Tea Caddy (dry fitting box)

Belated Happy Holidays!


Dry fitting the dovetails. I cut and pair the pins by hand then band saw and pair the tails.

Tea Caddy (Chopping Dovetails)

Lots of dovetails to be chopped. Notice the waste areas are marked with pencil. Its real easy to make a mistake and chop out the wrong area if you're not careful.

Tea Caddy (dovetailing box)

Its therapeutic to get back to the shop and to cut dovetails by hand. This is going to be a small but fun project, a reproduction of an eighteenth century tea caddy. I will post a picture of the original when complete.

ZEN Woodworking Day

Have you ever had a perfect day in the shop? This would be a zen woodworking day. The kind of day when you didn't have to search for anything. It's the simple things that make a zen woodworking day. Maybe you left the ruler exactly at arms reach every time. You had to take an extra step for nothing. You put everything away, real time, without thinking about it so the shop was practically clean when the day was through. I almost had one of these days and then I remembered I left the band saw blade tensioned.

Fall Cleaning, etc.

As you can see, I live in the woods. So this weekend, with the help of my kids, I cleared about 3/4 acre worth of leaves. Better late than never, and just before the first little snow flurries.

I also winterized my 1980 KZ250 thumper. The nearly showroom condition bike is great for short summer rides on a country road.

I am involved in a internal debate as to what will be my next woodworking project.

A Worthy Cause

Here is an awesome community service cause for this time of year. If you are a woodworker with a little extra this holiday season, it is worth a look. I would rather you go to http://www.moringacommunity.org/ to read the story yourself and watch the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpxK_qrb2Rg

From My Earliest Brewing Days

I bought this book with my first home brewing kit in 1988, rode back to my college dorm, and with the help of a small electric burner, brewed my first batch of ale. Hours later, in the middle of the night, I awoke to my roommate cursing me up and down as the CO2 snored "blurp, blurp, blurp" from the airlock of the fermenter. Thus began my long journey into beer and brewing. The original kit was purchased at Home Sweet Home brew in Philly, PA. The ale turned out great. Incidentally, my second batch was a stout which I remember giving a sample to one of my friends which resulted in a sourpuss comment "eeww! tastes like Guinness!" as he spit it out.