CJWA clothing and hats available soon

CJWA clothing is going to be available again soon, including T shirts, golf shirts, sweatshirts, caps, and hooded jackets.  Joe Thein has done a great job looking into this, and will catalogs to the November meeting for everyone to peruse.  Pricing will be somewhat dependent on the size of our order, so the more people that order clothes, the less expensive they will be, and who doesn’t love a bargain?

CJWA goes to WIA, and The King of Dovetails is crowned

A number of CJWA members made the trip out to Covington, KY, for the 2010 Woodworking in America conference, which was organized by Popular Woodworking magazine.  It was 3 days full of very useful classes and an unparalleled opportunity to try tools from some of the best woodworking tool makers in the country today. Among the CJWA members making the trip were Frank Vucolo, Simon Stark, and Jerry van de Sande. 

Besides just attending the talks, you could enter the Hand Tool Olympics, which was a fun opportunity to test your hand tool skills.  Simon Stark took first place in the dovetail competition, making a dovetail by hand accurately in 5 minutes 40 seconds, and won a set of chisels for his performance.  Congratulations, Simon!

October meeting: Chuck Bender on Bermuda dovetails

Our next meeting will be at 7 PM on October 13. We are again very lucky to have Chuck Bender from The Acanthus Workshop, and he will demonstrate how to make Bermuda dovetails.  What are Bermuda dovetails?  That’s exactly what I asked him when we were planning for this meeting.  If you want to find out, you’ll have to come and see Chuck’s presentation, which should be excellent, as always.

CJWA birdhouse event at the Fall Forestry Festival in Jackson, Oct. 2

Once again, CJWA will be participating at the Fall Forestry Festival at the Forest Resource Education Center in Jackson, Oct. 2 from 9 AM to 3 PM.  We will be selling birdhouse kits and helping kids build them throughout the day.  This is one of the biggest fundraisers for our club, so please come join us for a day of fun and help out CJWA to boot.

Directions can be found at the New Jersey Division of Parks and Forestry website, or the handy Google maps link below.

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September meeting: CNC techniques for woodworking

At the September CJWA meeting, Rainer Schmidt gave an interesting talk on CNC machinery and how it can be applied to woodworking, and how to put together your own CNC setup.  He brought in a small milling machine, a controller, and a computer with the software that controls the CNC process.  Although technical difficulties unfortunately didn’t allow him to demonstrate his setup, he was able to show how the process of designing a workpiece on a computer ultimately leads to the finished product.

David White also gave some insight about his experiences with CNC machinery in his woodworking, for both business and for himself.

Finally, Marc Gaertner showed a porch swing that he made.  Marc talked about the joinery involved, and about how challenging it was to precisely cut the joints for the back vertical stretcher pieces because of the curve of the top rail.  Because of the curve, every piece had to be individually fitted.