George and Jimmy: Two Guys Talking Shop

It's fun when I've got somebody in the shop, especially somebody like Jimmy Diresta to talk about our backgrounds, I don't know, just a little bit of cool stuff, where we've been, what we've done. So, for example, a question for you. Do you remember the first tool you bought, were given, found? You know, I grew up in, with my dad who's much like me, much like you, always was a woodworker. So, when my dad was a young man and I was a child my garage was full of tools. So I was constantly pinching my fingertips and things and dropping heavy weights on myself. The very first memory I have of a tool, I was about three years old and I picked up a probably, lookin' back, it was probably a five pound sledge hammer. I picked it up like this as high, as heavy as I could with two hands like this and I got it past the center point and it just fell back against my face. Oh God. And that's why I have this scar. Sorry to laugh. No, it's funny. I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember seein' the end of the hammer come down and hit me right in my eye socket and I got a cut through my eyebrow and right on my orbit here. Didn't break it, but it cut, that's why there's a cut right here on my cheekbone. And always playin' around with tools that were hangin' around in the garage. So, just as a side note to that, when dad found out you hit yourself in the face with a sledge hammer, do you remember what that reaction was? My dad, well, unless I broke something he pretty much if I got injured. It could've been your eye socket. But, he would laugh it off. If I broke the tool he would be mad. But the fact that I got cut, he didn't care. He would just laugh it off. And so, even now, like when I'm around friends and you know, my girlfriend or whatever and if she's injured I kinda laugh it off. She's like, don't laugh, I have a serious thing. I'm like, and I laugh. But, I realize my dad, it might've been his self defense mechanism to laugh it off instead of getting over reactive. I remember I stuck my thumb in the band saw right in front of him when I was like 10 years old, and he just pulls it out and goes, oh, he holds it together, just do that for about 10 minutes, you'll be all right. Never went to the doctor or anything. You know, he just laughed it off. He's like, you know, welcome to the club. Yeah, toughen up. Yeah, exactly. So, I can't go back to three years old, but when I was junior high I think, maybe elementary school still, the neighbor called me over one day and handed over my mom's fence a Dunlap jigsaw, so not a handheld saber saw, you know, not a jigsaw, but like a scroll saw, but a jigsaw. No motor, had the pulley on there for a belt, and some of this stuff when I think back on it, I'm like, where was my mother? 'Cause I found a motor some place and I connected it to this thing with a V belt and of course, no guards. I managed to get my finger in between the belt and the pulley a couple times. But, like anything that was laying around my mom's house I would lay out a sheet of wood and I would trace it and I would cut it on that thing, and turned it on by plugging the motor in and you turned it off by unplugging the motor. I had a Dremel one of those that my dad picked up at a garage sale. And the sad part of that story is a friend of mine wanted to get his kid into woodworking, so he said, do you have a saw that I could borrow for this, a tool I could borrow for like young kid? And so, I loaned him that saw, it was in my shop forever. Your childhood saw you loaned. My childhood saw, and then, one day when I was like, well, your kid is 30 now, what's the deal? Oh, I threw that saw out years ago. I go, are you kiddin' me? That was like where we are now, wouldn't it be cool to have that sledge hammer and for me to have that saw? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, how 'bout outside of a tool, a human, is there a distinct person, so your dad maybe, that had a real influence on getting you in the midst of what we do for a living? I'd say when I do make events and stuff and people come up to me and they're like, how do I get my child to do what you're doing? How do I inspire him to do what you do? My dad put tools in my hands. He was never a helicopter parent. I remember my dad would buy me tools. I was to the point where like I was a little intimidated and I tell this story on my podcast many years ago where I came home one day from school and my dad had gone to a tool sale where an older gentleman passed away and my dad basically bought his whole shop. And a large part of his shop was this like 200-set chisel set. But you know, you could tell, these chisels were from like the '20s and like, 'cause this guy was old, this was like when I was like 10. These chisels were like 60, 70 years. I still have them all. But, when my dad put those in front of me, he's like, you know, we'll carve. And I was like, I don't know anything about carving. He said, we'll carve and like we would go, when I was a kid we would often spend summers in Mystic, Connecticut. We had a relative that owned a summer house and we'd go to my Aunt Jo's house and we'd always go to the ship building yards in Mystic, Connecticut, and we'd always visit the ship carver. And my dad was always so intrigued. And so, this was like a few years later, had the opportunity to buy all these chisels. He just saw them, he's like, I'll take them. And the seed was planted from the ship carving for your dad. Yeah, and I remember one day I came home from school and my dad had played on his own, he'd carved the whole wing of a bird. He had like jigsawed out the edge of it, or the silhouette of it and then hand carved, saw it in a book. And I was so impressed, I was so intimidated. I