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Router Bit of the Month - April 2008 - Whiteside's Cove & Bead Bit
04/04/2008, 01:28 | Matt's Basement Workshop PodcastIt's the beginning of a new month and that means it's time for Router Bit of the Month!! For the entire month of April, 2008 Woodcraft is featuring Whiteside's 1/4" radius Cove and Bead Edge Profiling bit.
This little decorative edge profiling bit is like getting two bits in one. The combination of a 1/4" radius cove profile and a 1/4" radius bead give plain old square and chunky edges a beautiful decorative look that's very pleasing to the eye.
The great thing about Whiteside's cove and bead bit is that when you use it in your router table it's like getting four profiles for the price of one. By running your stock flat against the router table you get an edge with the bead leading the profile, but by standing the stock on edge and running it up against the router table fence you get an decorative edge with the cove leading the profile.
Or, if you're just looking to use the cove or the bead profiles by themselves it's once again a matter of adjusting the height of the bit and moving the fence back and forth. In a matter of minutes you're making separate profiles from this one combo bit.
If you're interested in ordering this month's Router Bit of the Month from Woodcraft.com just click on the picture:
Congrats to Frank Bylo, this month's winner of a Whiteside router bit!! If you haven't entered your name for free schwag or just have a comment, question or feedback, drop me a line at mattsbasementworkshop@gmail.com.
If you're in the upstate New York area this weekend April 5 & 6 checkout the Northeastern Woodworker's Association's Showcase. Filled with great seminars and demonstrations, check it out at www.nwawoodworkingshow.org.
For anyone interested, coming up on April 11 & 12, 2008 there's a great little tool demo and woodworking school openhouse going on at J. Miller Handcrafted Furniture in Chicago. The details can be found at Lie-Nielsen. There will be some great demos by a number of well known woodworkers and I'm planning on checking it out myself.
Don't forget to get your questions in for Hendrik's next visit in April, we're talking lumber defects and how to work around them.
Listen to today's show by clicking on the player below
Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
03/31/2008, 18:47 | Popular Woodworking The restored Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, has been on my list of places to visit for a long time. It is only a two-hour drive south of Cincinnati, and I can't count the number of times I've driven through the area and thought: "next time, we'll stop." This past weekend we made a special trip, and stayed overnight.
Pleasant Hill was one of the largest of the western Shaker communities, and the only one remaining that is open to the public in this part of the country. I had been to the Shaker Museum in Chatham, New York, and the Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts. Several of the pieces from Pleasant Hill have been featured in Popular Woodworking; most recently a firewood box was our "I Can Do That" project in our February 2008 issue. I saw three or four variations in different locations.
One of the unique aspects of Pleasant Hill is that a good portion of the property is an inn, with a wonderful restaurant and rooms available in the original buildings. I've been to a lot of museums and restorations, but I've never spent the night in one. It added immensely to the experience, giving us a much better feel for what life would have been like for the community members. (It also gave us some much needed peace and quiet.)
Our room was next to one of the most famous features of the village, the twin spiral staircase in the Trustee's Office. As a museum visitor, I would have gone up once or twice and taken a good look, but as a guest I enjoyed the stairs every time I left our room. It truly is an amazing piece of woodworking; there are actually two stairways on either side of a central hallway. Each side is two flights, twisting up to the third floor where a skylight provides both light and the feeling that these stairs lead to heaven.
Most monumental stairways are full of intricate details such as carved newel posts and turned balusters. The details in the stair are incredibly simple, yet the combination of shapes, and the subtle changes as the stairs turn and rise, make this an elegant statement of design and craftsmanship.
So if you're ever driving through Kentucky, make it a point to stop and enjoy as much time as you can spare. And don't leave without trying the lemon pie.
? Bob Lang
Stubbornness is a Skill
03/04/2008, 02:39 | Lost Art Press Blog 
It?s 5 p.m. on Sunday, and almost all of the students in my ?Precision Handsawing? class are packing up their tools to head home after two punishing days of listening to my drivel while trying to perfect their handsawing.
But in one corner of this picturesque Kentucky classroom, Michael Rogen refuses to stop laying out his half-lap joints. He refuses to lay down his tools and quit. Michael above all refuses to lay down, give up and wait to die.
Things are geting worse for Michael. His degenerative disease ? its name is unimportant ? has claimed most of his mobility, nearly all of his natural dexterity but absolutely none of his stubborn will to be able to saw, plane and chisel furniture-quality joints by hand.
