AAW offers free student memberships

Today my first through 4th grade students will making sloyd trivets and finishing their model birds. Yesterday in the wood shop, I prepared material for boxes, cutting hundreds of parts to size, and I also made a box for Froebel Gift number 2, designed oversize to hold the objects for spinning. I'll show how that works later.

The American Association of Woodturners (AAW), deserves a post of their own. In their efforts to promote woodturning to a new generation they've adopted a clear position in relation to hands on learning, and offer free youth membership to their organization. If you teach woodturning, you can go to tiny.cc/AAWYouth for details. I am planning to get my students involved.

I am at that time of the year in which I am getting proposal materials out to magazines. One process that I think would make a nice short article is about the use of the sled to cut tenons. Many woodworkers have experience cutting tenons on the table saw using a large cast iron tenoning jig. They are expensive and difficult to set up, but worse, they do a very poor job of holding small parts. And just in case you are not stuck on making small boxes, this technique can work for larger tenons, too. The image below shows the simplicity of this technique.

To prove the usefulness of this method, I made parts for 8 deckles yesterday, which our Clear Spring art teacher requested so that our students can make their own paper.

Make, fix and create...