As for turning, “Turning is kind of like playing the piano. You can buy a Steinway, but unless you, first of all, have a teacher to guide you and then, secondly, practice, you’re not going to be very good at it,” Conover says.

His Conover Workshops classes include Bowl Turning and Woodturning Tools and Techniques. In addition to having been the woodturning columnist for Woodworker’s Journal for 11 years, Conover is the author of several publications, including The Lathe Book, co-host of WJ’s “Getting Started in Woodturning” DVD and a founding member of the American Association of Woodturners.

When he downsized six years ago from a 3,500-sq-ft shop to an 1,100-sq-ft “retirement shop” at his Parkman, Ohio, facilities (40 miles southeast of Cleveland), “I kept all my lathes,” Conover says.

Hand Tools and High-tech Other shop equipment includes a Felder sliding table saw with a shaper head, a Hammer 12″ jointer-planer, band saw and drill press. There’s also a big collection of hand planes because, as Conover says, “I’ve always had a real love of hand tools.”

A six-day hand tool joinery class is a long-running course offering. “I had one doctor tell me it was the most intense experience he’d had since medical school,” Conover says, with class time stretching to eight or nine hours a day if students choose to work beyond a dinner break.

“On the other end of the spectrum,” he says, Conover also offers classes specializing in the use of Festool machinery, “and now I’m even playing around with the Shaper Origin CNC Router.”

He describes the Shaper Origin’s navigation via scans of patterned adhesive tape as “creating a sort of celestial path that it can set a GPS up on and navigate.” Recently, Conover used the tool to cut a piece for wife Susan’s loom, drilling a hole with accuracy down to thousandths of an inch.

Weaving and Woodworking Overlap

Susan Conover is also part of Conover Workshops, teaching courses in spinning and weaving from a six-loom home studio. Among her fiber arts experience is spending five years as operations manager at Vavstuga Weaving School in Massachusetts.

Ernie Conover says that, “We have found there is an overlap between people that have a spouse that weaves and a partner that likes woodworking.” He and Susan will often offer simultaneous courses, allowing participants to “buddy up on hotel rooms.”

The Conovers also travel to teach courses to either clubs or individuals, with Susan having taught fiber arts classes in South Dakota and Colorado in fall 2023 and Ernie recently scheduling a hand tool joinery class for the Western Ohio Woodworkers in Dayton for February 2025.

Other Learning Options

At their Parkman, Ohio, headquarters, Ernie limits his woodworking classes to a maximum of four students. It used to be eight at the older, larger shop, when he also had more assistance from an apprentice.

Lately, however, he’s been offering a lot of private lessons. Those might happen either at his shop or the student’s, with price breaks occurring for additional enrollees. “They save a little bit every time they can bring another person into the game, and if you can find three to four to take one of the scheduled classes, I’ll run it at the same price as the scheduled,” Conover says.

Private lessons, however, also provide the opportunity to tailor woodworking content to students’ specific interests. “I have two fellows here that are local who take a two-day class about four times a year from me, and we just figure it out as we go,” Conover says.

For more information, visit conoverworkshops.com or call 440-346-3347 for information about woodworking and woodturning classes.

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After Castle’s death, says Ken Page, interim director of the nonprofit Wendell Castle Project, the family “wanted to have a school, they wanted to archive his works, and they wanted to have a museum.” Castle, known for organic forms and stacked laminations, “would call himself a designer and a sculptor,” Page says. Part of the school’s mission is “to pass on the legacy that Wendell had of excellent design.”

Several Workshop instructors are former employees or students either of Castle or his students. (Castle ran a school from the studio in the 1980s.) Page describes this as “keeping the DNA of the place alive.” For instance, former Castle apprentice Silas Kopf taught a sold-out marquetry workshop last spring, while 17-year employee Taeyoul Ryu will teach two stack lamination workshops in the fall.

Learn Castle’s Techniques, Use His Tools

When Castle began making stacked laminations, “his first tool for carving was a chainsaw,” Page says. Students in a weeklong class will carve sculptural items with electric chainsaws, “whereas the weekend class is going to be the way Wendell did the stack lamination in the 2000s and the ’90s, which is making his model, scanning it into the computer, having the computer divide the model up into layers digitally and the computer printing off those templates.”

Students in the five-day course will receive pre-made templates to cut on the band saw, while the weekend class will review the digital process and tools needed. “The way Wendell did it for the carving was he had a robot,” Page says. “People aren’t going to buy a $150,000 robot, but we’re certainly going to demonstrate it.”

