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There are guys that “trick out” their cars…or motorcycles…with fancy paint jobs and chrome. Why not do the same with the tools in your shop? Wood Werks Supply in Columbus, Ohio is giving you the opportunity to order a customized Powermatic table saw.

To quote Wood Werks Supply:

“This won’t be just any saw. We start with the award winning Powermatic PM2000 10″ table Saw. We’ll Blanchard Grind the top, add the reliablility of an American Made Baldor® motor, then install your favorite accessories. You’ll decide exactly what color it will be, and we’ll finish it off by prominently displaying your name on the front of your perfect saw.”

Create and order your customized Powermatic PM2000 here. I created the one you see in the photo here with just a few clicks. It’s got a 3hp, single-phase motor; paint colors to honor the OSU Buckeyes; and a cast iron extension wing with cast iron legs.

If you’d like to find out more and join in on the long-running discussion over on WoodNet, click here.

I like to attend woodworking schools. From my very first hands-on classes at the Woodcraft store in Bloomington, Mn., I’ve been hooked on learning from the “masters.”

Paul Sellers is one of those masters. You might remember, he taught a hand tools foundational course that I took a few years ago. And so I was excited to hear that he has founded a new woodworking school in his native England. The New Legacy School of Woodworking is much like the school I attended near Waco, TX at the Homestead Heritage Craft Village. But with a twist. It’s housed in a castle — Penrhyn Castle in North Wales. Penrhyn is one of the many castles being preserved and maintained by the National Trust, with whom Paul has been working for the last year or so.

Paul says that the availability of some really good furniture from Asia has continued to make it difficult to earn a living as a woodworker. But he hopes that schools like his will fill the void left by the decline of apprenticeship programs like the one that helped start his career over 40 years ago in his native England. During his apprenticeship, Paul learned about the proper use of hand tools, still an important part of the trade in England even in the ’60s. That’s the focus of New Legacy and I wish him well.

If you own a DeWalt cordless drill/driver, you may want to check the table below. These models are being recalled because of a potential fire hazard. DeWalt wants you to stop using the drill immediately if it’s included in the list below:

You can find out all about the recall here on the CPSC web site. You can take your drill to your nearest service center for a free inspection and free repair, if needed. Click here for instructions on DeWalt’s web site.

Phil Huber proves you don’t need a drawer full of router bits to make a huge variety of moldings. In fact, during this week’s seminar he talks about how he used just three bits, 1/4″ and 1/2″ round-over bits and a 1/4″ core box bit, to make 17 different moldings.To make some of the profiles shown above, he used different parts of the bit or changed the depth or height of the cut. Of course, to make the more complex profiles, he used more than one bit.

With only a limited amount of time to rout the profiles, Phil wasn’t able to demonstrate all of the molding cuts, but the guide details how to rout all seventeen. You can find the guide, plus the bits he used during the seminar, for sale at the Woodsmith Podcast Store.

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A few weeks ago I stopped by The Hardwood Connection in Sycamore, Illinois. It’s a combined retail hardwood lumber dealer/woodworking store/cabinet shop/gallery. And it’s one of the best run shops I know about. Okay, I’m a little biased since I worked there for a short time in the early 1980’s when I was teaching high school woodworking in a neighboring town, but it is a cool place.

It’s always fun to stop by and see what owners Ken and Barb Burtch and their employee, Dave Smith, a former student of mine, are up to. This time Ken brought out a piece of wood and asked me to identify it. It had the coloring of walnut, but not the grain pattern or open grain. (In the photo at left, the “natural” wood is on the left and I sprayed some clear lacquer on the right side. That’s a little strip of end grain I cut off laying on top.) It looked a bit like well-aged cherry but had the grain pattern of curly maple. And it wasn’t stained or dyed as I could see the color went all the way through it. It had a slight bit of a “burnt” wood smell to it.

I was stumped and figured it must be some foreign wood I had never heard of. Then he told me that it was “Roasted Hardwood.” It’s being distributed by a Canadian Company called Goodfellow.

Roasted hardwood starts out as very dry soft maple, yellow birch, or poplar and is then heated (roasted or “carmelized”) at extremely high temperatures (440 degrees Fahrenheit) in a vacuum. It’s then rehumidified so that it’s once again dimensionally stable — and it helps create a uniform color. It was originally designed as a wood for outdoor projects since it’s very resistant to insects and rot, but it seems to me you could use it on indoor projects as well.

Apparently Australian aborigines started heat treating wood 10,000 years ago. As the story goes(?), in the 1990’s a kiln owner left some wood in the kiln and it was accidentally overheated. They were going to throw it out but someone decided to experiment with it and found it had some interesting characteristics. A French company got a patent to the process and started licensing it to North American companies in the late 1990’s. For more about the process go here.

Though roasted hardwood has the color of walnut, it’s much more consistent and predictable in color. Without any sapwood it makes grain matching easier when building up panels. And the cost is considerably less per board foot than walnut.

