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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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).”
Dutch tool chest class on October 13, after three days of diligent work.
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!).
When I’m teaching,I get just enough of my work done on a given project only for demonstration purposes. On my fall front from last weekend, for example, I cut a rabbet on only one long-grain edge and one short-grain end, then handed over my tool to students. I’m hoping to get this thing completed before the end of the week…then have it and a few other projects ready to sell at our Nov. 23rd Open Day.
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).
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.
The interior surfaces of the new GoDrillas. So much room for activities!
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.
The following is excerpted from Dr. Jeffery Hill’s “Workshop Wound Care.” The book delves right to the heart of what you need to know when faced with common workshop injuries, from lacerations, to puncture wounds to material in the eye. Dr. Hill is an emergency room physician and an active woodworker. So he knows exactly the information a woodworker needs to know when it comes to injuries. And he presents information in a way that a non-medical professional can easily understand it.
There are a number of diseases that, due to their being very uncommonly encountered in the modern world, seem like quaint relics of antiquity. Diphtheria? Rubella? Mumps? Rabies? What even are those? There are a few diseases that have been completely eradicated (smallpox) or nearly completely eradicated (polio) thanks to sustained vaccination efforts. Tetanus, however, is here to stay on this earth through all of eternity regardless of our efforts at vaccination.
Why? Spores, that’s why
What is Tetanus?
Tetanus is a clinical condition caused by the tetanus toxin which produced by the bacteria Clostridium tetani. Clostridium tetani possesses the relatively uncommon ability to form spores (examples of other spore-forming bacteria include Clostridium botulinum, a.k.a. botulism, and Bacillus anthracis, a.k.a. anthrax).
Spores are exceptionally hardy bits of microbiology. Composed of a hard shell and just enough reproductive matter, they are typically produced when the bacteria run into rough times. A lack of nutrients, which would typically just kill off less fastidious bacteria, triggers C. tetani to produce these spores that can survive a lack of water, nutrients, presence of high amounts of radiation, freezing weather, boiling temps and even chemical disinfectants. Spores can remain viable in inhospitable environments for tens of thousands of years. C. tetani spores are most commonly found in soil, dust and manure, but can be found anywhere in the environment.
When tetanus spores find their way back to a hospitable environment they come alive and start to replicate, along the way producing tetanus toxin (awesomely named tetanospasmin). The tetanus toxin is taken up by the nervous system, ultimately ending up in the spinal cord and brain where it acts to block inhibitory signaling pathways. Because two negatives make a positive, the end result of this action is an excess of electrical transmission from the central nervous system to the muscles and severe muscle spasms.
Opisthotonus, which can be caused by tetanus, is a spasm of the muscles causing the head, neck and spine to arch backward.
These unopposed muscle contractions lead to the characteristic clinical manifestations of tetanus. “Lock jaw” is due to contraction of the jaw muscles. Contraction of the facial muscles results in “risus sardonicus,” a fixed smile/facial expression. And contraction of the back muscles results in severe arching of the back. But the neurotoxin doesn’t limit itself to the motor system; it can also lead to seizures and uncontrolledblood pressure (both high and low) and heart rate (also high and low).
If you have ever had a charley horse where your legs cramp up, you have a little taste of how terrifically painful muscle spasms can be. Now imagine that affecting your entire body. Also, because the tetanus toxin irreversibly binds with nerve cells, the uncontrolled nerve signals and muscle spasms continue until the body can grow new nerve endings (a process that is weeks to months long). Generalized tetanus can lead to broken bones, spasm of the respiratory muscles, and aspiration of stomach contents and food into the lungs. Ten to 20 percent of patients still die of tetanus despite modern medical therapies.
What Wounds are at High Risk for Tetanus Infection?
Tetanus infections don’t just come from rusty nails. In fact, all wounds – cuts, abrasions (both to the skin and eyes) and burns – are susceptible to tetanus infection. There are certain wounds, however, that are more prone to tetanus infection and create an environment where the tetanus bacteria will produce the tetanus toxin. Wounds that are dirty, puncture-type wounds and crush injuries are most at risk.
Logically, the more tetanus bacteria present in a wound, the higher the risk of infection. As such, injuries with significant contamination with soil are more likely to result in infection.
If the tetanus bacteria is pushed deep into the tissue, infection is more likely. Puncture wounds, in general, carry a higher risk of all types of wound infection. The narrow tract of a puncture wound is apt to quickly close over bacteria and other matter pushed deeply into the tissues. And, it is much more difficult to adequately clean at the time of injury, meaning it is much more difficult to use irrigation to decrease the number of bacteria present.
Because tetanus bacteria are more likely to grow and produce toxin in “devitalized” tissue, crush injuries are also highly susceptible to infection.
How does this translate to you, the woodworker? A scratch or minor cut from a chisel or knife is less risky. A injury from an axe or froe while breaking down green wood is more risky. (Though to reiterate: Any break in the skin carries a risk of tetanus infection.)
What About the Tetanus Vaccine?
The tetanus vaccine includes a component of the tetanus toxin called a toxoid. This toxoid is coupled with a diphtheria toxoid (Td) and often an acellular version of pertussis (TdaP).
As a side note, the risks of contracting diphtheria and pertussis in adulthood are sufficient enough that the administration of the whole package of TdaP is recommended by the CDC. Pertussis (whooping cough) can be common in older adults (often presenting as mild illness) and easily spread to incompletely vaccinated infants (often presenting as a severe respiratory illness). For this reason, if you are going to be around a new baby in the family (e.g. new grandparents), you’ll likely be asked to get a “tetanus booster” (though really you are boosting your pertussis immunity). Back to tetanus…
As with other vaccines, introducing the tetanus toxoid gives the body’s immune system a “wanted” poster of what the real toxin looks like, allowing the body to create neutralizing antibodies to the toxin. The typical vaccination schedule is for three doses of the vaccine to be administered at two months, four months, and six months of age, with boosters given around six to 12 months after the third dose, and again before entering kindergarten. Following that, boosters are recommended every 10 years. In the developed world, adherence to the recommended vaccination schedule is (thankfully) high, meaning that most people are “fully vaccinated” for tetanus through their childhood. It is not uncommon, however, for adults to miss out on their regular boosters. As a result of this, most cases of tetanus are reported in patients 50 years of age and older.