These tasks are hard enough for a grown man in good physical condition ? most of my students from this weekend are probably still recovering from sore feet and forearms. But when you add on the fact that Michael can barely stand without two canes and has virtually no grip in one of his hands, it makes you ashamed to be so dammed healthy and lazy in comparison.
I?ve known Michael ? a former actor ? for a few years now. He started asking my advice on buying some tools and bit by bit has worked his way into my life and the lifes of other woodworkers, tool makers and woodworking instructors.
Despite the advice of his doctors, Michael traveled to Indianapolis last year to take my "Introduction to Hand Tools" class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. He was in better shape then, but by the end of the week I couldn?t believe that the guy was on his two feet and pounding out mortise after mortise with a mallet and chisel.
As we parted last May, Michael said, ?I think this is it. I think this is my last class.?
Hardly.
Michael went on to take a class in building a blanket chest at Kelly Mehler?s School of Woodworking. Then he took a class in making moulding planes from Larry Williams and Don McConnell followed directly by my class in sawing.
For the class, Michael took the bench next to mine, and while he had to have a little assistance with knifing a couple notches, he stubbornly declined other offers of help. He insisted on cutting his stock to rough length on a sawbench (I don?t know how he kept his balance), and he plowed through the project at a steady and slow pace.
At the end of the first day of this sawing class, I held a contest. I asked each student to make the best tenon he or she could manage with handsaws and a chisel. The tenon had to be consistent in its thickness and have clean shoulders.
Then all the students wrote their birthdate on their tenons and tossed them on my workbench. I left them there overnight so I was certain to forget whose tenon belongs to whom. On Sunday morning before class, I sorted through the joints, marked up their good points and bad and decided on a winner.
To everyone?s surprise (and delight) it was Michael?s tenon. For a piece of hand-cut work, it was solid. The tenon varied in its thickness by only a thousandth of an inch (or maybe two). The shoulders weren?t dead-nuts perfect, but they could be cleaned up with a shoulder plane easily and they outclassed many of the other tenons on my bench.
Michael (who lives in New York) was naturally suspicious that I had rigged the contest.
No so, my friend. You beat us all. Not only on that day, but in many other ways that have nothing to do with cheeks and shoulders, or tools and joinery.
? Christopher Schwarz
And I thought he only made Bibles....
00/00/0000, 00:00 | Skiving Offhttp://www.gutenberg.org/files/20846/20846-h/20846-h.htm
It appears the Project Gutenberg folks have made it possible for the entire world to own a virtual copy of:
By WILLIAM NOYES, M.A.
Assistant Professor, Department of Industrial Arts.
Teachers College, Columbia University
NEW YORK CITY
The entire book has been scanned, and is available at the link above. If this book had been written two weeks ago, I believe all of the woodworking book clubs would be clambering to secure exclusive rights to make it the Selection of the Month. It has about 4 boatloads of information, and it has pictures.
It tells how to sharpen a card scraper. It tells how to choose a hammer. It tells how to layout the rafters under the roof of your next house. It describes the proper circles to make when applying French Polish.
To me the most fascinating part of the book is the first section which provides tremendous detail on logging in the era before the internal combustion engine. The photos are amazing. Here are a couple just to whet your appetite.
Did it whet your appetite?
Wait!!!!!!! Did I just say “WHET”?????
Yes. And that leads us to the WHAT THE &$#*@&^%$ moment of the day…..
There is one area of this book that I read. Re-read. Paused to consider. Then re-read. It still confuses the heck out of me. I am pasting it here unedited….
To test the sharpness of a whetted edge, draw the tip of the finger or thumb lightly along it, Fig. 79. If the edge be dull, it will feel smooth: if it be sharp, and if care be taken, it will score the skin a little, not enough to cut thru, but just enough to be felt.
Maybe it’s because I am something of a bleeder, but I cannot bring myself to agree with that information. One of my primary objectives in woodworking is to avoid things that "score the skin a little."
99.9% of this free e-Book is gold, but whatever you do…don’t follow the advice “To test the sharpness of a whetted edge, draw the tip of the finger or thumb lightly along it…”
Enjoy your free book, and resist the urge to buy from the guy on Ebay who is offering a CD with this free eBook for the unheard of price of just under ten bucks. And to that Ebay guy...if you are one of my regular readers, I apologize for possibly hurting your plans for early retirement. It's nothing personal... I just wanted to be able to say that I gave all of my readers a free book.