this was when all I had was a jigsaw, a router

and a sander

that was basically it so I did some of the moldings

with the router

the jigsaw I used to cut curves in some
template boards and then smooth them out

with the sander as best I could then use
that to template route these to give

them a bit of rounding

that's my first project for the house and am
still happy with it; I still actually use

in sometime to get into the upper closets

in the house but uh...

I don't need it to get into the bed

Please tell us Paul, what is you favorite jointery technique?

Or which one do you prefare most

And what technique you completely avoid?

Myt best joinery technique would probably be
-- now the purists aren't gonna like this so

you might want to cover your
ears before I say it

would be using the Festool Domino.
I love using the slip tenons

or loose tenons whichever way you want to
put it or Dominos in the case of the Domino

where there are

certain sizes

I have a wicked precision with this tool!
I have a lot of different

tips and techniques on my website for using
it so while I can cut through-tenons I've done

that in the past especially for wedging
them which is very pretty effect

stuff like that when I'm doing general joinery

I tend to grab that because I am very
fast with that and very accurate

so it makes it that there's a lot
less work to be done after the fact

and I still get all the same strength
that I would get if I spent

considerably more time doing say integral tenons

for a regular mortise and tenon joint. Now that
said it doesn't mean that I'm going to shy away from

things like hand-cut dovetails when
I need them for drawer sides

or for the sides carcasses and
stuff like that in fact that's

if you can work those in those are really
nice effects that you can put on a

project that can...

for some reason those little discrepancies
that you get in the sizes and the

placement of dovetails

or any hand-cut joint like that can really
add to a project. A joint I don't like to do

or that I stay away from

it's not because of it's difficultly but just...

pocket holes.

the whole "pocket hole" screw stuff

I just don't... I just don't like the look of
it at all with a big long gaping hole that's

sideways and

you know normally you can't get away with
just one screw or else you sort of have a

pivot so you have to go for two so you're
doubling the amount of ugly holes

so I you know there's little patches that
you can put in there and plugs but at the

same time

especially in my case with this

I can plow a hole and glue it up with real glue
as a loose tenon that's hidden inside the

joint faster than I can pull out my

pocket-hole screw jig.