Day 3: More on bending; mortising; slat theory

For bending, you’re looking for straight grain, it doesn’t matter if it’s flat-sawn, rift-sawn, or quarter-sawn. The face (front) of the bent leg should be flat sawn.

For cherry and walnut, rung precision is critical if you’re also using them for rungs. For rungs, Boggs said soft maple is too soft, but hard maple’s okay. For one-species chairs, he recommends: oak, hickory, ash, cherry, hard maple. He’s never tried exotics for rungs.

Boggs uses Titebond 2 as an end grain sealer on wet wood after cutting off any visible checks. He used to use anchorseal, but it can be VERY slippery on (and is difficult to remove from) concrete floors, and was just too hazardous (because of the slipperiness).

About the sample one of his chairs brought in, in curly hickory: “This chair is a gnarly, difficult wood and I thought it was just perfect for its owner.”

Tenons at the end of each seat slat are 22-30 degrees off the chord line between the mortises. Both tenons need to be the same angle. If your seat slat is unevenly bent, try moving the center of the slat to the left or right to adjust the curve (this is one reason why he cuts these oversize — to givee som play room).

If the curve of the slats are too deep, it pinches the shoulder. If you have to err, err on the side of making the curve too shallow. For a post-and-rung chair, 25 degrees works well. Oh, and to straighten out a slat: push down. That’s all, really. Be careful NOT to push down before the chair’s assembled.

Cut the slats to different curves so all four tenon angles are the same; otherwise each slat would have different angles.

Boggs trims the back rungs after assembly to get a drop in the rear seat as that is more comfortable than a seat that’s straight across.

For the chair back above the seat, 95 – 100 degrees from the seat is typical.

18-19″ above the seat is as tall as you can support with slats. Thus, the useful height of a dining chair is 36″, but this height is perceived as “not majestic enough” for dining room chairs. When he added a third rung (and 2″ overall), Boggs started selling more chairs at a time, because they weren’t just settin’ chairs (as he calls them), but being used as dining room chairs.

As Phil from South Africa put it: a shorter chair is less formal.

After that, we all got busy chopping our leg mortises. Boggs did (in about 10 minutes, and giving explanations at that) what it took me two hours to accomplish.

2 p.m. “Time for Chapter 14. Put all your weapons away and allow me to be the center of attention.” We all put our mortising chisels down. 🙂

And then a long lecture that I won’t do justice to commenced. I’ll do my best, and I’m writing this down as much as for me as for you, because I need to know how to reproduce it when making additional chairs later.

Note before proceeding through numbered steps: Cut and fit your top slat before starting on your bottom slat. If you don’t do it that way and make an error in your top slat, you can’t easily make it into a bottom slat unless you’re making multiple chairs.

So how do you know what angle your seat slats are?

1) Draw a line that’s the spacing of the chair rungs. Put the slat on there until it bisects the line at the same length as the rear tenon. Draw the first bit of the inside curve, then measure the angle of that curve at the point at which it meets the line (on each side; they may be different). Note that it’s got to be the beginning of the curve, because the angle gets more acute as you get further from the line defining the chord.

1a) Now, measure that angle. For our purposes, it was 25 degrees, so when you see that number in the following instructions, you can substitute your own result. Draw it onto the paper, then also draw a right angle outward. This should be where your legs fit.

2) Next, make a jig. It should hold the legs so that they’re splayed at the correct angle (in our case, 25 degrees) so that the leg mortises will come in square to the leg. (If you look at the [url=http://flickr.com/photos/muhe-e/sets/72157594229899329/]paper diagram in my flickr photostream[/url], you’ll find it easier than if I explain it) Clamp the rear legs in the jig, and then you’re ready for the following half-billion steps.

3) Measure inside depth between legs at the bottom front of each mortise. Easiest using a folding extension rule. Don’t measure the depth of the mortises at this point, just how far it is between them.

4) Transfer the lengths onto paper.

5) Draw 25 degree angle (facing the starting one) for each slat length.

