Splinters with Gary Rogowski: Recent Episodes
Northwest Woodworking Studio
This podcast series is a look at furniture building from a veteran maker, designer, and author. The episodes are practical, philosophic, witty, and irreverent. Gary was a former contributing editor at Fine Woodworking Magazine, and founded The Northwest Woodworking Studio, A School for Woodworkers, in Portland, Oregon in 1997. He has no illusions about the value of this work in today’s culture of fast and furious and disposable. Making art, building furniture, is work that is useless and beautiful, and necessary for those who produce it. Creativity feeds the soul like nothing else can.
The Garrett Wade Catalogue has been bringing fine tools to the woodworker since 1975. The offerings have expanded in some areas like gardening and woodsman tools today. But the idea of starting a company with nothing to build a brand of quality items is an intriguing one.
A story about Jimmy the Beagle and his watchful eye. Also information about our Online Lectures and Workshops. Plus a brief description of our new Online Mastery Program coming this Fall.
Inlay is a mark left behind by the maker. A mark that says I built this. It was important to me.
How do we find balance in a world that has gone topsy turvy? How do we find balance in our work at the bench?
The best way to move quickly is to move slowly with purpose. Fast work of things usually makes mistakes.
To be involved with one’s work is not just a question of what gets produced but how it gets produced. This is in the nature of Quality.
You can handle a mistake in several different ways. Choose the one that yields the most for you.
There is no shortcut to learning skills. It’s just like taking a hike. All the steps have to be made.
Roger Benton runs a wood resource center in Brooklyn, New York. His sawmill saws up tons of wood every year rescuing these trees from the landfill. He does this to save beautiful wood to produce incredible slabs, dimensional lumber, and to build his own line of furniture.
The jointer is as sensitive a piece of cast iron as exists in the shop. Learn how to tune and use yours to get the results you are after.
There are a lot of tools one needs at the bench. Being able to bounce back from a mistake or two is one of them.
Picking out your lumber and milling it makes a difference in the look and longevity of your piece. Learn some of the qualities of wood to watch for.
Time to sharpen again. Not because I've been using so many of my tools and made them dull. No, it's our summer break now and this is a podcast broadcast in Season One. Enjoy.
This podcast came out in Season One. During a short summer break, please listen to this story of not paying attention and the cost.
A recorded DESIGN: Open House chat about Intention with John Eisemann, choral master, and Gary Rogowski, furniture maker. Two very different perspectives on considering the creative process.
Encyclopedia of Furniture Making Ernest Joyce Cabinetmaking for Beginners Charles Hayward Understanding Wood Bruce Hoadley Sharpening Leonard Lee Hand Applied Finishes Jeff Jewett A Reverence for Wood Eric Sloane Tools of the Trade Jeff Taylor 18th Century Furniture Making Jeffrey Greene A Cabinetmaker's Notebook James Krenov Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain Betty Edwards The Nature and Aesthetics of Design David Pye.
Tear-out when hand planing can be a frustration. There are simple techniques you can use to change the cutting angle of your blade or your chipbreaker. These will eliminate tear-out in the nastiest of grains.
This is a fascinating chat with Matt Howard, CEO of Sawstop Saws. They have blade technology that shuts off a saw before it can cut through a finger. Crazy and interesting stuff.
At The Northwest Woodworking Studio, we offer a school of thought and practice in the skills of design and woodworking.
The very act of building/ creating/ making furniture is an act filled with implications about you and your goals.
Front end load your design work and you will feel better at the back end when you finish a piece. Sketching, full scale modeling in cardboard, and quarter scale models are enormous aids in discovering what's right and what's wrong about your design ideas.
I know plenty of pad sanders. But I'd trade them all away for a sharp hand plane. Hand planes can be time savers when it comes to smoothing surfaces. They also fight that perfectionism that pad sanders lead you to.
