Today there is a vast amount of information that can be found online through woodworking communities, forums, blogs, and other social media such as Twitter and Google+.  Through these online connections, woodworkers learn from one another and build camaraderie with fellow woodworkers.  In a sense, we all belong to a woodworking club, the online woodworking club. The Modern Woodworkers Association is a place for the online woodworking community to reinforce our online connections and create personal ones in local gatherings in many regions across the country.

The MWA sprung out of what is now the Atlanta chapter. Since that time, chapters have formed on Long Island, Tampa Bay, Boston, and Seattle. Today I’m announcing the first meeting of the Mid-Atlantic chapter of the Modern Woodworkers’ Association.

There is a ton going on around DC and Baltimore the weekend of May 5th, so our first chapter meeting will be a scheduled double-header.

• Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event at Exotic Lumber in Gaithersburg, MD - Lie-Nielsen will let you get hands on with their tools Friday 10-6 and Saturday 10-5. Also demonstrating will be Chuck Bender of the Acanthus Workshop, attempting feats like cutting Bermuda dovetails in cardstock! Attendence is free.
• Fine Furnishings Shows at the Maryland State Fairgrounds north of Baltimore, MD – The Fine Furnishings Show is a great show where many local(ish) makers are displaying the great things they are crafting. It is a great place to get inspiration, see what’s “current” in furniture, and rub elbows with people who are living on our hobby. Tickets are $10 for a day or $15 for any two days. The show is Friday 4-8, Saturday 10-6, and Sunday 10-5.

The plan is to meet at Exotic Lumber at 10AM Saturday morning for the open of the LN event. Hang out, play with some great tools, sort through rooms full of lumber, and try to leave with money still in your pocket (efforts in futility). From there, those who are hitting both events will drive the ~45 minutes up to Timonium for the Fine Furnishings Show. The plan is to meet at the show at 2PM.

If you can make either event (or both) it would be great to connect offline! See you in Maryland.

I dog eared a bunch of pictures with notes about which details I wanted to include in this project. I ended up focusing in on the cover project from Woodworking Magazine #3 (Spring 2005) – Gustav Stickley’s #73 Magazine Stand.

I’ve decided to make a few adjustments and embelishments on Gustav’s design, mostly to fit our specific needs in the kitchen. I’ve adjusted the height and width, added drawers, and included some decorative mortises to the sides.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do for pulls on the drawers.

This weekend I finally got around to the initial milling of the cherry I bought for this project.

It felt really good to be in the garage doing some real woodworking.

If we jump in the WABAC machine and head to November 2010, you see a plan I laid out to get my shop into better order. That idea was quickly put into chaos three weeks later when I had my accident at the jointer. It was a sufficient mental trauma that it was quite a while before I did anything in the shop. One thing did happen though – I got the shop organized.

Back in late May, we moved to larger house which included a larger 2-car garage destined to be my shop. As seen in my last few blog posts, I put an insulated wood floor in the garage, along with a couple of electrical circuits below the floor. I have the big things in their final positions:

I finished moving the tools into position the Friday before Christmas, which brings us up to 2012.

For this year, I have three specific woodworking projects that I’d like to complete:

• Arts & Crafts Hanging Bookshelf: My wife asked for a new cabinet in our kitchen to hold her cookbooks. I volunteered to build it for her. It seems like a good project to both get used to my new work flow in the shop and to get back in the groove of building something, before I jump into…
• Roubo Bench: I have had the wood for some time now, so I’m going to jump in with everyone else at the Wood Whisperer Guild and finally build my bench.
• Entertainment Center: I’ve needed an entertainment center for my big screen plasma TV for some time now. I also have a receiver and some external speakers I want to hook up, but I need a place to put them. I have some initial sketches, but those are likely to change as that project approaches.

So that’s the plan. I hope you’ll stick around to see the projects come to fruition.

This past Saturday I visited my local Woodcraft to participate in “Turn for Troops” as part of Veterans’ Day Weekend. I’ve never jabbed a sharp rod into spinning wood turned before, but I had an inkling that I might enjoy it. This seemed like a great opportunity – a little instruction from some experienced turners and the resulting piece is off to a good cause.

Spent a bit of time working on getting the blanks round before attempting any shaping of the wood. I think things turned out well. I didn’t want to get too fancy on my first pen:

A few pointers on how to assemble a pen kit with the press and I had a finished product.

Hopefully this will make some soldier, sailor, airman, or marine’s day.

