How you know people are interested in fake woodworking...

UKworkshop.co.uk

Help Support UKworkshop.co.uk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Utube videos are a bloody godsend when Corrie and the “Love” programs are on, see a few crazy Americans, plus a few bumptious “experts” mainly doing things I wouldnt be intrested in anyway, but all entertaining in an informative way even if your looking at what they are doing and thinking, crikey I wouldn't do it like that, but at least your getting ideas and its readily accessible so I think whats not to like?,,,and you can always watch “Love Island” if it really irritates!
 
I love talking to fellow business owners and woodworkers but could think of nothing worse in my spare time to sit down and watch woodworking 🤣

People ask me "when you retire are you going to set up a workshop at home"................. how come they never ask a bus driver "when you retire are you going to buy a bus and drive around the village"
 
D_W wrote:
"You're on the money - I used the word fake for brevity, "

You're having a laugh, as we say in limeyland.
I don't think you know the meaning of the word "brevity".
🙂

perhaps you couldn't make it through my replies, but I mentioned previously that I used it because the space for a title is limited and I couldn't think of a way to say "people would rather watch a bunch of high production value hacks who spend all of their time improving on how to generate more revenue on their channel, none on being a better woodworker, and then the entertainment is confused for a building standard. Vs. the other option of watching a professional go through details about doing work to a standard".

>>I don't think<<

Yes, got that.
 
Unfortunately, now youtube thinks I want to see sumpy numbs videos, but there's a filter feature that will allow me to get rid of that.

Out of curiosity, he supposedly posted a video about safety as if he nearly had an accident to pitch people toward an amazon affiliate link to buy the item, and then boasted that the video wasn't sponsored. I'll bet there was no near accident any time recently, just suspecting that there's a long list of amazon products that he or some assistants/editors want to make up stories for. Normally, if something dangerous happens, you keep the offending wood to show people because it's illuminating. I have a piece of thin wood that was cut on a curve by a tablesaw and thrown at me like a frisbee from when I was a beginner.

..but that wasn't enough. After declaring the product wasn't sponsored, he went on to pitch one that was.

It looks like his collection of planes has gotten larger behind him - I doubt he's very good at using them, but it does appear that if he ever needs a bench plane that's got low use, he'll be able to find a bunch.

Just my opinion, but looks like the wranglerstar of woodworking to me. Nothing there.

I checked just to be sure, and of course, there's a revenue share token on the amazon link (who'd have thought there wouldn't be).
 
Out of curiosity, he supposedly posted a video about safety as if he nearly had an accident to pitch people toward an amazon affiliate link to buy the item, and then boasted that the video wasn't sponsored. I'll bet there was no near accident any time recently, just suspecting that there's a long list of amazon products that he or some assistants/editors want to make up stories for.

If you're talking about the incident I think you are, that was a genuine and quite serious accident. He wanted to do some 'power carving' and decided to ram on his Stetson and fit one of those god-awful chainsaw-blade-wrapped-round-a-wheel things to an angle grinder. Quite predictably it snatched, he lost control and ended up with a severely mangled hand. To his credit he did post a couple of detailed videos on what went wrong and I'm sure they did contain a sponsored advert for some 'safer' alternative, but hey, I suppose he has to pay for his hospital bill somehow.
 
This has been posted on this site before but worth a second look. Not quite woodwork, more access using wooden ladders. All you need are the ladders, hemp rope, pulley, hemp lashings, string, bits wood fixed together, lump hammer, chisel, small blocks of wood and some steel pins (dogs). No need for scaffolding, hard hats just ability to work at height. Easy to listen to, low key, no overstating and quite terrifying (for me).

Definitely for watching and not doing. This is part 1, part 2 should follow on automatically.

 
I never click on any amazon link - ever - if there is a reference token on it.

Why not? It's probably the most harmless method of revenue generation and costs you nothing. If you've watched a video and found something worthwhile in it, where is the harm in giving the creator a small 'thank you' by using their link?

I have a terrible youtube channel. the point of it is to never make any money on it, and make sure the ad revenue is always clicked off. only the most diligent people who want to do something will watch the videos (e.g., this morning, I got a nice comment from someone looking to make a new wedge for their plane - only someone who actually wants to do that will power through the agonizingly slow, long and poorly produced videos). It took me nearly no effort to share the info, and I figured my goal was that 5 people would use the information to make something they couldn't have figured out easily without them. I think that goal has been met.

