Category: For Beginners

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Rules

When I taught media and television production to seventh and eighth graders, I always insisted that being a bit juvenile was OK. Rather than being a curriculum and text-based course, I taught the subject as an enrichment. Every couple of weeks, there was a new project. Included was a scriptwriting workshop, storyboarding, planning the shots, and walk-throughs of the action. Along the way, technical aspects of editing or camera work got addressed. To make this work, because there was a lot of work involved, it also had to be play.

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Go to School

You can find out what grit of sandpaper you need to use on the internet. But learning what that thin whisker of a wire edge really feels like on a just sharpened gouge or chisel may be more challenging.

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Problems

Saturday I got to spend an entire day in my shop. The planets aligned, and only the fallen leaves in my backyard protested my ignoring them. Now, it may be strange that while my commute to the shop is less than a minute, I have to struggle to get to it. But, I still have a day job, family commitments, a blog, a garden to prepare for winter, and household duties.

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Methods of work: the nail board

Inelegant, unattractive, and probably never seen on a photoshoot for Fine Woodworking - it's a nail board.

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Manuals

I have some built-in learning disorders that make reading blocks of a small, close type challenging to read. In addition, the English used in the manuals is so poor that three pages in, you are skipping whole chapters looking for what you need.

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Bowls and Scrapers – Flashback Friday – August 13, 2019

Sooner or later, most woodworking sites and blogs have some sort of post on scrapers. Rather than duplicate what others have demonstrated in the care, feeding, use, and maintenance of scrapers. I'd like to point out that they produce much less dust than sanders - that's a hell of a significant point when you have a confined shop and allergies.

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Raffish

My shops tend to get set up wherever there is room; esthetics be damned.

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Utility

workers spend money on foolish things every year. Why? We see it on the web in a video or the catalog and realize that it is the solution to a problem we do not have. So out flashes the credit card, and next week we are looking for storage space for the new item.

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Flashback Friday – July 16 – Critical Tool?

Articles regularly appear in the woodworking periodicals about the essential power tool in your shop. The authors make convincing arguments for their choices, too. I prefer to think in terms of what suite of crucial tools makes your work possible? Your answer will vary with the materials you work with, how you change them, and the product you produce.