When I received the package containing the Back to Basics series, I had had a particularly rough day at work. I came home and found it on the kitchen table, and my wife giving me one of those “So, what did you buy for your shop now?” looks. I usually just have to say, these are books from Fox Chapel, and she understands. So that crisis was averted.

I was really excited, because I wasn’t expecting a new book, or books. I opened the package, pulled out the books and was overjoyed! Then a little bit of the mood of the day took over and I was saddened again. Just something about the cover art on the books made me think sarcastically ‘Boy, these are going to be joy to read. And I still have the Missing Shop Manual series to review.’

After looking over the covers of each book, I set them aside until late at night. After the kids were in bed I picked up Woodworker’s Guide to Wood and began leafing through it. Normally when I leaf through a book, I do just that. I look at the pictures, read a few captions, skip a few pages, jump to the index and see what I might have missed. Twenty minutes later, I found that I was reading more than leafing. I had read quite a bit of several pages and actually learned some things about wood that haven’t really been explained all that well in other texts and podcasts that I have learned from in the past.

I was surprised that this book had captured my attention so well. Pleasantly surprised. So much so that I decided to bring the Joinery book with me to work the next day. By lunchtime I had already experienced much the same delight with it.

As someone who really enjoys trying (and usually failing) to cut all kinds of joinery using hand tools and power tools, just for fun, I found this book to be a fresh look at joinery. While there are dovetails on the cover, the book doesn’t over emphasize the use, importance or play to the reputation that the various dovetail joints have garnered. What this book does do is fairly and accurately detail what joints are suitable for which applications, with which woods, and how to go about implementing them. Various tools are used for each joint, and the book doesn’t assume that you have every specialty tool possible for each joint. So, when necessary, jigs, and how to build and use them, are detailed also.

The next day I decided to continue this trend and bring the Setting Up Your Workshop book to work. I ended up getting so much out of it in so little time that I decided to rearrange my shop (1/2 of a 2-car garage) as it was depicted in the book.

I generally regard workbench and workshop books as pretty boring. I get enough advice about how to organize my shop from my wife and father-in-law. The last thing I voluntarily want to do is read about someone’s idea of how I should organize something that they have never seen. But, I was pleasantly surprised with this book, and plan on returning to it in the next couple of years as my shop evolves.

The Woodworking Machines book was next, and while I had already been through other books that gloss over the fine points of every machine you could possibly have in your shop, and probably act as a replacement for Ambien in the process… I was happy with the way this book shows how to setup each machine, describe the most common and best uses for each machine, how to tune and align them, and general maintenance. All-in-all, this one is staying in my shop so I don’t have to keep running inside and down to the basement where I keep my other woodworking books.

Other books in the Back to Basics series are Constructing Kitchen Cabinets, Fundamentals of Sharpening (available to Ship Dec 1st, 2010), Woodworker’s Guide to Carving (available to ship Sept 30th, 2010), and Woodworker’s Guide to Turning (available to ship January 1st, 2011).

It’s funny how these books struck such a chord with me. I was happy to actually read them instead of weeding information out of them. And you know what, that’s what it seems like I end up doing with most of my woodworking books these days. I feel like I need to set aside major chunks of time (because I’m a slow slow reader), just to get one little bit of information from them. With the Back to Basics series, everything you need to know is spelled out plain as day and ready for you in easy to read English.

Like I’ve tried to explain through 2 years of podcasting, I have learned, what I consider, to be a great deal about woodworking over the internet and by reading books. It’s great to see that these new books from Fox Chapel are not just regurgitating the same information that many podcasters, books and web sites continue to cover. These books are finding new ways to impart the same information, but supplement that with new ideas (at least to me), methods and non-mainstream information that may either be new to us all, or forgotten through the ages.

This sentiment doesn’t just end with the Back To Basics series. When I read the Joinery book this morning, I realized that this collection perfectly complements the Missing Shop Manual series, also published by Fox Chapel. The two collections even look similar. While the Missing Shop Manuals books are much smaller, they are all trade paperbacks with rounded outside corners and minimalist artwork on the cover. Both collections are full, and I mean full of charts, diagrams, drawings, and instructional illustrations.

And sturdy? Let me tell you about these… I usually ride around with a book or two in my laptop bag for about a week or two. By the time I take the books out, usually because I haven’t read them yet, they are mangled. I’ve done the same with the Missing Shop Manuals books, but they are still in great shape. The sturdy trade paperback covers have kept them mostly unmolested – except for a few dents on the covers from spiral notebooks.

