The First Thing I Ever Made

This is the first thing I ever made.

You might look at it in the pic & wonder “What the … is it?” I found it last year when I was helping my father to sort through some stuff in his garage. I saw it in an old toolbox buried in amongst all manner of random junk. Although it had been over 40 years since I made it, I recognized it at once!! What it is, is a handle for a rasp. Here’s how it happened.

Of the first tools that I had was an old, rusty woodworking rasp. It was big, heavy, rusty & had no handle & the tang (the end of the tool that fits into the handle) was bent, making it very uncomfortable for my hands.

Despite this, a rasp requires little technical skill to operate & is such a basic tool in shaping wood, so I wanted to use it but it wasn’t much fun & hurt a bit too.  So I had an idea… Let me use the rasp, uncomfortable & without a handle, to fashion a handle for it. A bit of “circular” design thought right there!

And this is what I came up with.

Looks like I only managed to shape 2 sides of the square stock, but that seems to have been ergonomically efficient enough to get on with it. Obviously, my hands were a lot smaller then and I remember using them for years on all manner of projects.

I like to think my skills have advanced since then, but I like to keep it around as a warm reminder of where this all began!