6) Find a good location on each slat for the curve and mark the slat ends from that line. This is just a starting point for layout.

7) Draw a line through each mark and perpendicular to slat bottom. These aren’t final lines, but the bottom corners of the slat will be somewhere along these lines.

8) Mark each mortise with a letter and carefully measure its height and depth. For depth, make sure you get the minimum depth. Since the leg is 1-5/8″ wide, in an ideal world, the mortise would be between 1 and 1-1/4″, however most of us didn’t get that far in the stated time (especially me, I was the slow mortiser).

9) Determine where on the slat you want the top and/or bottom. In part, this will depend on how much “belly” curve you want (Boggs uses 3/8″), and how much curve you want on the top (Silly me, I used 3/8″ there, too. Bad me. Tired me.)

10) Mark the starting point on the line where the slat bottom begins or ends. The slat top will depend on the mortise height; there is no shoulder on this mortise (so you’ve got to be very, very good).

11) With the legs in the jig and a slat centered on marks made in step six, and holding the slat lined up with the bottom of the mortise, have a partner mark each side’s bevel angle on the back. Set your bevel gauge to one and check the other. If they’re the same, you’re golden. If not, re-set your bevel gauge to split the difference between the two angles.

12) Take that bevel gauge and mark from the bottom of each slat upwards the mortise height on each side (I didn’t ask what to do about uneven mortises, btw. Chop better.)

13) Then mark the mortise depth on the outside of those lines to form the tenon.

14) Take two spring clamps and a flexible stick (like a dowel) and lay out the top and bottom of the slat profile. The profile for the top should extend to the end of the mortise. For the jig that occurred at the tenon’s bottom, it should be removed because it can break off and possibly cause a worse split.

15) Cut the slat using the method of your choice (bow saw, coping saw, band saw, drawknife, alien space ship…). For Boggs, the drawknife is faster than the band saw….

16) Shave off about .002″ off the tenon face on each side. Remember that curve? The tenon isn’t flat, but the mortise is. Shaving the face will help correct for that. When I say “shave,” I mean using a block plane, not a spokeshave. If you’re really good with a spokeshave, you certainly could do it this way.

17) Shave down the back until the slat fits into the mortise (and trim the tenon tops and bottoms if required, too.). You fit slats from the back for the simple reason that convex surfaces are easier to plane. Repeat with other tenon.

18) Repeat with other slat.

19) Now they should fit into the rear legs and when the tenons are seated to the depth of the lines drawn in step 12, your rear legs should be as far apart as the rungs want them to be. However, chairs being chairs, they may no longer be at the 25 degree angle you started with. This is fine. From this point on, we’re dealing with reality, not theory. As Boggs said when another classmate faced this problem: “According to the chair, the jig is wrong. But you can’t trust those chairs,” he added with a grin.

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Day 1 recap additions:

Brian said that he started his first shop for $50. Soon after that, he was laid off, and he never did bother getting another job, because he was soon making money doing woodworking.

He also gave a rule of thumb (though he noted it worked mostly for domestic hardwood) that below 20-25% moisture content, for each 2% loss in moisture content, you lose about 1% of dimension.

When making a chair, ideally, the growth rings of the legs should be aimed around the chair pretty much like they are on a tree. For rungs, the medullary rays should be vertical and growth rings horizontal because of how seasonal expansion occurs.

One guy asked about why the form went on the outside of the curve on a steam bend. Honestly, it never occurred to me to ask, but lest it save someone else from the same issue, here’s the reason: because if you’re starting a bend on a concave curve, you’re only able to bend at the very ends of the piece, which is not actually where you need the bend. If you start on a convex piece, you’ll bend from the part that needs bending.

I also never quite got why sometimes straps are used for steambending, except for large or complex bends where they are required. Basically, wood compresses better than it expands; if you put blocks on the end and a strap around the bend, you’re compressing the front rather than expanding it, so this would lead to fewer bending failures.

