Welcome and intro

Steven 0:45

Hey, and welcome to the Joiners Bench. I'm Steven, and I'm Alex. And we're just two guys talking about woodworking and the craft we love.

Alex 0:55

And that's woodworking. Yeah. And um problems, issues, errors, mistakes, like how I flubbed that segue into the show. Perfect. It's you know, it's something you just gotta roll with. Yeah.

Back in the shop

Alex 1:16

What have you been up to, I guess, in the shop?

Steven 1:18

Yeah, I mean, that is our first thing. But uh is is well, what have I been up to? I've actually been up to a lot and yet not accomplishing anything, which is fun. But I think I talked about last time working on the dining room table, which I am, and I've made a lot of progress on that. Not as much as I should have, but we're gonna talk about some mistakes that are made there. But no, it's coming along pretty good. I got the base pretty much put together and I got the top flat, and that's what we'll be talking about later. But so that's been going on. And today I'm supposed to be working on, we have a new class coming up this fall called the Craftsman Style Bench. And I was gonna hope to put together, my goal was to come in early this morning and put together the whole bench today, and I haven't even started yet. So that may be a tomorrow thing, but I guess those are mistakes as well, right? You get sidetracked, yeah.

Alex 2:03

It happens, and I mean that fits right in with this box that I've been working on. Uh, it was around Christmas time, I think I started these. I was gonna do one for each kid, and just didn't happen. Started working on it again, not just a week or two ago. And it's been tricky. I mean, we'll get to that. That's gonna be a lot of the the meat of the main set main part, but yeah, that's been the big thing is just little little bits trying to get back in the shop and rem getting back to the flow.

Steven 2:40

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think that's it's an that's an interesting concept, the flow part of this, too, just to get back into is like there are some things that we do get better at when we're just in the shop for consecutive periods of time. But then there's also things that it's like you have to try something first. And so one of my things that I talk about all the time is like the first one you build is a prototype. If it turns out great, great. You get to keep something. But if it doesn't, you got warmed up on that. But uh, but I find myself doing that on things that I've done, you know, tens of times anyway. And I do the first one thinking it's gonna be great,

A cascade of mistakes

Speaker 1 3:15

and it flubs up. And so yeah, mistakes are something everybody makes. And that takes us to our main segment, which is I love the title you suggested for the show of a cascade of mistakes. So there must be a story behind that.

Speaker 3:27

Oh, it well with this box, it just seemed like one thing after another. And I do think it fits with a lot of things, a lot of mistakes of that can happen on the shop floor, where if you're not careful, you're not diligent, you're off just a little bit, it gets worse with each cut that you do. Yeah, it does it starts to add up. Like I think you told me this, and I didn't realize it until uh not long ago uh with the jointer. You were saying about how if it's not set up right, you're just making trapezoids. Right, right. And I was figured, no, that can't be. It like it'll still be flat, it's fine. Then there's a little kind of a tabletop I was working on and trying to fix it up just a little bit, and I come to glue out, glue it up, and they're trapezoids instead of rectangles. I was like, I I was just trying to clean up that one little edge, but too much pressure in one spot or not enough in another, and throws it all off. Exactly.

Speaker 1 4:36

And that's you know, it is so easy. We look at milling wood, even, and that's the beginning for steps, right? And between the planar and the joiner, and you think, how hard can this be? But in my early years of woodworking, coming up with a square piece of wood was one of the hardest things I did. And it seemed like the harder that I tried at it, the worse it got.

Speaker 5:00

Yeah. For real.

Speaker 1 5:01

And then I figured out that it's just a few key things that you got to focus on and get rid of the rest of it. But yeah, and then if you don't start with square wood, then everything else is downhill from there. So yeah. Yep. So what else did you have going on then?

