And they weren’t this kind:

This morning’s woodworking assignment was to route 320 biscuit slots in Medium Density Fiberboard. It’s not the kind of procedure that makes me hop out of bed and want to run to my shop. As my Dad would often say, you just have to “grin and bear it.”

One thing I refuse [...]

At every show or event that I’ve been to, wood workers arrived by driving cars. Is there a more dangerous activity? How many people do you know or know of who have been involved in serious or fatal vehicle accidents, many within just a few miles of home? For all the new gadgetry produced, air [...]

Megan Fitzpatrick at Popular Woodworking offered a nice list of accomodations in the Cincinnati area (http://blogs.popularwoodworking.com/editorsblog/Where+To+Stay+For+The+June+4+5+LieNielsen+Hand+Tool+Event.aspx), one of which I availed myself of back in June for the Lie-Nielsen event for a night. Looking forward to the WIA this late September, I still haven’t booked a place, and need to locate a more low-budget option [...]

There’s not much wood content in the products I see designed by Resource Furniture. In fact, only the steam bent slats under the mattresses are wood, carefully used for their inherent ability to spring. I like this furniture because it speaks to the needs of people living in an increasingly crowded planet. I like the [...]

Board Face

We all know that wood is full of mysteries and surprises. I’m reading Spike Carlsen’s “A Splintered History of Wood” and enjoying the myriad tales of amazing discoveries in logs, both in rich grain and actual objects. One example is Sam Talarico’s having “found an entire axle from an old wagon inside a [...]

My late beloved sister, Tina, had a custom license plate that read NGHF. The letters represented for her a truth she had come to accept and wanted to be reminded of on a regular basis: nothing good happens fast.

In general (there are, thankfully, wonderful exceptions), I find this to be so, and as a practicing [...]

Back in the pre-Lie-Nielsen and Veritas era, this newbie wood worker read anything available about the magic properties of what a hand plane could do, in a desperate attempt to coax beautiful shavings from the one plane I owned, an off-the-Ace-Hardware-shelf Stanley. Of woodworking writers extolling the virtues of hand planes, Krenov was the obvious [...]

Vogt Toolworks. Does that sound familiar to you? Have you heard that name before? I hadn’t either until this afternoon. Talking to Don Schroder, the Artistic director at Popular Woodworking, about possibly signing up for the Woodworking in America event this fall to offer my fledgling shooting board and a few other items to the [...]

Precision Shooting

For the benefit of my curious niece, Gina, who has asked “what’s a shooting board?” here is a definition and some pictures. From Webster: “(Joinery), a fixture used in planing or shooting the edge of a board, by means of which the plane is guided and the board held true.”

So, why the word [...]

The "Super Chute" and accessories by Tico Vogt.

I just sent my third prototype of a ramped shooting board to Ron Brese (www.breseplane.com). He has been very encouraging in e-mail exchanges over the last month about this project of mine to develop a high quality ramped shooting board with attachments for sale on my website. [...]