Meet Tom Caspar

Here at WWGOA, we are really glad to welcome Tom Caspar onboard, so before you start reading his articles and seeing his videos, you wanna give you a little bit of Tom's background. So Tom, welcome to the team. Thank you, George. And uh, tell the folks at home a little bit about the Tom Casper story. Oh my God, well. Make a long story short, when I got outta college, I didn't even know what end of a hammer to use. But I got into the restaurant business with some friends. We didn't have any money, all the furniture was falling apart. I was the guy who learnt how fix it and I figured out, hey, I like to do this stuff, and I know how to do it. So I went into business for myself after a while. Ooh, first I guess, tell you this part. I apprenticed in this shop that came from the Jurassic era. It was really cool, we just built French furniture, French-style furniture, all curvy. Very fun. Hand tool heavy? Power tool stuff? No, this was old European craftsmanship. It was a very small shop, I learned a heck of a lot by sweeping the floor really slowly 'cause the guys working there didn't want to tell me anything. But I kinda figured it out. Then they went bust 'cause it was an old family firm in the, oh it was a long story. Anyways, then I built furniture for myself for 15 years or so and finally got lucky and landed a gig at American Woodworker magazine where I was an editor for 15 years, and now I'm- And Woodwork magazine was part of that, people might know you from that as well, right? That's right, yeah I edited that for 5 years as well. So, lotsa woodworking, lotsa editing, lotsa writing, lotsa teaching, I've been doing a class on hand tools, we just celebrated our 25th year doing it. Wow. Getting better and better, it's an introductory course on hand tools that lasts 13 weeks, it's kinda like a bowling league, everybody shows up every Thursday night for three hours and I take them through the whole routine. And what's cool I think for us, is Tom's got a diverse background but knows way more about hand tools certainly than I do, and so I'm really hoping to bring a lot of that knowledge to the forefront here, and extract some of it from Tom. So, glad to have you Tom. High five? Whatever, all right, if you must. And we're looking forward to seeing what you got to offer. All right, thanks George.