Luke Townsley's blog

Many of you in the US are familiar with the unique video rental service SmartFlix.com offers.

They are putting on their first woodworking contest. You have until October 10 to get in your entry and could win $250.

Voting will start on October 11.

I have been initiated; I broke my first chisel handle.

I was chopping deep mortises with a 1" Lee Valley plastic handled chisel. I was beating the poor thing. While I wasn't using a heavy mallet, I am a 200 pound guy and it was getting enough of a beating that the chisel got quite warm at times which may have softened the plastic. Anyway, about halfway through the fifth mortise, it gave way.

I really wasn't trying to break the handle, honest. I thought it would hold up to the abuse, but between the chopping and levering out the chips, it just didn't make it.  read more »

I am offering registered users the chance to post ads and notices for free. Registering is also easy and free.

Currently, the functionality is very simple and straightforward. Ads are good for 30 days and are renewable by going in to edit your ad and clicking the appropriate check box. Pictures are limited in size to 800x800 pixels.

There is no private message system. You must provide contact information. A good way to do this if you have a website is to include a link to the product listing page on your site.

Beware of publishing your regular email address. It will not automatically be obfuscated. I would suggest setting up an alias email address that you can later delete without interrupting your business or life.  read more »

Unpluggedshop.com is continuing to attract more and more users. In the last month, we had over 10,000 pageviews, over 3,000 visits, and more than 1,500 absolute unique visitors! The average time spent on the site is 3 minutes and 47 seconds or about one minute per page.

Thanks for stopping by, and as always, let me know if you have any comments or suggestions for the site.

Luke

One of the "tools" I want to get is a traditional workman's apron. There is a picture over at www.toolemera.com of a traditional woodworker wearing one. You can see it at this page if you scroll down to the picture called "THE WISE CARPENTER AT HIS BENCH."

I really like this apron although it seems that a design that had criss-crossing shoulder straps would be a bit easier on the neck and not as prone to getting the neck strap as sweaty.

If anyone has any suggestions, pictures, patterns or ideas, I would really appreciate them. Basically, I am looking for something somewhat traditional and lightweight. A pocket for a pencil or small square would be fine, but I don't plan on carrying my toolbox in it.  read more »

I am a bit cheap. I appreciate quality tools. I also happen to live in a warm sub-tropical Caribbean climate. I want to make some "woodie" planes.

Basically, I want to make a whole set of planes. I intend to start with something like a Jointer or Fore plane and then do a smoothing plane and perhaps a scraper as well as a router. Sometime, I also want to make a Jack plane to replace the hopelessly cobbled together metal boat anchor, I mean finely fettled antique hand plane, that I have.  read more »

In the US, there is a current discussion about a presidential candidate who apparently doesn't know how to used email. The question raises an interesting point.

Without going into the politics of the whole thing, which is a subject much better suited for other blogs, let's just look at the question of whether or not it is vital to be technologically integrated in this day and age.

If a person is, let's say over 50, is it vital that they get a computer and get into the internet age? I say no. I am not even convinced that the young should be totally immersed in it. Knowing how it works and understanding it is one thing, but for some of us, we would be better served to "just say no". For many more of us, we would be well served to limit our exposure.

I am not even talking about the renowned sinful temptations and cyberdangers of the internet. I am just talking about wasting our precious time in the pursuit of "efficiency."  read more »

My account is now active at www.adroll.com. You can now buy space through them on my site or among the groups of sites I participate in at AdRoll including "Traditional Woodworking" and Design/DIY/Crafty sites.  read more »

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 »