Probably the most useful book of the Missing Shop Manuals series is an unassuming title Glue and Clamps. Seriously, this book is worth it’s weight… It solves the ever frustrating adage that you can never have enough clamps.

Well, it doesn’t solve it in that it supplies you with enchanted clamp racks that magically fill themselves, but it does show you how to improvise and build your own, new, clamps out of the clamps you already own. Specialty clamps, clamping jigs, frame clamps, carcass clamps, improvised vises, clamp extenders, you name it, it’s probably in there.

The Drill Press and Table Saw books are also extremely helpful, in that there are tons of simply made jigs documented that you could easily pay for down at the local (or not so local) woodworking store. They also go over the machines, and the different categories of each machine in pretty fine detail. Even that’s not too boring

The lathe is still a small mystery to me, so I can’t really comment on that book right now, but it available also. So, you can imagine, if I’m as happy as this with the other books, then if you are really into turning, you might do well to pick up the Missing Shop Manual on the Lathe.

The final book in the Missing Shop Manual Series that I have, but haven’t mentioned is Circular Saws and Jig Saws. I don’t really have a comment about this book. I looked it over a few months ago, and it didn’t leave a lasting impression. That’s not to say it was terrible, it’s just that I wasn’t jumping around saying ‘I’ve got to get into the shop right now!’ I’d bet that if you do a fair amount of circ and jig saw work, this book might do you some good too.

I think what I like most about these collections, and I think Fox Chapel has hit on a veritable gold mine here, is that I like my information in personable – meaning, in plain English – relatively small chunks with examples that I can see, and accurately explained. I’m a hard sell when it comes to books. At least informational books. And I have to admit that I probably would not have even picked these unassuming books off of the bookstore shelf to thumb through, but that would be my loss. These are exactly the types of books that I have needed since I took up woodworking.

Though the Missing Shop Manuals can, and should, find a place in every woodworker’s shop library (I’ll be building a special bookshelf for mine inside the shop), I can see the immense value of having the Back to Basics collection in every new and intermediate woodworker’s shop. Some of the information may be a review, but there are definitely caches of knowledge in the books that most people haven’t seen before.

Hey everyone! Here’s the trailer we’ve all been waiting for. Our great friend and supporter, Tommy MacDonald’s trailer for his new show with WGBH is here. This will be my first attempt at embedding a video from another source, so I’m not sure how well this will work, but please go here if it doesn’t.

Cheers!

The show didn’t really catch on too quickly, and I still don’t see the number of subscribers/downloads that The Sawdust Chronicles has… In the first few months I received a lot of mail that I regarded as ‘hate mail’. It was very critical – to this day I still believe the emails to have been pretty critical – but I believe that these critics had my best interests at heart. Through social networking online, I’ve actually ended up cultivated pretty nice relationships with some of these guys.

And that’s probably one of the most reinforced lessons that I’ve learned about the online woodworking community, and even some of those that are never, and probably will never be, online – it’s that they are generally just really nice people. Sure, there are bad eggs in every group of people you meet, but even in the woodworking arena, the bad eggs are still pretty good.

Now, I’ve been getting a few correspondences about Splintered Board succumbing to the phenomenon that is now known as ‘pod fade’ . Hopefully every time I released a new episode, after being silent for a while, squashed those rumors or concerns. It turns out that I’ve been unbearably busy. So busy, in fact, that I’ve been doing very little woodworking. And, a low turnout of woodworking means a low turnout of woodworking podcasts. Sorry about that, but that’s just what happens when life gets in the way.

Again, addressing pod fade. I mentioned, on Twitter I believe, a few months ago that I might turn Splintered Board into a blog, but continue doing The Sawdust Chronicles. Well, The Sawdust Chronicles is definitely not going anywhere – in fact there are some great new surprises coming soon. The blog thing is still up in the air, but I think, for the most part, the podcast – Splintered Board – will remain silent except for the necessary podcasts.

What does that mean??? Well, it means that I have handshake obligations with Fox Chapel Publishing to review books, Micro Jig and Total Saw Solutions to demonstrate and use their products, and of course I’ll be involved in Woodworkers Safety Week each May. Plus, I’ll be podcasting about each woodworking project I complete, as they are completed.

