I’ve been thinking about nomenclature. I’ve been thinking about what I call the area where I do my woodworking thing (or at least where all of the tools and equipment live when I am busy surfing the internet or playing Wii Fit and complaining about having no time to do any woodworking.)

Some people call those tool filled places their “SHOP.” However, that seems a little too generic for me because I have more than one shop in my life. All of the car stuff happens in my garage, but it is more of a combination garage/bicycle shop. I’ve said before that somewhere in between my Park Double Arm repair stand and Park TS-3 Master Truing Stand are enough tools to make 90% of the bicycle shops in North America jealous. Do you need to re-tap a bottom bracket? All decent shops can do either English or Italian Threads. However, for some reason I also have a tap for French Threaded bottom brackets, even though I neither work on bikes professionally nor have any French Bicycles. (I never know why I buy every tool I see, whether I’ll ever need it or not).

The non-bicycle part of the garage is pretty well set up for anything I need to do with cars. In the last ten years I have done engine swaps, clutch replacements, Air Locker installations, countless tune-ups, 30 or so brake jobs, 100 oil changes, water pump and radiator replacements, Axle replacements, ring and pinion set-ups, and on and on and on.

Before my wife and I moved to this house, most of the automotive stuff was done at my father-in-law’s shop. Long before I met him he ran a 2000 sq ft body shop behind his house, but he retired and closed his body shop before I ever came on the scene. So in the early days of my marriage, I would commandeer his shop for various automotive projects.

So now to differentiate between his shop, my bike shop, my garage shop, and the area of my plantation where I do welding and metal work, I always refer to my basement area as my WOOD SHOP. I say to Gail, “I’ll be downstairs in the Wood Shop. If the lazy dog should wake up, feel free to convince him to come keep me company.”

I am very happy with the Wood Shop in my basement. However, I will inevitably have to rename that space. Eventually my work will be good enough for me to call my wood shop a “Studio.” It’s a subtle little thing, but it is the key to being a wood artist. Adirondack Chairs are made in Wood Shops by woodworkers. Commissioned furniture projects are done in studios by two types of guys. To the uninitiated, woodshops and studios look a heck of a lot alike. They have identical equipment and tools. The difference between woodshops and studios is the guy doing the work and the deposit slips for his bank account. Today I came up with the official list of criteria required for a woodshop to be called a studio, and here it is:

1) If the woodworker went to art school then it is acceptable to call it a studio. Art School guys are different. A couple of years ago I was a Mechanical Engineer who worked with a bunch of Industrial Designers designing Office Furniture. It was my job to make sure the roll-formed steel and the drawer slides could support the required loads. It was the responsibility of the Industrial Designers to make sure the theme of the company was represented with a passionate design that made one think, “If I have to spend 10 hours a day in a cubicle, this is the work space I want.” Those left handed, beret-wearing guys were studio types.

2) If you are a woodworker who has ever made $1000 profit on a piece then you can call your woodshop a studio. The keyword here is profit. It’s more than selling cherry cabinets for $2000 when you have more than half of that total tied up in materials, overhead, labor, and burden. Woodshops produce items that either generate no income or can sometimes sell for as much as one half of the price of the lumber they use. However, studios are the setting where profitable wooden art projects are created.

Someday my basement woodshop will become my Studio. I am not able to go to art school, so criterion 1 will not happen. However, I have a plan for creating a 4 digit profit on a piece of furniture or a similar woodworking project. I’ll share that plan with you now.

Someday I am going to resaw a walnut plank and find that the bookmatched inner faces form a distinctive picture of Jesus. Then, I will put the resawn slabs on eBay, and send out a press release. Within 24 hours of FoxNews and Headline News doing bits on Jesus in the Walnut, my auction will have bids over $5000. And when the auction ends and the buyer’s PayPal clears, my basement woodshop with the resawing 18” bandsaw will forever be referred to as “My Studio.”