I got my hands on a piece of roasted soft maple (see photo) and first cut a small piece off the end to make sure the color went all the way through (it does). I’d heard that the wood is “brittle” but I didn’t notice any problems. I tried jointing and planing the piece and discovered it works just about like I would expect from soft maple. It sanded okay, but the dust was very fine and I would strongly suggest wearing some kind of dust mask or respirator. I also quickly sprayed a coat of lacquer on part of my sample board and it brought out the color, again like walnut, but perhaps a little darker. (For a larger view, double click on the photo at left.) It will be interesting to see if it will lighten over time (like walnut) or darken (like cherry). My guess is it will stay the same.

I hope to make a complete project out of roasted hardwood some day.

Ken told me that he now is selling roasted hardwood and if you would like more information and pricing, e-mail him at KBHardwood@aol.com or call him at 815-895-8733.

I had recently acquired a barely used planer from Sears. It was one of those deals where the price was right and I couldn’t pass it up.

When I first brought it home, I fired it up and ran a few boards through it. It seemed to work great, but I didn’t need it right away, so I stored it under the bench. Let me say right here that when Sears calls this a “benchtop” planer, that’s an outright lie. This monster is heavy. I’ve got to build a stand for it one of these days. But I’m getting sidetracked.

While I was in the process of building the project mentioned in this previous post (where I injured my thumb on the table saw), I needed to plane some 3/4″ curly maple boards down to 1/2″ thickness. (Yes, it broke my heart to see 1/4″ of those boards go to waste as chips.) As I was planing, I noticed that there was a wide, shallow groove along one edge of the boards along the entire length. Since the two boards I was planing were cut from longer stock, I thought that the boards were rough-planed that way and that’s how I brought them home. A couple of shallow passes later it dawned on me that the groove wasn’t going away. “Great,” I thought. I was going to have to tear down this planer to see what was going on.

Fortunately, this planer is designed to make it fairly easy to get to the cutterhead. A few screws remove the dust shroud to gain access to the knives. As I rotated the cutterhead around, I couldn’t believe what I saw. The gib holding the knife in place was bent outwards and the remaining cavity between it and the knife was crammed full of chips. You can see what I mean in the drawing at right. (I tried to hightlight the area in red.) The item labeled ‘65′ is the gib. Item ‘64′ is the knife. (Item ‘60′ is the cutterhead.) Now, what to do?

Figuring that the worst-case scenario was ordering a new gib, I attempted to straighten it. I clamped the bent area in heavy-duty vise and torqued it as far as I could go. That took care of the majority of the bend. Then some carefully placed taps on the leading edge of the gib with a wood block and hammer took care of the rest. Some minor filing was all it took to get a smooth, straight edge. I re-installed the blade and gib and ran a few boards through it. No sign of a “groove.” I was relieved and glad that I was able to repair it.

But the question remains…what caused the gib to bend in the first place? It’s possible that it was like that when I first bought it. But the mystery remains. When I talk to the other guys in our shop, no one can come up with a plausible explanation. Very strange. If you’ve got any thoughts, leave a comment here.

It’s been a rough week. Sunday night, I was in my shop working on a small project. It was nearing dinner time and my wife stepped into the shop to inquire about my plans for dinner. I was in the middle of resawing a small workpiece. I knew she was standing there, so it didn’t startle me. But something happened to the workpiece and in a split second it kicked back with a loud bang. I instinctively shut the saw off and reached for the workpiece.

Then I saw it. The workpiece was not the only thing I was cutting. The end of my right thumb had somehow come down directly on the spinning blade. I hadn’t even felt it.  Yet. My wife saw the whole thing happen.

The end result after some microsurgery is a shorter thumb without a thumbnail. I’ll spare you all the gory details. The prognosis for a full recovery is good after some physical therapy.

But what I have left to deal with now are all the questions. And anger and blaming myself for letting it happen. I haven’t been back to the “scene of the crime” since it happened. I suppose I’ll have to face up to it here in the next day or so.

I lay awake at night second-guessing myself. Not believing that I’ve been woodworking for over 30 years without serious injury.  The full range of emotions and “what-if” scenarios.

I’ve already wrestled with the 100 different ways I could have accomplished my goal that night. And what I should have done differently. The constant blame game you play in your mind.

But that’s behind me and life must go on. My point of telling my story is that you should always listen to that voice in your head that says, “Perhaps I should do this another way.” For that’s exactly what I was thinking precisely one-half second before I permanently injured my thumb.

Jig plans for cutting circles, adjustable dadoes, and a flush trim jig are included in this week’s Woodsmith Woodworking Seminar Podcast. Bryan Nelson will also give the low down on how to build a hinge mortising jig and a unique router table sled that holds narrow workpieces firmly while routing across end grain.

Check out the Woodsmith Podcast Store for more deals on router bits and the seminar guide.

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