SawStop Saws with CEO Matt Howard

This is a fascinating chat with Matt Howard, CEO of Sawstop Saws. They have blade technology that shuts off a saw before it can cut through a finger. Crazy and interesting stuff.

The Mastery Program

At The Northwest Woodworking Studio, we offer a school of thought and practice in the skills of design and woodworking.

The Nature of Workmanship

The very act of building/ creating/ making furniture is an act filled with implications about you and your goals.

Models and Design

Front end load your design work and you will feel better at the back end when you finish a piece. Sketching, full scale modeling in cardboard, and quarter scale models are enormous aids in discovering what’s right and what’s wrong about your design ideas.

Pad Sanders I have known

I know plenty of pad sanders. But I’d trade them all away for a sharp hand plane. Hand planes can be time savers when it comes to smoothing surfaces. They also fight that perfectionism that pad sanders lead you to.

10 Things to Know about Wood

Wood doesn’t just sit there. It’s alive. It moves, it changes dimension, it colors over time. Learns some essential facts about wood so you can choose your wood for your next project with more information at hand.

Beginners Mind

Everyone starts at the beginning. Yet our expectations rarely match our skills then. The hardest thing is to be patient as we learn.

Brian Boggs, Master Craftsman

Brian Boggs is a chairmaker, artist, designer, and engineer extraordinaire. He is also quite a philosopher on the nature of work and workmanship, the value of excellent work, and how tooling affects design.

Discipline and Practice

Practice is what brings us first to competency and then to mastery. Listen to some stories of discipline that allowed practitioners to work through their own limitations. Quality doesn’t have a shortcut to it.