“I do not get your weird chairs,” exclaim about a dozen messages or comments every year. I understand your bewilderment. I remember being a prospective student at Northwestern University in 1985 where I had been paired up with freshmen journalism students. We were supposed to sleep in their dorm rooms and see what university life…
Read moreFor the last few years I’ve switched back and forth between using Wood Owl spade bits and Japanese Star M F-type augers for drilling critical holes. The Wood Owls are about $3.50 each, and the Star M bits are about $9. Both work fine. But here are their important differences. With the Wood Owls, I…
Read moreMy Grandma West spent a large part of her life observing my grandfather, Joe, and my uncle, Tom, at work – either on a house or in the shop. Both were skilled woodworkers, among other things, but each had a different way of looking at the craft. “Joe could look at a staircase or some…
Read moreAfter Jennie Alexander died in 2018, she left a house full of tools, chairs and bits and pieces from her long life of woodworking, research and writing. For several months, her friends and family sorted through the possessions and distributed them so they would do the most good. Shortly thereafter, we traveled to Jennie’s Baltimore…
Read moreEditor’s note: Here’s another essay I wrote in support of my new “Build a Stick Chair” video. My plan was to record these essays and set them to music with some images. I tried it, and it looked like the most boring slideshow with a narrator on quaaludes. So I present my script here, which…
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