I had an interesting day last week visiting on-site during construction and filming of the ABC-TV show Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. This is the first home they have built in Iowa, so my wife, Cathy, and I decided to drive the hour and a half north of Des Moines on a sunny, autumn day and check out the action.
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.
At this point, Doug Hicks has glued up the laminated legs for the side table and cleaned up all of the excess glue on the legs by running them through his thickness planer. Then, before cutting the legs to length, he made one pass on all four edges of each leg with an 1/8″ roundover bit mounted in the router table. Let’s pick things up from there. Read the rest of this article »
Once Doug had the bending jig completed, he was ready to get started building the legs for the side table.
RIPPING THE LEG STRIPS
With the bending jig all done, I actually started making the legs. The first step was to rip a number of thin strips from 6/4 (1-5/16” thick) cherry. After some experimenting, I discovered that I could bend an 1/8”-thick strip around the arc of the jig. Any thicker than that and it wouldn’t bend around the jig without breaking. Since the finished legs were to be 1” thick, that meant I needed 8 strips per leg, or 32 strips for all four legs. Read the rest of this article »
I probably would have started woodworking a lot earlier in life if my experience in 9th-grade shop class hadn’t been so abysmal. I don’t remember what I tried to build during the class, I just remember that I didn’t finish it.
That’s not to say that the class was a total waste. I did learn a few things. My shop teacher was a stickler for safety, so I’ve always paid close attention to that. But, the one thing we didn’t have available back then was good dust collection or air clearners. Consequently, I breathed a lot of sawdust into my lungs before I began to see the benefits to wearing a dust mask.
I suspect there are a lot of things we all wish our shop teacher’s had taught us during those woodworking shop classes. Doug Hicks has come up with a few of his own and in November, he’ll be teaching a seminar at the Woodsmith Store in Des Moines on this very topic.
Doug is more than qualified to teach the seminar. Early in his career, he was a shop teacher in Illinois and New Hampshire. Here are a few examples of things he wished he’d learned while in high school (and tried to teach in all his classes):
So that begs the question — Do you have any high school stories about things you wish you’d learned in woodworking shop class? If you do, send them to me using the comment section below. Or email them directly to Doug Hicks. Then later on, I’ll have a follow up after his class on all the tips we’ve come up with.
Note: The Fall Seminars at the Woodsmith Store begin this September 28th with “How to Get Started in Woodworking,” and run through December 14th with “Cabinetmaking 101: The Basics of Designing and Building Cabinets.” They’re every Thursday at 6:30pm (except on Thanksgiving). A full schedule of the classes will be posted in the calendar soon at WoodworkingSeminars.com.