Sorry, D_W, I really can't fathom your argument here. Is this some kind of zen guru thing? The master will only share his secrets with the worthiest of students? Are you saying that I must prove my dedication by poring through hours of diatribe to discover the few nuggets of useful information?

I've watched a few of your videos and you're right: they are terrible. But there is useful information in them that (to me) is worth running the gauntlet. I really don't know why you object to making a meagre amount of money from ad revenue, but I assure you it makes not a jot of difference to me. You are the only person affected by your decision, so if you're trying to make some sort of statement then I'm afraid I've missed it entirely.

The product placement bothers me, though, as it creates an illusion of choice by a presenter unless there is a big sticker on the stuff saying loudly "I'm using this because I'm paid to, do your own due diligence".

It's not an illusion of choice, it is a choice. The choice to use something because it was gifted, or because you are being paid to use it, is no more or less meaningful than choosing to use it because it looks pretty. Viewers shouldn't need a big sticker to prompt them to use their brain.
 
I make guitars and fancied my hand at doing a banjo for a change of scenery, so started doing some research, and came across this chap, who's attitude to problem solving I find quite frankly amazing:

 
Last edited:
all my everyday tools fit in a carry rack that comes out of secure storage at the beginning of the day


A lovely piece of work but I have a question. You must have a table saw and planer thicknesser or similar to prepare such a beautiful piece.
I'm still using most of the hand tools I had to get for college more than 50 years ago. (Though I've added a few powered bits and pieces)
 
Yes I do, I made bespoke furniture for a living and unless you are one of the very few who can charge megathousands you can’t afford the time to do everything by hand, but saying that I plane everything by hand to finish it. In case anybody is wondering the doors are push to open hence no handles. Ian
 
Nothing wrong with people making money from ads and placement. If people want more videos from these people they need to support them. making videos takes time and effort and that should be rewarded.

There are many creators who finish pieces on YT, Bourbon Moth, Ishitani, Square Rule and the list goes on. Some people watch these and want to learn how to do this themselves. Thats where some guy or girl showing how they managed to make dovetail joint, a tapering jig or whatever is a useful appendix to the this is what I make videos.

To make a piece and show / teach all of the techniques required to make it would be a Herculean task. Matt Estlea is currently making a tool box, he teaches some of the techniques in the series of make videos and refers people to his other videos which explain the techniques in depth. That much content must have taken months to create and edit. If he makes money from ads, Patreon or placement, good luck to him and well done.

A lot of what I am reading here seems like envy. More seems to be the equivalent of arguing over how many woodworkers can dance on the tip of an awl with entrenched views and a fetish for micro adjusted accuracy to be used working a material that has movement, imperfections and character.

Paul Sellers made a workbench from plywood, I watched that with interest because it seemed to me that this was making something that any person could make with materials almost anyone has access to to enable them to build something which they could use to build more things. Bravo Paul.
 
Yes I do, I made bespoke furniture for a living and unless you are one of the very few who can charge megathousands you can’t afford the time to do everything by hand, but saying that I plane everything by hand to finish it. In case anybody is wondering the doors are push to open hence no handles. Ian
I love that piece. Well done.

I think that most YT woodworkers employ what Mark thingy the Wood Whisperer refers to hybrid woodworking. My favourite being the English Woodworker who applies skill and craft with pragmatism.
 
I give paul a pass -he was brought up here, but he has his own special gimmick. It's not about lack of skill, it's about substituting mood. ("lifestyle"). He does peddle a lot of the something for nothing gimmick, though (the ply bench, the hag's tooth in a 2x4 - all of that stuff gives the illusion of something for nothing as long as you don't build any of it thinking you'll use it for long). His objective is to sell something else and proclaim not being beholden to tool companies.

I haven't yet met someone who is a Rob Cosman subscriber or a Paul subscriber who has progressed into understanding design and self-problem solving to make fine work, but that's not their point. Someone who learns the basics and then becomes an independent curious type is a bad customer for them.
 
Here is the person I mentioned earlier - who learned all of what you see here at a two-year trade college - stephen's college here (thaddeus stevens is what it used to be referred to as). One of the more famous high level instructors worked there (it was phil lowe or something like that...edit, looked it up. Steve Latta).

https://myfoundingfurniture.com/
This (stevens college) is a trade school that offers instruction like this or HVAC, etc. As in, they teach the kids to work wood - it's not pompous or overwrought with anything other than learning how to do things instead of making excuses or building egos - (if your desire is fine furniture, they'll teach that. If it's making kitchen cabinets, they'll teach you that instead). Two years, no mystical stuff, just teaching you how to make things without excuses not to.