Speaker 5:15

Yeah, so this box, I kind of started it to well, I said last episode the box I made for here for the donations and the kind of freehand box joints I tried to make on it. I was like, all right, I want to try a legit making of box joints, and I want to learn the shaper origin. I saw it's super easy to do on there. So I was like, all right, here, let's let's do that. So one of my first mistakes was you take the my brain, it's not the rotor, but you take the the spindle out for changing it and whatnot, changing the bits. And so I did that, it was all safe, made sure it was totally unplugged, not just off, but unplugged. Took it out, put the bit in that I needed, and then put it back and did my my tracing. Then when I got done, it was way off because I didn't tighten the spindle back in. So it had just that that little bit of play that throws it off. Yeah. And like the shaper is so precise where you can tune it in to the hundredths of a an inch. Yeah, that was eye-opening.

Speaker 1 6:38

Yeah. Yeah, it's those little detail things, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. Yep. All right. So you're started with a trapezoid, you've now made your tolerances a little heavy on.

Speaker 6:50

Yeah. I mean that what else did I do? It again that cascaded so much, and I took a long time off of working on this, which it happens, but it still felt like a mistake of, or I should say it's something that could have been prevented of just finish this all at once. Don't worry about remembering. Is it did I go with two and three quarters inches tall, or did I cut it down to two and an eighth because that's what the math ended up for the box joints? But yeah, coming back to it, I was all sorts of confused, just trying to figure out what I was doing. I didn't measure or I didn't plan really with the box joints of how to put the bottom on. So when I put the channel in, I guess, or the the dado in, it went through so you can see it. See it on the ends, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I tried to overcome that by putting, I guess, a rabbit, cutting a rabbit in, I think on the outside to do a bit of an inlay. And I was I was doing that or sorry. I made a conscious decision. I was going back and forth between do I glue it up or do I do this routing just now with the pieces separate. Decided to do separate. And two ways that that bit me. Can I want to see, can you guess what what they are?

Speaker 1 8:30

Uh I'm guessing that your alignment between the the two edges were not spot on. Nope.

Speaker 8:38

Not a problem. Okay. Yeah, because it was just the just with the bit, I just Oh, the tear the tear out? Tear out was one of them. Yeah. And then the other is one of the pieces I did the wrong side. Oh. See, I never would have guessed that.

Speaker 1 8:54

But yeah, that's a common one. Yeah, I don't know why I wouldn't have guessed it, but yeah. And yeah, we're sitting here looking at a box. Yes, right. So you did finish it. So that's the one thing I'm gonna say is you kept going, which was awesome.

Speaker 9:05

Yeah, and I won't say, or I don't think I'm finished yet. But I wanted to talk over kind of the what to do from here. I got some ideas. And but I'm curious before I go into that, your what you would do.

Speaker 1 9:23

All right. So we're looking at this, and yeah, you've you've put a rabbit in on the the lower quarters where the so if you're imagining this as you're looking at it, it's it's it's like a tray.

Speaker 9:35

So I did have there is more lower. So it would have been like if you think of three-eighths of an inch foot all around before the that bottom. Right. Then I ended up planing that off at home. All right.

Speaker 1 9:52

Well, see, I would have said I would have left that. Because oftentimes when you look at these boxes, particularly not so much trays, you do see the edge, the sides raised up off the table that it's sitting on. And there's like a foot that is basically the base. Which is essentially what you've made here with your rabbit going around the lower edge, uh, that still allows you the the it's it's a nice, it's a nice little bit over an eighth of an inch, so it's not it's not big. It's a nice delicate feature. And actually, I think it lets it it works very, very well, actually. You've got a couple of overlaps that you gotta take a chisel to and cut those off on. But the other thing I'll say is that your box joints look really, really good.

Speaker 10:38

Thanks. The the thing that the machine did for me is the one that or the part that turned out well. I I joke. Like it it did take, as I said, three tries or so to make sure that those fit well together.

Speaker 1 10:53

Yeah.

Speaker 10:53

And thank you.

