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Power totally rules.

In school, I loved my history classes. Reading about the early colonists who settled very close to the site of my elementary school made me feel as if I had a direct connection with the history of America. And, learning about the hardships they had to endure made me feel pretty lucky to grow up in an age of power tools.

Washing machines to do the laundry. Chainsaws to cut down trees, and powered log splitters to spit out cord after cord of firewood. Table saws, sanders, routers and all of the other tools Norm Abram used to build projects on This Old House and the New Yankee Workshop. Yes, Norm and my dad are the two guys responsible for my woodworking habit. Both made – and still make – extensive use of power tools when they build their projects, although Norm a) has more of them b) has fancier ones and c) can build a freakin’ bedroom set in half an hour, while my dad can do something like that over a period of a few years. So, it was only natural that when I started setting up my shop, I told my wife that I was going to need more power in order to build nice projects. I built pretty projects with my power tools. The louder my shop was, the nicer the projects turned out.

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Let’s back up, and see what’s needed for a furniture period to be established. In three simple words, “an exceptional economy”… not just good, but exceptional. Enough disposable income must be created that will allow furniture designers the freedom to create this again means an exceptional economy. For a period of furniture to come into existence, the economic window must be long enough to sustain the purchase of furniture. In the scheme of disposable income, the furniture purchase is one of the last considered. The furniture manufacturer will be the last to enter an economic boom, and the first to feel the effects of economic slowdown. The economic window for the furniture manufacturer is small. First the car is purchased, then the second car, then the home, then the refrigerator, the TV, the washing machine, then if the 1st car has held up, the furniture purchase. After all, you can always get by another year with the couch.

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In this episode of Wood Talk Online we don’t mess around, we get right into answering your questions. OK, we do go off on some tangents but it wouldn’t be the same show without them!

First things first, a huge Wood Talk Online congratulations to Barry Johnson from Ewing, New Jersey! Barry is our very first winner of the monthly ‘WoodSlicer’ Bandsaw Blade giveaway from Highland Woodworking. Don’t lose heart if you’re not Barry, there’s always next month when we give another ‘WoodSlicer’ Blade away.

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Not so long ago a question came into Wood Talk Online asking what we consider to be a list of essential tools for the workshop. It’s hard to pinpoint which tools work for every woodworker, but after a little time and some thought, I think I finally came up with a list that should cover most situations.

Essential Tools - “The Hand Tools”

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My woodworking hobby stated – as many do – as a home improvement urge. My wife and I moved into our home back in 1997, and the previous owner……

Well, as my mom taught me, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all. Some of the things I saw still leave me puzzled. For example, ceiling fan in the master bedroom. Rather than install the silly thing in a way that would 1- ensure the sucker would stay on the ceiling and 2- not cause a house fire, she did things her own way. The electrical wire was just run through a hole punched in the ceiling. The connection between the fan and the wire was made only with electrical tape – and it wasn’t inside a junction box. The fan itself was hanging from a vaulted ceiling socket that was screwed into a joist until the screw heads stripped out. Since neither screw was tightly mounted to the joist, the fan had this nasty tendency to wobble like crazy.

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Let’s back up, and see what’s needed for a furniture period to be established. In three simple words, “an exceptional economy”… not just good, but exceptional. Enough disposable income must be created that will allow furniture designers the freedom to create; this again means an exceptional economy. For a period of furniture to come into existence, the economic window must be long enough to sustain the purchase of furniture. In the scheme of disposable income, the furniture purchase is one of the last considered. The furniture manufacturer will be the last to enter an economic boom, and the first to feel the effects of economic slowdown. The economic window for the furniture manufacturer is small. First the car is purchased, then the second car, then the home, then the refrigerator, the TV, the washing machine, then if the 1st car has held up, the furniture purchase. After all, you can always get by another year with the couch.

Read Full Article

Download Episode
In this episode of Wood Talk Online we don’t mess around, we get right into answering your questions. OK, we do go off on some tangents but it wouldn’t be the same show without them!

First things first, a huge Wood Talk Online congratulations to Barry Johnson from Ewing, New Jersey! Barry is our very first winner of the monthly ‘WoodSlicer’ Bandsaw Blade giveaway from Highland Woodworking. Don’t lose heart if you’re not Barry, there’s always next month when we give another ‘WoodSlicer’ Blade away.

Read Full Article

Power totally rules.

In school, I loved my history classes. Reading about the early colonists who settled very close to the site of my elementary school made me feel as if I had a direct connection with the history of America. And, learning about the hardships they had to endure made me feel pretty lucky to grow up in an age of power tools.

Washing machines to do the laundry. Chainsaws to cut down trees, and powered log splitters to spit out cord after cord of firewood. Table saws, sanders, routers and all of the other tools Norm Abram used to build projects on This Old House and the New Yankee Workshop. Yes, Norm and my dad are the two guys responsible for my woodworking habit. Both made – and still make – extensive use of power tools when they build their projects, although Norm a) has more of them b) has fancier ones and c) can build a freakin’ bedroom set in half an hour, while my dad can do something like that over a period of a few years. So, it was only natural that when I started setting up my shop, I told my wife that I was going to need more power in order to build nice projects. I built pretty projects with my power tools. The louder my shop was, the nicer the projects turned out.

Read Full Article

Not so long ago a question came into Wood Talk Online asking what we consider to be a list of essential tools for the workshop. It’s hard to pinpoint which tools work for every woodworker, but after a little time and some thought, I think I finally came up with a list that should cover most situations.

Essential Tools - “The Hand Tools”

Read Full Article

Can I brag for a moment?

I have really good eyesight. I mean, REALLY good eyesight. As long as I can remember, I have been able to read license plates across a parking lot. This is quite a feat, considering the rest of my family has awful vision. Both of my brothers, my mom and my dad all wear glasses or contacts. To be fair, my dad’s glasses are reading glasses (that must be where I got the good eyesight from). But they are all amazed at just how much more detail I can see than they can. Why, then, was I having trouble seeing what I was doing? Could it be that I was tackling my first really small project?

It was a simple one. Someone asked me to build a postage stamp holder - something funny, creative and made out of wood to hold a roll of stamps. I had the idea of building a very small band-sawn box that could do the job nicely. The lid was going to be held on by rare-earth magnets and a slot that would meter out a stamp at a time from the roll. There was even going to be an appropriate decoration paying tribute to the speed at which stamped letters travel compared
to e-mail. To make this vision a reality, I grabbed a chunk of maple, headed to the band saw, and immediately realized just how different the scale of the project was compared to others. This piece was small. I mean REALLY small. Three inches across and an inch and a half thick. And, once I cut the body of the box to size, I had to cut it into even smaller pieces to create a base and a lid. As I cut the box from the chunk of maple, the tiny size of the project forced me to rethink nearly all of my construction practices. Well, it wasn’t actually the size of the project, but the close calls I kept having that caused me to sweat the details and count my fingers.

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