Chairs and more

It’s good to be back in the shop and actually making some furniture. I sent the final parts of The Foundations of Better Woodworking off to the publisher a couple of days ago. And so for a short time, I don’t have to deal with it! The folks at Popular Woodworking Books get to play with it for now, and then I’ll see it again, looking much more like a book. Then it will be my turn again to correct and clarify, refine and rework.

Most of the content of Foundations… comes from years of teaching, and seeing what students know and don’t know. I’ve taught a bunch of very well-informed students, and they certainly know plenty about how various other writers and instructors go about cutting dovetails or mortise and tenon joints. They know plenty about various tool choices. But they often didn’t know how to stand, how to align their bodies for more accurate work, or even what part of their bodies should be doing the work. There are problems with what watch, and even more with what to observe. As I saw more and more of this, I got more and more excited about writing this book. And I was lucky to find a publisher equally excited about bringing it out.

The image below is a mock-up of the cover (I’m told it may change). It won’t be out until November, but the design is already under way.

I won’t say I’ve been lazy in not posting for the last, well, too many months. It’s been pretty crazy. I’m just finishing up a new book that’s due out this fall, and I also recently started on dialysis (I’ve had kidney disease for more than half my life – and for my entire woodworking career – and this is just another phase in dealing with it). So my energies have been focused pretty seriously on other things. But it’s time to get back to business.

Especially since this weekend (Friday, April 20^th, 10 am to 6 pm, and Saturday, April 21^st, from 10 am to 5 pm) is this year’s Lie-Nielsen Toolworks Hand Tool Event in my shop. Not only will the good folks from Lie-Nielsen coming, but there will be an over-abundance of other great presenters: Chris Schwarz (Lost Art Press), Megan Fitzpatrick (Popular Woodworking Magazine), Jameel Abraham and Father John from BenchCrafted, Kevin Glen-Drake (Glen Drake Toolworks), Raney Nelson (Daedworks planes), Gary Benson, from Elkhead Tools, and Andy Brownell, representing Gorilla Glue. Whew!

The book is ever so close to complete at this point. It’s tentatively called Foundations of Better Woodworking, and it’s scheduled be out this fall, just in time for Woodworking in America in Kentucky (where I’ll be teaching a couple of classes). Popular Woodworking is publishing, and I’m excited to be working with them on this. The book covers a lot of stuff I’ve seen very little of elsewhere – the essential things that underlie all of the skills and techniques that get all of the attention. More on this later.

I hope to see you this weekend, for a great educational experience. The event is free, no reservations are required, and you’re sure to learn something. Oh. And you get to play with some of the most amazing tools anywhere.

- Jeff

I recently finished up an article for Popular Woodworking on my Arch Table, a piece I’ve been making for at least 20 years. It’s a something of a signature piece for me; perhaps because it’s part of my logo (thanks to my graphic designer), but more importantly, because it was one of the first pieces I did using flowing and branching curves, and a lot of my work since then has grown out of this piece.

The Arch Table in cherry

Megan at Popular Woodworking asked me to do the article about two weeks after I had shipped one out to a customer in Florida, so I had to make a new one. And now I’ve got a beautiful table sitting around looking for a buyer. It’s not exactly the same as the one on my web site (but is the same as the one shown here) but it’s available for $2795 (plus tax and/or shipping). That’s $200 off the standard price for this version, and $500 less than the version on the web site. Let me know if you’re interested.

There’s no place like home! I’ve been traveling an awful lot over the last six weeks: first a family vacation, then a trip with my son to his freshman orientation at college, then out to the AWFS Conference in Las Vegas to present two seminars, and finally off to Lie-Nielsen Toolworks to give a weekend workshop on mortise and tenon joints. A great time at each of these events, but all that moving around does take its toll. So it’s finally time to dig back in to the work at hand; furniture to make, lots of articles to write, and lots of photographs to shoot for those articles. Oh yes, and a new book project, which is scheduled to be published next fall by Popular Woodworking! More on that another time….

There wasn’t a whole lot of woodworking relevance on our family trip, but one thing stood out: the dining table at the rather bizarre place we stayed was actually a classic old Roubo-style workbench.

A Roubo Dining Table?

You can see where the threaded hole for the leg vise was plugged, and there’s some evidence of a crochet as well. Made a great dining table (other than the stretchers, which did get in the way). That will certainly go on the list of options for a new table design. This one only had through-tenons, but I like the idea of the through-tenon and dovetail joint even better.

AWFS in Las Vegas was great fun, and the seminars were well attended and enthusiastically received. The show itself was a wild experience. Attendance was not the greatest, which wasn’t really a surprise given the state of the economy, and I’m clearly not exactly the target market for a show like that. But cabinetmakers were in heaven amongst the endless sea of CNC (!). I loved watching an Onsrud 5-axis CNC router machine a sphere inside a cube (loose, but still captured).

http://www.cronsrud.com/video/5axis/pages/sphere_inside_cube.php

This was extremely impressive work, but it would be hard for me to justify something like that in my one-man shop. I also liked some of the Grex air tools, Lamello’s INVIS fasteners (that are indeed invisible once assembled, and tighten up with a rotating magnetic tool! – they’re not new, but they’re still pretty amazing), and a variety of other small tools.

Mostly, I enjoyed meeting people.

At least they're easy to see

One of the better time-saving choices I’ve made in my shop was to purchase a pair of fluorescent green Peltor hearing protectors. I admit that they’re pretty goofy looking, especially in combination with the bright pink P-100 filters on the 3M dust mask I often wear, but I’ve cut down drastically on the time I used to waste looking for my black ear muffs; the green is pretty easy to spot anywhere in a shop full of more natural colors. But yesterday, my system broke down just a bit. I had brought in a Granny Smith apple, and left it on my bench in the morning. For much of the day, I found myself heading over to the bright green apple when I was about to turn on a machine, instead of to my hearing protectors, which were usually hiding somewhere at the other end of the shop. I finally had to eat the apple just to stop wasting time. Or rather, to stop wasting time in that particular way.

Not exactly the same color, but close enough...