Speaker 1 10:55

Yeah, I mean, this is actually gonna be even with all the stuff you you lined up of all the things, the mistakes. And you know what, to tell you the truth, that's part of what I like about woodworking is that when you're in the process and when you're in when you're doing it, and you make these mistakes, and some of these mistakes are mistakes because you know there was a right way to do it and it ended up not being the right way. Some of it is like mistakes that we made along the way, and some of it is just not knowing the process. But the truth of the matter is that some of the best, most famous woodworkers out there never followed traditional woodworking practices. Sam Maloof is one of them, one of my heroes who always said he would never teach woodworking because he was never taught woodworking and he would never recommend anybody do the work the way he does it. But I think the I think the cool thing is you've got a box that's gonna look really, really cool. And you said you're gonna give it to your kids, right? One one for each of them. I might end up keeping this one for myself. I mean, the truth of the matter is, and this is what I tell everybody that comes through here. And like in even I'm looking at the box going, this looks really good. Can I look at little details and see things? Sure. Nobody else is gonna do that. Your friends and neighbor in your family are gonna look at this and go, You made this? This is incredible, right? True. And your kids are gonna look at this and say, Yeah, my dad made this, right? Maybe not this week, but you know, when they're old and uh looking back on things. So I don't I don't know that I would not go ahead and give that one, right? And I think that is the that is the cool part about woodworking is we can make mistakes. Most of those mistakes are things you won't ever do again. And you know, you'll make new new mistakes, just like I make new mistakes every day. So yeah, yeah.

Speaker 12:45

Yeah. So the I guess just kind of what I am planning to do with it is I I want to try inlays. So I at a certain point on this box, I reached like it's not how I was originally thinking, let's play with it, let's try some things out, and so that's where I'm at. I want to do I guess kind of an inlay all around it. So all four sides of each of the four sides, if that makes sense. Yeah, right, right. And I know I'm gonna lose the box joint, like the look of that, but I think the structure should still be there, and then you have this cool border all around.

Speaker 2 13:26

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 13:27

Yeah, that'll be kind of neat. Yeah. So see there, you'll turn it into something. Yeah, or like you said, it'll be a practice piece.

Speaker 2 13:31

Yeah.

Speaker 1 13:32

Oh, yeah, yeah. Very cool. Well, so for me, yep. And it doesn't, it just goes to show you that it doesn't matter how long you do this, you make mistakes. So I'm working on this cherry table. Uh it's kind of a trestle table. And I'm remaking a table like the one we're sitting at right now, that it was an older one that has just potato chipped over the years. I used non-kiln drying wood. It was wood that came from a friend of mine. I let it sit for years and years and years. Still didn't do enough. It moved, it split, it cracked, and it literally is looks like a Pringles potato chip. If you set a pencil on it, it rolls off. It's it's that bad. So my goal was to build a new one in cherry that was flat. Well, so now we're working in a shared shop, and this is a problem with a shared shop. I didn't notice anything wrong until I in this this talk about a cascade of mistakes. I went to the table saw, I ripped down all the pieces to get straight edges. I put the edges together, and it looked okay on the laying flat on a table without being clamped.

Speaker 14:41

Yep.

Speaker 1 14:42

One thing I have learned to do is I do put clamps on even dry and try to clamp it up and see what it is. And that's when I saw I had a problem. And what I saw was when I went and looked at the table saw, the table saw, the saw stops have it's kind of a known issue with them, but they have stops that you can set. They're just screws that kind of uh ends as like stops that it dead ends on. Okay. And if you set it at zero, which is what they intend you to do in the book, it's also the bolt head is facing straight up. And so if you take it 45 degrees and make cuts on it, then sawdust piles up on that. And when you come back, you don't hit zero. And so on one of our saws out there, which was my original saw, I had years ago move that down so that you could go past zero.

Speaker 15:33

Okay.

