Bowling for Charity

I have just completed my latest turning. It is an Osage Orange bowl, by far the largest bowl I have yet turned. It measures 7 3/8″ in diameter and is 2 3/4″ tall (it is 2 3/8″ deep).   My wife’s work is having a Charity Auction this Friday and I am giving them this [...]

There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)

I just recently celebrated my 20th wedding anniversary, and as part of the celebration my wife and I took a private wood turning class together (neither of us having ever turned anything before). I was able to set this up at McLaughlin Woods, where I had recently taken a joinery class.  We had a load [...]

Another Woodworking Class = More Dovetails

Well, it has been quite a while sense I posted, Christmas has come and gone as well as the whole winter.  I was in the ranks of the unemployed for about 4 1/2 months at the end of last year, and spent a fair amount of that time taking care of my mother who diagnosed [...]

So much cutting, I got … board.

We finally got the new, permanent counter tops installed on the bank of cabinets in the kitchen. My wife loves the counters, but Quarts can be a really killer on your knives, so I decided to take a lesson from The Wood Whisperer and make a pretty end grain cutting board.  I didn’t document the [...]

Acanthus Workshop – Woodworking Class

I spent the first weekend in October at the Acanthus Workshop in Pennsylvania taking the Woodworking Fundamentals I class.  All in all a great couple days spent with Chuck and Joe, with excellent lunches provided by Chuck’s wife Lorraine. From the Acanthus Web Site: This two day course covers the basic hand tools used in [...]

They call it labor day for a reason…

I finished the kitchen cabinets on schedule and my brother and sister-in-law came up this weekend and attacked the project with gusto… First the sheet rock came down, and then most of the wall studs came out. Then the carpet and the kitchen floor had to be cut back to the subfloor level so cabinets [...]

It’s Time for a Cabinet Meeting

The great cabinet build started in earnest on Thursday.  Before any cabinets got built, however, I had to wait for a little help to show up to cut the full sheets of plywood down.  While waiting I gave the shop a pretty good cleaning and even managed to organize my sheet good pile. I even [...]

One Project Down, Another Project Ready To Go

Finally finished the face frames on the built-in bookcases, and they are now done except for painting (and my lovely wife is going to take care of that). Here is the “finished” product that still needs some “finish”. Now on to new and (gasp) even bigger things.  We are going to take a wall out [...]

A journey of a 1000 books begins with a single shelf…sort of.

It has been unusually hot and humid here for the past few weeks with a couple breaks in the weather recently.  The small air conditioner in my shop does an admirable job of keeping things bearable, but only if I give it a 2 hour head start to get things under control.  This means really [...]

Don’t put my heart on a shelf … or in a box

All has been pretty quite on the blogging front for the last few weeks.  I’ve been working on a little project for my wife’s birthday (I won’t say which birthday) and she is one of the few people who read my blog so I had to keep mum about what I was really doing. So [...]