Made by Hand (29 page)

My DIY experiences have boosted my confidence about things I would have shunned a year ago. I’ve installed two toilets (with plenty of leaky mistakes). I’ve repaired and installed a number of electrical outlets and light fixtures around the house. I’ve started teaching myself how to program a microcontroller so that I can make a device that automatically turns over a jar of natural peanut butter every twenty-four hours to mix the oil and the solid ingredients. I’m not as afraid of new challenges because I know that with enough perseverance, I’ll eventually get them done. It’s a great feeling.

The most persistent obstacle in trying to achieve these goals has been finding enough time to do them. It would have been easier to accomplish everything I set out to do if we had dropped out of our current lifestyle completely, but we tried that in 2003 when we went to Rarotonga, and it didn’t work out. So I have to squeeze my DIY projects in between my work hours and the time spent dealing with other non-DIY-related domestic chores, like house-cleaning, driving the kids to school, and paying bills. That meant that most of my leisure time was spent on DIY projects, which cut into my usual leisure activities, like watching TV, drawing and painting, and reading books. Fortunately, working on DIY projects has been so much fun that I don’t feel bad about missing out on those other things.

I’m not alone in my discovery of the joy of using your hands to build a richer, more meaningful life. In the last few years, I’ve witnessed a growing interest in DIY projects.
Make
magazine’s Maker Faire, a giant DIY expo held yearly in San Mateo, California, started in 2005 with twenty thousand attendees. By 2009 attendance had grown to seventy-five thousand. The pickle and sauerkraut workshops I’ve helped run in Los Angeles get bigger every time they’re held. Our beekeeping club has gone from a dozen members to more than fifty in a few months. So-called “hacking spaces”—where people can gather to work with power tools, soldering irons, and signal analyzers—are popping up all over the country, offering guidance and workshops on everything from sewing dresses to programming microcontrollers. Corporations like Adobe regularly offer hands-on project workshops for their software developers as a way of breaking them out of their virtual-reality ruts.

The growing interest in DIY is charging a virtuous circle—individuals who make things enjoy documenting their projects online, which inspires others to try making them, too.

I’ve joined this virtuous circle myself. Whenever I build a new guitar or a new gadget for my chicken coop, I post a description or a video about it on my blog. Many people have e-mailed me to let me know that my projects have spurred them to do their own projects. They’ve told me that making things has changed the way they look at the world around them, opening new doors and presenting new opportunities to get deeply involved in processes that require knowledge, skill building, creativity, critical thinking, decision making, risk taking, social interaction, and resourcefulness. They understand that when you do something yourself, the thing that changes most profoundly is you.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book wouldn’t have been possible if not for the hundreds of truly inspiring people I’ve met through
Make
magazine and Maker Faire. I can’t name them all here, but the following were especially helpful and deserve recognition: Mark Allen, Chris Anderson, Kirk Anderson, Gerry Arrington, Russell Bates, Gareth Branwyn, Daniel Carter, Laura Cochrane, Shawn Connally, Larry Cotton, Kelly Coyne, Collin Cunningham, Julian Darley, Roy Doty, George Dyson, the Evil Mad Scientists, Limor Fried, Kyle Glanville, Arwen O’Reilly Griffith, Saul Griffith, Bill Gurstelle, Keith Hammond, Sherry Huss, Tom Igoe, Brian Jepson, Kip Kay, Erik Knutzen, Todd Lappin, Andrew Lewis, Steve Lodefink, Kris Magri, Terrie Miller, Forrest Mims, Goli Mohammadi, Sam Murphy, Julia Posey, Tim O’Reilly, Mike Outmesguine, John Edgar Park, Tom Parker, Celine Rich, Phil Ross, Adam Savage, Amy Seidenwurm, Donald Simanek, Paul Spinrad, Becky Stern, Eric Thomason, Phillip Torrone, Gever Tulley, Cy Tymony, Marc de Vinck, David Williams, Katie Wilson, Dan Woods, and Lee D. Zlotoff. I’m especially thankful to my friends Mister Jalopy and Charles Platt, who generously shared their time and workshops with me, and who changed my idea for what this book was going to be about. I would like to thank Dale Dougherty, the founder of
Make
, for inviting me to join him and for providing me with many insights about the nature of DIY that found their way into my book.

