Luke Townsley's blog

I just signed up with www.adroll.com. I had been looking for a service like this and even pondered (very briefly) starting one for the community, so I was happy to come across it.

It offers a unique opportunity for those of you who are making and selling things at home or in a small shop as well as those like Joel with larger businesses to market those items within the hand tool woodworking community at reasonable rates.

As it stands now, we have several hundred websites in the hand/traditional tool community, many of which are serving ads that are too generic to be useful. For instance, there was recently a Google Adsense ad on this site for a CNC machine. I think you can see the problem.  read more »

I took a look at my web stats today for this site. The results are quite encouraging in that, for the last month, Internet Explorer accounted for just under 50% of all visits to my site.

For the uninitiated, that is big news to a web developer because IE is, well, awful to develop for. Basically, we have to develop for all of the standards compliant and up to date browsers and then figure out how to work around IE's brokenness.

Of course, IE7 is a significant improvement over the long neglected and horribly outdated IE6, but not nearly as good as just about every other major browser including Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, Epiphany, and now, Google's Chrome.

Anyway, to all of you who have seen the light, thanks. You just made my day.

To the 10% of you still using Internet Explorer 6, please do your part to make the world a better place. Upgrade your browser.

Get Firefox

Don't like Firefox?  read more »

These last nine months or so of running unpluggedshop.com have been interesting and profitable to me personally. I have enjoyed doing this site, and believe it fills a needed niche. I am not thinking about closing it, but I don't have the time or incentive to take it to the next level.

You see, I am having a lot of trouble keeping up with my "real" job, and would also like to spend more time woodworking and less time writing about it.

My point is that I would be willing to work through a transition, and help someone (whether a person, business, or organization) take unpluggedshop.com who could express a vision for the site that I like. I might even stick around after the transition if the new owner so desired.

Basically, I am looking for someone who is technically literate or willing to pay for quality development services (sorry, I am not for hire), and who will use the site to promote hand tool woodworking.  read more »

Got your attention, didn't I?

Well then, lend your attention to www.woodtreks.com.

You can thank me later.

Keith Cruickshank's video blog is the latest blog I am tracking here at www.unpluggedshop.com on the blog aggregator on the front page.

Oh, and don't forget to leave a comment or send an email, and let Keith know how much you appreciate his stuff.

Here in the Dominican Republic, we had Tropical Storm Fay pass over a week or two ago dumping about 15 inches of rain at my house. Today, we have Hurricane Gustav going over Port au Prince, Haiti and dumping an inordinate amount of rain here once again. Don't get me wrong, we need the rain, but let me explain my problem.

I have been working on flattening the sides and top of the English workbench I am building. Given that the glue up was fairly rough and I am using a Jack plane that I really don't like, it is a fairly big project even though the bench will only be 6 feet long.

My plane has a cheap iron in it (I have a nice Hock iron, but I am saving it for a woodie plane), and in the best of times I have to keep it waxed or oiled in storage and, I have to sharpen it at least every couple of hours when I am working the southern yellow pine for my bench.  read more »

I have been scratching my head for a while wondering where to start figuring out the various periods of furniture design. I just came across a chart that I want to share a link to.

While the timeline might not be terribly useful in and of itself, assuming it is reasonably accurate, it should provide a great jumping off place to do some further research on wikipedia, google, amazon.com or even at your local library or museum.

Go ahead over and check it out.

Doug Stowe has up a new article on the therapeutic value of creative manual labor such as hand tool woodworking. He has some food for thought that many of us can back up from personal experience even if we don't understand the technical and chemical processes involved.

Here is a quote from the article: "By getting lost in our work, transcending the sense of self, losing all track of time in our creative efforts we generate the same neurohormones that we excite through mind altering drugs and alcohol... We ignore the needs of our children for creative expression only to introduce and enforce their tragic addiction to other things."  read more »

It wasn't intentional. I didn't know. It was a mistake. Your money will be refunded as soon as your claim is processed by our customer service department located conveniently (for us) in a country that an English speaking person has never left alive.

Well, it isn't all that bad, but this website let you down. In particular, inadvertent alphabetical discrimination of the worst sort (ok, so you didn't get the pun, yes, it is a bit obscure, think: sort, lists... oh, nevermind) was practiced. It isn't bad enough that you always had to sit at the back of the class just because your name started with "X" or "Z". It isn't enough that we put you at the bottom of the list in the best of times. This time, you were left out completely if your name started with one of the latter letters of the alphabet and you were "listed" on one of our longer directory lists.  read more »

Here are the promised pictures of my earlier saw sharpening adventures.

