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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.

(Photo courtesy of DesMoinesArtsFestival.org)

The Des Moines Arts Festival, rated among the Top 5 in the U.S., celebrates it 10th year in 2007. Featured will be over 150 premier juried artists and 24 “emerging” artists from the state of Iowa. Artists will exhibit in 14 categories, including wood, metalworks, and sculpture.

I think this is the second year that the festival will be located in Des Moines’ new Gateway Park, just down the street from the August Home Publishing offices. I’m excited about attending this year and so I’ve spent a few hours looking through the galleries of all the artists that will attend. I always get a lot of inspiration for my woodworking hobby from shows like this, and I’ll even go through a phase occasionally where I’ll work only on boxes or chairs for a period of time after I see something I like at a show.

For the last several years the Des Moines Arts Festival has attracted over 200,000 people and it’s also become a great place for young artists, like Matthew Obbink (whose tables are featured in the photo at the top of the page), an Iowa State University student competing in the Emerging Iowa Artists Program category.

The Wharton Esherick Museum is located near Paoli, Pennsylvania which is just outside Philadelphia. It’s open for tours by appointment only. Esherick’s studio is located in the musuem which was also his home for 50 years before his death in 1970.

Esherick’s daughter Ruth Bascom, and her husband Bob currently own the museum and have been the caretakers of the estate for the last 35 years. The Bascoms want to retire and hand over the museum to the nonprofit organization that currently runs the museum.

Described during his life as the “Dean of American Craftsman,” Wharton Esherick’s imaginative, sculptural-style workpieces had a huge influence on American modern art and have been displayed at the Smithonian Institution. His spiral staircase (photo at left) is probably his most famous piece.

Photos by George Widman for GPTMC

I love old wood.  Not only the wood found in antique furniture, but I mean old wood found in old barns and houses.  There are companies that systematically tear down old barns piece by piece just to reclaim their wood.  I once saw some lumber cut from large chestnut beams from a barn.  It was estimated to be at least 100 years old.  It was some of the most beautiful wood I’ve seen.

For me, using reclaimed wood in my projects means I can give new life to old wood and hopefully it’ll be admired for years to come.  Here’s an article I ran across that talks about the demand for old wood:  Race for Rare, Old Wood

I recently received the following email notice from the Minnesota Woodworkers Guild. It illustrates the problems with buying online.

Wood SCAM

In the Nov/Dec Guild Newsletter there is an ad offering 400,000 bf of lumber. The advertisement leads with the line “Lake Elmo Lumber closes doors.” Sadly, it is true that Lake Elmo Hardwood Lumber has closed.

They have however informed us that they have nothing to do with this offer. Please don’t call them! It has also been brought to our attention that the offer maybe too good to be true. Be prudent, do not pay in advance. If advanced payment is required, arrange to use PayPal or some other 3rd party. Hopefully the offer is good.

Apparently, if you were interested in buying lumber from the person running this scam, the first requirement was that you pay money down before delivery. Predictably, the material is never delivered. I’m told several local businesses and some individuals did lose some money and the police are investigating the scam.

As the email notice states, if the offer sounds to good to be true, it probably is! Just be careful out there.

Olympus just announced a revolutionary technology that uses compressed wood in place of plastic for some of its products.  You can see their prototype camera in the left photo.  According to this news release from Olympus:

“The processed wooden material has the feel and grain pattern of natural wood, but is much harder than engineering plastics such as ABS and polycarbonate resins. Strong enough to be used to create the outer casings of electronic products, the material can enhance the aesthetic value and pleasure of ownership that those products provide.”

As a woodworker, I find this exciting.  Woodworkers have always been looking for ways to add the warmth of real wood to their computers, keyboards, etc.  There are photos all over the internet that show wooden keyboards, mice, and computer cases.  I’ve even seen where guys have built wood cases for their iPods. 

Hopefully, we’ll see more products with real wood cases as the technology becomes more widespread.

Our friends at The Woodworking Channel are running a poll on their website. It asks what woodworking magazine you read the most. The choices are listed as follows:

American Router
American Woodturner
American Woodworker
Fine Woodworking
Furniture & Cabinetmaking
Popular Woodworking
Wood Magazine
Woodcarving
Woodcraft Magazine
Woodturning
Woodwork
Woodworker’s Journal
and Other

Several of the ones that are listed are specialty magazines (American Router and American Woodturner), focusing on a single aspect of our hobby, such as turning or routing. Three of the magazines — Furniture and Cabinetmaking, Woodturning, and Woodcarving — are published in the UK and may be hard (or expensive) to get here in the US. I didn’t even know they existed until just recently. (And I’ve been subscribing to anywhere from 4 to 10 woodworking magazines since about 1995.)

Woodwork is good magazine that appeals to woodworkers who have an artistic bent, and Woodcraft Magazine, even though it’s only been around for a couple of years, is starting to gain some readers.

The rest of them (American Woodworker, Fine Woodworking, Popular Woodworking, Wood Magazine, and Woodworker’s Journal) are all fine magazines, and I subscribe to all except one.

A few magazines not on the list include Woodshop News, Woodworking and Popular Mechanics. Woodshop News, from Sounding Publications, is a great source of information for consumers, as well as the professional trade. I don’t subscribe, but I always look at it when I’m at the Woodsmith Store in Des Moines. Woodworking, a no-ads limited circulation publication from Popular Woodworking, has started to gain a real foothold with woodworkers interested in hand tools and learning about craftsmanship. Finally, Popular Mechanics has included at least one woodworking article in every issue for many, many years. And every November, they dedicate the entire issue to woodworking. Some of my favorite plans for Arts & Crafts furniture come from PM.

But most odd of all is the absence of any of the woodworking magazines from August Home Publishing. That’s because two of the top four woodworking magazines are Woodsmith and Workbench. According to the last published figures from ABC (Audit Bureau Circulation, 2006)* that I know of, Workbench is number two and Woodsmith is number four. Then there’s ShopNotes. Although its subscription base is smaller than its sister publications, ShopNotes is a one-of-a-kind magazine for woodworkers who are looking at solutions for building shop jigs and storage projects for the shop.

I don’t have the capability to do a poll here, but I’m interested in your comments or feelings. What is your favorite woodworking magazine?

(* According to ABC, Wood Magazine is first in paid subscribers and American Woodworker is #3.)

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 »

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.