Long, thin pieces may need side support for a bend, or a wraparound support like tape.

Day 2: Recovery from Tragedy

I got in early to fix my horse and hey, it worked! I think I learned more from fixing my mistake.

We started with our lecture about sharpening, and Brian got into the various similarities and differences between how drawknives, spokeshaves, and planes cut. He was trying to describe a bench plane without having one, so I offered up the LN 5-1/2. He then started talking about the camber on some blades, and so I showed the Knight scrub plane I also brought. Several people looked at it. Brian asked who made it and I told him, then he said, “Oh, he made those too,” pointing to a shelf with several Knight planes at the front of the class. Guess I’ll try those out before I go home. 🙂

Part of the lecture about sharpness and cutting angle: You can prevent tearing (with a drawknife) by taking a light enough cut. The thinner the chip, the less pressure it’ll take. The lighter the cut, the smoother the surface (of course, this is pretty much true for any tool, powered or not). You want the lowest angle that’s comfortable for your work and stays sharp as long as possible. For finish work, you want a higher angle. The harder the wood, the higher angle required. The higher the angle, the more it’ll wear you out (like a york pitch plane, just harder to push).

Skewing a drawknife lowers the effective angle of cut and also increases the length of sole supporting the work.

In discussing sharpening, there was a funny moment. Brian said, “Some people use glass glued down to sandpaper,” then chuckled because he’d said it backwards.

One of my classmates quipped, “Which side up?”

Boggs quipped back, “Depends on how long you want to take.” I love quick wit.

Later, as he was having issues with a drawing on the blackboard, someone asked if a whiteboard would be better. Brian said, “No matter what you give me to work with, I’m going to gripe about it.”

Another classmate this time, “You need a better back bevel on your marker.” (Everyone busted up at this one, because we’d had a long talk about microbevels and back bevels)

One of Brian’s rules about skewing drawknives and spokeshaves: “Every time I can skew a tool, I will.” He also pointed out that beginners tended to use just one part of a drawknife or spokeshave, and that led to uneven wear.

We got some practice then shaping the front legs in, and I found my hand cramping a lot with the drawknife. The handles were uncomfortable, but I think it was just my unfamiliarity with the tool that caused most of the problems.

Spokeshaves get darn hot during use, which surprised me. Boggs says that his sometimes get too hot to hold, which is one reason he’s got so many. How many? His shaving horse is within reach of a wall where he’s got two rows of a bunch of spokeshaves, including four of the LN flat ones (one set up as a scraper, plus three different setups for depth-of-cut), two round-bottom ones (one set up as a scraper). They each have different handles so he can tell them apart. In addition to these, he’s got a number of vintage shaves.

Boggs then went to demonstrate some point, and managed to knock over the shaving horse while trying to get on it. “You’d think I’d do better than that, coming from horse country and all.” He gave a good demo, and after he’d flipped his spokeshave in the air a few times, someone asked him if he did that with drawknives too. This got a good chuckle out of the class. Seriously, though, one of the things he worked on with the LN Boggs shave was to get good balance for being able to flip it, as well as ability to use it one-handed. He also talked about his frustration with traditional adjusters and why his isn’t set up the same way.

After lunch, we went on to practicing mortises for the next day. I’ve only ever chopped a few, actually, because my hand tools class teacher prepped them for us using a router. Someone asked why we weren’t using a machine (e.g. a hollow-chisel mortiser), and Boggs pointed out that they really weren’t terribly suitable for round work.

When sharpening, hold the mortise chisel’s handle weight with your pinky so the weight of the handle doesn’t skew the chisel.

For a mortise chisel, if the edge isn’t square to the sides, the chisel may lean to one side or the other in a cut, causing the mortise to be out of square.

One of the primary rules of mortise chopping: don’t pry your chips loose, only pry your loose chips. It’s probably easier to clear out chips with a smaller chisel.

Even though Boggs has done many mortises, before he does a real one in a chair, he always does a practice one. At one point, he was the one chopping mortises and was doing as many as 90 in a single day.

