February 23, 2002

To: Dick Morano

From: Dan Smullen

Subject: Minutes from Furniture SIG meeting of 2/6/02

Attendees: We had 30 people at Chuck Rinehart’s house for this meeting, including a two new people, Wayne Wessels and Rick Surace; welcome guys!

Next Meeting: Ward Donahue is our host for the March 6^th meeting. Ward has invited the saw blade supplier who does a lot of sharpening for Ward and others of us to give a talk about saw blades in general.

Other news:

· George Cooper asked about what might be the best 6” jointer for him to buy. The 6” long bed Powermatic was offered up, but some of our members have the 8” Grizzly, which costs about $750 and price/value wise is hard to beat. The 8” “professional” model from Delta has had a lot of problems according to Jackson Saw – almost all of them sold have something to “fix”. On the other hand, the Delta DJ-20 is a great 8” machine, weighs almost 600 lbs, and has a 43” infeed table with a 72” overall length. It’s a honey, but is priced at $1200 - $1400, depending on whether or not it is purchased at a Delta sale at Jackson, etc.

· Five woodworkers from our area went to the Williamsburg conference in early January. Attendees are immersed in 18^th century techniques and demonstrations help convey the manual methods of work of that era. This year featured tables, with a speaker actually making a good-sized turning with the help of a lathe powered by willing participants from the audience. Most of the people showing these techniques had attended the Bennett School of woodworking. Next year’s conference, if I heard right, is going to be on finishing. The website to check out the conference and for more info about this year’s, is: http://www.history.org/history/institute/0201_3_prog.htm

Above: Trimming larger amounts of wood from the chair with a large chisel Left: Headley shows the audience one of his spokeshaves, made by the craftsmen at Colonial Williamsburg

· John Britton can get the special segmented belts which reduce vibration and can be sized at will for any application at Grainger courtesy of a healthy discount. Examples:

o 60” A belt $20

o 25’ A belt $91

o 25’ B belt $115

The belting is $6.40 per foot in catalogs. See John if interested at 334-6840.

Program:

[Since this evening was to be a hands-on event, we moved to the program part a little earlier than usual]

Dave Ingalls and Chuck Rinehart explained the fine points of making the tapered sliding dovetail jig featured in American Woodworker’s December 1996 edition. Several members brought the kit of materials needed to build the jig, and Chuck’s shop was abuzz with activity as folks started making the jigs under the guidance of Chuck and Dave, who had each made a jig prior to the meeting and did a self-critique for us along the way. One option is to taper both sides of the jig vs tapering only one side. Personal preference, I guess, as to which is better – if tapered equally it should be possible to flip the jig, centering on the dovetail guide in the "socket" part of the jig. On the other hand, there is so little physical difference between the options that no one could tell which way was used – we're only dealing with 0.015" over the width of the partition being added!

It's hard to describe in words exactly what was taking place, but the article would help clarify things for anyone reading this. If you don't have that edition in your magazine collection, contact Dave Ingalls or me and we can get you a copy.

Happy woodworking!

Dan