When first reading the series of posts, I thought that this was an interesting project for refining a woodworker’s skills. I consider myself a hybrid woodworker, but right now I definitely lean to the power tool side of center. I’m also a bit of a smartass, so I thought to myself “Why not try to make one of these with just power tools?” Here is the result:

I was true to the “power tool only” constraints I placed on myself for this exercise. Here’s how I cut each part:

• Front Edge & Bottom Face – Jointer
• Top Face/Thickness – Planer
• Back Edge, Rabbet - Table Saw
• Mortise, Dados, Gain – Hollow Chisel Mortiser
• Concave Curve – Forstner Bit
• Convex Curve – Spindle Sander
• Miter – Miter Saw

I have to thank Matt Gradwohl of UpperCut Woodworks. I don’t own a hollow chisel mortiser and he was kind enough to let me use his when I was visiting Seattle back in late July. We also  jointed and planed the board in his shop.

I have a couple of thoughts on my choices of tools. I cut the rabbet with my normal blade on the table saw, a la Norm Abram, chipping away at the wood. If my shop wasn’t in complete disarray (and I wasn’t butted up against my self imposed deadline of finishing this before Woodworking In America) I would have used my stacked dado set to cut the rabbet.  That would have likely left a smoother cut. The convex curve would have been cut on the bandsaw if it were larger, but the amount of wood that needed to be removed was so small that the sander was enough for the whole cut, not just the finishing.

The one place that I wasn’t able to get great results with just power tools was the inside corners of the gain:

The way I approached this cut was to plunge with the mortiser down into the face of the board at the inner most shoulder of the gain. Then I flipped the board on edge and plunged down the “length” of the gain. This gave me crisp lines on the face of the board, but the inner corners are a mess. I tried to clean some of it up with the smallest router bit I had, but that didn’t go very well. Perhaps if I had the world’s smallest router bit with a bearing, it could have worked. As it is, this is easily the most sloppy part of the block.

I’ll be bringing this with me to Woodworking in America this weekend – hoping to get Bob to sign it for me!  If you want to check it out, find me milling about during the conference and come say hi!

There have been two things I didn’t fully anticipate: 1) How much I would be on my knees, and 2) How much the Tapcon drilling & driving would suck the juice out my hammer drill batteries. The first was remedied by my wife running to the local hardware store to buy some construction kneepads. The second is currently be rememdied by my battery charger, which is why I’m sitting here writing instead of drilling & driving

The progress has been slow, but I feel like I have a good path forward. Hopefully I’ll get to more tomorrow.

The basic idea is to create a frame of pressure treated 2x4s that is surrounding rigid foam insulation of the same thickness. On top of that, tongue and groove plywood that is screwed into the 2x4s.  I plan on using 3/4″ OSB instead of plywood, simply because it costs half as much per sheet. This is my initial swag at the layout of my frame:

The 2x4s are set 24 inches on center (right to left) and 32 inches on center (top to bottom). I have the shorts alternating every two rows, so each 4′x8′ sheet is supported all along its edges. By alternating each pair of cross braces, I keep the seams of the sheet goods from running continuously across the width of the garage.

Here are the steps I’m planning to take:

• Seal the concrete with epoxy
• Glue the 2x4s to the floor with construction adhesive
• Attach the 2x4s to one another with either nails or pocket screws
• Progress from the back right corner, one width of rigid foam at a time to the front of the garage
• After each pair of rows, set and screw the OSB to the 2x4s
• Wash, rinse, repeat

With a couple of small deviations around the one corner, that should do it. I do have a couple of questions I hoping the more experienced among you might be able to answer:

1. Given that I’m sealing the concrete with an epoxy, do I need sheet plastic anywhere as an additional moisture barrier?
2. Do I need to do any taping and/or spraying to seal the pressure treated 2x4s to the rigid foam?
3. In the FWW article, the author nailed the 2x4s to the concrete with a powder-actuated nailer. Is this really necessary?
4. I plan on running some branch circuits to the center of the room. I was thinking of just routing a channel through the 2x4s and rigid foam to run the wires. Is that a good approach or is there something else I should do?
5. Having the OSB sheets line up in the center of the 2x4s means I’ll have 1 3/4″ between the end of the first sheet of OSB and right wall. What should I do here? Should cut this first 2×4 in half so the OSB is against the wall? Maybe add a 2×4 “baseboard” on end and shift everything over 1/4″ to the right?
6. This garage, like most, slopes down towards the front. Should I shim the front of the subfloor so the final floor is level? I’m leaning towards yes, but am open to contrary opinions.

If you have any comments or answers, please leave them below. And thanks in advance.