After our Fun With Mortises, we got all our back legs out of the solar kilns and pulled them out of the forms. I found that mine were well and truly lodged in, so I used a smaller dowel and a dead blow hammer to get them out.

Some of the guys got a lot of springback, but my legs had nearly none. The poor guy who’d bent his leg the wrong way the first time, well, that leg failed. He was really depressed about the split, and Brian said, “It’s only wood deep.” Heh.

In that case, since it was the back that was split, Brian’s solution was to taper not only the front of the rear chair legs, but also the back, removing the split. He got on the shaving horse and fixed the leg.

For the rest of us, we had to check to make sure that our legs weren’t still overbent. For correcting the curve, we just put a couple of blocks on the end of a bench and unbent it manually. Took most of my weight to do that (and a few tries, too). Boggs wanted to make sure that our legs were evenly bent, which is more important than how bent they were. I didn’t get to see what the legs looked like for the guys who’d had a lot of springback.

I finally got comfortable with my drawknife, at least somewhat. The hands started cramping less frequently. I worried about the way I held it, because it seemed to want thumb pressure behind the cutting edge. Sure enough, when I went over a bump, the work caught on the right side and my left thumb got a small cut. I patched it with cyanoacrylate glue and went on, though I realized I was probably not awake enough to continue working with a drawknife. 🙂

Oh, almost forgot. Pictures can be found here.

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Day 1: And then tragedy struck

Since I was so exhausted I couldn’t think Sunday night, I deferred the few remaining tasks until Monday morning. I got up at 6 a.m. and went out to my car for a couple items I’d need.

I had several choices of glue I’d brought with me, but the late hour pretty much doomed me to 5-minute epoxy. While one can use coffee cup lids as a mixing platform for said epoxy, coffee stirrers proved to be a inadequate for thorough application.

I did take pictures of the fully assembled horse, then set off for the class. I finished. Go, me!

I was worried about how the horse would fit in the car with the new assembly, but didn’t think about stresses.

Unfortunately, this was fatal: the dowels I’d just epoxied less than an hour before failed. Fortunately, as I said, a coffee stirrer doesn’t make the best epoxy applicator.

So I arrive to class on time, but am harried, and unload then repark my car, arriving in at exactly 9 a.m. I notice everyone else has a Boggs-style horse except for one semi-styled based on his and half- styled on a more traditional horse.

Everyone introduces themselves. A bunch of us are from California, though I’m the furthest north, several from Oregon and Washington, one from Nevada, and one guy (Phil) came all the way from South Africa for this class and the Windsor class the following week.

I sit down, fiddle with a piece of my horse, relieved that my glue joints did give with a reasonable amount of force. In one case, the joint was too tight to get significant epoxy in the joint and thus was glue-starved; in the other, there was too much gap and too little glue to fill it. Regardless, I was lucky, because that meant the fix was easy.

Initially, I thought about dowels, then realized I should just use threaded rods as a temporary fix, then re-drill the holes out when I had access to a drill press. Everyone else used either 5/8″ or 3/4″ dowels, which would have been my first choice (I even have a lot of 3/4″ dowels), however, my drill wouldn’t drive the 3/4″ bit I happened to have, and I didn’t want to do all of them with a brace (especially being such a newbie with one), so I stepped the dowels down to the next size I had an appropriate bit for: 3/8″.

Needless to say, I was a bit distracted by the morning’s failure, but I tried not to let it get to me.

Brian talked about the goals for each day of the class, which I dutifully took down in my notebook, but I left that in the classroom, so this is without notes.

One of the things he did emphasize, though, was that he recommended that we do every step, and not do everything perfectly. As he said, if we were working on it on our own, we’d take more time, but as class time was limited, we should adjust our workmanship downward. Don’t make everything perfect. Learn what you can.

Monday’s goal in the class was to steam bend all parts, so Brian talked a lot about how wood worked and how steambending works.

