It’s early here on a Monday morning, the week of the American Thanksgiving holiday. I feel compelled to qualify this coming Thursday as an American holiday since Americans often think that our customs and holidays are simply the standard experienced around the world. You need to have traveled a bit to understand that isn’t true. In any case I look forward to seeing my extended family and spending time with my new granddaughter and munching on some wonderful food, all while watching our hometown Detroit Lions possibly win another (American) football game. See what I did there? Respect. Respect for friends and blog readers I may not know who live in other countries. “Go Argonauts”, “Go Wrexham”. So while our football may not be your style of Futbol, and our Thanksgiving may not be your understanding of Thanksgiving, I still wish you all a wonderful, peaceful and prosperous week. Except for you Black Friday nut jobs who stand in line at Midnight and then elbow other people out of your way to get a $5 toaster. I’m bereft of any supportive language for you.

But this blog isn’t about holidays or food or the madness of holiday shopping. I wanted to offer a sincere “Thank You” to you all who read this, or visit our website or watch our YouTube videos. It takes a lot in order to produce what looks like a simple video, so a creator like me truly does appreciate when people tune in, drop me a thumbs up, subscribe to the channel or share a video with others. That support means literally more to me than any small ad revenue I might get from viewership.

When you have a small channel like mine and you’re not in the business of making shock videos, reacting to other people’s content or modeling bikinis, you do the work because you love the work. In my case, I do love the work. I love coming up with new or different ideas on a project. I really enjoy the challenge of engineering the thing I’m building, and I also like to envision the best camera angle to record the process and make it entertaining. It’s not about the money, which is why I don’t push memberships, or sell merch, or beg for Patreons. That seems so disingenuous. “This is a woodworking channel so I can share my ideas, but please donate, buy me a coffee, visit my sponsor for a product I don’t use, become a member and buy my new hoodie!” No thank you.

So what does it take to actually make a video?

Everything starts with a need

On my channel, project ideas are most often driven by a need expressed by one of our family members hence the channel name “The Family Woodworker”. Yes. Yes. Yes. Wonderfully original. 🙂 My favorite oldest daughter asking for a new coffee table for their first home. My favorite youngest daughter asking for matching bedside tables. My wife asking for a new larger dining table or most recently some sort of wooden pole to hang up to 16 decorated stockings for Christmas morning. (New video coming later this week). Sometimes, the need is a personal desire to push the boundaries of woodworking and mechanics to create kinetic wood art. Those projects are the hardest, and often the most rewarding.

It takes more time than you might think

Time invested in the woodworking activity on a project varies by the complexity of the project. That really isn’t a size distinction but rather a function of how many small pieces and parts need to be fabricated in order to complete the item. My mission style dining table for example does have quite a bit of detail in the build equating to about 30 individually cut pieces. The glue and dry time activity as I assembled the parts took multiple days. The total hours for the build came in at around 40, and I spent more time than that putting the video together. By comparison my marble machine took 5 weeks of design and engineering with over 150 individually cut pieces. It is a kinetic sculpture measuring in about 1/8 the size of the dining table, but took 6 times longer to build. Another example of “size doesn’t matter”. (Winky face) This week’s Christmas stocking project will take less than a day to build, but the video production will take longer than the actual woodworking part of the project. As small as the stocking project might be, I’ll still have about 25 separate videos and camera angles to edit together and try to make the story line interesting to watch. I also script the complete narrative for the project so I can record it using a better microphone, since the echo and tool noise in the wood shop is terrible for sound quality. I need to merge the recorded narrative so that it aligns with the video storyboard, and oh yeah, make an interesting thumbnail picture and title so that the video attracts attention. Piece of cake. (Picture me with a sarcastic facial expression here)

Stealing other people’s ideas

It’s hard to come up with a unique idea for a table or a chair or a box when there are literally millions of other videos out there before you publish yours. Having said that, I try not to watch a bunch of other woodworking videos in any attempt to steal a design. At most I might get inspired by an idea but then work very hard to make my own design unique. A great example of this is watching the kinetic art of David C. Roy. I thought it was extremely cool and wanted to give a rotating kinetic sculpture a try. My rotating blade design was my own, as was the addition of meshing nautilus gears located under the rotating wheels. I was inspired, but my end result was different. My Bic pen design was also my own and I thought it was unique, that was until after publishing the video I would get other wood pen designs for Bic inserts recommended in my video feed. I wasn’t the only person who thought you could upgrade the basic Bic pen. But, I never try to steal anyone’s design. I like to think all my projects are unique, but the sheer weight of published video statistics are simple against woodworking creators.

Do I make any money?

Um, no. I’ll post a picture of my regular monthly ad revenue below simply to be honest about the whole story. It’s not unwelcome, but on average by project, the income doesn’t even pay for the wood. As an example, my White Oak dining table project I mentioned earlier cost me over $1,400 in materials, not counting the labor which is always free and done with love for the craft. When my Delta table saw died, the replacement Grizzly saw cost over $1,500, and so on, and so on. But the point is, I don’t care. This is a hobby and a way to show my love of this craft. I am fortunate that in retirement I can afford to maintain this hobby without the need for this to become a business, or the need to beg for sponsor or monetary support from the people who might watch our channel. I love you guys. I love woodworking. I love making this content. I am thankful that I can continue this effort without the specter of “Cost” hanging over me.

Which brings me to you

More views and more subscribers do help grow the basic ad revenue model, so I very much appreciate that you tune in to your little channel! Our channel subscribers and viewers have been respectful and supportive and wonderful all along our 3 year journey. Thank you! Please continue to come back for more content and please drop me a line if you have a suggestion for making our videos better or more fun to watch. I also appreciate all your “Likes” and “Shares” as those little affirmations as well as new subscribers really help the channel grow. You can help with more of that of course, to help spread the word about our channel. As for now, please have a fantastic holiday week or if you’re reading from another country, have a great fourth week of November!

Best always,

Mark – TFW