The school’s students will, however, have the chance to try some of Castle’s tools. “I was not going to do that, (but) Wendell’s widow was insisting on it,” Page says. Students will be able to borrow Castle’s tools from the classroom’s instructor bench to try them out.

Most of the power equipment in the Workshop was also used by Castle, with the exception of a new SawStop 5hp table saw, a Delta 20″ band saw and an additional horizontal slot mortiser. Those and additional power tools are split between two machine rooms.

While students will have access to the stock preparation room, normally Page says he will plane, joint and rough-cut wood to size ahead of time. Exceptions include a September beginning furniture class taught by Larissa Huff, in which students will prepare their own stock.

Archives of Inspiration

The Workshop also contains a room with 14 student benches Page built earlier this year. Most classes, however, will be limited to 10 to 12 students. Courses are targeted to a range of skill levels, including beginner, intermediate and advanced, with both weekend and week-long offerings. Lodging is available in Rochester, New York, 10 miles north of the studio’s Scottsville location.

Currently, the school is taking up 5,000 sq ft of the 15,000-sq-ft studio, a former bean mill that once served as home to Castle, wife Nancy Jurs and their children. A gallery provides inspiration to students by showcasing both Castle’s works and ceramic pieces by Jurs. A “Great Room” area will eventually become an event space and museum, while the Wendell Castle Archive will also be housed in the building.

“He drew every day from his 20s into his 80s,” Page says. “So there are thousands and thousands of drawings that he’s created and then models that he made for his work.” The Wendell Castle Project owns at least 100 of Castle’s foot-square models.

Also located on the campus are a former railroad station that is currently Jurs’s ceramic studio and a metalworking building. The school may add ceramics and metalworking courses in the future.

Right now, the studio also occasionally houses Castle pieces sent in for repair and a few pieces whose completion he had approved prior to his death. “Those are literally being final-sanded and finish put on them at this point,” Page says.

“The magic is here,” he adds. “The space itself is where Wendell actually designed and created his different masterpieces.”

For more information, visit wendellcastleworkshop.org.

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He started harvesting the tree with an electric chainsaw and, at one point, found the forester’s note nailed to the log: “Call me.” Turns out, he couldn’t do that in a city park, but “He told me, ‘You really want logs? The city has massive quantities of logs that we don’t really know what to do with,'” McLean reports.

What the city had, McLean says, was “a pile of logs, the better part of the size of a football field, and turns out that they’re paying to get those turned into mulch – and it’s all oak, and ash, and maple and all of this high value, high quality material. I was like, ‘What if I told you I’d take all of it?’ I went and bought a truck trailer, skid steer, sawmill, kiln, warehouse, quit my job and got to work on trying to divert some of this stuff from the waste stream.”

Backlog of Logs

The reason the city of Minnetonka in Minnesota had such a backlog of logs was due to a confluence of factors, McLean says. Trees come down due to emerald ash borer, oak wilt, storm damage; warmer winters may have some impact. Subsidy shifts to solar over biofuels changed municipalities’ markets for mulch.

Partnering with friend Patrick Hughley, McLean began acquiring wood from tree services and municipal mulch sites. They’re often happy to hand over large tree trunks because, “A: they don’t necessarily have the home that they used to for the mulch and B: the big stuff is what breaks their equipment,” McLean says. Some material is dropped off at the Storm Trees warehouse, “but I’ve said that I’m like an Uber driver for logs,” he adds. “I’ll get a ping, ‘We’ve got a tree coming down, can you be here in, like, 30 minutes?'”

For all this material, Storm Trees tracks data. “We track every board foot that we produce, and then we quantify the carbon sequestration characteristics of those board feet,” McLean says. “Wood is a natural carbon sequestration vehicle. Every city, a lot of companies, all have carbon reduction plans.” They’re tracking granular data, including species – varying wood densities store different levels of carbon – and asking what people want to know.

Capturing Footprints

“Would you like to know where it goes? Would you like to know does it come out as a live edge piece? Is it an 8/4? Our end game is to be able to capture the actual carbon footprint of every board foot,” McLean says. He used a live edge table destined for an IT company as an example. “I know that this tree was taken seven miles from the place where it’s going to be used as a table. I know that I drove it here in a truck on a trailer, I know that it ran through a sawmill. All those things layered together can help us capture the carbon footprint as opposed to just the carbon sequestration.”