The vast majority of shows will be video episodes from now on. I hope that gets people excited, I know I love doing video shows… But that also means that the post production time is longer, the episodes are shorter, and the time between podcasts will remain extended (especially since my output has been very sporadic over the past 12 months).

Another change is that I’m not going to promise to do one project per season. I think that was ambitious of me, and doable too, but things just aren’t working out with that, so I’m just going to fall back on doing things as I’m able to get to them.

Projects I have in mind are going to include another iteration of the X-Leg table, a possible weekend commission project, a bent lamination coat hanger, and a stack lamination Pizza Pie table. So there will be plenty of material to podcast to you in the future.

What have I learned in two years of woodworking podcasting? It’s a pretty tall order to list everything that I’ve learned, but I’ll give you some topics in no specific order: Microphones, Audio/Video Editing, Lighting for Videos, Tool and Shop Safety, Sharpening, Hand Tool Use and Maintenance, Power Tool Use and Selection, Dust Collection, Shop Layout, Scavenging for Materials, Relational Dimensioning, a little about Finishing, Versatility of the Tools You Own, Bargain Tool Hunting, Furniture Design, Period Furniture History, Lathe Use, Scraper Importance, Inlaying, Wood Bending, Wood Grain, Wood Figure, and much, much more.

Guess what?! I just (and I mean less than 5 minutes ago) got off the phone with Tommy MacDonald. If you are reading this you should be ashamed if you don’t already know that Tommy is one of the first people to ever successfully turn a freely available podcast into a national television show.

Tommy was very excited to tell me that Woodcraft just signed on as the exclusive underwriter of Tommy’s new show, through WGBH, called ‘Rough Cut Woodworking with Tommy Mac.’ Where, up until now, there were still some loose ends to be tied up that may have hindered the show’s existence, Woodcraft’s signing on as the underwriter has solidified the deal.

I want to add something that perhaps many of you do not know. ‘Rough Cut Woodworking with Tommy Mac’ was signed to a 3 year contract. This just doesn’t happen with unproven shows on PBS. WGBH found something, something we are all familiar with, in Tommy that showed he was definitely the person to make this show work. And with a 3 year extension, I’m sure he’ll make it work for a long time to come.

Shows are expected to begin airing around October 3rd, 2010.

I can’t happier for Tommy, Eli, Al, Rachel, Neil Lamens, David Pruett, Scott Oja, the local 207, and everyone else that has supported Tommy’s efforts and made this a reality.

Good luck Tommy! And Congratulations!!!

Hey everybody it’s Rick Waters for the Splintered Board Podcast. This 3rd annual Wood Workers’ Safety Week was organized by the ubiquitous Marc ‘The Wood Whisperer’ Spagnuolo.

In this episode I want to demonstrate something that MicroJig sent me last Fall. It’s their safety tool called the GRR-Ripper. I think the GRR-Ripper is one of the most safety-centric tools on the market today. Now everybody has push sticks or push blocks, but the GRR-Ripper protects your hands and give you a place to guard your fingers just by holding something that grabs your stock and pushes it through your tablesaw, jointer or router table. So in this safety video I’m going to be demonstrating a little bit on the use of the GRR-Ripper, but also, I wanna do a little bit of Where’s Waldo. I want you to be able to identify all of the safety hazards that you see in the different clips of me cutting the stock for a project that I’ll be doing this summer.

So here I’m frozen on a picture of the face of the GRR-Ripper and I’m showing you that because I want you to be able to see that there are 2 channels and 3 legs. What you see is the leg on the left which will grab the stock and provide balance for the tool; a leg in the middle which will stabilize the GRR-Ripper, and also grab the stock; finall the leg on the right serves as a thin wall that is attached to a handheld outside fence that also provides stabilization because it rides on the top of the table saw bed.

So, the reason you have these channels is so that the table saw blade itself can pass between two of the legs. If that’s confusing, it gets easier to understand when you see it in action. So, let’s go ahead and take a look at how this works.

OK, so hopefully you can see from this little demonstration that from my actions, I’m acting like I kind of don’t really know what I’m about to do, but I really want to cut something. So I turn on the table saw, I get the wood in place, but I don’t know where to put my hands… So, indecision is what I’m trying to show is a very unsafe thing to have around spinning or rotating blades. If you don’t have a plan ahead of time on what you are going to do with a tool, Stop, Turn the tool off, Sit down and come up with a clear plan. Come back to the tool and Execute. Never turn on a tool without clearly knowing what you are going to do.