was like, I'm never gonna be able to do this. And of course, we looked at tons of pictures and books and whenever we did go to Mystic or there was another place in upstate New York called Sugar Loaf, and there was a bunch of carvers there and furniture makers there. It was like, kinda like an old village, you know, with like all the different people, like where you get butter made and the blacksmith and we'd always go to the wood carver there. That was like in between Mystic 'cause that was just a little drive away. So, for you, so is it your dad? My dad. He's the guy that got you here. Yeah, he's the guy who always put tools in front of me. And like I said, there were some times like with the chisels where I was too intimidated to even consider using them, but I did catch up in time. But, put me in front of the band saw, the jigsaw. The band saw that I still have, I have several now 'cause I'm a buff, but the one of the ones that I use and still have is the one I used and learned on as a little kid. I still have that one. For me, my dad died when I was real little, but a good friend of his became my substitute dad, so I had two things goin', that his name was also George, my substitute dad, and he was also a very active Scout Master. So, I spent a lotta time, he wasn't really a woodworker so much as a DIYer. Yeah, kinda like bush craft stuff? Yeah, and a very good carver, which he tried to teach me and I never figured out. But, Boy Scouts taught me a lotta stuff under George's umbrella of you know, livin' outside, startin' a fire and everything that goes along with that. And then, I had a junior high shop teacher, Mr. Mathis, who I can remember this like it was yesterday, where I just one day I said, I wanna be a shop teacher, what today we call Tech Ed, I wanna be a shop teacher just like Mr. Mathis. And I asked him where he went to college, how he got where he was, and he told me, and I went to the same college he did. I like, literally followed in his footsteps to get a teaching degree, which then when I graduated I couldn't find a teaching job and ended up doin' this kinda stuff instead. So, that was George Johnson and Bill Mathis were the. Like I said, I had my dad, but not only did I have my dad, I had my dad's brother, my Uncle Tony, and I would always spend weekends with my cousin, who was my age. We grew up together like brothers and we would spend every weekend in either my dad's workshop or my Uncle Tony's workshop, his brother. Me and Thomas would be there or here. We grew up together constantly making dart guns and bow and arrows out of like surgical tube and all kinds of things. I think with those two topics a cool thing outta this is for us, like, and I don't mean just us, I mean like us collectively, the world, to think about here this guy hands me this, like he probably wanted the scroll saw out of his damned garage is what happened, you know. He hands me this thing over the fence and here I am cuttin' wood the rest of my life. And then, these two guys, George and Bill and Uncle Tony and your dad and like, you gotta think about that ripple effect that you have, and I would say especially for you, with your ripple effect through YouTube is so huge. Of course, yeah. And what a great way to get, to continue to get people involved in the kinda things we do. I get the greatest thing, you know, every other email, brings me to tears, this guy saying you changed the course of my life because of what you put out there. And then, every once in a while we both are constant creators, so you'll get a troll that might kick you in the stomach and you'll be like, ah. And then you'll get somebody send you an email saying like, the reason you're doing, I'm doing what I'm doing is because of what you shared online. You know, and that really brings you back to life and it's like, wow. Who gets those emails? So, the question I kinda hate the most, but I'm gonna ask you it. Coolest thing you've ever made? And I'll go first on this one with my answer, which is like when I'm makin' any thing that's the coolest thing I'm makin' in that moment, and that's why I'm makin' it. So I kinda hate that question because it's like, it's hard for me to give anything a hierarchy because that was very special then. And then, a month later this was special. And a year later this was special, but, I'll throw it out there 'cause people ask the question. Well, I think of milestones. I think of when I built that canoe, you know. I famously did a canoe project with Nick Offerman, but I only filmed him making that canoe. I didn't actually make it. I just, I was the videographer for that video series. And years later I said, I'm gonna make my own, but because I watched him through the camera for months, five months, making it, I was, I breezed right into it. I knew exactly what to do because I had that visual memory of not only seeing it while I shot it, but watching the edit. I edited the thing, took months to edit this. I had 30 hours of video. So, getting through that and there was a few very difficult parts. You're workin' on a canoe now. Yeah. When you gotta bend that gunnel up, over, around, and up and in. Compound curves in a canoe. And then it's gotta land with the right amount. It's like, it's almost impossible to guess how long it's gonna be. You just gotta get it close and then cut it. And then, when you cut it if it's too short you just go, ah, you know, I gotta figure out how to hide that mistake. And so, that was a big, a big challenge for me was to actually, physically make my own canoe. Finally, after so many years of everybody thinking I made one. So, that was the thing. Like, everybody thought I'd made one, but I actually never did. So, that was a big one. And then, this last year some real