McLean and Hughley build simple projects, but their focus is on lumber. “It’s time-consuming to pick up and mill trees, dry wood,” McLean says. Currently, they sell to furniture manufacturers, cabinetmakers and craftspeople, plus supply a school district’s woodshop.

Passing the Smell Test

Some contacts came from a Minnesota Woodworkers Guild Expo. “One of my bigger fears as we started this whole operation, was, ‘Is it going to pass the smell test?'” McLean says. “It’s like I’m saying, ‘I got this tree, it’s essentially been defined as somebody else’s garbage, and now you’re going to use it for your expert level project.'”

He also has conversations in the field, where people might reminisce about family sawmills. He says, “It’s actually shockingly moving when you’re sitting there running a skid steer and a sawmill and you’re covered in dirt and, all of a sudden, you’re having a deep conversation with somebody.”

Part of the appeal, Hughley says, is “[We’re] doing some good with business, and people want to see that succeed.”

The limiting factor, McLean adds, “is our ability to process and the sheer volume. If somebody opened up shop doing the exact same thing across the street, we’d be fine. There’s no shortage of desire, demand, or supply.”

For more information, please visit stormtrees.com, call 612-979-5193 or follow @stormtreeslumber on Instagram.

A version of this article originally appeared at eplocalnews.org.

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What’s the secret to the Guild’s success? Current president Charlie LeGrand says, “The mission is what has set us apart.” The Guild’s three-part mission statement focuses on educating members, educating the public about woodworking as an art and charitable works. For LeGrand, “Educating our members and charity work are the two most important aspects of the Guild,” with the two mission goals often completed in tandem.

“We’re not a shop for hire, and we try to emphasize that to people as they consider joining,” LeGrand says. “We are a community of like-minded individuals who share an interest in a hobby.”

The now-required pre-membership meetings for those who are thinking about joining emphasize the equality and responsibility among Guild members. There are no paid employees, and “if you break something, you need to fix it. If there’s dirt on the floor, you need to sweep it up. Don’t just come in here and use the shop and leave; we expect you to participate,” LeGrand says.

The ethos of everyone pitching in was evident in the acquisition of the current shop building, which the Guild has been operating out of since 2011. The former retail site was acquired with a monetary donation from member Bobby Hartness; for construction renovations, members not only contributed financially but also put in 6,500 labor-hours in 907 work sessions with 252 volunteers, according to Going with the Grain, a book charting the Guild’s history, written by member Aubrey Rogers.

Big Shop, Big Names

Now, the building includes a machine room with power tools that include a 5hp SawStop table saw, 10″ and 12″ Grizzly table saws, 16″ Oliver jointer/planer and 25″ planer, Festool Kapex miter saw, Laguna 16″ band saw, two CNC machines, a laser engraver and more. In addition to two lathes in the main shop, there’s a dedicated lathe training room with six more JET lathes, plus even more lathes in a youth program room.

“We have an assembly area; we have an enclosed sanding booth; we have a pretty good-sized hand tool room which right now doubles as a finishing room. So it’s a big place,” LeGrand says. Additionally, the building houses a woodworking library, conference room, lumber room and auditorium. An outbuilding stores extra wood.

The 300-seat auditorium is the current site for visiting lecturers, but that program predates today’s shop. Sam Maloof built a chair in a member’s garage shop in the 1980s; Ian Kirby spoke on design; Frank Klausz did a session on dovetails. More recent speakers have included Roy Underhill, woodcarver Mary May, Alf Sharp on marquetry, David Finck, and Tom McLaughlin of Epic Woodworking, whose all-day presentation last year “covered everything” about the tables he was building, LeGrand says. “He did it right here on the stage, veneering a curved piece to shaping a table leg while we watched.”

Presenters will also do hands-on seminars of varying lengths. Finck, currently a luthier who studied with James Krenov, “had us making Krenov-style hand planes,” LeGrand says, while a four-day session “had 10 students learning to carve from Mary May in our bench room.”

Charitable Projects

The educational aspect of the Guild also ties into its charity work. For instance, a Guild team of toymakers meets weekly from April through November to create playthings for children’s charities — 1,532 were delivered in 2023. “You might be on the John Deere tractor team, or somebody else might be on the airplane team,” LeGrand says. “If anybody comes in and they’re new or they’re nervous about, let’s say, using a router table, by the time you make 65 John Deere tractors and round over the edges, you’re probably pretty good at it at that point.”

