While those junior high shop classes may have jumpstarted his fascination with woodworking, it was a job as a teenager at a mom and pop hardware/lumber store that helped to cement it. “I would sometimes go out on deliveries with the raw material, and then I’d go back a week or two later and see tables and chairs,” John said. That planted the seed of the idea, in regard to building furniture, that “If somebody else can do it and charge me for it, I can do it cheaper.”

John’s plan after returning from military service in Vietnam in the early 1970s was to work in the construction industry, but a building lull made jobs scarce in that field. “I decided I liked wood, I liked kids, so I used the G.I. Bill to go to San Francisco State. That’s how I got into the teaching end of it,” John said.

Upon his graduation in 1977, the Las Vegas school district was the only one that offered him a job. John spent most of his teaching career focused on shop classes at the middle school level, although for the last 11 years, he taught at a boys’ prison that was included in the school district.

Sometimes, John said, he would run into former students, “Some would say they still do some woodworking. That’s always encouraging, running into old students who still do something with it” – despite, as he noted, the decline in woodshop offerings at schools. “To me, it’s kind of sad that people have lost that direct brain-to-hand connection,” he said. “I would always tell the kids, there’s something magical about it: you think of it, and you draw it, and you create it.”

That describes John’s own process of creating a piece, too. “I start my thought process with ‘How can I get from nothing to what’s in my mind?’ I draft things out on graph paper and work out plans.” For at least the past 10 to 15 years, John said, he’s been designing his own plans for the projects he builds.

“A lot of times, I will take on a project more for the challenge than for the financial gain. For me, it’s about the actual work: solving the problem,” John said. “It excites me to come up a with a piece somebody has envisioned.”

That was the case, for example, when he received a commission for a “mechanical cellarette.” (Click for a video.) When the client first contacted him, John had no idea what that was. It turned out to be a furniture piece similar to a buffet cabinet, with a bar that pops up out of it.

John said he really enjoyed building that piece (he accomplished the movement with a mechanism similar to a TV lift), as well as an armoire he built for himself, which was inspired by Thomas Moser’s “Dr. White’s Chest.” In contrast to that piece’s monolithic appearance, which wasn’t what he was looking for, John created a stepped effect with the drawer placement.

“A lot of times, somebody will say, ‘Oh, that’s a nice piece, you should make 100.’ That would be boring to me,” John said. “I like to get a challenge, and work through the challenge, and then move on to the next thing.”

He has also added additional challenges to himself over the years, in moving more and more toward hand work on his projects. For instance, while he will use power tools to cut wood to thickness or to make initial cuts in larger pieces, after that, he will go to hand-cut dovetails, pegs, or mortise and tenons for joinery.

“I think of it as power tools being my apprentices and performing the grunt labor,” John said. “At this point, I’m doing primarily hand joinery and surfacing on my work. I prefer using a hand plane to create a smooth surface rather than sanding. I also prefer using a scratch stock to create details, rather than a router. The quietness of using hand tools and its result just doesn’t compare to the dust and noise of powered machinery.”

He also prefers a hand-rubbed oil finish, using a three-part top coat that is sanded in with very fine wet/dry abrasives. Although his students called it “the John finish,” he actually learned it at San Francisco State from Art Espenet Carpenter. “Very rarely will I stain a wood,” John said. “I prefer selecting a wood that has the coloration I’m after rather than dying or staining to get that color.”

Personally, he said, he loves working with exotic woods, such as bubinga and wenge. Making boxes out of smaller pieces of wood gives him a chance to experiment with these types of wood.

Of course, despite his love for challenging, one-off pieces, “I’ve got to pay the bills,” John said. His wife is an artist, and this has led him to pursue a niche of carving and gilding picture frames specifically tailored to artist’s pieces (he’s got a commission waiting for him that is meant to frame a seascape; the carvings will be “an ocean wave type thing”) as well as artist’s furniture. That includes things like easels, tailored to the particular angles and heights an artist might need, as well as wet panel carriers, which are a solution to the problem of carrying wet paintings out of, for example, a class at an artist’s school.

John makes such things for his wife, who carries them to workshops. “People see the stuff she has, and say, ‘Where’d you get that?’ ‘My husband made it.’ That leads to three or four orders. If I can make a couple hundred bucks, then I can buy exotic woods and do the more challenging items.”