Speaker 1 15:34

So you'd never have that mistake. And I just knew I would I watch it and I go to zero. Well, nobody here in the shop does that. So they always go past zero. So it's off by pretty close to a degree, probably. And so I cut all these pieces of wood with it, and so it just barreled up on me. So then I thought, I know what I'll do. I'll go to the joiner and I'll face these. Now, these are six foot-long boards, so they're hard to deal with anyway, which was ultimately when I I didn't, but I did one board, and when I went back, it was worse than it was to start with. Yeah. So I went to the joiner and looked. And I hadn't checked that one for square, and it was off of square. So I basically looked and I had two inch thick boards. I knew I wasn't gonna do two inch. I glued it together anyway. Okay, and it looked like a roller coaster. And then we did it in two halves. So ultimately it's like a four-foot wide table, and I glued it up in two halves, and I took those two halves. We have a wide belt sander and I ran them through the wide belt sander that's that's 24 inches, and I basically took off a lot of thickness with a sander, which took forever, but it made them flat. And and then I glued the two halves together, and I have a semi-flat table out there, which is really good. So did recover from that. But yeah, I find myself these days things that uh you can compensate for that you can catch, and I don't. Like I get so engrossed in like trying, and we start this off by saying time, right? Like, you know, I had a plan to do the whole day and just do woodworking today, and here we are at you know, three o'clock, and I haven't touched a piece of wood to actually work on it yet. And when I do get out there, I'll be like wanting to accomplish something, and that will cause me to do things that I shouldn't do. Usually not safety concerns, but usually things that I know maybe I'm skipping a step or you know, didn't check the squareness of something.

Speaker 17:38

Yeah. Or verifying. Um, that one always gets me as verifying square as I'm assembling something.

Speaker 1 17:46

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And that's where I get one of my other core principles from is that I try to measure wood not with a ruler or a tape measure, but by measuring the piece it's mating to. Because that's where even if you made a mistake early in the process, it it doesn't compound usually on it, it fixes itself as it goes. But if you cut the piece to the actual measurement, but the opposite side was short by an eighth of an inch, now you've got a trapezoid box versus versus doing it the other way. So yeah, little things. And it and how did I learn that? Because I've done that many, many times where I've cut multiple pieces and they weren't all the same length. Tried to put them together.

Speaker 18:29

Oh yeah. Oh, those are always fun to kind of track down. And fun by I I guess do you mean it a little seriously, where at least for me, of trying to piece together what went wrong or really what is what is happening here. And then realizing, oh, that saw blade sure looks like it's straight up and down, but nope, it's a known issue that it's off just that little bit, and that'll keep compounding, like I said.

Speaker 1 19:01

Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, I carry a little four-inch square just for that purpose, and I did not use it at all that day. So yeah, that's cra that is crazy. Well, do you have any other ones for us?

Speaker 19:11

Or yeah. And actually, it kind of goes well with the measuring off of the the piece. That's what I've done with this one, and I think it also is what got me into trouble with it. Or I should say what makes it really hard to move on from where I am right now. So I talked about this a little bit before, the twisty table. And so you have two vertical pieces that are basically an L. And then you cut the top and bottom of them at an angle so they'll end up twisting in between the top and bottom table tabletops. Tabletops, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 19:58

So between the the base and the tabletop, yeah. So I'll try and this is where we need cover art so we can show people. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, if you if you can imagine two pieces of wood that are cut triangular, and then you know, the wider parts of, and then that you you you uh edge glue them together so that they're at a 90-degree angle, but their tapers are on opposite ends. That's what we've got. And then that that forms two like L feet, and then when they're set on the floor or and then the hit at the tabletop, they're flat, so it looks like a twist in the boards. Yeah.

Speaker 20:42

And so I saw this on YouTube. I was like, that that's a pretty cool idea, and it it's a pretty simple, I'm not gonna say easy, but it is a pretty simple design. And like all videos on YouTube, I was like, oh yeah, cool, I can do that. No problem. And I didn't really take any measurements. I think I did figure it would be roughly two feet tall or three feet whatever. And I knew I wanted the base. The one that they designed, I think, had the base to the edges of these legs. And I plan on having it overlapping. Right, right. Like an overhang on them. Yeah. So that angle that you cut to so these have that twist is a pretty arbitrary angle. And I'm trying to think to think of how to describe where I went wrong. Like to get it, it was just a matter of at the at the miter saw making sure that the piece is oriented the right way or a certain way, and then that'll bring the blade down flat to give you that reference, and then they'll be top and bottom will be parallel from each other. I think if if I'd have stopped there, it would have been easier to I guess. Sorry, let me step back. The problem that I'm having is that I don't know that the tops and bottoms are truly parallel.

Speaker 1 22:25

Okay.

Speaker 22:26

Or I I'm pretty sure I'm like 95% sure they are. But trying to find the reference on the boards of really just to to check it and to put dowels in is my big problem.