Guild member and retired professional woodworker Jon Rauschenbach is currently leading charitable cabinetmaking projects for the Guild. “He’s educating our members at the same time that they’re completing these charity projects,” LeGrand says.

Additional charitable builds of the Greenville Woodworkers Guild include lidded bowls for medical care recipients to collect Beads of Courage, Urns for Veterans to encase cremains in veterans’ cemeteries and numerous projects for the Meyer Center, a Greenville organization focused on empowering children with disabilities, among many others.

The Guild has been building projects for the Meyer Center since shortly after its founding, which occurred on June 1, 1981. Art Welling, one of the five founding members, had seen another woodworker’s business card that proclaimed him a member of the New England Woodworkers Guild and thought such a membership sounded like it would enhance his credibility as he worked to establish a high-end furniture business. The Guild itself, however, has always existed “for charitable, educational and artistic purposes only.”

A current educational aspect is the youth program. Offered on weekdays during the school year, its enrollees are mostly homeschoolers. “We’re not a trade school and don’t intend to be,” LeGrand says. “You’re teaching woodworking, but really what you’re doing is using woodworking to develop their brains” through math calculations, project planning, wood knowledge, finishing and more. “It’s a good hobby and develops their brains, just like it keeps old folks’ brains active.”

Many of the retirees currently active in the Guild are former Michelin engineers. In addition to the tire company, BMW and General Electric are major employers in the area. LeGrand thinks many in the profession turn to woodworking as a hobby because “it can satisfy their need for precision in measurement.”

Lumber Program

Membership isn’t for everyone, though. In addition to the nonprofit Guild not allowing its shop to be used to make items for sale, they also don’t allow the use of reclaimed wood, pallet boards or Southern yellow pine on their machinery. “The resin gums up the blades and it clogs up the dust collection system,” LeGrand explains. “Anything that could damage the machinery” is not allowed, “but anything else you’re free to bring in — or use what we have,” he says.

The lumber available for members’ use and purchase includes species such as Eastern white pine, poplar, cherry, red and white oak, walnut, padauk, purpleheart, Spanish cedar, sapele and canarywood.

The Guild’s lumber program, like a mentorship program that pairs more experienced woodworkers with those with less experience, has been an ongoing part of Guild activities for several years. The mentorship program began decades ago in each other’s home shops, prior to the Guild having its own building that operates throughout the week. An earlier 1,000-square-ft shop operated from 2003 to 2011 out of an industrial building Hartness leased to the group.

While members do still work in their own shops, the Guild tracked about 40,000 hours of work in its current shop in 2021, which includes both time dedicated to Guild charity work and personal projects. “Other guilds — this is not a criticism of them — but other places, you pay for and reserve shop time,” LeGrand says. That’s not how the Greenville Woodworkers Guild, whose current annual dues are $150, operates.

Instead, “The mission is what has set us apart,” LeGrand says. “For 42 years, it’s set us apart.”

For more information, visit greenvillewoodworkers.com.

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In the past decade, Dan has built about 5,700 tables. At one point, he had four employees, but “I hated it. It just wasn’t fun anymore,” he says. Now, “It’s back to me and my CNC.”

Although he started out making custom tables from demolished barnwood, Dan now considers himself a small manufacturer. “You cannot make custom furniture at a reasonable price and expect to thrive,” he says.

“When you have a flat piece of 8/4 wood that’s 96″ by 45” wide, your job’s halfway done. I can have the CNC running while I’m wide belt-sanding tabletops,” Dan says. “I can come in on a Monday, glue five tables up; on Tuesday, I can start sanding down; on Wednesday, I can start putting on varnishes; and then Friday, I can start adding the legs.”

The CNC is a key element of the “Akin,” Dan’s favorite among his table styles. “What I love about this style, is it’s made 100 percent on the CNC,” he says. “There’s not much labor involved, except for routing the inside.”

Although he’s recently started outsourcing metalwork to a welding shop, for a long time Dan did everything in house. “I took a lot of pride in that. But with business, sometimes you have to relinquish a little bit,” Dan says.

He’s learned other business lessons, too. He calls building a kiln and a sandblasting booth “two of my biggest, most expensive mistakes.” An idea that paid off was pitching his work to HGTV designers. On a friend’s advice, Dan started looking up shows’ designers and asking if they’d be interested in his tables. Several have been used on HGTV.

