Meet Jimmy Diresta

Great week in the shop this week because Jimmy Diresta is here. And if you've been living under a rock you might not know who Jimmy is. I have a channel under a rock, too. So Jimmy's got a great history as a toy maker, as a creator, as a maker. Yeah. Very significant YouTube channel with how many subscribers these days? Close to 2 million. About 2 million. Yeah, creeping up on 2 million. Got a couple people watching him. So instead of me babbling on and on, which I'm good at doing, you please tell the folks at home a little bit about yourself. Like what are you looking for in a date? Oh no, no, no. That's a different show, never mind. Well, I've been making things with my dad in my dad's shop since I was a little kid, since about six or seven years old. My dad put me in front of jigsaws and bandsaws at seven, eight years old, hot glue gun playing with his scraps in his basement, in his workshop. And I grew up in that workshop until I moved to New York City. And then I developed basically the same shop that I had growing up in New York City. And now I moved upstate. I have much bigger versions of those shops now and I make things all the time, every day in multitude of materials, metal, wood, plastic fabric, leather, glass. We're gonna do a bunch of woodworking, but you have a very varied background. Really mostly just outta curiosity. I get curious about stained glass and I'll pick up stained glass and I'll play with it for a little while. Made a canoe. You're gonna start a wooden boat very soon. Yeah, I made a canoe a few years ago and that led me to wanna make a boat. I'm gonna make a rowboat. I'm just starting that project now. And just outta curiosity I just want to get into automobile repair. And it also, because I'm on YouTube, it helps me expand my audience because I'm trying things for the first time. The fans watching are also trying things for the first time, so I can get on their level. And I think what's cool about that is if people are handy in a shop, woodworking is probably not their only thing. I mean, they're like you and I. They're probably spinning a wrench on a car. They wanna learn to weld. They wanna learn whatever. They're exploring lots of different hands-on things. And you teach to many of those other disciplines. The idea of making itself is a discipline, and it's just to be multidisciplinarian in different materials. It's the basic concept. It's just that like metal is wood, but it's harder. Wood is metal, but it's softer. Plastic has no grain in it, you know? So there's all different types of ways of looking at everything. It's all basically woodwork. Give us a second on the toy making thing, 'cause I think that's such a cool part of your background that maybe people aren't as familiar with as the other stuff. Yeah, I went to art school and when I graduated I met a teacher and he introduced me into the toy business. And so I spent many years from about 1989 to about 2010 designing and developing, inventing and troubleshooting and costing toys. So I spent many, many, many nights in China and Hong Kong in tooling rooms and figuring out first shots and mechanisms, why this mechanism off the tooling's not working well, how can we modify the tooling? So I have hours and endless hours of practice in exercising problem solving. And you literally had not a toy shop in the retail perspective, but you had a toy makers shop, 'cause you were freelancing the toy business. Yeah, we prototyped vacuum form. A little bit of woodwork. It was really more just for jigging up stuff when we were working more on plastic and resins. But yeah, and I did a lot of woodwork in my own shop just for my own shop furniture, but then shortly after I left the toy business only because it became kind of boring and I kept having more opportunities doing woodwork in the interior design business. And so I got a whole girth of knowledge designing and developing furniture for the interiors of homes, commercial and non-commercial. That was a lot of fun, too. What a cool background. Thank you. Thanks for having me. So while we're very lucky to have Jimmy here and looking forward to a lot of great video content coming your way, thanks to him. Thank you. Thanks for having me guys.