Hello

You may be a little disappointed reading my bio, as
you will soon discover I am far from being an expert
as most of you are. Hence I will be an active
spectator rather than a renown actor on the list.
My name is Ludovic Angot, and I come from France. I
live   in Taiwan since 2 years and work here as an
electronic engineer for a USA company. I am 31 yrs
old, married and will be dad in 2 months (I can't deny
it is an experience!).
I worked on wood since I'm about 10, and my first
tools were a jigsaw and a drill, all electric. The
only hand woodworking tool I had access to were
drawknifes from my grandfather. It is only recently, 6
months ago, after I finally set-up to a fixed place,
that I start to be more and more interested in tools,
hand tools and woodworking.
How? Thanks to internet, and thanks to the skills
discribed by members of this forum, and online shops.
Wihtout this, I wouldn't know anything about what is a
good handplane, a performant saw... France has
wonderfull pieces of furniture, surely some skilled
craftmen, but you need to be an apprentice to learn
working wood the traditional way. Hand woodworking is
definitely not as much accessible as it seems to be in
the US. Am I wrong if I say that the traditional hand
tools are given a new life thanks to english speaking
people, a lot of them being american? Thank you, guys.

So it is only recently that I bought my first plane
from Lie-Nielsen, then another one, a PAX tenon saw (I
since then learnt about ADRIA, and all the range of
Japanese hand made saw), and a wonderfull olive wood
smooth plane from HNT gordon, some chisels... And I
started with the basics: truing a small board, thanks
to a DVD from David Charlseworth. I buy about a tool
or 2 per month, good tool I mean. And hand tools. I
won't go electric, except maybe for a small drill
press. Most of my tools come from the US, so you can
imagine the money I need to spend for the shipment...

To finish, few words about my host country: the
difficulty has been to find wood. People here are
definitely not DIYers, though few B&Q opened their
doors about a year or so ago. Last month, my wife and
I localized a reseller of high quality wood: zitan,
blackwood, ... I bought an 80$ sample of species in
various forms. I will continue to explore other source
for wood, I heard there is beech here. Otherwise I
have been given few pieces of camphor wood, quite
common here.

My current project is a bow saw, made out of zitan and
guava wood (yes the fruit, which wood is very very
hard). Hopefully in a near future I will post (if
possible?) a picture of my first hand made hand tool.

Thanks again to make the woodworking word so nice and
sympathic, and accessible.

Ludovic