Speaker 1 22:44

I what sounds like the way you did it, it should just come out that way. So if you again imagine you've got let's say you've got a full board and it's let's say six inches tall, and you cut it from the upper left-hand corner to the lower right hand corner. So you've just cut that angle on it. You've split the board in half, but at an at a diagonal. And then you took that bottom section and you folded it up. And so now you've got two angles. And the angle of the board, if you put that down, if you put the flat edge that was the top of your board on the miter saw, and you cut that straight, which is what you've done, then you should have a 90-degree angle between your edge and your long edge. So your end and your side. And if you do that on both boards, then those are going to be parallel with each other by nature. Which it does look like it is. So I think you're good. I don't think there's a way to not unless you flip the board the wrong direction. This is one where we need video, and we've talked about doing video for these so you can see them, but I think you're there. I actually think you're in a good spot.

Speaker 24:16

And so one thing that made it harder, a way that I made it harder on myself, is I planed off some. You did such a great job at at describing. I'm gonna try and use that example. So at the thin end of the triangle, there's an overlap with the the thicker piece, that the leg of the thicker piece. And so I tried to plane it where it would be basically even with with the other end. Right. Yeah. I didn't do any kind of reference with that. It was entirely just by eye. Just by eye, just planing and sanding. And I think with some of them I did it I I shaved off some of the shorter edge.

Speaker 1 25:15

The end, yeah.

Speaker 25:16

Some of it I didn't touch that. So that those are a little off. And I think you had previously recommended that I kind of used that as a reference with the shaper. So if that angle was the same, if I had done it a repeatable way on all of them, I could use that as the reference the the shaper, the the table and the shaper, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And for sure get the top piece, and then also know that I'm going in the the same places, the same three dollars or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. But not having that reference. Yeah.

Speaker 1 25:58

Yeah, it's gonna be gonna be fun. Yeah. It's gonna be by eye. Yeah.

Speaker 26:04

Interesting. Okay. And I think on the video they made it with just pine or maybe poplar or something. I decided to get artistic. And it's it was one of the boards was ash, and then the other was walnut that I had. Yeah.

Speaker 2 26:24

Yeah.

Speaker 26:24

So I was like, oh, this looks like really cool contrast. Yeah, let's just jump in. And yeah, I I there have been things that I've worked on that I just gave up on, basically. And like the there's no fixing this. Some carvings that I've done actually I was working on a moth and it was coming out super cool. And then trying to clear out some space kind of by the neck, I guess. The way I put pressure, it the whole head popped off. Popped off, yeah.

Speaker 2 26:58

Yeah.

Speaker 26:59

And when I tried to glue it back on, it just didn't line up. So I was like, all right, this is firewood now. And sometimes it is. Yeah. Sometimes it is. It was good practice. Yeah. And this is somewhere in between. Like I with the box, I think I think how it turned into two boxes was I ended up having to cut it in half for some reason. But it was like, all right, this is gonna be just a little bit different shape now. Some things it's like, all right, well, that's gonna be a key holder now. That's not gonna be a table. Yeah. Just the how can we repurpose this? And with the twisty table legs, it just looks so cool that it's like I can't really give up on this. I don't know how to turn them into something else. And as we said, it turns into that learning.

Speaker 1 27:56

Yeah, exactly. And I think it's salvageable. So yeah, you'll just have to give it a try. I'd say keep going, like you did on the boxes, and then it'll either work or it won't. And yeah, we'll find out next week.

Speaker 2 28:09

Yeah.

Speaker 1 28:11

And on video. Oh, yeah, yeah, hopefully. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. All right. Well, what else do we have this week?

Speaker 28:18

Yeah. I mean, those were I guess how as we come across these issues, some of the some of the more common ones that I've come into, I'm just gonna ask your advice on how do you overcome it? And in like a practical sense, not the yeah, cool figure something else out kind of way. But with these box joints, and I I mean I'll point out a couple where they don't quite seat completely. There's like that little gap in there. What is a good way of I guess preventing it, most likely, and dealing with it? Right.