We selected our rear leg pieces, then bandsawed off the taper on the front (which starts not far above the rear rungs and goes to the top). We then made the back half “octagonal” (half-octagonal?) with the bandsaw and a vee jig.

Because the piece needed to be fairly smooth to bend well, we then planed down the taper surface to remove the band saw marks. I started out behind (fretting over the shaving horse), so Brian pitched in and planed my other leg flat. Day-um, he’s fast with a plane.

Then lunch was delivered and all work stopped. I discovered that I really really needed to be drinking more water, so I tried to make up for my earlier dehydration by drinking nearly a quart.

About this time, the steamer was ready, gurgling away (but not yet fully hot, because it’s safer to put the wood in when it’s not), and we stacked our legs in (having first put our initials on the bottom of our legs).

After that, Brian talked about the theory of bending and bending forms more, and a lot of people asked questions, some of which I wrote down in my notebook. One I recall was about Shaker oval boxes and why the steam time is so short (typically 15 minutes soaked in hot water rather than steamed). Brian said he wasn’t certain, but suspected that the wood for Shaker boxes didn’t become fully plasticized the way a steam bend would, rather they got just flexible enough to bend around the form. They didn’t need to retain the shape; the drying form and the tacks helped them.

Okay, I’m a heavy person, so one of the things I feared was breaking the wood when using the bending form. Boy was I wrong! Not only didn’t I break it, I actually needed a little bit of extra help to get it fully bent. I suspect this problem is more due to my overall lack of arm strength; I simply couldn’t bear enough of my weight onto the wood to fully engage it onto the form. Fortunately, there were other people around, but it is something I will have to handle differently and plan for if I’m doing this by myself.

Apparently, people who do a lot of steam bending, Brian included, have a commercial sauna for same. The mfr also sells a lot of them to people who make hockey sticks. Not something I would have expected, eh?

While we were waiting for the slats to heat up, and during a lull when other people were doing other tasks, I asked Gary Rogowski where the nearest hardware store was and decided to take a side trip there so I could pick up the parts for the horse repair and be done with it.

So, side trip to Wink’s, which is an awesome, awesome hardware store. It’s kind of like an auto parts store — you ask for the hardware and they find it for you. When I wanted to double-check how large the nuts were (outside diameter), the guy whips out his little gauge to check. I was going to need a hacksaw. I didn’t realize the guy had gotten one, so I saw they had a Starrett one hanging up and I selected it.

“Oh, you want the Cadillac,” he says.

“I have a fondness for Starrett,” I say. That’s when he mentions that the gauges they use are also Starretts. I immediately heart them. The other guy up at the counter is being helped with a more complex problem. The woman helping him is suggesting intelligent possibilities for his design problem. Not just a bolt pushed out the door, a whole freakin’ service to solve customer’s problems. Imagine that.

I go to pay, and the clerk asked if I owned the PT in the lot. I said that I did, and he said that my front passenger tire was low (and it was). So, not just great hardware service, but great human service too.

I get back to class and Brian’s just gathering everyone back to talk about drawknives and drawknife safety. Basically, he said, drawknives caused more blood loss, more stitches, and more people going home early than all other tools combined. Keep your drawknife covered. Don’t put it down near ANYTHING else — frequently, the injuries occurred while reaching for something near the drawknife. Obviously, I need a better cover for mine….

Speaking of which, my biggest disappointment today, which will sound silly to some of you. I was secretly hoping that Brian would be bringing some unreleased LN kit, specifically in the form of drawknives and the like. Nope. In fact, he had none at all. Some of us brought stupid little carver’s drawknives. One guy had the Barr medium, which Brian thought was way too big. I believe someone else had a Curry, same problem. Boggs pointed out that most drawknives weren’t made for chairmaking and were balanced for different applications. Never knew that.