Remember that I am not offering these pictures as the standard of excellence. They all still have fairly major defects, but they are all quite usable and, in my opinion, cut pretty nicely, particularly when compared to what they were before I worked on them. I expect to take care of some of the defects with further sharpenings at some point in the future.

Here is the HSB & Co. OVB rip saw:


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Back in the day when I did power tool woodworking (at the exclusion of hand tools), I never did feel the need to cut a mortise and tenon joint. Somehow, using hand tools, it just feels right to do it.

However, there is a problem. I have never done it and didn't know how to do it properly - with any kind of tools. I started to work cutting tenons for the base on the workbench I am making and somehow, it just didn't seem to be coming out right.

I took a break from that and started a little stool for my daughter to reach the kitchen sink. Somehow, it just seemed right to dovetail the legs into the ends. Also, I felt like I needed the practice before going any farther on my bench.

I was right. I DID need more practice. As it turns out, the stool will be usable for children, but it will hardly be pretty or even that strong. I realized that I needed more help. A LOT more help.  read more »

Starting with www.toolemera.com, The Village Carpenter, and Matt's Basement Workshop among others, I have been slowly adding new blogs to the aggregator on this site.

The aggregator displays the headlines from the source blogs for the last two weeks and provides a convenient link to the blog. Headlines are updated automatically and generally should be updated within three hours of when you post them.  read more »

These last few months, I have been slowly getting together some tools and rehabbing them. So far, I have four saws. One of them is a nice old rip saw that is about worn out (not much blade left), another is a Disston that might be about 50 years old. I also have an almost new and not-too-rusted Stanley backsaw that has a price tag on it of about US$12. Another saw that I haven't rehabilitated yet is a really old dovetail saw with damaged saw nuts and a handle that is worn out but still usable.

I have sharpened each of these saws once (except the dovetail saw). I filed the Stanley backsaw for a rip cut. It was my first ever try at sharpening a saw. I did this one without a proper saw vise, without proper lighting, and without any jigs or aids.  read more »

A site's usefulness is never measured by the number of links it maintains. If the number of links was what mattered, Wikipedia and Google would be among the most popular websites today. What was that, you said? Oh, ok. So Wikipedia and Google ARE very popular sites.

Anyway, whether or not this site is useful, you can decide for yourself, but we have reached a notable milestone in that according to Google's count on our Custom Search Engine, we are now linked to and indexing 300 sites with more to be added soon.

***Speaking of links, have you put a link on your site to this one yet?***

Although the directories have become a large part of this site, they really are not the focus. This site isn't about amassing huge numbers of links or even linking the whole known hand tool universe. The main goal of this site is to help new hand tool woodworkers get started and to encourage more people to get into hand tool woodworking.  read more »

My story goes like this. I was edge jointing some boards for my workbench. (Yes, I am still working on it, no it is not finished yet.) Of course, I was trying maintain a very sharp edge on my plane blade since I was having trouble with my plane, and since the yellow pine I was using was a bit contrary.

I have a set of Norton water stones that I bought new a few months ago. As I was progressing from the rough stone down through the 1,000 grit and 4,000 grit and to the 8,000 grit, I noticed that it seemed like no matter what I did, the finer grits were not properly honing the blade across its entire width.

I didn't suspect at first that the stone might not be flat since I had been religiously flattening it. However, after a bit of inspection, I finally figured out that it seemed like my stones were striking the blade differently. Finally, I pulled out a straightedge and checked the stone.  read more »

For those of you who didn't know, I am an American living with my wife and kids in the Caribbean in the Dominican Republic. I am working as a Baptist missionary planting a church in Santo Domingo.

Last week, we went to a beach town called Juan Dolio. It is located an hour or so east of the capital, Santo Domingo, and is a fairly popular tourist destination.

Around the area, there are a number of bateys, or sugar cane fields. Even today a lot of the cane is cut by hand by Haitian immigrant workers. One of the problems with sugar cane is that it is an extremely bulky material to handle.

I haven't been to any of the bateys when they were harvesting for several years, so I don't really know how they are doing it now, but carts like this one were used to haul the cane out of the fields to a light railroad or trucks or directly to a mill where it would be ground into something more manageable.  read more »