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164996 Ron Banks <rwbanks1@s...> 2006‑11‑20 Bio Update -- Ron Banks
GG’s

Its been about 8 years now since I first posted my
bio, and like many others on the list I’ve  have
decided to give mine new coat of paint.

When I first joined the OLDTOOLS list in 1998, my wife
and I were living in a historic stone house in Salado,
TX and trying our hand at self employment.  Em was
making soap/perfumes, and I was making early stringed
instruments.  It’s amazing how much one’s life can
change in the short span of 8 years.  After becoming
new parents and realizing that few of the visitors in
the village could be seen carrying shopping bags from
anyone’s shop, we decided to cut our losses and return
to North Texas in August of 2000.

While Em (SWMBO) still makes a great Goat’s Milk soap,
she has been very active in professional theatre in
the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and has made  a pretty
good name for herself in the local theatre scene.  I’m
still building instruments on a part time basis, but
with a GIT (a great kiddo), four cats and a Great
Pyrenees (who thinks she’s a cat) also in the family,
I’ve opted to take on a day-job to keep us all fed. 
I’ve been working in IT (again) since 2000, and for
the last 4 years have been the IT Security Architect
for a company that owns/manages about 170 country
clubs and resorts in the US.  While life as a
corporate fear-monger is not very Galootish, it at
least keeps the lights on. :-)

I'll admit its been a big change since Salado, but
there has been an upside to the whole experience – it
has shown me that it’s nice to actually have some
occasional discretionary income, and while I don’t get
very much time in the shop anymore, it has given me
tremendous freedom with the types of projects I can
pursue there.  

When I sent in my last bio, I mentioned that I was
trying to de-Normify my shop  - well, I’m still at it,
and can at least see a time soon when the tailed
apprentices can at least take up residence under a
tarp in a dark corner of the shop. Something else has
happened over the last few years.  While I used to
hate building tools, I’ve actually started to enjoy
the process, almost to the point that the whole
Luddification process has become labor of love in
itself.  Plus, after my tools were in storage for more
than a year, I pretty much decided that my ultimate
shop needs to be portable, quiet, and require no
special care/feeding other than muscle power, floor
space, ventilation, and light.

While my desire to knuckle-drag my way into a
commercially questionable set of luthiery processes
originally began as just a quest to “walk the walk” my
violin-maker granddad walked (i.e. using no power
tools), I’ve found the whole experience of discovering
for myself just how efficient hand tools can really be
to be very satisfying – so much so that I find myself
becoming more and more process-driven in my
woodworking, just to see what works and what doesn’t. 
Of course, almost none of the steps I’ve taken along
the way would be possible without help from The Porch,
and lots of documentary sources old and new (with
humble thanks to St. Roy, Mack Headley, Michael
Dunbar, etc.)

As part of the whole process of back-dating my shop.
I’ve begun to build some of the major tools missing
from my kit, allowing me to say fairly reasonably that
the methods “could have been used” by a luthier
practicing before 1800.  Since reactivating the
project this past spring, I’ve been focusing on stock
preparation methods, as that’s pretty much all I’ve
ever really used power tools for in my instrument
building.  

Of the current projects I’m working on, some of y’all
have probably seen me drone on about veneer sawing and
the free-standing vises built to accomplish the task
in early cabinet shops.  After recently building a
veneer saw based on an example in Mercer’s “Ancient
Carpenter’s Tools, I’ve set out to build a veneer
sawyer's vise based on one shown in Diderot’s
“Encyclopediae…” It’s been a fun project in itself,
taking me into large tap and screw-box making, metal
work, etc.   I used to think the sliding down the
"slippery slope" was just a danger of tool buying, but
I now know that any tool acquisition will take you
down the low-friction, inclined-gravity-ride. About
the only thing that has changed in my TAS (Tool
Acquisition Syndrome) behavior has been a switch from
me thinking:  “I need (to buy) one of those,” to “I
need (to make) one of those.”

Making tools to make tools – I feel like a pig in
swill, and am loving the ski-like ride into part-time
Luddite-dom.  Of course tool making has pretty much
put off any instrument building for a little while,
and seems to force a continual re-arranging of my
small shop to make room for human powered stuff, but
that’s temporary (I think), and I’ll soon start
working again on a few of the lutes and citterns I’ve
suspended work on since Salado.

Thanks for the bandwidth, and especially for your help
over the last 8 years,

Ron Banks
Ft. Worth, TX

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