I’ve Never Met A Woodworker I Didn’t Like

I went to the Brown Tool Show last week and had a good time.  The turnout was a bit low on both the buyer and seller side and I struck out on tools.  I’m really looking for a few specific molding plane profiles and a good panel gauge but had no luck.  I did find a great Ebony panel gauge for $250 but that seemed a bit extreme.  One of the molding plane profiles I’m looking for, a thumbnail table edge, may not even exist as I have never seen one.  I may have to make my own some day.

Despite not finding anything I was looking for, I had great conversations with the sellers and other woodworkers at the show.  I even met a guy named Tim Allen who was telling me about his monstrous 26″ radial arm saw with a 7 HP motor!  I’m not making this up, I wanted to get him to grunt for me, but he didn’t like that suggestion.

The real highlight of this trip up to PA however was after the show when I met my friends Mark Hochstein (@Loogie on Twitter) and none other than the famous Kari Hultman of The Village Carpenter.  Kari had us over to dinner at her house and we had a great time talking about just about everything with plenty of woodworking thrown in.  For dessert we got to hang out in Kari’s shop and play with her new googly eye magnifier glasses and all of her amazing tools. There is so much to see and play with in Kari’s shop but one thing that caught my eye was her sawbench.  Kari will tell you that this is certainly not an original design as you will find versions of it all over the internet.  The timing for me however was perfect as I was just finishing up the filming of my second lesson in The Hand Tool School that was all about sawing.  So of course being a blogger I had to snap a photo to share with you all.

I was planning on building a sawbench as the project for my sawing lesson but was thinking of something more rustic with Windsor chair principles (round tenons with wedges).   However, as a project designed for putting sawing skills to work this just wouldn’t cut it (bad pun I know).  So I decided to adopt her design and build a bench for the school much like it.  So here is my own bucolic shot at the end of a fulfilling hand tool day and my new sawbench.

It is nice to finally have a sawbench that is the right height for me and I really like the ripping notch all the way down the middle.  Plus since it is based on a 5 board bench it is really quick and easy to assemble.  It was built only with the tools you see here and a 5 ppi rip saw that is not pictured.  It is a great, quick project that you can build in a few hours.  I built mine in about 4 and I was filming the whole process.

Thanks Kari as always for the endless inspiration, great conversation, and good food!