And I’ll get to show pictures to people and say things like, “here is a picture of my Studio. The Unisaw is in the middle, and on the left is my hand crafted maple workbench. If you look closely in the corner you can see my bandsaw where I created my most famous pieces, Jesus in the Walnut, as I was resawing stock one day…”

In this episode of the Woodworkers Resource Video Podcast we're continuing the topic of building bookcases. This time we look at cutting and installing crown molding on our bookcase.

We will show you how to use simple off the shelf crown molding you can find at most "Big Box" hardware stores to really dress up your bookcase.

Ever had problems getting tight joints when install crown molding? I'll show you a simple way to get perfect looking miters every time!

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And as always, if you have any questions or comments, you can email us at:

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Thanks for Watching!

Matt Vanderlist has just posted a podcast of a conversation he and I had last week. I hesitate to call it an interview because it sounds a lot like us just goofing around and joking about woodworking.

So I guess, it actually just sounds a lot like a day at the office.

In any case, we discuss handsawing, premium tools and how we generate story ideas here at Woodworking Magazine and Popular Woodworking. Plus Matt and I brainstorm an idea for a shop garment that ensures you never have to take a break while woodworking – and it composts the yard. (If anyone has a good name for this product, post it here.)

It was a fun conversation and if you have some time at your desk and want to look like you're working… I highly recommend it.

— Christopher Schwarz

Let me take a moment to preach to the choir.

Some friends that my wife and I know through our local Cycling Club are expecting their first child in a month or so. Today I received an email from him asking if I had time to make them a toybox. Immediately I came up with a beautiful idea....

It requires a point of information, though. Here goes… Some time between when God chose rainbows as a symbol of the promise to never again flood the entire earth and the Homosexual community adopted the rainbow colors as their symbol, the international cycling community chose the rainbow jersey as the prize given to the World Champion. Whoever wins the World Championship gets the high and mighty honor of wearing the rainbow jersey during competition for the next year. Also, all former world champions get to sport the rainbow stripes as accents on their clothing and bikes for the rest of their lives. If you ever see a photo of a former World Champion (Mario Cipollini, Lance Armstrong, Paolo Bettini, etc) in their regular jersey, you may see the rainbow stripes as accents at the end of the sleeve. The blue, red, black, yellow, and green horizontal stripes on a pristine white jersey is cycling’s highest prize.

So, when asked about the opportunity to build a toybox for the first born child of a bike-loving friend, I provided the following response.

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Toybox….My first thought was a lovely white toybox with World Champion rainbow stripes going around it and a raised silhouette of a road bike….start planting the seed early.

However, I am really far behind in my projects.

I would love to do a project like this, but timing is a really bad thing with me. I worry that we would work out a design and deal, and I would deliver it just in time for your first child to take it off to college as a footlocker.

Also, the cold harsh reality is that one can get “furniture” from Asia cheaper than we can even buy the raw wood for. This is why I travelled to Viet Nam and China in 2005 when I was working with Company A (a Fortune 500 consumer products company) on the design of a wooden deck box. That was when I was still working with Eric (another cycling friend of ours) up at Company B (a design firm) in Grand Haven. Eric and the Industrial Designers that work for him came up with a beautiful design that combined aluminum and wood, then I went to Viet Nam and China to find a company that could make the whole thing for $99. It is truly insane how inexpensive the stuff coming in from overseas is. It is great for us as consumers, but it makes any type of custom, hand made furniture here in the States have to be marketed as “artwork” in order for the craftsman to make a profit.

I am thrilled that you would even approach me on this, though. However, when I did a quick search and found something on the internet: (Link to a toybox website)

I realized their finished prices are just about what I would pay for materials.

If you had any other thoughts or questions about design or construction, feel free to ask.

