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Really beautiful lathe work. Your last video inspired me to turn on my lathe for the first time in a very long time. I found that the live center for what is likely a 60 years old Delta lathe was missing, so I ordered a new one that will hopefully fit. Since I could not do spindle turning, I put a faceplate on the lathe that already had a board attached, likely attached to the faceplate when I bought the lathe 13 years ago. Within seconds, the screws holding the waste board to the faceplate broke loose, sending the board and waste board to the floor. I then noticed that I had what looked like a screw sticking out of a piece of metal that would fit into the headstock, so I rounded a piece of 4" x 6" black walnut, attached it to that screw, and then put it into the headstock. Within a minute of cutting, that screw snapped, sending the piece of black walnut to the floor. I then just simply used three screws to directly attach the walnut board to a faceplate and glued up two other 4" x 6" black walnut boards to waste boards for later experiments. While cutting the black walnut, I kept thinking that the top-of-the-line Craftsman high speed steel lathe tools that I bought in the 1980s are less than ideal in part due to their short blades. In the early 2000s I bought a Tormek, and figured out how to use its accessories to sharpen some of those lathe tools, but not all of them. I had picked up some Sorby lathe tools at an estate auction close to 20 years ago, and had previously sharpened a few of those with the Tormek, and this morning I found that those seemed to work more effectively with the black walnut. Are you using only carbide tipped lathe tools? What brand are your carbide tipped tools? If you are not using just carbide tipped tools on the lathe, how are you sharpening your tools? I will have to dig out the manual for the Tormek and see if I am able to sharpen my lathe tools to cut as well as your tools.

Hope they like their handmade/turned gifts. Really nice exotic timbers used too.

Great ideas for lathe projects. I am sure that if you post more about lathe usage, you will help inspire other people who bought a lathe and haven't used it in a year (or in my case much longer than that). Really nice video editing and camera skills in this video.

Man, for your first go around, it came out great. Definitely on my list to try sometime for myself. Thanks for the series and the honest personal feedback. It’s amazing to me when watching several Maloof style builds, how much shaping is involved. It makes sense though since the end product comes out with such a flowing appearance. Definitely a cool style.

I appreciated the self-appraisal and reflection at the end. Not to beat yourself up but what to change, how to tackle it differently, see where design decisions strengthened or hampered the build. I really enjoyed the series. Thanks for sharing the project journey.

While watching the episodes of this chair. ( I really like the design, and I think it’s beautiful.) I’ve been impressed with your skill set. You gave the impression that you haven’t used an angle grinder or die grinder much or any at all. So from my point of view, You did a damn good job! Thanks for sharing.

Excited to see the end product. Looking real good. I just watched a recent post on Tom McLaughlins YT channel “Epic Woodworking” where he toured Sam Maloofs studio. Pretty neat. Looking forward to episode 4 👍

Love your videos, the pacing, clarity of explanation, and mix of tool use. I would like to hear more about your design choices, the reason you chose one design over another.

I am enjoying this series. I am wondering why you created templates for the chair's legs rather than just cutting one leg, and using that leg as the template for the other leg? Are you planning to eventually make additional chairs of this style, or do you normally create part templates even for one-off projects so that the left side and right side are identical? Or are the templates primarily just a tool that help you refine the chair's style before committing to cutting expensive wood?

Looking great Gerald. Coming along nicely 👍

Beautiful work!!

I haven’t tackled a chair yet and the Maloof style has always been on my list but it’s definitely intimidating. Excited to see how this turns out.

I'm looking forward to the future episodes. Keep it up

I haven’t made rail and style doors in a while. I have a set of MLCS cutters. They work great. Or at least they did when I put them up (20 years ago). I never had a problem with sloppy joints. I bought them when I made an Ash cupboard for the kitchen. I also made cabinet doors for a rent house I had. They were made out of yellow pine and then painted. I think using the domino is a great idea. It adds strength to the joint and helps with assembly. Besides you already have everything. No need to buy something else. I feel the need to tell you that I think you do a great job at explaining and showing what you are doing and why. To me the why is as important if not more important than the how. Thanks for sharing.

Great instructional video on jointer use and safety. Nice Lie-Nielsen jointer plane too.