So, by this time, the chair slats were ready, so another round-robin of bending started. Because it’s easier, Boggs suggested we bend one side first, then the other, then bend in the middle, as it’s much easier to get a complete curve. One poor soul had the misfortune to break three chair slats in a row. In one case, he was bending it only in the middle, but other than that, there wasn’t any obvious reason (that I saw) in his technique that would cause failure. Once we’d held the slat to the bending form for 20 seconds, we then put it into a form for drying. Basically, this consisted of a plywood board with two boards battened to it, each cut with a 45 degree edge (bevel to the inside, of course). The battens were 1″ closer together than the slats were long. Interestingly, on a previous occasion, I’d calculated the back bending distance at 1.07″, so it’s good to know that my calculations were pretty close.

Once we finished with the bending, we were done. I was exhausted (too little sleep three days in a row, tired from the agony of defeat.

I went to find a gas station, but got turned around and wound up going south rather than north. Found a little tire store that was happy to put air in my tires. Gratis. I wish I remembered where I was so I could tell you more about how cool they were.

When I got to my hotel, I needed a nap, so I picked up some of the complimentary orange chamomile tea and snuck up to my room.

Now it’s dinner time. Tomorrow, I’ll go in an hour early and put the rod and bolts on so I can use my shaving horse. Wish me good healing thoughts, please.

Oh, wait, I forgot one thing. I’d been dreading one aspect of this class: the fact that we were also going to use hickory. As it turns out, the hickory rungs were already prepped for us. Boggs used to have students do the rungs themselves, but he said they looked dead by the end of the week, and he figured they weren’t learning anything additional by doing the rungs themselves. Go, Brian! We’re also using maple instead of the cherry I’d hoped for, but that’s cool. This stock is air dried from a tree Brian felled and sawed for best chairmaking yield, which isn’t the same as best clear lumber yield.

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This is a pent-up rant that’s been waiting for a while, but bear with me.

Last time I had to contact our state government’s Employment Development Department by phone, I had to “Press 1 for English.”

Now, really, does that make any sense at all? Shouldn’t English be the default? Especially when there’s separate phone numbers for other languages?

I mean, it might be A Clue that if you don’t happen to speak English and you call the English phone line, maybe you should press 1 and get some message like, “Well, maybe if you learned English (or one of the other supported languages), you might not be unemployed.”

Your tax dollars at work, making the UI harder for everyone.

I’m reminded, as an aside, of Nick Moffitt’s response when being panhandled, “I’m sorry, but I don’t speak a word of English.” Still makes me laugh.

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Going to be going to Northwest Woodworking School for a week for a class. I’m really looking forward to studying for a week with Brian Boggs. Traditional chairmaking is still very much in vogue, and I’ll be interested to see How Things Are Done.

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I’m going to join the throngs of people who are sad about Malan being out. He not only has some good ideas of design, he also has heart. Unlike Vincent, he also had the grace to point out that of his team, he should be the one who would be out because it was his vision.

Last year, the judges called Santino a coward when he was team lead and suggested one of his teammates be the one eliminated. But this year Vincent gets a pass? What’s up with that?

The only thing that should have saved Vincent was the fact that Tara Conner happened to like his Joan Jetson knockoff dress. His dissing of Angela was not only unprofessional, it showed that he didn’t do his job as team lead. True, Angela was ineffective, but she did try to collaborate, which is more than Vincent did.

In the end, Vincent had a badly-constructed garment, a horrible experience (“worst day of my life” unbelievable), and no one but himself to blame for it. It’s obvious why Vincent had to leave fashion before: he can’t get along with people, and he hasn’t learned.

A lot of people disagree with the winner, but it really wasn’t about the best dress, it was about the most appropriate dress for Tara, and I think Kayne and Robert really nailed it.

Edited to add:

Thanks to Vincent’s commentary on Blogging Project Runway, I’m going to retract my criticism of Vincent above. Also, at the time I wrote the above post, there were a few bits of the episode I missed because I was out of the room (like where Angela was lobbying Kayne), nor had I seen the first episode yet.