My father, Lew, a DIYer his entire life, taught me many lessons that I didn’t pay much attention to while growing up, but which became invaluable when I made the decision to become a DIYer.

Thanks go to my co-editors at Boing Boing—Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, and David Pescovitz—as well as to the readers of the blog, who offered constructive feedback on my projects that I posted there.

The copy editor, Candy Gianetti, did a top-notch job of tightening my copy and catching quite a few factual and chronological errors, and for this I’m grateful.

I couldn’t imagine embarking on a book without Byrd Leavell of Waxman Literary Agency at my side—thanks for being the best, Byrd.

Tim Sullivan, the editor who approached me with the idea of writing a DIY book in March of 2008, provided great advice during the early stages of the book.

I was delighted to have the opportunity to work with David Moldawer again, the editor of my previous book. David’s guidance, creativity, and enthusiasm were essential ingredients in this project and I’m lucky to be able to work with him.

Finally, to my family, Carla, Sarina, and Jane: Thanks for putting up with me these past two years. I promise to get those bees out of the rafters as soon as possible.

NOTES

24 “brain research suggests that making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn”: Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn, “Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn,”
Scientific American
, Oct. 29 2009,
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=getting-it-wrong
.

 

24 “No one talks of failure as anything but shameful”: Tom Jennings, “Fail Early! Fail Often!”
Make
10 (2007).

 

26 “The astounding success of propaganda during the war”: Cited in Alan Axelrod,
Profiles in Folly: History’s Worst Decisions and Why They Went Wrong
(New York: Sterling, 2008).

 

27 “radio, a toy of the unwashed, became the musical instrument of the affluent”: Museum of Public Relations,
http://www.prmuseum.com/bernays/bernays_1939.html
.

 

27 “women bought just 12 percent of the cigarettes in America”: Edward Bernays,
Propaganda
(1928; Brooklyn: Ig Publishing, 2005), pp. 54, 71.

 

28 “Brill told Bernays that cigarettes were symbolic penises”: Alan Axelrod,
Profiles in Folly: History’s Worst Decisions and Why They Went Wrong
(New York: Sterling, 2008), pp. 95, 96.

 

28 “[strive] to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs”: Sigmund Freud,
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1933).

 

29 “Eddie Bernays saw the way to sell product was not to sell it to your intellect”: Cited in Mick Brown, “America and China: The Eagle and the Dragon Part Three: Onward and Upward,”
Telegraph.co.uk
, Sept. 7, 2008.

 

29 “People must be trained to desire”: Siavash Rokni, “How One Man Convinced America to Stop Needing and Start Wanting,” The Other Press, February 2008,
http://www.theotherpress.ca/index.php?iid=9474
.

31 “The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land”: Quoted in Maurice G. Kains,
Five Acres and Independence: A Handbook for Small Farm Management
(New York: Greenberg, 1935).

 

31 “Mollison later said it could also mean ‘permanent culture’ ”: Cited in
Permaculture in Depth
,
http://permaculturecanada.ca/joomla/index2.php?option=com_content&do_pdf=1&id=34
.

51 “a liter of petroleum ‘contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor’ ”: Rob Hopkins, “Transition to a World without Oil,” July 2009 speech,
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/696
.

 

52 “Hopkins explained that for every four barrels of oil we use”: Hopkins, “Transition to a World Without Oil.”

 

62 “Erected on stilts, with a single sloped tin roof”: Christopher Kieran, “The Shack at Hinkle Farm,”
http://archrecord.construction.com/residential/quarterly/0801shack-1.asp
, excerpted from
Architectural Record,
January 2008.

 

63 “seventeenth-century French chancellor Henri-François d’Aguesseau”: David Fryxell,
How to Write Fast (While Writing Well)
(Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1992).

