On Wednesday July 28 at 6.30 pm, shortly before the beginning of our first in-person general meeting in over a year at 7.00, you are invited to see Paul Duffield give a short presentation about hand tools and how they feature in the life of the SDFWA shop.
To give you a little background, during the forced inactivity of the COVID shutdowns the members of the shop found ways to maintain and enhance the SDFWA community that has arisen around the shop facility in the last four years.
Special interest groups that were already meeting started to meet on Zoom and new ones were formed that have revolved around public service woodwork projects such as building Little Free Libraries and a Design group that has designed and built an economical compact folding desk for children who have to study at home. The first desks produced are already in service!
Another Special interest group that was slated to debut at the first cancelled general meeting was the Hand Tool Group. We also started up on zoom and with a production crew of one, Paul Duffield has produced numerous videos about hand tools that are available to view on Youtube and the SDFWA website. More about this later….
During this time we also reviewed our education program and took the time to form an Education team. This team was tasked with forming a cohesive plan to expand and improve the quality and quantity of our class offerings once the COVID restrictions eased. You only have to go to the Education tab on the front page to see that we are offering a range of classes aimed at a wide array of different skill levels.
I am told almost daily by woodworkers, both new and experienced that they really like the idea of working with hand tools, but they have very little knowledge of how to sharpen them, let alone use them effectively.
They have often also heard that there is a great deal of joy and satisfaction to be had using these tools if you can just learn how to use them. The challenge is that there are few opportunities to learn these ancient skills in today’s machine centered world and it is hard to meet others who have a similar interest.
At the SDFWA shop that situation is changing. We have started a hand tool education program. Because most woodworking activities involve cutting, and a sharp blade is essential to effective cutting we decided to lay the foundation for this development with classes that focus on, you guessed it… sharpening and using your tools! We teach methods that enable you to be spend most of your time woodworking and very little time sharpening.
We have already held four, basic sharpening classes that are now a scheduled monthly event, and look out for a couple of new classes to be posted during the next few days.
Luther Shealy of Rob Cosman Woodworking and SDFWA will be teaching two separate classes later this month and in the first half of August. The first will be Plane Blade Sharpening and the other will be Plane Set Up and Use.
Now back to the Hand Tool Group and the general meeting. Half an hour before the main meeting at 7.00 pm Paul Duffield will be making a short informal presentation about hand tools and education as well as announcing an exciting hand tool build project that requires no previous hand tool skills. Hint… you could end up making and owning your own wooden plane.
If you have seen any of Paul’s video presentations, you may have noticed that his visual aids tend to be the tools he is talking about, often from different eras and countries. This evening at 6.30 will be no exception and you can be sure that he will bring along some interesting tools.