“Most people don’t turn down a table, especially when it’s fun and creative,” he says. His tables are often shipped to a filming location, used to stage a set, then returned to him for later sale.

That led to the hosts of Renovation 911 contacting Dan to build for their show about restoring damaged properties. HGTV pays for a piece that the homeowners keep. “It’s a little more sentimental, and normally it’s a dining room table,” Dan says.

His involvement with IWF was more serendipitous. In 2022, he was invited to participate as an influencer and subsequently invited to become a spokesperson for IWF. He views his contributions to IWF’s Network News publication and plans for classes at IWF 2024 as being a liaison between large tool manufacturers and garage woodworkers.

“The problem is, people get into woodworking, and they only know what’s at Home Depot,” Dan says. “Then they’ll dive into it a little bit more, and they’ll learn what’s at Rockler. If you’re a small business and you want to take that next step up, that’s when you start going to the woodworking shows.” Dan would like to see tool manufacturers bring their smaller items to the show, and he’d like to educate garage woodworkers on what a CNC can do for them, bringing both ends of the spectrum together.

For himself, Dan’s trying to maintain woodworking as his “therapeutic getaway,” even though actual vacations still involve work. On a trip to Costa Rica, Dan visited local lumber companies and “just fell in love with monkeypod and Spanish parotas and wild cashews and teaks and eucalyptus,” which he considers more sustainable than North American hardwoods. “A walnut tree grows three inches a year, where a monkeypod tree grows three to five feet a year. So there’s a big misconception that everybody thinks [if] you’re going down South to get this wood that you’re doing deforestation, when we’re actually doing the opposite.”

He uses these woods in his tables and some other items. “Over the years, I’ve found that tables are my bread and butter,” Dan says. “That’s what I like making. It’s a simple process to make a table if you have the right equipment and the space for it.”

Dan’s photos and videos are on TikTok and YouTube @the_voice_of_woodworking and on Instagram @countrytables. His website is countrytables.com.

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His 12- and 14-year-old sons both play youth baseball, and Little keeps busy during practices by whittling in the stands. A couple of years ago, he set himself a challenge of making a “fungo bat” — a long, slender bat that coaches or parents use during practice. “It’s something I’d use with my kids, so I just thought, ‘this is something I want to try,'” Little says.

“As soon as I made that bat, the kids were like, ‘well, I want a bat,’ so they each got a bat,” Little says. Then he showed one to a coworker whose son also plays baseball, and got another request, “and then it just started to escalate from there.”

An engineer by day, Little has now made about 200 bats in his garage workshop for his apexbats.com side business. He starts with billets of maple or ash, or upon request, birch or beech. “I only make game bats with the best possible grade that I can get,” he says.

Most critical for purposes of bat-making is the density of the wood, which, in combination with the bat’s design, impacts its weight. Bats for adults generally use higher density wood — sometimes extra dense if it’s meant to be a heavier training bat — while Little tends to make kids’ bats from lighter, lower density pieces.

He also tests the quality of the wood using an ink dot test. This involves putting a drop of wet ink on a piece of bare wood, then observing how far it deviates from a center line as the ink bleeds.

He’s adapted this test from a Major League Baseball requirement that the ink bleed no more than 2.86 degrees away from the center line. “It’s really just saying, ‘Is your grain straight in this wood?'” Little says. “If it’s not, then it’s gonna have much more likelihood of breaking. I don’t want to have a kid break a bat because I used poor-quality wood.” Because bats are made one at a time, customers can choose how the weight is distributed through the barrel of the bat (whether it’s balanced or end-loaded): the bat’s length and weight; how much the knob tapers for their personal comfort; and barrel and handle diameter. “Some like it to just feel a little thinner in the hand, and some like it to feel a little thicker,” Little says. “If there’s a model that I’m finding is a very popular combination, I’ll make a story stick that has all the key points,” he says. “It’s really quick for me to grab that, and it cuts down a lot of time.”

Customers can also choose to have the bats “cupped,” or somewhat hollowed out, on the end. Cupping a bat, Little says, can help remove some weight or balance a bat out so it swings a bit lighter. “I start by drilling a center hole, then I use a router with a guide pin to cut out the rest, and then I go back with a larger drill bit to drill it out again, because it leaves kind of a core.”

