AEDC employee uses woodworking skills to give to others

  • Published
  • By Patrick Ary
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  If you're ever in a meeting with Daryl Justice at Arnold Engineering Development Center (AEDC), you might see him run his hand over the wood on the table where you're sitting. He admits it's a habit; one that he says many people who love working with wood have.

"I'll see a table or something in a store or somebody's home or something, and I'll check it out and mentally I'll just file it away for future reference," Justice said. "And then I'll try to remember what it looked like or sometimes, if I have a piece of paper with me, I'll try to do some dimensions or try to sketch it or something."

Justice, the emergency management lead for Aerospace Testing Alliance (ATA), was bitten by the carpentry bug about 20 years ago.

Now he has an impressive portfolio of work that is documented in page after page of photos he keeps in a brown leather album. There are countless photos of him working in his wood shop at home and just as many photos of the finished products: cabinets, tables, bookshelves, clocks and even toys for his grandchildren.

And he hasn't taken a dime for the work he's crafted in the shop behind his home -with the exception of a few bucks for materials here and there - because that's not why he does it.

"It gives me a tremendous amount of satisfaction to see something that I've made that's being put into use, and people appreciate it," he said.

Justice's hobby began when his wife wasn't able to find the right size of shelf for their living room about two decades ago. They finally just sat down with a piece of paper and sketched up some plans. Then Justice went to work.

"When I first started out my angles were a bit off, my cuts were a little bit short. So I always called it designer firewood; it was just fit to burn when I'd get done," he said. "But over the years I got a little bit better."

Getting better at the craft meant getting better equipment than the 10-inch table saw he started with. He ended up buying a planer, then a joiner, then a big Delta table saw and today, he has just about any tool you can think of.

It also meant that his 12-foot by 15-foot utility shed had to go; he tore it down and built a two-car garage that has never had a car inside of it. That became his wood shop.

As he got better at the cuts and measurements, his projects became more ambitious - and more sought-after. Building something for one of his daughters would sometimes turn into a two-piece job.

"One's got three kids, and one's got four kids," Justice said. "When one of them would say 'Dad, I need a cradle for my baby,' I'd go ahead and fix it. When one would see it the other would say 'Hey dad, you fixed one for her so I need one for me.'"

And he didn't stop making cradles for family. In all, he's made seven. Some of them were for people at his church. He also made one for a co-worker: Tamalena Breiding in industrial security got one for her daughter Katie in 1999 as a gift. Breiding was surprised to get it, and says she was even more surprised at the quality of the work.

"I had seen some of his cabinets and stuff, but I don't think I really expected how beautiful it was," she said.

Justice also made a toy box for Katie, who's now 11. It's still in her room and is apparently staying there for a while.

"I asked her the other day if I could move the toy box out of her room and she said no," Breiding said.

The projects on base didn't stop there. Justice also made a china cabinet for a co-worker who couldn't afford one. And when AEDC Fire Chief Daryle Lopes needed something to showcase a Confederate sword he bought as a retirement gift for an old friend, he went to the guy who he knew had "mad skills" when it came to woodworking. He ended up giving his friend the sword in a display case that got "oohs" and "ahhs" from the crowd on-hand for the retirement ceremony.

"I just described what I was thinking about and then the next thing I know, Daryl came up with that. And it was awesome." Lopes said.

Over the years, Justice turned out dozens of major projects from his shop; some of them he got from woodworking magazines and others were original pieces he designed himself.

But after about a decade of serious time in the shop, he started to burn out. Projects he promised for friends started backing up, and it started to feel like work instead of fun.

"It just got to be aggravating," Justice said. "So I just quit for a while."

The sword cabinet for Lopes ended up being one of his last major projects and that was almost five years ago.

But his desire to get back out in the shop has never really gone away. Justice still makes little things for his wife, like bookends and bases for figurines. And over the holidays, the itch to create something really started getting to him.

"My neighbor wanted to use my tools, and I had not used the shop for a while," Justice said. "It got cluttered so I got out there and cleaned it up a little bit so he could get in there, and then he did some cleaning up and stuff so he could do his little project. And so what I'm gonna do is go ahead and get everything all straightened up and then get back into it."

He even has an idea of what he wants to start with. One of his bigger past projects was a floor-standing clock with glass shelves. He bought a couple of clock mechanisms around that time, and he's thinking a wall clock might be his first major project in half a decade. Eventually, he may try a real hanging clock, complete with a pendulum - although he thinks that level of precision work might be biting off a little more than he can chew.

"I haven't run into anything that I would not do again," Justice said. "But I'm sure there are things out there I wouldn't do."