leaps and bounds in blacksmithing. Blacksmithing is a real science that I've always wanted to learn and there's a couple things, like makin' a fork, makin' a knife, of course, with certain upsetting the corner so you have like a perfectly square corner that's from a piece of straight stock, stuff like that are little things that I've been able to kinda piece together in my development of just watching guys online that make their content available and then goin' and tryin' it. So, blacksmithing to me was always like, that's for them, I'm not gonna be able to do that kinda thing. Well, and the metallurgy of that, I'm, I just told Jimmy I just bought a forge 'cause I'm very intrigued by the whole thing. But the metallurgy of it and how you can change the composition of metals and you can combine different metals to get different results, and that's all very cool. And I, similar to your canoe, we talked about this last night, I built a boat 40 years ago, and the day that boat rolled off the trailer into a lake and I stood up in it and it didn't sink was like, just I don't know, we've just both had our hands in a lotta different things. But, that was one of the coolest things I've done. When I finally put my canoe, 'cause I finished it in November and the lakes were all frozen, and I couldn't use it until you know, til April or May the next summer, and when I finally put it in the water, me and Taylor, we rode it out to the middle to go see the Bald Eagle nest at this lake in upstate New York and it was like, wow. It's a pretty magic moment. It's not flippin' over. I got a little clip on my phone I'll show you later of us takin' it out there. Yeah, that was definitely magical. It's not flippin' and it's not leakin'. Last one, I think, unless I think of something else. Biggest mistake ever, like not, I shouldn't have made that video and put it on YouTube. But, like you know, in the world of workin' with your hands. Well, I got injured several times. Those were always big mistakes. And you know, there are stupid habits that I got into early on, like just not being more respectful of the table saw. There were habits, I was kinda like a little bit of a hot shot and I got put in my place on March 31, 2010, when I cut my pinkie off. So, that's obviously a big mistake. And since then I use the guard all the time. Before that, I never had a riving knife, never had a guard, and since then I won't even go near it, like you know I said to you, put the riving knife on please. You know, it's just safety precautions that I otherwise just thought weren't for me. I was an idiot. But, you know, thankfully I get to keep my pinkie a little bit, it works a little bit. Yes, it's kinda like a shot across the bough, yeah, it could've been worse. Yeah, could've been a lot worse. The doctor said it's usually two fingers in a bag and one mangled. He says, that's usually every table saw accident. And the reason it wasn't worse is 'cause the blade was only up three eighths of an inch when my hand got pushed into it because of a kickback. So, I got very lucky. Good warning. Good warning, yeah. But, as far as shop mistakes, besides that obvious one, I think keeping a cluttered shop is a huge mistake. You know, that's probably one of my biggest bad habits is keeping a cluttered shop. Your shop, every tabletop is available to use. Mine, every single time I go in my shop I gotta make a plan. That's 'cause we're doing a video shoot this week. That's the reason it looks like this. Well, every time I make a plan to do a video, I have to like clear off the table, and if that's gonna be in the background and I don't want anybody to see my dirty laundry and maybe with that, I'll put that over there behind the tripod. So, keeping a cluttered shop is difficult. So that's why now with my so-called TV Shop, the one we shot the Netflix show in, I'm trying to keep that sparsely populated with tools and my other shop is just dumping, dumping ground mess. We talked about mine the other day 'cause we are very close to the restaurant where this went, which was I did a, early in my woodworking career I took on the job of fixtures for a restaurant. And one of the things was a galvanized metal bar top to cover their bar. So, I went down there and I measured for it and of course, I didn't make it. I had somebody else break the steel and do the whole thing. And it took forever. It took months. And the bar's ready to open, I finally get the metal and I lay it on the bar top and it's about a foot short of this piece comin' this way and this piece comin' this way, and I still had the paper that I had written the measurements on and I wrote one, one, three, which now I'm losin' the math in my head, like I either ordered 11 foot three and it should've been 113, or I ordered 113 and it should've been 11 foot. One of those equations comes up short. Yeah, yeah, one of those was the short number. And so, there we were, like whatever, two weeks til the place opening and two months lead time on gettin' that galvanized bar top. And in the end the owner was very forgiving about it. And I made a little server station right there outta wood that covered the spot and the bar didn't come together. But it was a, it was in too big a hurry, moving too fast kind of a timeframe. Yeah. You remind me of somethin' silly, which I'm glad, could've been worse. So, I did an interior design for Leonardo DiCaprio's apartment and I got to interact with him very little, but he was always very pleasant and very easy to deal with. We dealt mostly with his mother, me and the interior design firm. And we installed these big built-ins. I made mostly all of them, but we installed them and we designed them together as a group and there was this one like desk area and a big piece of