Jeff Skiver

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So, at the moment I am torn. I would love to make a custom toybox, but I don’t know how I can do it without charging hundreds of dollars. Given how slow and detailed I am, I don’t think I could produce it in less than 12 hours and I know the wood and hardware would cost from 100 to 150 bucks. If I had nothing else to do, I could come up with the 12 hours of time and do it for close to the cost of materials. However, I have a ton of things on my plate already. Also, that brings up the debate of whether or not it disturbs the Economics of the Free Market by offering a product that has an unrealistic labor figure attached. Ya know…how can a professional furniture maker ever compete with “Uncle Jeff” doing respectable furniture quality work at a labor rate of fifty cents an hour?

Yet, it means a lot to me that someone asked me to do this.

I suppose I need to focus on the fact that I am right now 6 months behind schedule on delivering two large picture frames for the nursery of a different cycling friend out in Durango, Colorado. Right now there is a little girl in Colorado who is supposed to have two beautiful Graham Watson posters above her crib housed in frames that are trimmed with wood that came from her great grandfather’s farm. Every time I walk into the shop I feel the dreaded self-hatred of knowing that I have to finish those frames and get them out to Colorado before they break down and decide to go with the Sponge Bob wall paper.

Kudus is a city in the Central Java, Indonesia, located among Jepara, Demak, Pati, and Purwodadi districts and in the route of Semarang the capital city of Central Java to Surabaya (please see location map). Based on story, Kudus name was from Al-Quds, which mean holy.

The history of Kudus cannot be separate from the name of Sunan Kudus as the founder and one of the Wali sanga (nine Wali) spreader of Islam in Java at that moment. As his inheritance, Kudus has a famous artefact called Menara of Kudus which form like a temple, placed in one complex with mosque of Menara Kudus that build by Sunan Kudus around 1685 M.

My story goes like this. I was edge jointing some boards for my workbench. (Yes, I am still working on it, no it is not finished yet.) Of course, I was trying maintain a very sharp edge on my plane blade since I was having trouble with my plane, and since the yellow pine I was using was a bit contrary.

I have a set of Norton water stones that I bought new a few months ago. As I was progressing from the rough stone down through the 1,000 grit and 4,000 grit and to the 8,000 grit, I noticed that it seemed like no matter what I did, the finer grits were not properly honing the blade across its entire width.

I didn't suspect at first that the stone might not be flat since I had been religiously flattening it. However, after a bit of inspection, I finally figured out that it seemed like my stones were striking the blade differently. Finally, I pulled out a straightedge and checked the stone.  read more »

A big thank you to Michael B. for alerting me to this. For those of you who don’t know, iTunes is a pretty important part of the podcasting community. In fact, about 63% of my subscribers use iTunes to watch the show. As a result, we frequently review iTunes stats and rankings and consider them a barometer for what’s happening in the bigger picture. And all too often, we are beaten out by knitting podcasts and podcasts provided by BBC and G4 TechTV. We usually hover around 3 or 4 in the Hobby Category Top 25. But as of today, we are back in the #1 position!! Woohoo! This may be short lived though, since I believe these rankings are based on the number of new subscribers as opposed to total subscribers. This way, new and notable podcasts can find themselves in the #1 position if they start to get popular.

This is all very cool, but what excites me even more is the number of my comrades that appear in the list as well. Congrats to Woodworking Online, Matt’s Basement Workshop, The Rough Cut Show, and Woodworkers Resource. And let’s not leave out the rest of the awesome woodworking videos and podcasts that just happen to not be on the list today. Woodworking is clearly, ALIVE AND WELL!

Here's another video from our trip to The Woodworking Show in Atlanta, GA. In this video we get a look at a very innovative tool to sharpen your your woodworking tools, the Jool Tool.

My good friend Rob interviews the CEO of Jool Tool, Anie Piliguian, about how this sharpening system works.

We were sure impressed with the speed and ease that the Jool Tool can put a razor sharp edge on cutting tools.

If you have any questions about the Jool Tool or anything related to woodworking, visit our site at:

www.WoodworkersResource.com

Craig Stevens