Right now, however, all of John’s woodworking projects are on hold until he completes the renovations (ideally, by the end of this month) to his shop at a new retirement house in Phoenix. The property had an existing shop building, but it needed things like a bigger door and insulation, as well as air conditioning. “With the shop in Las Vegas, I would quit when it hit 105 degrees,” John said. “We decided we’re going to budget for air conditioning. That’s an exciting thing for me.”

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– Roger Mickelson
West Burlington, Iowa

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– Charles Mak
Calgary, Alberta

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Special attention has been paid to conveyor belt parallelism in the new JET 16-32. Parallelism adjustments of the precision-flattened, reinforced-steel belt can be made without tools by simply turning a dial located on the left side of the conveyor. A redesigned conveyor system pulls the workpiece through the sander instead of pushing it to minimize stress on the belt.

A depth scale has been added to the large handwheel on top that adjusts drum height to control the depth of material removal. The machine sands material from 1/32 in. to 3 in. thick, and it can safely handle pieces as short as 2-1/4 in. long. Each full turn of the crank adjusts the drum height by 1/16 in. for precise sanding thickness control. Adjusting drum height and downward pressure also helps alleviate snipe. The sander’s open-ended design allows the JET 16-32 Drum Sander to sand workpieces up to 32 in. wide by making two passes. A convenient camber adjustment makes it easy to avoid “witness marks” on wide boards.

To improve dust collection, JET has redesigned the hood to feature an integrated channel that mirrors the shape of the drum. The channel directs dust and debris to a 4-in.-diameter dust port on top of the hinged hood.

The JET 16-32 Drum Sander incorporates two TEFC motors. A 1-1/2HP, single-phase, 110V, 14-amp motor turns the sanding drum at 1,725 RPM. The conveyor belt is driven separately by a direct-drive, DC motor. This combination provides both consistent sanding power and fine control of conveyor speed.

Infinitely variable control produces conveyor feed rates of 0 to 10 feet per minute. JET’s exclusive SandSmart control monitors the load on the drum motor and automatically regulates conveyor speed to maintain the highest feed rate. A red indicator light warns when the sanding depth is too great or the feed rate is too fast. A safety-keyed On/Off switch with overload protection is conveniently mounted on the control box next to the SandSmart control.

Patented conveyor belt Trackers significantly reduce the need for manual belt adjustments. If tracking adjustments become necessary (after breaking in a new conveyor belt, for example), independent tracking adjusters on either side of the conveyor are easy to access and use.

Measuring 5 in. in diameter by 16 in. long, the sanding drum is designed for smooth running and heat dissipation. The precision-machined and balanced, extruded aluminum drum is self-cooling to prevent heat damage to the workpiece or abrasive sleeve. Sealed and permanently lubricated, 1-in.-diameter ball bearings provide smooth operation and long life. Patented abrasive take-up clips make changing abrasive sleeves quick and easy, and the drum is removable.

The JET 16-32 Drum Sander’s steel stand has a 20- x 37-in. footprint for stability and includes a storage shelf and pre-drilled holes for casters. Optional accessories include a set of infeed/outfeed tables; $129.99), each measuring 16-3/4-in. wide x 10-in. deep, which expands the sander’s total support surface to more than 42 in. A set of four, full-swivel locking casters with polyurethane-covered wheels ($133.99) also are optional.

“The JET 16-32 Drum Sander has proven itself to be a user-friendly, precision machine with plenty of capacity to efficiently handle a wide variety of sanding jobs,” said Joan Duvall, JET’s senior director of marketing. “Our new, upgraded version is sure to become an indispensible tool in many small- to mid-size woodshops, as well as enthusiasts’ home workshops.”

The JET 16-32 Drum Sander with Stand (model JWDS-1632) sells for $1,299.99. It is covered by a 5-year warranty, as well as JET’s RED Assurance, the industry’s most dependable service and support guarantee program. Click here to learn more about it or to find a JET dealer near you.