Speaker 1 29:03

So tear out mostly we're we're dealing with sharp bits. That's the number one thing. And then being aware of your end grain, because that's what's happened is you came out the the side of the of the in grain, and that the wood had no support on it. So using a backer board would help because that gives you that support. Slowing down, you know, although that doesn't, you know, all these things you could do all the right steps in the world and you still get tear out on the board. And that is the fun and the challenge to woodworking is that wood will do what wood wants to do, and we can't tame it. And sometimes a piece gets ruined because of a squirrely piece of wood. Feeling, you know, if you have box joints, dovetails, you know, the age-old thing is you take some sandpaper and you make some sawdust with the sandpaper of the same board, you fill the joint full of glue and you rub the powder in it, and it comes out looking surprisingly good. On something like the tear out that you've got there, once it's there and it's in a box, you can do things like patch it with another piece of wood, right? Take your chisel, chisel out a square, and then cut a square to fit it and glue it in. If you match the grain good enough, most people will never ever see it. Or it looks like another square on your box joint, right? Sure, right? Which is the other thing you could do is you could take off that level of a square and then glue in a piece that makes it look like the square, right? Okay. So there's ways of getting creative and hiding it, putting inlay over it. You know, so you can either want you can either in in purposely remove wood or you can purposefully add a patch or sawdust or something into it. So for that, that kind of common mistake, that's how you do. But I think I think the big thing with mistakes are to not let it get to you. I think I think it was in one of these podcasts. I talked about the rocking chair where I it fell and broke. I'd have so much work into it, and I basically decided that I was going to walk away from woodworking altogether. And I'd like to say that that's an uncommon thing, but I think all of us as woodworkers at some point have such a massive failure on something, or maybe even a minor failure on something that we've put a lot of time and energy into. And it's it's it's a mental game at that point, right? Oh, for sure. For me, I have Sam Maloof now forever in my ear saying, chin up, you know, get back to work. And that's something that that gets me. And I think everybody's got to find their own little thing of like, what is it? And I think it's usually a piece that you recover from or a piece that you make make peace with and throw away or put in the fire. Right. I know a lot of professional furniture makers who have a Friday night campfire ritual where the stuff they don't dwell on it, they throw it in the fire and they get rid of it. I tend to be the type of person that hangs it in my shop. Okay. I don't think that's right. I don't mean I wish I didn't do it, but that's usually what happens. Although now that I have a public shop, I don't do that as much. But my home shop was a wall full of just, you know, shame. I called it the shame wall. I'm not sure that's a wise thing to do, but it it helped me. It's a wall of learning. It's a wall of learning. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, I think that's the big thing, is it's like we, you know, if if we were professionals in this craft, and I don't even know that this applies to professionals, and we're losing money when we're making these things, this is one thing. But when it's just something that's supposed to be fun and a pastime, if you get upset about it and and fret about it, then it's not what you wanted it to be. It's not the hobby you wanted it to be, and that can be discouraging. And so I think a lot of this is like make the mistakes, realize you made the mistakes, learn from them, and then move on. If you can make something out of the piece, if it becomes a keychain holder after it was supposed to be a box, then even better. Sometimes those pieces have the best stories, is the other thing. Some of my favorite pieces have major flaws and and they've either become stories and lore, or just something that I just kind of know they're there and they're hidden in the back somewhere and it and it and it brings me joy to know that nobody else knows it's there. So I'd say lean into it, lean into the mistakes, make it a learning experience. That's how a lot of my prototypes become things that I give away.

Speaker 2 33:40

Okay.

Speaker 1 33:41

Because I look at it and at the end, it's easy in the process to be discouraged because oh, I made this mistake and oh, the the piece is ruined. But if you keep going, even if you just keep going and say, I'm gonna ignore that, at the end of it, you step back and look at the whole piece in total and go, that's a good piece. And it's worth giving away or selling or whatever you're gonna do with it. If you're selling it, I think the story is even better, right? I had one of my instructors told me at one point that, you know, it's how you know things are handmade. Yeah. If a piece is perfect, it was probably made on a machine, in an assembly line. But it's handmade if you see the tool marks, if you see the the tear out in the wood, if you see the little imperfections. So that's or the story I've told multiple times of uh, you know, uh amateurs point out their mistakes and professionals charge more for them. It's it's kind of the way it goes. So yeah. I don't know if I answered your question, but I think so, yeah. I went on one of my normal rants.