I saw this guy set up the year after he graduated. This furniture isn't what he's learned to make 10 years later, it's what he was building right out of school, and as his bio says, he learned it in those two years.

That should make people think about what's possible and what's not. As to whether or not he's a single example? No, he placed fourth in a competition on one side of the state (three other trade school students from another school in philadelphia beat him). The real issue for this stuff is finding customers. He's definitely older looking now (he was a fresh faced kid sporting this furniture at a booth in a craft faire that typically sells brooms and turkey legs. It was a bit of a shock.
 
Sorry, D_W, I really can't fathom your argument here. Is this some kind of zen guru thing? The master will only share his secrets with the worthiest of students? Are you saying that I must prove my dedication by poring through hours of diatribe to discover the few nuggets of useful information?

No, it's a matter of spending time. Are you going to try to be popular, or are you going to try to start discussion only with people who are actually interested. Nobody has to prove anything to me or anyone else. You either go through the content to learn something, or you don't - if it's more fun to be entertained and hypothesize that you may potentially do something with the 10% of the actual process that's presented (that's very easy, enticing - like watching other people dig a ditch - it looks easy), or you're looking for something to use.

I set a channel up before youtube was as highly produced as it is now, have no interest in turning ads on or editing videos and kind of hoped for about 50 subscribers who were actually doing things. The format has passed that by, and no big deal, it's their site. If you cater to high views, it becomes a tax on you if you just want to deal with the topical stuff. If you're rex or numbs or any of those people selling patreon or ads, well, that's the point - the material isn't. If you're not wanting to deal with throngs of people asking questions, then you make a dumpy channel like mine and once a month or so, you get a snide comment, but most people just leave. It's actually great. As long as you're doing it for no reason other than to just share something. I hope for five people to use something that I post - but if zero find it useful, that's fine, too. If 100 do, I'll be surprised. The number who find something useful (vs. entertaining) probably doesn't increase with view numbers.

As far as the tokens - I don't follow tokens. It's a principles thing. When someone shows you a video and adds a token to the item they're trying to sell you, they usually spin a yarn about how the item was somehow meaningful to them, but the odds are slim that the video wasn't made with a fake story to push you to go to amazon with the token hoping that you'll buy the item and a bunch of other things. I don't ever buy any of that rubbish, but the token will remain resident if you buy something else. The principle part is that I'm not reinforcing the behavior of making videos with fake stories one after the other when magically every "meaningful" experience can be purchased on amazon. Seems a little unusual, doesn't it? Especially when someone boasts that they weren't sponsored by the product. If they can get 1000 people to buy anything on a pass through with their token, getting sponsored would just add work.

Quite often, segments of the "stories of experience" match passages word for word in the ad copy of an item either in a listing or on a manufacturer's site. it stinks.
 
'Tis a bit strange that some on the forums, and not just here..
bring up some of these channels and come away with the thought that they have a basic understanding of how to do things well.

It's an important subject when it relates to tablesaws or planers for instance,
Without going into that though...

How do those folks manage to find places like this, with such a seemingly brief time studying woodworking online,
but not have stumbled across folks who have somewhat more credentials regarding the specific task at hand?

I suppose it's harder to pick and choose the who's who of the specific tasks in hand, when you don't have all the names to fill in the blanks.
Surely this forum makes that simple, no?

I agree that you can learn skills very quickly, if you practice well
and not practicing doing something wrong.
It seems that most folks who watch those snazzy edited videos are looking for some sort of shortcut,
as they might have something important missing out of their
setup or something?
I don't get, not wanting to watch something that will help, by going to a good source like Follandsbee for hewing, Charlesworth for accurate planing, yourself David, for learning to set a double iron plane, and watching other interesting woodie stuff for entertainment purposes if one wished like Chris Harbor.

Tom
 
Last edited:
I suppose it's harder to pick and choose the who's who of the specific tasks in hand, when you don't have all the names to fill in the blanks.
Surely this forum makes that simple, no?

Depends on who is giving the information out. At one point, George Wilson in the US landed on the blue forum over there. He'd just retired and was still full of interest in talking craft. He is probably the finest maker I've ever met - as in, he has a great understanding of design, is able to work entirely by hand or with machines, can carve, make metal dies, refurbish machinist tools, make musical instruments, furniture, guns, just about anything.

