I remember when I first started woodworking how ignorant I felt. There was so much to learn about tools and machinery and wood. I mean there was all that but then there was finishing to learn and also design, hardware and dovetails. Goodness. There was so much. It was just after college for me and my head was filled with poetry and debate and just a bit too much weed so my woodworking skills were not, shall we say, fully honed yet. As luck would have it though, after graduation I found work with a guy named Harvey Ronne. We poured sidewalks and driveways. Harvey thought of himself as a Renaissance man as any concrete worker might. The Romans had built their domed Pantheon with concrete after all. Harvey also made furniture for himself in his garage shop. The coffee table he showed me came from a design right out

I am going to confess something to you. This thought had never come to me until this dark January morning. I wondered what would have happened if I had just realized that the Studio was done? That when Covid hit us, and I shut the doors and started classes online, that these were last gasps. The world had changed. We were all just so close to things that we couldn’t see what had occurred. The world would never look like it once had so I should have embraced that change. Dark morning thoughts. Listen to Beethoven. His world changed when he went deaf. He was a composer! How do you do your life’s work when you can’t even hear it except in your head? He pressed forward. I’m sure he felt sorry for himself some days, raged against misfortune, cursed his luck. Then he pressed forward. This is what I

Greetings. It’s that time of year again when everyone says ‘It’s that time of year again when . . . ’ Well it is just that so hang onto this season and to 2025 as tightly as you can. Both will be gone in a few days. I just saw a nice quote by the poet Robert Bly: ‘Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, I want to tie the two arms together, And walk out of the bank carrying the time in bags.’ I myself have forgiven Time for tricking me over and again into believing that it is always the same, a slow steady metronome of tock and tick with no variation. In my school years, Time inched forward with a glacial pace at almost a dead snail speed. I know because I would check the clock every ten seconds to see if it had died.

Like many craftspeople, I made a fortune early on and didn’t know what to do with my time and all that money. Nah, I’m kidding. The economy makes puppets of us all. I had to work hard to stay solvent enough to lose only a little money each month. I sold cutting boards, plant stands, and hand mirrors at craft fairs making these quick little items that brought in a small bit of cash. After some years, I thought that teaching might help my income stream. The very first woodworking class I taught was held at the Multnomah Arts Center in SW Portland. Their woodshop and the dust-making sat down three flights of stairs in the basement of an old house on the main drag there. Smart folks at the MAC. Douglas Janacek was one of three students enrolled in that class. I don’t remember the other two. Why do I

Laminated Curved Tool Rack Project Setting Up Shop Series Try and build something simple in your shop. Build a birdhouse or a trivet and see how the work goes. Will it flow easily through to completion? Will it be a weekend project that actually takes a weekend? Or will you find, like I did for a time, that your new shop is not set up for working yet. Yours may actually be a storage facility, a retreat center, or a private bar, but it is most certainly not a working shop. A few years back I found that my new little shop was so cluttered I couldn’t find my tools or the clamps were under another pile of stuff or I had to move something off my bench to do the next simple job. The only sense of Flow I got was by opening my roll up door every few

Screws hold our stuff together. Nuts & Bolts & Screws I’ve been struggling with a couple of ideas to discuss with you and none of them has gained any traction. That says to me that they’re not ready yet for daylight. Therefore since this is a newsletter for woodworkers, let’s get down to some nuts and bolts, and screws. The first lecture I ever gave was in 6th grade shop class. Not because I was noted then as a great and riveting speaker. No. We all had to do a presentation in class on some subject be it woodworking, metals, or melting plastics into bowl shapes in the oven. My own talk was on the mighty wood screw. The screw as we all remember is one of the six classic Basic Machines. This list starts with the mighty wedge, which is a part of every tool in the shop except

Gary pondering the world and all its charms these days. I Get It I am in a curious spot these days. We all are. This time is, our times are, so uncharted. No one knows which way is up. Are we on the verge of a revolution or will we calm down as a people and start acting ‘normal’ again? And were we normal before Covid? The Covid effect makes us feel even more strange. Is the internet surge in all of our lives something we can recover from, manage, or do we just go numb under its constant effects? You know what I’m talking about: our phones, personal computers, digital toasters and ‘smart’ washing machines. What happened to technologies that we could put in neat little boxes? Here’s the phone technology and the computer technology and here’s the durable goods technology. Why ever should they all meet? Cui bono?

High Angle Block Plane   There’s a story about teaching told in Joe Posnanski’s great book called “The Baseball 100″. In it he tells the story of Honus Wagner who may have been the greatest shortstop ever. He was lightning fast leading the league in triples and stolen bases many times over. Wagner won eight batting titles. He was also baseball smart and generous to everyone around him. But some years after Honus had retired, in the 1930’s, he was asked to coach Arky Vaughn, the slugging but error prone Pirates’ shortstop. No one remembers the great Arky Vaughn.   Posnanski writes, “After a few days, someone asked Arky how it was going. ‘I’m not sure,’ Vaughn said. ‘When I asked Mr. Wagner what to do he said, ‘You just run in fast, grab the ball and throw it to first base ahead of the runner.’ But he didn’t tell

Apologies for my recent silence. Busy, you know, with things and then the ball gets rolling and when you finally look up it’s what? May? July?? And I missed those opportunities so I’m finally back with more musings. I’m building a new shop for myself now. Let me rephrase that. I’m paying folks to build me a new shop right now. They will make choices about lumber or nailing patterns or discarded chunks of good plywood that make me grit my teeth in dismay. And my response to them is always, “That is fantastic.” My motto for carpentry is ‘Get ‘er done’. I’ll worry about the fixes later. This new shop build got held up by Covid and lumber prices and then finding people to work at all. Having a roof and walls up right now is a huge accomplishment. The final design details I have yet to make. I