Speaker 34:43

Yeah. The yeah, the sawdust, the either cover up, like you know, cut out the area, which still kind of blows my mind that when you you have this damaged area, you're gonna damage it more to make it to make it better. But it works out. Yeah. Or as you said, like lean into the flaws. Just play and cover them up or turn them into I don't know if I said it, but that border I'm planning to do on this box is I think it's Paduke. Yeah, it looks like Padook, yeah, yeah. So this it's super bright red and it to me it it brings some fun to to it. Yeah, it's an opportunity to stand out. Yeah. I guess kind of

Common beginner mistakes

Speaker 35:34

last question-ish that I have on this is what are some of the most common beginner mistakes or things that are super easy to overlook.

Speaker 1 35:46

You mean overlook b and and do them or or mistakes that are made that people overlook?

Speaker 35:53

So the what I kind of had in mind was like the table saw not being at zero.

Speaker 1 35:59

Oh, so just what are things you run into? Yeah, I think I think those are big ones. It's like not checking your setup. I I would say the thing that most people make the mistake of and don't ever realize, even maybe years later, is they've not read their tool manual and understand how that tool works. I can't tell you the amount of times, even today, as I have to maintain a big full shop, how I pull a manual out and I go, Oh, that's what that's supposed to do, right? Even though I thought all along I knew what it was. The thing we have we forget about is that there was at least one, but probably a group of engineers who designed this tool. And they designed it to be a proficient and efficient tool at what it does. And if you understand that, unless they designed it really badly, then you're gonna know how to use the tool safely. And I think that's the problem that I see. The most the number one thing I see is like on a chop saw. People just walk up to it, grab the trigger, pull it, slam it through the wood, leave the trigger on and pull it back up. And then they wonder why their piece isn't the right dimension, right? Well, you just scraped off an extra sixteenth of an inch on each end because you're slamming the tool through it. And you're getting a crappy cut, and it's probably not straight. And all those things that, like you said, that's so that's a mistake that you may not even know you make. Oh, yeah. And then you go to put your piece together and you're like, why is this not fitting together? And it's like, well, you didn't pay attention to detail. Now, the flip side of this is, and and you know, we see a lot of different types of people come through the joinery here, but we'll get people who were in their real jobs were machinists and they're working at a thousandth of an inch tolerance. And woodworking, you just can't do that because the wood's gonna move that much by tomorrow. So I get I get people that are over analytical about those things, and then people that just don't know they need to understand those things. So first mistake people make is not understanding the tools, how they're meant to be used, and using them correctly. And then after that, I think we talked about it. Setup is, you know, did verify that everything's the way it is, double check, you know. Norm Abrams was famous for his book, Measure Twice, Cut Once. Uh, you know, there is, you know, there is some truth to that, you know, double check everything. Reading measurement marks incorrectly. Oh, yeah. Big one. Big, big one. I'll remember this.

Speaker 38:34

Yeah.

Speaker 1 38:34

Yeah.

Speaker 38:35

1964. So I got it.

Speaker 1 38:37

Yeah. What was that? Yeah. 24 to 30 seconds. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, I I think that's, you know, and then that's why I use measuring blocks. That's why I use story sticks. That's why I measure one piece of wood to another piece of wood. I don't have to remember, I don't have to interpret my mark. And that leads me to another big one. Learn the correct way to mark your works in progress. When we start a class and we we enforce this rule very severely for a couple of reasons, but we teach people how to use a maker's mark on a piece of wood. And we will probably have a whole show on this at one point. But what we see is people come in and they want to mark everything. They over there's pencil marks all over the board, right? And it's the same as measurements. Once you've got like 15 arrows on it, what does the arrow mean? Yep. Where the maker mark is a very simple one mark you can put on one piece of wood that dictates the end and the top. And it's an easy way of doing it. You should look it up. We won't go through it to this podcast because it's it's a little long, but look up maker's mark. You can go to Lost Art Press. He does a lot of talking about it. But it's a tool that professionals have perfected over hundreds of years to mark their work in progress and keep track of where their wood belongs. And it's not, you know, I I see some people mark up boards like you can't see the wood grain anymore because there's so much pencil marks on it. And the reason we enforce it in the class is one to try to teach you that it's a better way. But also if everybody's consistent, we can see that from a few feet away. Oh, yeah. And can see if someone's about to cut something wrong or make a mistake. So yeah, those are just a few. There's I could probably keep going on and on and on, but those are a few mistakes of people.