OK, here’s another. You can see that the stock is giving me some trouble moving across the bed of the table saw. There are 2 really good reasons for that: The wood is a little damp – it’s been sitting in the garage after a particularly humid few days; Also, the table saw bed is not lubricated well – it hasn’t been used in months and is dry as a bone with dirt and debris all over it. Clear off your tablesaw top and lubricate it, hopefully with wax. The next segment will show that the table saw top is waxed and the stock glides very well. I just want you to know that the GRR-Rippers have nothing to do with this inability to move the stock, they are definitely doing their jobs as best they can.

Hopefully you noticed that when I first put the stock on the table, that it wasn’t being supported behind me. You’ll see that again at the end of the clip because it won’t be supported on the outfeed side either. Both of these are safety problems for heavy boards (which these are).

OK, here you see me forcing the board, just pouncing on it to get it moving. This is NEVER a good thing, please don’t ever do this. Even if you do have GRR-Rippers, what if the board suddenly gave way and as you pounced on it it flew forward? If you didn’t have very sure fotting, your arm or even your chest could land on the spinning blade. Never pounce on a board to get it to move. If anything, turn the tablesaw off, take off the stock, and lubricate the bed of the saw.

At least with this clip and the entire video, I have a couple of good things going for me: I’m wearing hearing protection and the dust collector is going.

The last criticism I have for this clip is something very basic to the procedures of using a table saw, and that is to push your stock completely free of the blade before turning it off. This is a habit that I’m trying to break, but haven’t completely gotten rid of yet.

One of the great elements of the Micro Jig GRR-Ripper is that you can adjust the position of the handle. They did this (I assume) because your center of balance should mainly be centered over the table saw blade itself. This makes moving the stock much easier too – and here I demonstrate that. All it takes is a few seconds, a short twist of a philips head screw driver and the handle slides very easily. Another twist and the handle is locked down.

See how much of a difference a waxed table saw table can make?

Here I’m visually check to make sure that the table saw blade is going to pass through one of the channels of the GRR-Ripper. The table saw blade should not be digging into the GRR-Ripper. This isn’t a problem if it does – some people do it on purpose. The components of the GRR-Ripper are replaceable, so there’s no problem there, but for my intentions, there’s no reason to damage the tool.

Has anybody pointed out the fact that I’m not wearing safety glasses yet?

Now that was quick, did you miss it? I locked down the fence again just to make sure that it wouldn’t move while I was cutting and pushing against it with the stock. This is very important, I posted something on it last year that my fence’s locking mechanism is loose and will mess up my cuts if I don’t put a lot of weight on it when I lock it down. Those people who say you can’t make a curved cut on a table saw have never used a table saw with a loose fence.

Now, if you’re about to point out that I vary the speed at which I rip, there’s actually a good reason for that. I was trying to determine the best speed to feed Lyptus into the saw to avoid burning. It turns out you have to go pretty slow to burn Lyptus.

Right there, did you catch that? As I was putting down one of the off cuts, I got a couple of big splinters. One of the dangers of using a dull blade, which this is, is that the cuts aren’t the cleanest and you have to be careful with handling all of the stock.

Learning from my mistakes, I’m double checking to make sure that the board was seated fully up against the fence and that the GRR-Ripper’s channel will go fully over the blade.

It was pretty quick, but did you catch that? I pulled up my sleeves once again to make sure that they didn’t get caught in the blade. I just published a safety podcast on that, so if you haven’t seen the dangers of getting your sleeve caught in a table saw blade, check it out.

No what just happened there was that the wax on the table saw bed has worn away. What I acutally need to do is put down a nice spray lubricant for the table, but when I was shooting this I was counting on the wax holding out for the entire video. The jumping of the stock actually serves to proved the point that pouncing on a board to get it to go through the blade is a bad bad idea.

What am I doing here? I’m checking the GRR-Rippers to see if they actually did hit the table saw blade. It turns out that when I was removing one of the GRR-Rippers from a board at the end of a cut, I twisted the GRR-Ripper instead of lifting it off. That resulted in a minor cut taken out of the bottom of the green foam material that grabs the stock. So, remember that whether you use a push block or push stick, or even a GRR-Ripper – which I very highly suggest – keep it fully engaged with your stock and lift it straight off and back as opposed to twisting it.