Given that, I’m with 60+% of the other Project Runway fans that Angela should have been the one axed (about 20+% think it should have been Vincent, and 5% Malan, but Malan has shown himself to be a surprising fan favorite). The presentation of a design was also a part of the challenge, and she didn’t present one too. While neither Vincent nor Angela were shown as being good at teamwork, I think the episode’s editing was unfairly harsh on Vincent. That said, it’s a show, you know? Editing must go on.

Having looked at Angela’s web site, and read up a bit more, I genuinely think that Angela is insufficiently talented for PR. It’s possible that she may surprise me — it’s happened before.

Thanks for the corrections, Vincent.

As Tim would say, carry on.

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Shopify has been touted as one of those Rails apps that’s going to change the face of the web. I don’t think so, and my comments about why it wasn’t appropriate for me (for fuzzyorange.com) went completely unanswered.

Since others may be considering shopify, here’s my critique:

1. There’s no easy way to charge tax only in one vicinity, but not others. In the US, if you charge tax in your state, you may not charge it in others. Canada, where Shopify was developed, has both a national GST and a provincial one, so its tax structure is fundamentally different.
2. There’s no practical way to charge actual cost for shipping. But that’s what I do already (though I ship priority mail and charge for the median zone price for that weight with an estimate of box and packing material weight). In shopify, shipping rates are a function of state. Priority mail rates do not break down by state, but rather by zip code ranges. Frequently, these do not follow state boundaries. Yet, with web services, calculating actual cost should be easy, right?
3. Most e-commerce sites are poorly designed for people selling one-offs. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting a lot (because it is fairly unusual), but sometimes a store consists entirely of one-offs. Like mine.
4. No API, thus no easy way to develop add-on tools, e.g. bulk info uploaders, especially handy for those of us selling one-offs.

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I’m writing about my annual thought-experiment, so that some of you can play. I’m posting early so that the Canadians can also play on Canada Day.

Given the recent near-pass on the anti-flag-burning law, I’d like to propose the following: if you happen to see anyone wearing a flag or “USA” or anything like that over the next few days — ask them where said garment or accessory was made. (In my experience, they don’t know. I’ve never seen one actually worn that was made in the US, fwiw.)

Personally, I’m far more tired of people wearing “patriotic” gear made in some sweatshop in a third world country than I ever could be of people burning the flag. It’s faux national pride, and I think it’s time we called attention to it.

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It’s funny how you can feel a great sense of loss when someone dies that you’ve never met — and I wonder, given the number of conventions I’ve been to, how it came to be that I’d never met him. Some of my favorite books were published by Baen.

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My story, “A Sword Called Rhonda,” was published in the popular Chicks in Chainmail series from Baen books. Unfortunately, Jim’s had a stroke. While we’re all pulling for him, strokes are very serious things, especially when they leave someone in a coma for days like Jim has. Having seen my late husband in a coma from a stroke, I have at least some sense of what everyone’s going through, though grief is very personal.

From the update Patrick Nielsen Hayden forwarded, it sounds like it is Very Bad News.

So, in the spirit of Esther Friesner (the Chicks editor), we definitely want the prayers and hamster wheels spinning on this.

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Well, I missed it (busy doing things I couldn’t move in time), but I thought I’d see who used which plugins for Railsday, just to see if there were any cool new ones.
Here’s the list. (deleted because outdated)
I got it by checking out the source for all the projects and trawling through the vendor/plugins directories.

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Well, Woodworking Online is a blog about Woodworking, and the WoodNet forum thread of the week happens to be the one I started about issues with the wooden plane I made.

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Yesterday, I went up to the city to spend time at Geoffrey Grosenbach’s Rails workshop, offered by Carson Workshops. While I was already better-versed in Rails than most anyone there, there’s always things you pick up from other people, and it was an excellent recharger for the mental batteries.

I highly recommend anyone new to Rails go to the workshop when possible.

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Been fighting one off for nearly a week. Need more sleep.

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As Rick would say, “Conceptual humour at its finest.”

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