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Chris Marshall: Without a drawing or a more thorough description, Lee, what would be helpful to know is how you intend to build the substrate for your countertop (the material that builds up the countertop’s thickness underneath the top work/wear surface). And then, what sort of lipping you plan to install on the edge of the substrate that will serve as the surface you’ll be routing into around the curve. Even knowing how large the radius of the curve will be would be helpful to know (are we talking a 1/2-in. radius curve or a 10-in. radius?). As is, we don’t have great deal to go on here to offer advice.

If you’re planning to install a solid-surface countertop, then there won’t be any glue lines, because you won’t be gluing the sheets together at the curve. On the other hand, if you’ll be building up a more typical chipboard or plywood substrate, then banding the edge with solid wood and covering the top with plastic laminate, it’ll be tough to completely hide glue lines around the edge when you rout the roundover. I suppose you could laminate a bunch of thin strips of solid wood around a form to create the curved portion of the lipping (glues lines would be on the top and bottom edges of this curve instead of on the curved face), but you’ll still see a few long glue lines when you rout the top edge roundover and expose some of the laminated edge. If you do a really careful job of creating this lamination, the glue lines would be minimally noticeable and might even add some dynamic to the look of the countertop’s edge.

In my shop, I built a countertop with lipping made of solid ash and gray plastic laminate as the work surface (see photo). My substrate was two sheets of built-up MDF behind the ash lipping. The outside corner is mitered, and there’s a roundover on both the sharp mitered corner and the top edge to make it more durable and “skin friendly.” Of course I can see the glue line where the mitered pieces come together, but I think this looks pretty good, and it’s a logical intersection of two parts. When a glue line is an unavoidable intersection, I don’t see any need to hide it, so long as the pieces come together in a tight, neat seam. To me, that’s just good craftsmanship–not a mistake or a blemish to be hidden.

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10% goes into making some sort of wooden Christmas gifts for family and friends. This year was a woven wooden trivet.

Finally, 10% goes into making stuff just because I feel like making it,  many are from Woodworker’s Journal magazine, some are larger more detailed trucks from various books.

The cars became kits for the children (any kind of wood I can get my hands on). The gas truck, dozer and crane (all poplar) were some I made then gave to friends. The trivet is the woven trivet made out of cherry.

– Jack A.
South Windsor, CT

See the Gallery Below:

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There seems to be a rather sharp divide among woodworkers in terms of their preference, with some being all in favor of it. – Editor
“Carving has been my passion for years, both on boxes and in furniture. It seems that popular stuff in the past cycles around and starts to become the ‘in’ thing again.” – Greg Little

“My woodworking is carving, entirely!” – Lynda Kelley

“My life would be so much simpler if I liked Shaker or ‘Danish Modern.’ But I like Art Nouveau, which can entail a great deal of carving, depending on the design. I have a side table that is extensively carved, and my couch and side chair, which were inspired by a design from a couch in the Musee D’Orsay in Paris that is more shaped than carved in more traditional forms, but still using carving tools and techniques. Carving is very satisfying, almost a zen-like meditative experience.

If natural edges are an effort to achieve the feel of carving on furniture, it is a much simplified way of doing it without putting in the work.” – Barry Saltsberg

 And some avoiding it as much as possible. – Editor

“I think one of the biggest draws for live-edge wood is the natural feeling of the piece. I love it when someone can’t keep from caressing the edge of one of my tables or cutting boards. I do no more ‘carving’ than necessary with my pieces. Mainly just enough to get a void back to good wood so I can fill with stone and epoxy.” – Bob Farris

“A few thoughts about carving. To me, it seems too difficult to do and seems to require artisan skills which I do not possess. I really haven’t attempted any carving. Both my wife and I will look at some carving on furniture. We will agree that the carving is nice and took a lot of effort to do, but it is not to our taste in furniture. Commercially carved furniture, if available, is prohibitively expensive. Even if the carving is done by a CNC system, it takes time. We all know that ‘Time is money.’ The other thing that I’ve noticed about carving in furniture is that parts of the carving tend to collect dust. The sad fact is that nobody these days wants to dust or wax furniture on a regular basis. Isn’t that why they invented polyurethane?” – Rich Flynn

And some have other issues with it. – Editor

“I have tried to do some carvings so they really look nice. I have, at this point, managed to make a decent looking stick figure — if you really use your imagination.” – Richard Downey

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