This is another very good video that you created. I am sure that what you mentioned in the video will be very useful for new and experienced jointer users. I believe that you nicely covered all of the essential skills for obtaining good quality cuts at the jointer (at least all of the essential skills that I have learned previously). I noticed while watching a couple of professional cabinet makers face joint boards on TH-cam, that they often stop face jointing a board before it is fully flat across the entire board surface - it seems that they stop once enough of the face is flat enough so that it will register evenly on a planer bed. After cleaning up the non-jointed side on the planer, they then finish flattening the side that was jointed (likely while making certain that an equal amount of wood is removed from each face to minimize later wood movement). I am not sure if this is done to extend the life of steel blades in a jointer when the planer has carbide blades, if it is a faster process when time directly translates to money in a production shop, or if there is another reason. The last time I was preparing to change the blades in my jointer and my planer, I bought a Woodstock W1218A Rotacator, which Grizzly was selling through Amazon (I just checked, and Amazon now sells this item directly). This is essentially a dial indicator that is able to rotate to point directly up or directly down (in addition to being able to freely rotate to different angles in between), and has a magnetic base to keep it from tipping over. I thought that this was the perfect device for setting blade height evenly. I attached the large flat shoe to the end of the dial indicator probe, thinking that doing so would allow the large surface area to make certain that the blade always contacts the shoe at its highest point when the blade is rotated by hand. Unfortunately, the Rotacator apparently has a tendency to rotate slightly when it is moved from one end of the blade to the other (causing a different portion of the large flat shoe to make contact with the blade). Several times I moved it from one end of a jointer blade to the other, and then back to the original end and found that the original end often measured up to 0.010" different than it did just a few seconds earlier due to the slight rotation. So, I really did not know if the two ends of a blade were set evenly without repeating the movement several times. The area of the bed roughly an inch before and after the cutter head on my jointer is aluminum, rather than cast iron, which also caused complications for the magnetic base when changing the position of the Rotacator to either slide it side to side or back slightly to allow rotating the cutter head (magnets are not attracted to aluminum, but they are attached to cast iron in case that is not obvious for some people reading the comments). After seeing you demonstrate using a ruler to set the jointer knives, I will probably try that approach rather than using the Rotacator the next time I need to swap blades on my jointer. Fortunately, I was able to find straight carbide blades to install into the planer, so it will probably be a while before I need to change those blades again.

Those large joinery router bits make my butt pucker from this side of the Pacific Ocean. Great video too. I liked the use of the story stick.

Another very good video. I never thought about using a story stick to transfer measurements when creating cabinet doors. Regarding the loose routed joint where the rails and styles meet, I wonder if there is any way your router could be slightly tilted either inside your router table's lift, or where the router table lift mounts to the table. That might explain slightly loose joints that are cut with your rail and style set at the router table. I have had good success using Whiteside brand rail and style bit sets (although my bits have certainly cut far fewer door parts than your bits). I have a Whiteside 6000F Roman Ogee Raised Panel bit that I used to create raised panels probably 20 years ago (I had to buy a speed controller for my old Milwaukee 2 HP router to use that bit). I have either a Whiteside 6005 traditional stile & rail set or a Whiteside 6002 ogee stile and rail set (the number was apparently written on the boxed set's thin plastic cover that has been lost since buying the set probably 20 years ago - it appeared to be a Roman ogee shape when I checked a few minutes ago, but the traditional set also seems to be an ogee style). I also located one of the two bits from the Whiteside 6001 round stile and rail set - I am not sure what happened to the matching bit. The Whiteside bits have their slot cutters 90 degrees offset from the profile cutter. I do not recall ever having a splintering problem in the red oak doors that I created using the bit sets (I seem to recall using an 8" x 8" MDF backer board when cutting end grain - it has been a while), and the joints at the corners always fit perfectly so that glue alone was enough for the joints. Hopefully, the current versions of those bit sets are still just as good.