Here I’m just showing off a little bit. I wanted to show everyone what figured Liptus looks like once it’s been planed, and before it has been card scraped. This stuff is extraordinary! I couldn’t believe the flame figure on these boards. I have 7 or 8 of them and only 2 didn’t have any figure at all. Stay tuned this summer so you can watch me turn these boards into another X-Leg Table.

So that’s it everybody! Please stay safe working wood this year, and I hope to be talking to you all again real soon!

What I want to actually show you all today are the dangers of wearing baggy or loose clothing while operating a table saw. I realized that this would be a great subject while filming the next video that will come out later this week.

So, here we have a dummy with a single arm that should be a good representation of a left arm too close to the saw blade while wearing a baggy long-sleeved shirt. Yes I understand that the dummy is mostly positioned in front of the blade, but this could also happen with a right arm too. Just watch…

I’m showing the ‘naked’ dummy so you know how solid the structure is. A human would be constantly moving, while this dummy is solidly constructed and won’t move unless about 100 pounds of force push or pull it.

You might be able to make out that the cuff of the sleeve is already caught in a tooth of the blade. This is for our safety. If I were to pull the sleeve into an already spinning blade, the results would be very unpredictable. Here, we’ll start the blade with the shirt already caught in it.

Make him a little more human with a hat … and a face… And, let’s go.

OK, let’s look at what happened. In two frames of this film, the blade tore the cuff of the sleeve down into the saw. A third frame, and enough of the shirt was grabbed to lift off the zero clearance insert and destroy it. 4 more frames and the saw blade is so caught up with the shirt that it won’t turn anymore. So, that equates to 7 1/100ths of a second to destroy a shirt, a zero clearance insert, and possibly your arm.

Regardless of my initial observations, my zero clearance insert was not the only thing damaged. While removing the shirt from the blade I noticed the shirt shoulder had been ripped by the wooden arm’s sharp rear corners. I’ll show this later.

Let’s do another run with no insert.

This time, with no insert, the shirt was pulled in even further and almost completely around the blade. Let’s look at the aftermath.

A length of shirt about equal to my entire forearm was pulled down to where the dummy’s ‘hand’ was. Meaning, an entire forearm could have been damaged in this kind of an accident. I totally do not advise sawing without a zero clearance insert if this is the case. And, I think I’m making my next one out of hardwood instead of hardboard…

Joey, as my kids named the dummy, doesn’t look too happy here, huh?

Here’s that shot of the shirt ripped off the shoulder. And this was a pretty tough shirt to begin with…

Let’s gear up for a final test.

This time I moved the arm closer to the blade and stapled the shirt to the arm. I originally intended for the wooden arm to fall into the blade for the extra gore factor, so here I’m trying my hardest to get this to happen.

OK, looks like Joey’s ready…

OK, so no wooden arm or hand splinters flying, but still a good example of how fast an accident can ruin your day.

This split in the wood is not from the blade hitting it. The arm was made up of 2 3/8” strips of lyptus screwed together.

Here you can see that my once nice-looking shop shirt is trashed. And so is Joey…

I want to thank my kids for help with this demo and to my baby for napping long enough for us to set up and shoot it.

Stay tuned for my second video later this week.

Tommy MacDonald just sent a few of us a link to a survey that WGBH just released for his new show. They are looking for a title and want your opinion. Some of the questions seem redundant to me, but you get to leave comments at the end. So, go ahead and jump right over to the survey and share your thoughts.

The survey is here: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22AJSFXA5MK

Last night I had the great pleasure of talking with Peter Cales of Measure Cut Cut Studio and Share-A-Chair. We recorded a The Sawdust Chronicles show (look for it next week), and in the span of just an hour I have come to respect Peter so much for what he has done, and how he approaches woodworking, that I consider him among one of my greatest inspirations within the woodworking community (among Neil Lamens, Tommy MacDonald, Adam King, Kari Hultman, and a few others).

While speaking with Peter last night, I called into question, again, my disdain for Arts & Crafts furniture. I didn’t bring it up during the discussion, but it was nagging at me in the background (much like my mother used to nag about ‘how could [I] live in such a messy bedroom’).

Peter’s designs are definitely Arts & Crafts influenced. Straight, parallel lines, some exposed joinery, and other subtle hints here and there point to this. But Peter’s personal flair opened me up to take another look at A&C again.