Customers also get to choose the colors of their bat, for which Little uses oil-based stains applied by hand. He’ll burn in personalized messages with a small laser engraver, and he applies the Apex Bats logo with an ink transfer using freezer paper. “I tape that to an 8×10 sheet of paper and print it off in a mirror image, then quickly flip it over and rub it on. I like the way it looks, and it’s embedded into the wood, so it’s never gonna come off,” Little says.

Most of the bats Little makes are game-quality bats; about half of them are for kids. While he’s not pursuing the lengthy and costly process to become an approved bat vendor for Major League Baseball, Little is reaching out to town ball teams and has made bats for wood bat tournaments. “I don’t know if it’s a nostalgia thing, or if people are just looking for something different,” he says.

A version of this article originally appeared at: eplocalnews.org.

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Icelandic lore says the dwellings are for the huldufólk (“hidden people”), who provide their visitors with strength, good luck and good health. Jerry first learned of the concept when he and his wife watched the movie Eurovision, in which an Icelandic competitor in a singing contest visits an elf house for good luck. His research since then indicates that many Icelanders still believe in the concept.

“It’s important to them to have this understanding that there’s something that might be a little more wonderful out there,” he says.

The first house Jerry built, now installed in a whiskey barrel koi pond in their backyard, was a birthday gift to his wife. He has since built seven altogether, using a sawmill’s discarded log offcuts.

Design ideas might come from dollhouses, haunted houses or the window and door placement in a children’s playhouse. “Each house has its own personality,” Jerry says. They’re intended to be whimsical: in some, solar lighting mimics a fireplace’s flickers for a few hours after dark.

Positive Responses

Responses from the public have been positive. Icelandic people have appreciated finding a slice of their culture in Minnesota. People also appreciate the wonder, Jerry said: he told of a woman who approached him during an installation to tell him how wonderful the project was, and how children would love it.

“I said, ‘You’re allowed to like it, too,'” Jerry says. “When we’re kids, we’re told to believe that reindeer can fly. You have the kids so excited they can’t sleep at night because they know something amazing’s going to happen. If you want to come to the elf house and feel like a kid again, just know that it’s OK to want to believe in something again.”

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The school has been in Texas since 2018, but it originally opened in Kentucky. “The idea was to live on my acreage and make furniture,” Miller says. “I decided to start the school because there was no one teaching the fundamentals, that I could find, other than where I went.”

Miller had attended instruction from Paul Sellers and Frank Strazza at what’s now Heritage School of Woodworking. In his own school, he has replicated their focus on hand tool joinery.

Three Primary Joints

“There’s only three woodworking joints: the dovetail, the mortise-and-tenon and the housing dado,” Miller says. “I didn’t want to teach how to make a chair, how to make a box. There are a lot of schools that are doing that, but if you want to learn how to do layout and how to cut the three woodworking joints by hand, you don’t have many options. So I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to focus on that niche.'”

The “Introduction to Joinery” class serves as a prerequisite to other courses. A candle box class, for example, is mostly dovetails; a side table class is all mortise-and-tenon; and the wall shelf course is “housing dadoes with a couple of mortise-and-tenons.”

Project classes are two days long; others are one-day offerings.

Miller also teaches classes on spoon and spatula making and bowl carving. “Not everybody wants to build furniture,” he says. “Many people just want to be able to sit down and make a spoon or spatula with a couple of basic tools.”

Shop Space and Supplies

Miller originally tried running classes out of his two-car garage, “but the ambiance wasn’t what I wanted,” he says. He built a 1,600-square-foot shop and now uses about 25 percent of it for Full Circle Woodworking classes.

Four student workbenches, with a vise on each corner, allow two students per bench. Miller also has his own single bench in the classroom area. One quadrant of the shop is for display and storage, another is for wood storage and the fourth is for machinery.

“Most of the lumber I buy is roughsawn,” Miller explains. “I can plane a board flat and true and to dimension with a hand plane, but it’s not an efficient use of my time. There are machines that are much faster at it, and so I use them. I want to spend my time doing the joinery.”

He does provide wood for students in his classes, as well as tools — although students are welcome to bring their own hand tools if they have them. “Everything’s provided, and most of the time, I throw in a lunch as well,” Miller says.

With the school’s location in Azle, Texas, about 12 miles west of Fort Worth, “there are ample things to do to keep spouses engaged if they don’t want to participate in the class,” Miller says. Specific attractions mentioned include the Forth Worth Stockyards, Sundance Square Plaza and Kimbell Art Museum.

