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While I was vacationing near my hometown in Ohio in August, I received a phone call from a long-time family friend, Dave Corwin, from Delaware, Ohio. He and my dad are friends with a history spanning several decades. When I married, our first home was across the street from Dave’s, so we became friends as well as neighbors. The best part was, he was a fellow woodworker. There were three of us woodworkers on the block, so we could often be found in each other’s shop on any given day sipping a cup of coffee and telling a story or two.

Dave called to tell me that he made a Shop-Built Mallet we featured in ShopNotes 95. He said he really enjoyed the article and was especially tickled and surprised when I told him I wrote it. He said he had a little trouble planing the resawn stock to thickness. Here’s what Dave said about the project:

“The mallet was fun to make and was a challenging project. One problem that I encountered was that the double faced tape did not work out very well because it continually got saw dust in it. So, what I did was put a ¾” board on the planer table and ran the thin pieces through on top of this board. That seemed to work out well.”

Dave also commented that he really thought the simple resaw pivot block for the band saw was a great idea. He built one and used it for this project.

Thanks for sharing, Dave.

I have a healthy respect for power tools. Well…maybe it borderlines on fear. I still get a little nervous when I flip on my table saw or router.  I can’t even explain why that is. I’ve never had a serious accident with power tools, so my respect/fear must be working.

I ran across this column by Burt Prelutsky on Townhall.com. In it, he gives a rather humorous account of his fear of changing tires, heights, and “tools with moving parts.” He recalls:

“In the seventh grade, I was required to take woodshop at John Burroughs Junior High. In order to make a bookend, it was necessary to employ a band saw. This, in case your life has been one long strawberry festival and you’ve been spared being introduced to this Satanic device, is an electric blade around which you manipulate the piece of wood you’re sawing. In case you still don’t get the picture, your hands are in extremely close proximity to this totally malevolent moving blade.

“If you’re still wondering why I have this terrible dread of electrical tools, it’s probably because I neglected to mention that our instructor, Mr. Bailey, was nicknamed ‘Fingers Bailey,’ and it wasn’t because he had more digits than your average Homo sapien, but because, all told, he only had four, maybe four-and-a-half of them left.”

He goes on to talk about how he has learned to avoid his fears and the fact that he hasn’t touched a band saw in fifty years. 

That’s too bad.  What contribution might such a creative talent made to the world of woodworking?  One can only imagine…

Try to forget the obviously exclusionary nature of their slogan and you soon realize that Steel City Tool Works is out to “steal” away a big piece of the market with their brand new, full line of woodworking machinery. From what I saw at IWF in Atlanta, the goal is to hit the ground running with the introduction of 35 new tools ranging from dust collection to bench grinders to table saws.

When I first saw the steel gray and black paint scheme I was reminded of another manufacturer of woodworking machinery. That may have been done on purpose, but I doubt it. They made no secret that quite a few of the people working for Steel City formerly worked for the competition, including Delta, Powermatic and Jet. But they’re not out to copy anyone. Their goal is to offer quality machinery without all the gimmicks.

When asked what it is that they hope will set them apart from the competition, the answer was — service. All of the tools are backed by a full, 5-year warranty and they promise to deliver the best customer and technical service and support possible.

From what I could see, they’ve made a good start. Look for more on Steel City Tool Works in future editions of Workbench magazine.

Doug has created a really enjoyable series of articles for building a project to fit a specific need. In this last installment, Doug completes the table top and attaches it to the base.

Read the rest of this article »

Recently, Doug Hicks decided to build a much-needed end table for a spot between two easy chairs in his home. After spending some time with his wife Cathy, designing the table and making a cardboard mock-up, Doug got to work by making the bending jig. The jig makes bending the thin laminated leg strips to shape easy.

MAKING THE BENDING JIG

In building the table, I figured I would start with the most difficult part – the legs. And since the legs were to be relatively thin (1”) I decided that the strongest way to make them would be using a bent lamination technique. This involves gluing together a number of very thin, flexible strips and placing them in a bending jig to dry.

So the first step was to build the jig. I found some old exterior 3/4″ plywood left in the attic by the previous homeowner and decided to use that. Something like MDF (medium-density fiberboard) probably would have been better, but hey, “ya use what ya got,” right? Anyway the plywood worked fine. Read the rest of this article »

Sometimes (all the time?) one click leads to another, and another.

Yesterday, while researching the “…Best Woodnet Forum” post I found a link to Steve Cooley’s blog. A quick scroll down to the categories section on the blog led me to his posts on Woodworking. It turns out he’s a big fan of ShopNotes and recently built the lathe from Issue No. 73.

But, because of my interest in green woodworking, I was really drawn to this link on Steve’s blog to Gary Katz Online. Gary’s web page had some great pictures he took at the Hull-Oakes Sawmill. Gary goes On the Road and finds great places for virtual visits, like the Lummis Home and others.

You won’t believe the size of the logs they can mill at Hull-Oakes. Here’s a look at the huge band saw blade used to rip the logs to size. And the crosscut blade used to cut them to length. Pretty amazing.

Doug Hicks, executive editor at August Home Publishing, was asked this question recently at one of our woodworking seminars at the Woodsmith Store: If you could have just one tool on a deserted island (assuming it had electricity!), what would it be?

Doug’s answer was a band saw and he gave his reasons why in a seminar later that spring. Here are his reasons: Read the rest of this article »