In fact, just now, I’m taking a look at the names above (Neil, Tommy, Adam, Kari, and of course Peter). I’m surprised that I never realized that these 5 individuals lean in almost entirely different design directions. And… I love their work, their passion, their motivators (actually I don’t know much about Kari’s motivators, but I still find her work amazing), and their openness about the craft.

Although I may never intentionally make an A&C style table (or chair as Peter would like to see me make), I plan on being less pessimistic and more open to the style of furniture that I’ve shunned in the past.

At first glance, I was taken aback to have seen a naked woman on the cover. It shocked me enough that I stopped, backed up and took another look at it. I could have sworn that I had just seen a partially naked woman on that paper. But it wasn’t – not by a long shot.

What I realized was that I was looking at the paper upside down. There was a large man on the cover with his sleeveless arms folded across his chest. Somehow the upside down, naked and muscular forearms, and bony elbows made me think of a nude woman.

Granted, I’m just as prone to thinking of nude women just as much as the next guy, but I don’t normally associate mustachioed, overweight, sunglasses and black t-shirt wearing thug-like bald men with beautiful naked women. In my book/brain, the two are as polar opposites as oil and water.

So my only recourse is to think that my spacial/dimensional perspective on the picture, with only a split second to observe it, was to blame for the misinterpretation of the image.

What does that say for how we approach our craft? About how we regard it? About how we view other woodworkers’ designs before they are built?

I have always had preconceptions about other people’s designs. Especially Arts & Crafts, Shaker-esque, and designs derived from Greene & Greene (as it seems G & G is becoming a very popular sub-culture in Arts & Crafts). These preconceptions haven’t been favorable.

While some of the designs may be appealing to my eye, they generally feel soulless to me. Soulless, because they’ve been over-done in my book. But that’s my perspective. I’ve been known to look at things from a very skewed point of view. Often! So please take my personal preconceptions as just that – my PERSONAL preconceptions.

So this revelation, if you can call it that, calls into question something that I’ve been focusing on lately. ‘What is good design?’ And ‘What does it mean to be a good furniture designer?’

I wonder if my questions are now going to be answered similarly to the well-known and dubious answer to ‘What is Art?’ – ‘Art is what I say it is.’ or ‘Art is what I point at and say This is Art.’

No, the changes I began to make last night were much more simple. For the last 5 months I’ve been growing my hair out for the cold weather. Last night, I had my wife shave it all off (again) for a couple of reasons – it’s getting warmer, and I’ll be biking to the train station for the Spring, Summer, and Fall, so I don’t want my hair to get messed up by a helmet.

I had just returned from the local sports-focused big box store with a shopping bag full of bicycle-related goodies. The change that I made this morning was actually getting on the bike and riding to the train station. I know some people might not see that as much of a difference from my first change (the haircut) but actually DOING instead of planning to do is a major feat.

What I’ve come to realize this morning is that our woodworking endeavors sometimes mirror the desirable and undesirable traits that we exhibit in our lives. Many of us plan to do great things in our shops. We talk to our friends and neighbors, our spouses and our contacts online about the next big project, or the new design we come up with – or even, that new jig that we are going to build that will solve all of our problems in the shop.

But, what are we really doing. Paying lip service to our passion. The jig never gets built. The new design remains either on paper or is fading from your memory. That big project becomes a small spice rack or new shelf for the coat closet.

In contrast look at what those energetic young people are doing outside right now. Go ahead, take a look. Well, I’m assuming that you’ll read this during daylight hours, while people are still up and about. Anyway, what I’m talking about is look at all of those people who enjoy jogging, walking, biking, swimming, orienteering, whatever… They are out there doing it every day. Actually doing it.

It’s Spring in the Northern Hemisphere right now. It won’t be for long. Soon it’ll be Summer. Then Leaves will start to fall and then it’ll be bone chillingly cold again. When it gets that cold, that’s it for me. I spend at least 3 months making excuses for why I’m not in the shop. But right now, I’m getting back in the saddle.

I spent an hour in the shop two nights ago just milling up the lumber for my next iteration of the X-Leg Table. This was supposed to be my Winter project, but it has become my Spring project instead. What got me out to the shop at 8pm on a Tuesday night? Me thinking ‘I can sit on my butt watching TV, or I can DO something. DOING is better than doing nothing.’ So I got out to the shop and jointed and planed 6 boards of Lyptus.

I’d love to show you this Lyptus now, because it is some amazing wood. But, that’ll have to wait for a podcast.