The anniversary comes up at an interesting time, as the Taylor Garage has recently become much larger! We recently moved (within the local area) to get another bedroom, a lot more land, and some more shop space for yours truly. I have an amazingly supportive wife, who has given me the entirety of our two-car garage to work with as a shop space – provided I leave an open path from the interior door out to the driveway. This reboot has given me a great opportunity setup shop with some forethought and do things right. This is my initial envisioning for the shop layout:

I’ll get into the details of the layout, flooring, wiring, insulation, etc. over the coming weeks. I did reach one milestone yesterday – the county inspector signed off on the additional 200 amp panel that was installed in the garage!

This is the first step in many to getting the “New & Improved” Taylor Garage up and running. I hope you’ll stick around through this build and the ones that follow. Thanks again!

I’m sure some people have noticed that I haven’t blogged much since last Thanksgiving, and that is directly correlated to a reduced amount of time in the shop. What many of you might not know is that the reduced amount of time in the shop is the result of a serious accident I had the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I’m hoping that this post will be a catharsis for me and give you both a warning and possibly a new way to look at things.

First, the Story:
That Sunday I was working on a Christmas gift. I had some long grain miters that I had cut (a long time ago) on the table saw that just weren’t coming together tight enough for my liking. I decided I would kick the fence of my jointer out to 45 degrees and make a light pass to clean up (and hopefully fix) the joint. As I was pushing one piece through the cut, I felt a tug on my left hand and that arm was thrown back across my body. Before sensing anything else, I had enough time to think to myself “Wow, I just had the closest call ever.” Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, as I came to realize upon looking at my left hand and seeing blood oozing out of what used to be the tip of my pinky finger. The details of the next couple of hours aren’t important except to say that the jointer had taken the fingernail and distal phalanx of my left pinky finger. Thankfully (as odd as it may seem to say that at this point) the pad of my finger survived mostly intact, so the hand surgeon was able to fold that up to close the wound, saving some of the finger’s length. Don’t worry – I don’t have any gory pictures to show you; I didn’t even look at it until the stitches had been in for over a week. After a bunch of healing and physical therapy, I’m left with this:

Things really aren’t that bad. In the grand scheme of things, if you were forced to lose part of one of your hands – you would choose to lose the tip of your pinky finger on your off hand. My biggest issues came not from having a shorter pinky, but rather from unlearning the work-arounds I had adapted while I was bandaged up.

Now, the Moral:
It would be easy to simply state “Use push sticks or pads at the jointer.” While this is true, it something we’ve all heard a million times and consciously ignore from time to time. Instead I want to bring your attention to the mindset that put me in this situation. When working with the jointer, I’ve always used push pads when jointing the faces of a board. While some have suggested that might not be necessary, I’ve yet to see anyone suggest it isn’t safe.  When jointing the edges of boards, I tend to use just my hands to hold & guide the piece over the tool, which I think is also common practice.

This is where the world got a little gray (before it got really red): If you are working on a 45 degree bevel, are you working on the face or the edge? In my mind, I was working on the edge of a board, which lead to my relaxed workholding, which lead to my accident. I really think that is the lesson to be learned from my ordeal – when you are working out of square, whether it be on curves or non-orthogonal angles, take a moment to think about how that change in orientation could affect the safety of your task.

For someone whose first major woodworking tool was a Craftsman table saw,

the decision to become a galoot is not made lightly. I haven’t come to this place in my woodworking because of some zen connection with a plane or dovetail saw, nor am I doing so to pimp Shannon‘s Hand Tool School. Actually, I’ve come to this decision simply because I’m moving. I’m not just moving across town for more shop space, but my real job has me hopping the pond over to Germany for the next couple of years. As much as I love my table saw, bandsaw, 8″ jointer, and 15″ planer, I just don’t think I’m going to have the floor space (or the shipping weight allowance) to bring those toys tools back and forth across the Atlantic.

If there is one place where hand tools completely dominate their powered bretheren, it is in size. In a box that would hold my bandsaw, I could fit every plane, saw, chisel, etc that I own a few times over – so this first decision is pretty much a no brainer. (Sidebar: It would seem perfect timing to take Chris Schwarz’s tool chest class in Germany in June, except I would still have to get my hand tools over there first!) I plan on bringing most of my hand tools with me, but that leads me to one big question:

What should I do with my large power tools? I see 3 possible options:

1. Sell all of them and buy new ones when I get back to the states
2. Store them for the ~3 years I’ll be overseas
3. Some combination of 1 & 2

Right now I’m leaning heavily towards #1, with a speck of #3 sneaking in every couple of times I debate this with myself. What are your thoughts? If you had to “let go” of your power tools for a few years, would you sell them or store them? Let me know in the comments!