Joel's Blog

"HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3"I just heard a spectacular sound system that was set up as part of an exhibit, The Art of Noise, at the Cooper Hewitt Museum a Smithsonian museum that focuses on design (above). The exhibit "HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 3" by Devon Turnbull is a state-of-the-art listening system set up in one room of the spectacular Andrew Carnegie mansion in which the museum is based. The sound is powerful, crisp, with an articulated bass that I have never…

Manhattan is filled with boring skyscraper boxes. But fortunately Manhattan is also filled with the buildings that predate the boring boxes, so there are many opportunities to see incredible decorative elements. But you may have to look up. Union Square doesn't have a lot of skyscrapers, but it does have many late 19th/early 20th century tall buildings that were the skyscrapers of their time. Retail shop remodeling on the ground floors has robbed some of the buildings' original details, but if…

I was pleasantly surprised that the Museum of Modern Art was open on July 4th, when it was a million degrees in my apartment and most other activities were closed for the holiday. I figured the museum would at least have good air conditioning. Evidently I was not the only one with this idea. The place was fairly crowded, with art lovers and natives and World Cup tourists alike. One of the high points of the visit was seeing furniture made by Frederick Kiesler (18901965) an architect who…

Last Saturday I went to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where I was born and lived for many years, to check out what turned out to be an unimpressive museum show. The plan was to take advantage of beautiful weather and commute back home with a ferry ride downtown instead of the standard subway ride. (NYC is a watery town, with not only spectacular beaches and bridges, but also ferry rides for commuters and day trippers - the world famous Staten Island ferry between Staten Island and Manhattan…

This picture is from the graduating class photos taken in 1940. The guy in the middle, L. Moskowitz, is my father. The picture is from P.S. (Public School) 30 Junior High School in the Yorkville section of Manhattan. My father was 18 at the time, and he was just graduating junior high. My father came to this country four years earlier (1936) from a small town of what was then Czechoslovakia. He spoke no English. At home he and his parents and siblings spoke Hungarian, because their town was in…

We get large and frequent deliveries from Festool, which is why our showroom routinely has a pallet or two, and a forklift in the way.Festool is releasing a range of new cordless tools next Wednesday, June 17th, and some of these tools are even catching the eyes of woodworkers who typically work in a shop or on a jobsite with no shortage of dependable electricity. Of course woodworkers have long used cordless drills and jigsaws as a matter of course. Whats more novel is the serious…

The five volume compendium "Turning and Mechanical Manipulation" by Charles and John Holzapffel started with Volume 1 in 1846 and ended with Volume Five in 1884. A planned sixth volume was never completed. The series is a treasure trove of hand tool technology. Volume Four, on Plain Turning, and Volume Five on Ornamental turning are the bibles of their field. Unfortunately the Holtzapffels, both father and son, may have been great tool makers but they were crappy writers of how-to books. In the…

From "The Village Carpenter" 1938Although the table saw and planer were invented in the early 19th century, it was only in the 20th century - with the invention of small electric motors and ubiquitous electricity - that professional shops, and later, amateurs, started using saws, planers and jointers on a mass scale. This development substantively changed the process of sourcing wood. If you're imagining woodworkers buying wood in rough thickness and then substantially planing it down by hand,…

5 Ways of driving things in the latheWe've talked a lot about our folding treadle lathe. But let's not lose sight of the attachments, which also deserve our focus.When using a lathe, the work is driven by the headstock and supported, if necessary, by the tailstock. Bowls and similar pieces can be gripped or screwed on to the headstock and wouldn't need tailstock support. A long spindle can be held multiple of ways, but it is driven by the headstock, and the tailstock simply functions to support…

Olive Bread from VesuvioOne of my great joys at Tools for Working Wood is steering our visitors to great local places, whether great Mexican food in Sunset Park or worthwhile museums they might have otherwise missed. In that spirit, let me tell you about some of the food shopping I did with my son over the weekend.We built up our fortitude for errands with a falafel at one one of my favorite falafel spots, the original Mamoun's on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village. According to their…

The gorgeous large advertising and movie posters that were popular in the 20th century were mostly printed using color lithography, a wonderful, but complicated and expensive process. For more modest budgets, and for traveling shows where the signage had to change based on locale, woodblock printing was a much more economical approach. I was at the Poster House Museum, one of New York's best small museums, this past weekend to see their to see their fabulous new exhibit "Act Black: Posters from…

Here are four bullnose infill planes from the late 19th to the early 20th century: the oldest on the left is by Holtzapffel & Co (1828-1922); the two in the middle are by Norris (1872-1943); and the one on the right is by Arthur Price (1924-1967). All three companies were London makers. Bullnose planes are not that useful in a shop, so all of these planes show very little wear. The Holtzapffel plane does not have a steel sole for wear (planes without steel soles are less common that ones with…

The set of five bedgers tools in a boxA few weeks ago I wrote about about the actual gouges and hook tools used for mainstream turning - as opposed to the scraping tools used mostly in ornamental turning on fancy hardwoods.In that post I mentioned that I was unaware of any current manufacturer that makes hook tools today. Since I wrote that I have found a few specialty makers that make machined, beefier versions of traditional hook tools for turning the inside of a bowl. As it happens, while...

My first bowl I made that I likeI'm catching the wood turning bug. The biggest issue for me is developing automatic skills. When I cut up wood, I cut square by hand automatically: I don't have to think about it. When I'm turning I still have to think about it. But I am thinking far more automatically than I was even a month ago.Above is a picture of my first bowl. It's the same bowl that I was working on last week - but finished. It's made out of cherry, and I think it's a little thicker in ...

Tearout that shouldn't be thereWhen you work on a CNC mill, it's all about feeds and speeds. For a particular material, the questions are: how fast do you spin a given milling cutter, how fast can you move the tool across the work, and how deep a cut can you take? Do it right, you get a nice smooth finish and fast cutting. Do it wrong and you waste time, break the tool or damage the work.With a wood lathe, when it's just you holding the tool in your hand against a toolrest, the same actual c...

E. Hoppus, "Mr. Hoppus's Measurer", London, 1777Before the internet, finding things in a book could be challenging. A library with a good librarian could be essential for success if your topic was obscure. But even with the book in hand, a table of contents only got you to the general neighborhood and you might need an index for the actual item. Library indexes date from ancient Greece and Egypt but the indices at the end of the books are a thirteenth century innovation. Tool catalogs real...

Hulot, pere "L'Art du tourneur mecanicien" 1775I've always been puzzled why most of the turning tools listed in classic books on turning (published in the 17th - 19th centuries) are what we would now call scraping tools. One possible rationale is that scrapers are a lot easier to make than forged tools like gouges.As I found myself diving more deeply into the literature, I discovered a couple of things. Early tool catalogs that show turning tools don't show a lot of scrapers.They show gouges ...