Preparing scrap door parts for making them into great wooden toys!

A couple of major points to be made at this stage.  One, the woman in the picture is Elizabeth Stroop.  At the time, known mostly as Betsy Olney-Stroop.  My first wife, and co-founder of The Toycrafter.  It later turned out that being a toy maker was not her first choice of a life plan, and we each went on in different directions.  Elizabeth went to Colgate Rochester Divinity School in Rochester, NY not long after this, and that also led to the move of The Toycrafter to 1237 E. Main St., Rochester, NY about a year later?  We spent a year with her commuting to Rochester each week, and coming home to Ithaca weekends, but that was far to hard on both of us! I remembered that we figured out that either I needed to move to Rochester, or we needed to separate our lives.  In the end, we did both - I moved to Rochester, along with our tools, lots of wood, etc.  Elizabeth went on to become a hospital chaplain and a trainer of other chaplains, and found another love, and another family.  Things went well for both of us, and I went on making toys and other things for the next 40 years!  I also found another love, and another family, but this blog is mostly about The Toycrafter!

In the above picture, Elizabeth is jointing the edge of one of the pieces of scrap door parts that we made into our toy cars, etc.  Our shop was on the second floor of a very sturdy building.  The wood shown in the previous post, was stored downstairs. The big grey object next to her is the counter weight on the door in the floor.   Each piece of wood had a joint on all 4 sides, and we used the jointer to remove the shaped edges.  She is wearing safety glasses, but in those early days, we were not as careful with ear plugs, and dust masks as the pictures will show.  Just for the record, in all the years that The Toycrafter made wooden toys, the only major injury happened to me, not long after this series of pictures of us making Rolls Royces!  More about that later.