paneling goes on the desk wall. So, there is no wall on that whole wall. There's no real sheetrock. It's all this laminate wood. And so, when we glued that piece in, me and my assistant, I kinda haphazardly made like, I used PL glue, so I wrote my name, I wrote his name, I wrote the decorator's name, I wrote the assistant's name in glue, just goofin' off. And we glued everything up. I figured no one's ever gonna see those until the building gets remodeled. A year and a half later like, yeah, something fell off the wall at Leo's apartment. I'm like, what could it have been? I'm like, nothing could've fallen off. We go there and that had fallen off the wall and everybody's name was written behind it. Thank God I didn't write anything inappropriate, because I just assumed nobody would ever see it. You know, rip the wall down and the sheetrock would come with it. But, all the glue was all like kissed off, like it kissed off like probably a minute after I stuck it on and never really held. You were so busy writin' names, it all skinned over as you're spelling Diresta. I was such an idiot. But, like I go in and actually Leo's there and he's like oh yeah, that thing fell off the wall. He's like, no big, just maybe put some screws in it, is what he said. I said, oh, that's a good idea. So I drilled a couple little secret screws and just put it up with black screws on black, black wanegay. I should've done that a year before. Well, cool stuff. I don't know, anything else in the world of like fun facts or I don't know, weird questions, answers, smart ass comments, all of the above, I don't know. Well again, people always say how do I know so much? And I think just more than anything else for me, it's just curiosity. It also goes back to when I was in high school and I wanted so many things. I wanted a hot rod car and I wanted a mini bike and I wanted a dirt bike and I wanted an electric guitar, and I couldn't really afford those things. So I'd find a wrecked dirt bike and I'd put a new motor in or I'd put a new front end on it, or I'd find a car and I remember had, my dad finally gave me his beautiful Cadillac once somebody rear ended him at a stop sign. I was like, I was dyin' to get this car from him. I was gonna inherit the beautiful '78 Coupe de Ville, it was in absolutely immaculate condition, low miles. And one day he goes, today's the day you get the car. He goes, but I got bad news. I go, what? He goes, I got rear ended. The back end is destroyed. So, he gave me it and I had the frame straightened and I went and I bought the same type of Cadillac from the junk yard and my mother's like, what is goin' on? I had it dropped off and I cut the whole rear corner off and then I had the junk yard take the rest of the car away and I swapped out all the crunched parts. But, just all that wanting of things I couldn't really afford, afforded me all this, this hands-on knowledge. Little pieces of stuff. Yeah, little hands-on knowledge where I could like jump and change a new quarter panel or a rocker panel on my new trucks that I like to play with. I remember that when I did that when I was a teenager, you know, all that stuff. Just all that learning comes to play all the time. But, I think for both you and I it's, and it's odd how many parallels there are in our lives, but I've said to a lotta people, I was making way before making was cool, 'cause I remember. I like, just walk into the title. I'd always been doing it. I took a lawn mower engine off of a lawn mower and turned a baby buggy at my mom's house into a go cart. Takin' old TVs apart, RCA console television to try to put a fish tank in there, once the television quit, you gotta turn that into an aquarium. That's cool. And the neighbors down the street tore their garage down. I mean, I wasn't drivin' yet and I went down there with a little red wagon, literally, you know the little red Radio Flyer, and I loaded that up with two by fours and then I strapped 'em on and I rolled the wagon home. That's how I made my first tool cabinet in the garage was by haulin' those two by fours home from the garage. So yeah, just constantly. So I think maybe outta that a lesson for people is don't feel penned in. I mean, if you really dig woodworking and you don't wanna do anything else or blacksmithing, or whatever it is, cool. But, I think part of what, I feel like I'm not really good at any one thing, but I'm okay at a lotta different stuff and part of that is the curiosity of like I wanna build a canoe. I wanna try blacksmithing. I wanna try bending wood. I wanna. Sometimes now I have to remind myself a lot of those things I learned early on, although curiosity, the reason why was because I was curious, I wanted to do it, and I couldn't afford anybody else to do it for me. Yeah. And so now, when I feel like my brakes are goin' on my new truck I'm like, oh God, I gotta get new brake pads. I gotta go to J.C. Whitney, buy brake pads or get 'em at NAPA, and I'm just like, just drop it off at the car dealer. You don't have to fix everything yourself anymore, you know. Yeah. You got more fun things to do than all this stuff. Which is cool when you can spend time doin' stuff besides spinnin' a wrench under the truck. Yeah, yeah. Just, you know, maintenance stuff, I just take it to Chevy now. But, I always forget. You know, the minute somethin' goes wrong I'm like ah, I can just hire somebody to do that now, I don't have to do it myself anymore. I can hire a real plumber that really knows what he's doin' instead of 50 trips to Home Depot, you know. Cool. Cool. All right, well thanks for this. I think it's fun to hear the respective backgrounds and that's all I got. I don't know how to get outta this. It was fun, good, thank you. Thanks guys, thanks for listening.