Some of his work has made it to the queen's residence (or at least some part of the royal property), as awards for PGA tour winners, to heiresses with extremely deep pockets, to the duponts here (who took a shine with things he was making and shopped his output) and to a gaggle of american presidents (at least in contribution of some part of a good if all of it wasn't his trade).

That said, he met resistance from the fanboys and eventually left the forum. So what does this have to do with a list of "real things"? The folks who were upset by his insistence that people can learn the principles of good work remain with some claiming that he's a fraud or flatly saying that he's not as good of a craftsman as someone like Sellers. A statement like that is idiocy. He is a savant. On one of the other forums where this was asserted, the poster finally after badgering admitted that he didn't consider someone a good craftsman if he though they were rude.

I talk to George fairly often. He's 80 now and still sharp, but not full of energy to make things any longer. He is enormously patient and will explain things or help with design without asking anything in return. What he doesn't tolerate well is people asserting that with 3 months of experience, they should be regarded just the same as far as advice goes.

In a straw man scenario, this can be enticing "well, just be friendly, it's not really that important". But when someone comes along making something relatively finely and they want that last kick toward making it finely and not just relatively finely, George is the guy who can look and in 10 seconds tell you the difference between "I can't see what's wrong with it but it doesn't look quite right to me" and "I can't see anything wrong with it, it only looks right".

Forums will chew someone like that up when they assert every so often that something is important enough to get right, or when they are critical of something presented by a blogger. At one point, Chris Schwarz developed a fascination with clenching nails, but he did it unnecessarily sloppily. George, who would've seen hundreds of things clenched with nails and done plenty of it on his own repairing rare good or making for a museum criticized the result as unsuitable. It literally caused folks to register for the forum that he was on just to complain and then post the link over to CS's blog, which caused CS to blow up. This kind of thing is interesting when it comes to folks who like to volunteer "I'm not posing myself as a fine maker" but then when they come up short and it's pointed out, they have the ego of someone who thinks they are and can't look at the criticism and see if it's valid.

This is just one little example - if you're going to follow along and clench nails and it takes the same effort to do them neatly or not, doing them the way "your hero" does them doesn't serve you. Doing them the way "your hero" does them to spite a fine maker doesn't ,either. These last two cases generally win a majority of the time under the illusion that the blogger or presenter is your friend and George, who is turning your wheel a little with no expectation of anything in return is "rude".

It's bizarre, but part of the falseness. That someone who seems friendly in a video where they're there only to get something out of you is actually your friend. Same kind of illusion April Wilkerson going from obvious rank beginner to putting together a plywood cart with 20 brand new triton tools all lined up neat in the background. If they're never discussed, it's not apparent to the newcomer that those just appeared and that it's probably not what she would have bought (the terms of the agreement aren't discussed, so the viewer is working with a curated idea of reality).

This isn't remotely close to being limited to woodworking, of course. Placement of guitars and gear etc. in that arena is rampant, and while most folks will say "we know they're compensated" would suddenly think a little less well when they find out that the pusher of the goods doesn't like them that well, but received 7k to make three videos that had to be approved by a manufacturer and the words the person says in the videos were edited and written by someone else.

All of the sudden, that doesn't seem so genuine and in the spirit of "just keeping the channel going".
 
This has been posted on this site before but worth a second look. Not quite woodwork, more access using wooden ladders. All you need are the ladders, hemp rope, pulley, hemp lashings, string, bits wood fixed together, lump hammer, chisel, small blocks of wood and some steel pins (dogs). No need for scaffolding, hard hats just ability to work at height. Easy to listen to, low key, no overstating and quite terrifying (for me).

Definitely for watching and not doing. This is part 1, part 2 should follow on automatically.



Another one that I've seen before, but is absolute gold. When you feel like working on something and think "I can't", then think of someone like dibnah.

Imagining yourself going up the ladder like that is enough to give you what my mother referred to as "loose poo", just with the imagination, though.

Anyone ever climb something like that untethered? I had a relative (same one as mentioned with the windmill) who also had a 200 foot radio tower on the same property as his window tower. It had large round head bolts for foot pegs and he would go up the tower and work untethered, and once you're up off the ground a little, there's a whole lot more breeze than you expected from ground level.

I went up about a fifth of the way at one point when he asked if I wanted to climb it (i thought it would be neat), and then chickened out. I guess you can get used to that, but with no experience and no safety didn't seem like a great way. My mother would've killed him (her brother) if she'd have seen me going up it.

And that seems about half of this - as the pegs were already there and in the tower.
 
Back
Top