Sometimes, however, spouses or entire families take his classes together. Previous students have been “young, old, male, female, educated, some of them not,” Wayne says. “I couldn’t pinpoint a specific demographic for people that are interested in this.”

Learn a Skill, Go and Do

Although he’s happy to see students return for additional classes, that’s not Wayne’s goal. “If they come and they take one class, and they can go do their thing, I’m happy,” he says. “I feel like I’ve achieved what I wanted to do: I’ve taught someone a skill, and now they’re off doing something with it.”

He helped one former student — a sushi bar owner — build the workbench that then allowed the restaurateur to build tables and sushi serving platters.

“I don’t want students to feel like they’re married to me,” Wayne said. “I want to teach them something, and I want them to be able to go employ that knowledge. I don’t need groupies; my dog is my groupie. I just want to teach and to keep the craft alive.”

For more information about Full Circle Woodworking, visit fullcircleww.com or call 817-444-1122.

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As both an instructor and a professional woodworker, his niche is Arts & Crafts-style furniture and built-ins, particularly Greene and Greene. “My view is that you can’t improve on perfection,” he says of their style. He offers an advanced kitchen cabinets class in the Greene and Greene-style, as well as project classes on a Greene and Greene clock, blanket chest and barstool.

A course on a Maloof-style rocking chair inspired a separate class on making jigs — students who took the project home realized they couldn’t build more without the roughly 30 jigs used at the school.

Dale begins most classes demonstrating two or three techniques, then lets students get to work, with his assistance as needed. “They’re not waiting in line, or three people watch one guy work,” he said. Students leave with completed projects. “If it’s a chair, they’ll be sitting in it. If it’s a rocker, they’ll be rocking in it. If it’s a table, it’ll be complete and put together.”

Classes vary in length and take place in a 30′ x 60′ two-story shop with a wood floor. Equipment includes SawStop and Powermatic 66 table saws, a 16″ jointer, 14″ and 20″ band saws, wide belt and edge sanders, lathes, routers and a hollow-chisel mortising machine.

Dale and Mary, the school’s administrator, provide all materials, including wood. “We’ll use nice wood so the people are more engaged. You use real cheap wood and you’re not too worried about making mistakes, but if you’re using some nice wood, you’re going to be more careful,” Dale said.

Located near the Hoosier National Forest, the Barnard Woodworking School is an hour away from Louisville, Kentucky. For more information, visit: the-cabinetmaker.com/wood-working-school or call or text 502-551-8889.

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These days, woodworkers and builders are posting memes offering to trade 2x4s for late-model Corvettes or, as Clint Miller, a sales representative for Automated Building Components in Chetek, Wisconsin, said, “I could take my wife out for a steak dinner with four 2x4s, 8 feet long … that’s 50 bucks. A year ago, they would have been $10 or $15.”

So, what’s up? Well, you may recall a worldwide pandemic that began in 2020. Lockdowns that spring meant people stayed home, and businesses — including those in the building and lumber industry — shut down for a while. Then, while many people sheltered at home, they decided to remodel. That’s the demand.

What about supply? The short answer is: there hasn’t been enough of it. Lumber mill shutdowns due to COVID-19 were a factor, according to the NAHB. Plus, there isn’t enough domestic supply. The National Lumber and Building Material Dealers Association’s (NLBMDA) 2021 National Policy Agenda states that “as much as one-third of the framing lumber used in the U.S. comes from Canada each year.” And the U.S. charges tariffs on Canadian lumber.

Organizations such as NAHB and NLBMDA have been lobbying for reductions in tariffs. They’d also like to expand the domestic lumber supply through such methods as increasing logging from U.S. federal forests — through responsible management and in an environmentally sustainable manner, they’re careful to note in their advocacy documents.

Some other factors:

• Domestic producers are selling their lumber abroad.

• The 2008 economic downturn closed many sawmills.

• Remaining mills have limited kiln capacity and face labor shortages.

When Will This End?

What’s the solution? It seems we’ll have to wait it out. Until when? That answer is tougher to predict.

Clint Miller, whose company works with roof and floor trusses as well as other engineered wood products, thinks that we’re facing a “rubber band economy,” which will contract, then spring back with elasticity before leveling out at a certain point. For now, though, “Everything is such a mess that it’s going to take a while to get there,” Miller said.

For an expanded version of this article including helpful links to learn more about the lumber shortage, click here to download the PDF.

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