Speaker 40:24

Yeah, and kind of what comes to mind for me, deflection, is one that I've been bitten on a couple times of yeah, just not expecting the blade to shift even that little bit. I want to say more so with the miter saw than anything. Yeah.

Speaker 2 40:42

Yeah.

Speaker 40:43

And yeah, just getting really frustrated by that, thinking, all right, this is laid out, this is perfect. I go slow with it. I make sure the laser is on and I'm at the right side of where I want to cut, and then I do it and go relatively slow, but still there is enough deflection that I wasn't thinking of. And yeah, then it it's thrown off. And another one, this is my last one, but it I really opened my eyes on wood movement. I had I'm making some slats of decoration in my house, and I had a piece of several of black limba and then maple. So I was just it's making squares or long rectangles. The maple, when I ripped it down, sorry, I'll back up the board. I got a nice flat side on it on the joiner, and then from there went to the table saw and kept the same measurement just and just you know ripped a whole bunch down, and then I go back to look, and some of them are just super curved or or super cupped. And like before then I didn't realize the tension. There's that much tension. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 42:07

Yeah.

Speaker 42:08

And that was not too bad to get around of just playing them down a little bit more. Some of them that were more distorted became my short pieces where I just Yeah, cut them in the shorter links, they're not as bowed as they were.

Speaker 1 42:26

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

unknown 42:28

Exactly.

Next week and events

Speaker 1 42:29

All right. Well, we've run kind of long today, but it was a good one, I think. So yeah, I guess we can hit up real quick. What's our plans for the next week? Are we gonna be working in the shop, you think?

Speaker 42:39

Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm gonna actually right now, I'm gonna go see what I can do with this box and yeah, see about cutting out for these inlays at the very least, getting advice on that.

Speaker 2 42:52

Yeah.

Speaker 42:52

Because this might be a good topic for another time of multiple ways to do the same thing. Yeah. Like do I do this with a table saw or a router or a chisel?

Speaker 1 43:03

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm gonna go probably do nothing today, but over this weekend I'm gonna work on that bench and try to finish that table up. So we'll see how those two things go. And yeah, coming up with the joinery, we just published all of our fall classes. We haven't really publicized that we have. It's a good lineup this year. We've got the introduction to woodworking as always. We've got a new serving tray class, we have a new Craftsman style bench class, tool totes. What else do we have in there? Uh, some new wood turning classes. There's a segmented bowl turning class. And yeah, there's just a whole lot. So go check out the journey.club and see all that. There's also, it's kind of hidden away, but you can do it from the from the footer. There is a new section called What to Build Next, which is a nice stepladder of plans and projects that you can get on at the early stages and build them up through through more advanced work. And that's a that's a good thing. And that page has a lot of tool techniques on it and tools and all kinds of fun stuff. So it's a great page. I hope people find value in it. But I guess unless you got something else, that's it for this week.

Speaker 44:09

Yeah. Just go out and make something. Yeah. And check us out on all the social medias and in the blog and come by. Uh there's open house coming up here pretty soon, isn't there?

Speaker 1 44:19

We just had one last weekend, but you can come by any Saturday. There's usually somebody here. We are going to be at Good Neighbor Fest in Middleton, Wisconsin on the 28th and 29th of this month. And then Joinery Fest, that's probably the big one for us. That's our in-house one here. That's going to be on, if I remember this correctly, September 12th. And we're going to have a lot of great vendors here for that and demonstrations going on. You can see the shop and see a bunch of projects. It's a great time. Get some free food. And uh yeah. We'll see you in a couple weeks.