Weekly Editorial
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Bon Voyage
It’s time for me to get ready for some serious road rash! This coming Saturday (September 16th), I — along with my trusty photographer, Donna Chiarelli — will board a plane headed for China. It will kick off two weeks of traveling from tool-making plant to tool-making plant to see how our favorite woodworking tools are made. The trip will be a challenge.
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(Extra, Extra! Read All About It!)
Sometimes it’s so fun being a woodworking editor that I don’t want my boss to know how much I like it (because he might stop paying me). Today, I am going to let you in on a couple of secrets that I have been sitting on for a while (as uncomfortable as that sounds). The first is a new web site, the eZine EXPO, that we will be putting up for the introduction of the fall woodworking season.
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It’s Woodworking! (Cabinetmaking That Is)
Thank you for all the comments and answers. I can always count on you to offer an answer to a difficult question. Last issue I asked if cabinetmaking was woodworking. (Specifically if you are using huge 1,000-lb sheets of melamine. I know that I said they were 90 lbs. in my last e-mail. After a couple of weekends of hefting and cutting them, I have to admit — I was just wrong.)
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Cabinetry: Is it Woodworking?
This weekend I was making sawdust … of a sort. Our laundry room will shortly be outfitted with melamine cabinetry, made by yours truly. I used a bunch of skills that are based on woodworking (measuring, sawing, gluing and clamping), but a question that I have is this: Should I call it woodworking?
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Hot Weather Woodworking
I don’t know where you live, but here in Minnesota recently it has been stinking hot. Now ordinarily, those of us, whom Garrison Keiller calls, “God’s frozen people,” don’t complain a lot about warm weather — we’re just happy not to have to shovel our precipitation at the end of a day. But the last hot spell has taxed even the fabled “Minnesota Nice.”
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You Asked…I Don’t Know Why
you may well imagine, I get a fair number of e-mails as a result of this eZine. I try to answer as many as I can, but often I am overwhelmed. (To answer 400 e-mails, if each one took, say, three to five minutes to read and answer, that would add up to … well — a lot of hours … maybe even days?
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Coming Soon: Tool Geek Nirvana!
Some exciting things are happening in the woodworking world, and I for one can’t wait to see the chips start flying. If you click over to our Tool Preview story, you’ll read about a brand new line of tools that will be launched this summer. (Made by some good old boys who know what they are doing.)
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Unlikely Heroes
Have you ever had a product (like a tool, for example) perform far beyond your expectations? I had a drill driver like that. Years ago (when I actually worked for a living — unlike now where I just get to do this instead), I was on my way to a job site when I hit a curve on the freeway a couple of miles an hour over the speed limit.
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It’s Time, Time, Time
Recently, I got my hands on some quartersawn, 300-year-old longleaf pine. (Find out why, how and where in the July/August issue of the Woodworker’s Journal print magazine.) So, after the wood had acclimatized to my shop, I glued up a blank and started turning a rather large cake display plate.
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Spring’s New Opportunities
Spring … which has just arrived here in Minnesota … is an exciting time of year. New growth and new opportunities abound. Key to the experience of spring are Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Each year they come along and allow us to celebrate our parental experience as a child, a parent or both.