Wood doesn't just sit there. It's alive. It moves, it changes dimension, it colors over time. Learns some essential facts about wood so you can choose your wood for your next project with more information at hand.
Everyone starts at the beginning. Yet our expectations rarely match our skills then. The hardest thing is to be patient as we learn.
Brian Boggs is a chairmaker, artist, designer, and engineer extraordinaire. He is also quite a philosopher on the nature of work and workmanship, the value of excellent work, and how tooling affects design.
Practice is what brings us first to competency and then to mastery. Listen to some stories of discipline that allowed practitioners to work through their own limitations. Quality doesn't have a shortcut to it.
The scraper is a small wonder. It is capable of cutting in most any direction without tear-out. How to get one sharp can be frustrating. Listen to one simple tip that will change your method and make sharpening a scraper a snap.
An interview with Ron Hock of Hock Tools, maker of plane irons and knives. This is a fascinating discussion about starting a business, metallurgy, and the rise of civilizations.
Drilling and screwing a box together. What could be simpler? But it often turns out to be a test of your patience, your dexterity, and your ability to forgive yourself.
Thomas Lie-Nielsen and Gary chat about tools and hand tools specifically. What drives his company to build quality tools in a throw-away society? And what is the value of Quality?
What tools do you always carry to work? Is it all in one sector or another? There is a middle ground for woodworkers who both seek quiet at the bench and results at the end of the day.
The ease with which you produce work depends upon how smooth your flow is at the bench. The distractions you allow, the interruptions you permit or block, all contribute to your success. Achieving flow is the key to successful work.
An episode in which we discuss the idea of purpose vs. intent in a design. This difference is that between the absolute basic functional requirements of a piece and its plan to entice, soothe, or beguile a viewer.
Glue changes everything in an assembly. An assembly that has gone together dry several times with no mishaps, no errant angles, no parts stuck in odd places, now, with the introduction of glue, can be difficult, anxiety producing, and vocabulary building. Why is that?
Here are some gift ideas certain to please every woodworker. Or ones that will make a great list to place where your gift giver can see and seize the Aha! moment.
Which tools are the most necessary at the bench? There are so many choices and limiting it to just ten of them makes for hard decisions. Learn what makes the cut in this episode.
Come with us to observe the Woodworker in Captivity. They are a shy proud and circumspect beast. Approach with caution, perhaps with beer, but always with a healthy respect as we spy on their unusual behavior at the bench.
Learn about the methods for sharpening. Sharp tools cut better and cleaner. And if you cut yourself with one you heal up faster too.
Everyone has standards of accuracy. What are the ones that you can adopt that won't drive you crazy trying to be perfect? Give a listen to this podcast on being accurate and how it can affect your time at the bench.
A furniture maker needs several machines to build their work. But a table saw isn't one of them.
Splinters are a sad and pointed part of a woodworker's life. Reminders of several truths to be found at the bench. There are the attractions of wood, its beauty, its luster, and its grain. And then there are the moments when we forget how sharp wood can be and how direct. Listen to tales from the bench on memorable splinters and their removal as well as a short chapter from the new book: Handmade, Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction.
Your choice of wood can make a difference to your happiness in the shop. Learn about the differences between hardwoods, ring porous vs. diffuse and semi-ring porous woods, and how grain will affect the look but also how a piece moves over time. These little bits of information can help you choose the right wood for you and the job.
Our very first podcast opens with a chat about the new book by Gary Rogowski called Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction. www.handmadecreativefocus.com. Gary is a furniture maker, author, former contributing editor at Fine Woodworking Magazine, and the Director of The Northwest Woodworking Studio, A School for Woodworkers, in Portland, Oregon. This maiden podcast is a short practical and philosophical stroll through some of the topics to be found in his new book. He touches on subjects like the only two things that woodworkers can agree upon, the “Right Way” of doing things at the bench, and forgiveness in the wood shop. The book argues for taking a chance on your creativity and the value of working with our hands in this digital age.