Update: Comments are now closed. Join us again on Nov. 16.
If you have a woodworking question, today is your lucky day. Chris and I are holding Open Wire between now and 5 p.m. Eastern.
How do you ask a question? Leave your question in the comments section, and we’ll do our best to answer it.
The next Open Wire is on Nov. 16.
– Fitz
I’m teaching four stick chair classes in Germany and Australia in 2025. Yes, it’s an American teaching a Welsh/Scottish/Irish form in places that are truly exotic for this humble chair form.
Here are details and links. First stop, Germany.
Comb-back Stick Chair With a Steambent Arm
July 7-11, 2025
Dictum, Niederalteich facility
This is the most ambitious chair to make in a class. Heck, I wouldn’t dare teach it anywhere else. But Dictum’s Niederalteich campus has a great steam box and – most importantly – incredibly good workshop technicians (Mattias and Wolfgang) who can make anything work. The classroom is in a converted barn in a monastery. It’s a beautiful and isolated place to take a class.
Irish Stick Lounge Chair
July 14-18, 2025
Dictum, Munich facility
This is one of my favorite chairs to build (I have two on the bench right now). It’s incredibly comfortable, and the joinery is perfect for a first-time chairmaker. This class is in Dictum’s Munich facility, which is across the hall from Dictum’s storefront in Munich. Peter runs the shop there, and it’s an excellent urban workshop. (Bring your family, and they will find lots to do in Munich.)
Second stop, Australia.
Seven-stick Comb-back Chair
October 6-10, 2025
Wood Dust, Melbourne
The Wood Dust people are bringing me (plus Michael Fortune and Matt Kenney) to Melbourne for a woodworking event. I’ll teach a five-day class in making a comb-back, and there are evening events in Melbourne as well. Tickets haven’t gone on sale yet, but the link will take you to the site that has more information.
Seven-stick Comb-back Chair
October 14-18, 2025
Wood Dust, Newrybar, NSW
After a couple days off and some travel, I’m teaching a second five-day class in making a comb-back in Newrybar. Tickets haven’t gone on sale yet, but the link will take you to the site that has more details.
Teaching overseas is difficult. Not just for me, but for the people who organize and execute these classes. Because of the difficulty, any one of these trips could be my last. Not because of me – my health is great, and I have plenty of energy. But because of the difficulty and expense of putting on a class with an instructor who has to travel 9,786 miles to get there.
— Christopher Schwarz
Yale Environment 360, an online magazine published at the Yale School of Environment, recently published a story titled “How Traffickers Got Away with the Biggest Rosewood Heist in History” by Zach St. George.
This story tells how 30,000 rosewood logs were illegally harvested in Madagascar and trafficked on a cargo ship to Singapore. And why they are now sitting in a warehouse, attracting termites.
According to the University of Oxford, “Timber harvested from rosewoods has been the world’s most trafficked wild product since 2005, accounting for 30-40% of the global illegal wildlife trade (more than all animal products put together).”
Many types are now critically endangered.
(For a deeper look, Yale Environment 360 published another article on rosewood in 2019, “The Rosewood Trade: An Illicit Trail from Forest to Furniture” by Sandy Ong and Edward Carver.)
In addition to the story of the heist, George’s article provides insight into why and how “the Rosewood Mafia” came to be.
Hat tip to Michael O’Brien for sending this article to us.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl
As I got ready to teach my Dutch tool chest class last weekend, I realized I was incredibly rusty as far as succinct instruction for this project. I checked my calendar, and I’m pretty sure the last time I taught this class in our shop was the weekend of May 6, 2022 – and the last time I taught it at all was at the Florida School of Woodwork in October of 2022. So it’s been two years since last I tried to cram all the instruction into just a few days.
Instead, I was busy expounding and expanding instruction in “Dutch Tool Chests,” which (if the printer deities are smiling upon me) will be in our warehouse in early November (and we’ll offer a pdf free with purchase for the first 30 days it’s on sale, just FYI, since a couple people have asked). In the book, I offer a brain dump on different ways to approach the various building steps, so that readers can choose what works best for their mindset and tool set.
Take rabbets, for example, which are cut to create a raised panel on the fall front and chest lid (and as practice for cutting a square rabbet in a low-risk decorative situation, where it’s OK if it’s slightly out of square!).
In the book, I mention the dado stack for those who liked a tailed approach, then cover at some length techniques for cutting a crisp rabbet with a skew rabbet plane, a straight rabbet plane or a shoulder plane (there are other hand-tool ways of course – but I teach what I know best).
In a short class, though, it simply isn’t possible to explore the options and offer choices/decisions. Instead I sharpen and set up ahead of time our Veritas skew rabbet planes (which are technically moving fillisters) for a 3/4-wide x 1/16″ deep cut, show the students how to use the tool (preferably without cutting myself on the corner of the blade while looking up and talking about the work instead of paying proper attention to what I’m doing), then send them off to do the work.
After filling almost 200 pages of “here’s lots of options,” it was difficult to remember to dial it back in the shop to what was possible to achieve in three days, with limited tool sets and varying skill sets among the students. But thank goodness I dusted off my in-person DTC teaching skills last weekend in our shop, where I know where to find everything. The next time I teach this tool chest will be in a few weeks in England, at the London IWF, where my own tool set will be severely limited and I’ll have no idea where to find anything.
And by the time I get back from England, I’m hopeful my book will be in the warehouse. Now I just have to not cut my signing fingers (I won’t – it’s always my left hand that gets cut by not paying attention to that pesky pokey-outie skew rabbet blade).
– Fitz
Good news: We now have 500 pristine-perfect GoDrillas in our warehouse, and we’re shipping them out as fast as you can order them.
Today ends our six-month saga with manufacturing difficulties with this tool. If you care about sob stories involving aluminum extrusions and custom lathe tooling, then this is the bedtime tale for you.
Earlier this year we received a batch of GoDrillas that would not accept a hex-shank drill bit. Things were just too tight. The manufacturer said they were in spec. We ate the cost of that run. We ordered a replacement batch. It was better, but still on the tight side. We could get hex-shank tooling in with a little effort. After a few go-rounds using these GoDrillas, things loosened up and the GoDrillas worked normally. Still, we were grumpy.
So we sold that batch at a deep discount.
Now we finally have GoDrillas that are perfect. We had to buy a $2,000 tool and add a step to the process to get here, but it was worth it. We all spent all day today packaging up GoDrillas and hex rods and instruction books, and they are ready to go.
If you have been waiting for these in-spec GoDrillas, the wait is over. You can order one here.
Thanks to Josh Cook, the mechanical designer for this tool, for figuring out the problem and getting a solution.
— Christopher Schwarz