Splinters with Gary Rogowski

Slow down, I’m in a hurry.

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.

Chisels, the wedge, the most important hand tool in the shop.

This is a list of the top machines that a furniture maker needs in the shop.

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.

Forgetting your last mistake.

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 an...

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.

This April Fool’s Day lecture is on the value of working out with your woodworking.

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.

All block planes are not created equal, even ones with sentimental value.

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?