What do I with my time off? Well, up to about a year ago, I had a catering biz too, lots of bread&butter corporate stuff, parties for up to 3-400, and inbetween that, my family and keeping the building from falling down I was pretty busy.
Still, I like to do anything with my hands. For a while it was restoring old english 3 and 4 spd bikes, then we moved into abigger house with an actual garage, and I declared it MINE!. When my Dad moved into a retirement home he gave me all of his old woodworking tools, and I supplemented and updated a few... Did some minor bits and pieces for the home then built my own workbench--all out of reclaimed wood. Top is solid maple--reclaimed (with about 20 hrs of reworking it) from a couple of sandwich table cutting boards, frame is solid 2" thick red oak, salvaged from pallettes. Then we started up our chocolate business, so I did all of the trim and cabinetry work, even made the customer's table tops from the leftovers of the solid laminated beech countertops from the servery area. Wasn't impressed with the flimsy s/s prep tables, so I made my own, from common 2x8 material but with wedged through-mortise and tennon construction, and scrounged up a few battered up baker's table tops and redid those too. Even made a stand for the deck ovens too, same wedged through mortise and tennon construction. Made my own chest of drawers for under one of the prep tables, 4 drawers all dovetailed and made to accept shallow full size hotel pans. Made the trays for displaying the chocolates, about 3 dzn of them, all solid Birch with plexi-glass bottoms and splined mitered joints.
Anything with my hands, with compukers I'm totally lost....
