Episode 9: It Takes Two — Introducing Co-Host Alex Baum
Eight episodes in, I was getting tired of hearing my own voice. That’s the honest version.
The slightly more diplomatic version is this: the most interesting woodworking conversations I have aren’t me explaining how to cut a dovetail. They’re the ones that happen between someone who just started and someone who’s been doing this for forty years. The beginner asks the question nobody else will ask. The experienced person realizes they’ve never had to actually explain the thing they’ve been doing on autopilot for decades. Both of them leave a little smarter.
So starting with Episode 9, The Joiner’s Bench has a co-host.
Meet Alex Baum
Alex has been a Joinery member for about nine months. Before that, he spent 17 years as an Army medic and National Guard member — retired now — and works as a stay-at-home dad. His woodworking education, like a lot of people his age, came almost entirely from YouTube. Hundreds of hours of it. He can tell you about furniture making in impressive detail. He’s also made knife handles and tiny dollhouse furniture for his daughter’s Barbies, because that’s what she wanted, and that’s the point.
His current project: a full basement bar with custom cabinets. For someone who started less than a year ago, that’s not a small swing.
The Prototype Mindset
One of the things we talked about in this episode is the single piece of advice I give to almost every beginner: consider your first build a prototype.
Not a failure. Not a practice piece. A prototype. There’s a difference.
When you walk into a project knowing it’s a prototype, the mental weight comes off. You stop obsessing over every measurement before the cut and start actually cutting. And here’s what I’ve seen happen in almost nine years of teaching and watching people build: ninety percent of the time, you get to the end of the prototype and realize you don’t need to make another one. It’s better than you expected. And the ten percent who do make a second version? They make it with actual confidence, because they’ve already done it once.
The companion rule is “don’t fall in love with the wood.” It sounds simple. It isn’t. We all do it — you pick up a board with a beautiful figure or a knot in exactly the right place and you’re already picturing the finished piece. Three cuts in, something goes sideways, and now you’re upset in proportion to how much you loved that board. The attachment is the trap.
YouTube: Great Starting Point, Not the Whole Education
Alex came up through YouTube, and he’d be the first to say it got him excited about woodworking. I don’t want to knock it — YouTube is genuinely amazing for this hobby. But there’s a gap worth naming.
Most woodworking YouTube is made to be entertaining, which means it’s edited. The parts that take time, or go wrong, or require explanation, often get cut. The host moves fast because slow is boring to watch. And a lot of popular creators are self-taught, which is fine — but it means they may not know the shop-efficiency habits, the why-behind-the-cut stuff, that you only learn from someone who was formally trained and has done it professionally.
A few resources I mentioned in the episode that are closer to actual instruction: shaper.com has excellent tutorials built around their Origin tool, and Sledge Tool (a Festool instructor with his own channel) is one of the genuinely good ones. These are for the people who want to go deeper.
For in-person learning, I’ve been going to the Mark Adams School of Woodworking in Franklin, Indiana almost every summer for close to thirty years. There are schools like it all over the country. If you’ve hit the ceiling of what YouTube can teach you, that’s the next move.
What’s Coming
Alex and I are going to run parallel builds — we’ll both take on the same project, do it our own way, and compare notes on the podcast. The idea is to surface the difference in approach between a newer builder and a more experienced one, and find out what each of us learns from the other. It’s also, frankly, a good excuse for both of us to get in the shop more.
We’re also opening it up: if you have questions for either of us that you’d like answered on the air, send them to thejoinery@thejoinery.club.
This is going to be fun.
— Steven
The Joiner’s Bench is a podcast about woodworking, learning, and the people who make things. New episodes every two weeks. Listen wherever you get podcasts.
