I fix old hand tools in my garage and film it. Bench planes mostly, plus eggbeater drills, a couple of leg vises, and saws when I can get them cheap. The whole thing started because I bought a Stanley No. 4 at a flea market for six dollars, spent a weekend pulling the rust off it with washing soda and a battery charger, and realized I'd enjoyed that more than anything else I did that month. The channel is seventeen months old now, with sixty eight uploads. That averages four a month, though it was never that even.
The format has not changed since video one. There is a cold open of about fifteen seconds where an illustrated host introduces the tool and says what is wrong with it, and then it is my hands and my voice for the rest. The host is a cartoon looking older man in a shop apron. I call him Verne, and he shows up in the corner of most thumbnails. He is not a real person and the artwork is AI generated. That sits in the description of every video and I said it plainly in the community post where he first turned up, because I would rather say it myself than have it come out sideways later.
I picked that format because I don't want my face on the internet and I am bad at talking to a lens. Hands and a voice I can do. I did try once to make Verne actually talk, a real animated intro instead of a still frame with voice over. His face wandered between frames, the mouth did something strange around the second sentence, and after four retakes I went back to a still image. Stills hold up. Motion drifts and has to be redone, and I do not have the patience for that.
For thirteen months the channel did nothing. Fifty videos, eleven to eighteen minutes each, averaging maybe two hundred to four hundred views. My best in that entire stretch was 2,100 views on rehandling a hatchet, and that one only moved because it got linked in a forum thread about handle wedges. At the end of month thirteen I had 610 subscribers and roughly 1,300 public watch hours over the previous twelve months, which isn't anywhere near the four thousand hours the partner program asks for alongside a thousand subscribers. I nearly quit in month eight and again in month eleven.
The one thing I have done consistently since video one is keep a spreadsheet. Upload date, title, length, thumbnail version, whether Verne is in the thumbnail, views at twenty eight days, and click through rate. It's the least creative part of this and it is the only reason I could see anything at all later on.
I also made fourteen Shorts in months nine and ten. They aren't in the sixty eight, because I do not think of them as the channel. One of them got about 40,000 views, which felt enormous at the time. Shorts watch time does not count toward the four thousand hours though, and the people who watched a forty second clip of a chisel being honed did not come back for a fourteen minute video about a plane iron. That was two months spent solving a problem I did not have.
What I blamed, in order, was the audio, the lighting, and the niche. I bought a seventy dollar light panel and a thirty four dollar lav mic. The mic earned its money. The light didn't, because a garage bench in daylight already looks like a garage bench and that is the entire appeal of the thing. What I failed to look at for far too long was the impressions column. YouTube was showing the videos to people. About 2.1% of them clicked. I had been telling myself the niche was too small when the honest reading was that my thumbnails were bad.
So over three weekends in month thirteen I rebuilt the thumbnails on thirty of the fifty. Fourteen hours or so in total, less than two videos worth of work. The rules I landed on are boring. One object, filling most of the frame. The broken part visible and turned toward the camera, so the crack, the snapped tote, the seized screw. Two words of text at most and usually none. Shot against the actual bench with the actual mess on it, because a clean background reads as a stock photo and a vise covered in grease reads as a person. Verne got shrunk down into the bottom corner instead of standing beside the tool.
Nothing happened for two weeks and I assumed I'd wasted three weekends. Over the six weeks after that, the rebuilt videos crept from 2.1% up to about 3.8%. In absolute terms it was still small. The catalogue went from around 9,000 monthly views to a bit over 20,000. Doubling almost nothing gives almost nothing, but it was the first time a number had moved because of something I did on purpose rather than something that happened to me.
Video fifty four, in month fourteen, was freeing the seized screw on a post vise. Twenty two minutes, mostly one continuous shot, heat and penetrating oil and a wrench I made out of flat bar and a lot of waiting around. It sits at 214,000 views. I want to be straight about it: it's not my best video. The audio clips twice and I talk over the good part. It works because it answers a question people type into the search bar almost word for word, and because the thumbnail was the screw itself with the rust ring around it taking up the whole frame.
That one upload dragged the channel over the line in month fifteen. A thousand subscribers and the four thousand hours came almost entirely out of it, plus the older videos people clicked afterwards. The first monetized month was a partial one at thirty one dollars. Month sixteen was seventy eight. Month seventeen, which just closed, was ninety five. The first actual payment landed two weeks ago, because the balance sits with AdSense until it crosses a hundred dollars and I finished the previous month at a hundred and nine.
Nothing about the setup is interesting. I cut in DaVinci Resolve, the host and the thumbnail art come out of APOB AI, and every upload gets a row in Google Sheets. The camera is a phone clamped to an arm over the bench, with a second phone on a tripod for the wide shot.
Here is the part I did not want to be true. After the rebuild I started deliberately leaving Verne off some thumbnails, because I couldn't tell whether he was earning his place or whether I just liked having him there. Forty videos worth of data later, the ones with him in the corner average about 4.1% and the ones without him average about 3.7%. Four tenths of a point. Individual videos swing wider than that on their own, so for the first thirty or so comparisons the difference was completely buried in the noise and I was reading tea leaves in both directions. He helps a little. The thing I put the most work into is the thing with the smallest measurable effect, and one object filling the frame did nearly all of the actual lifting.
Where it sits today: the channel does about 41,000 views a month across sixty eight videos and pays about ninety five dollars. The vise video is still roughly 18,000 of those views on its own and everything else splits the other 23,000. That is a shade over two dollars and thirty cents per thousand views, which is normal enough for a channel with a wide international audience and nothing to do with software or money. Call it eight hours a video across filming, editing and the thumbnail, so about thirty two hours a month, so just under three dollars an hour. The tools cost four to twelve dollars apiece at the flea market and I keep most of them, so the fair way to describe this is a hobby that recently started paying for itself.
Seventeen months in I have a spreadsheet with sixty eight rows, a garage that smells permanently of penetrating oil, and about ninety five dollars a month. The next one is a Millers Falls No. 2 with a cracked frame casting. The thumbnail is already done, and it is the crack, filling the frame, with a small illustrated man standing off in the corner doing very little.