73 “Bezzera devised a steam-powered solution to speed things up”: Barry D. Smith, Uma Gupta, and Bhupendra S. Gupta,
Caffeine and Activation Theory: Effects on Health and Behavior
(Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC, 2006), p. 19.

94 “Twenty-four billion chickens are alive today”: Christopher Perrins, ed.
Firefly Encyclopedia of Birds
(Buffalo, N.Y.: Firefly Books, Ltd., 2003).

 

94 “the most successful birds on the planet”: Tim Flannery,
The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples
(New York: Grove Press, 2001).

 

102 “Seth (he goes by his first name only), wrote an essay for the Canadian magazine
The Walrus
”: Seth, “The Quiet Art of Cartooning,”
The Walrus,
September 2008,
http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2008.09
—the-quiet-art-of -cartooning-seth-comic-book-cartoons/.

 

105 “April 1, 1909, issue of a magazine called
Gleanings in Bee Culture
”:
http://books.google.com/books?id=4npaAAAAIA
AJ&pg=R A11-PA217, p. 217.

 

107 “chickens still have a gene for growing saber-shaped, reptilian teeth”: Ammu Kannampilly, “Scientists Find Chickens Retain Ancient Ability to Grow Teeth,”
ABCNews.com
, Feb. 27, 2006,
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=1666805
.

 

134 “One Web site suggests keeping a ‘very active young cockerel’ ”:
http://www.feathersite.com/Poultry/BRKBroody.html
.

135 “What’s important about this making stuff is”: Quoted in John Kalish, “Digital DIY: Web Helps Do-It-Yourselfers Share Ethic,” NPR online, March 9, 2008,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87815753
.

 

147 “the repetitive aspect of knitting elicits a ‘relaxation response’ ”: “Knitting,”
Academic Medicine,
July 2001,
http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Fulltext/2001/07000/Knitting.4.aspx#P10
.

 

147 “Andrea Price, a knitting-book author”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpv07ZaGoHg
.

 

151 “the master carvers of the misnamed ‘Black Forest’ school”:
http://www.blackforestantiques.com/black_forest_antique_carvings.asp
.

156 “One book says it originated in Southeast Asia”: Harald W.Tietze,
Kombucha: The Miracle Fungus
(New South Wales: Phree Books, 1995).

 

157 “In his 1968 book,
Cancer Ward,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn”: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn:
The Cancer Ward
(New York: Penguin USA, 1968), p. 165.

 

157 “An article published in 2009 in
Chinese Medicine
”: Ola Ali Gharib, “Effects of Kombucha on Oxidative Stress Induced Nephrotoxicity in Rats,”
Chinese Medicine
, Nov. 27, 2009.

 

157 “one study in Sweden in 2005”: Py Tubelius, Vlaicu Stan, and Anders Zachrisson, “Increasing work-place healthiness with the probiotic
Lactobacillus reuteri
: A randomised, double-blind placebo-controlled study.”
Environmental Health
4:25, 2005.

 

157 “probiotic drinks could fight some kinds of cancers”: “ ‘Good’ Bacteria May Help Stop Some Cancers, Say Scientists,”
The Guardian,
Oct. 7, 2006,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2006/oct/07/cancer.medicineandhealth
.

 

158 “a few sobering items about
kombucha
”: Richard C. Dart, ed.,
Medical Toxicology
(Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2004), p. 1750.

 

158 “In his book, which is part how-to guide”: Sandor Ellix Katz,
Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods
(White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green, 2003), p. 28.

 

159 “ancient rituals that humans have been performing for many generations”: Ibid., p. 3.

 

159 “completely cut off from the process of growing food”: Ibid., p. 27.

163 “In September 2009 a
New York Times
blog ran an article”: “Saving Bees: What We Know Now,” Room for Debate,
New York Times,
Sept. 2-3, 2009,
http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/02/saving-bees-what-we-know-now
.

 

164 “Every February, bees are transported to the Central Valley”: Singeli Agnew, “The Almond and the Bee,”
San Francisco Chronicle
, Oct. 14, 2007,
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/10/14/CM2SS2SNO.DTL
.