Another interesting video with an excellent model. It has been a long time since I last installed any kind of trim in a house. Roughly 35 years ago, I attended a two-year long construction trades program where the students built essentially a double-wide modular home each year. Among other things, I learned to cut and install trim. While we installed tongue and groove knotty pine ship-lap boards on the ceiling in the family room, I believe that we only used rectangular shaped stock to cover the area of the wood ceiling where it met the walls - so the students never learned to install crown molding in that program. Your cope cut in the corner of the crown molding looked great. We were taught to use cope cuts for baseboard molding inside corners, as it helps to hide gaps when the boards slightly shrink or the house settles, just as you stated in the video. When cope cutting, we were told to cut a 45 degree bevel on the end of the baseboard (so that the face is shorter than the back), and then when using the coping saw to slightly back-cut when cutting the profile so that only the point of the profile contacts the mating baseboard - I suspect that back cut was to address issues where walls did not meet at exactly 90 degrees. We used a Delta Sawbuck (essentially, a portable radial arm saw) to cut the molding. I do believe that we ever created outside corners with the baseboards. The technique that you used is interesting. I am wondering if a cheap digital bevel gauge (such as the one created by General) would be a good effective middle ground between the manual calculation approach and the Festool solution? If I were installing regular baseboard trim 35 years ago that required an outside 90 degree corner, I would probably cut the first board to exactly 45 degrees, and then tweak the 45 degree angle as necessary on the mating trim board (then hide the imperfections with the same wax stick that we used to hide the countersunk nail heads). When joining two baseboards end to end, we were taught to use a 45 degree bevel on the end of the baseboard, like you used for the crown molding, and that bevel would help hide imperfections as the house settles - much like the carpenter that you mentioned in the video. I like the approach that you used, as it will likely result in a better looking result after a few years of house settling. However, that approach would likely add a few minutes to the construction time for each joint, and in that time a good finish carpenter using a nail gun might have installed several additional pieces of baseboard trim - we used regular hammers, nails, and nail sets to install trim, so the time savings would not have been as significant back then. Biscuit joiners were rare roughly 35 years ago - I bought my Porter Cable biscuit joiner in 1991. Have you ever tried creating molding? I have a Foley-Belsaw 12 3/8" planer (actually I have three, but one is missing a few parts) that is able to cut crown molding and other types of molding. The previous owner of the planer paid around $3000 for the planer in the late 1990s, and used several styles of molding knives in the planer to create various type of molding for his woodworking business. I bought the planer with several molding knives at a bargain price in an estate auction in the mid-2000s, and never used the planer for creating moldings. I just recently bought a Pantorouter, and with its tilting table, I am thinking that the unit might also be able to create interesting moldings with the right router bits.

Good job mate, love to see a man doing good work

Very good video on table saw safety - excellent presentation style and editing. The video seemed to be only about 10 minutes in length, yet it was four times that length. You included a very good selection of safety tips that even long-term table saw users may forget about. I do not own a SawStop table saw, but I have two Delta Unisaws and a Delta Model 10 contractor's saw, all manufactured in the 1980s. None of those saws, when I bought them used over the years, had blade guards or splitters, and all are too old to support riving knives found on all current saw models. I have owned the Delta Model 10 contractor's saw since the early 1990s, and bought the first Unisaw in the early 2000s. Last year I started finding ways to make the saws safer (I have had a few close calls with binding related problems when cutting boards, and a couple cases where my fingers wandered too closely to the blade). I found a Delta "popup" splitter on Amazon for less than $100 last year (it is currently more than $100) and installed that on the Unisaw that I have had the longest. After finding that the popup splitter saved me from a few bad kickbacks (in one case I was using the rip fence to cut sheet stock that was three times as wide as it was long, with 2/3 of the width to the left of the blade, and I could not properly control the offcut... this is one reason why I later added the Harvey crosscut table to that saw, which is similar to the crosscut table on your SawStop). I moved that popup splitter to the other Unisaw and bought a Shark Guard ARK package blade guard and splitter (almost has a riving knife) for just under $400 (they are now over $400) for the first Unisaw. The Shark Guard has a top-mounted 3" dust collection port, and the guard is removable in 30 to 60 seconds when there is a need to make narrow rip cuts, and fully removable for through cuts or crosscut sled cuts in about two minutes without any tools. A good blade guard might not seem to be necessary, but having one on the saw significantly reduces the chances of kickback and fingers accidentally contacting the blade. This year I bought another Shark Guard ARK package blade guard and splitter for the other Unisaw and moved the popup splitter to the contractor's saw. A few other changes that I made to improve table saw safety: * Added a JessEm 04301 Clear-Cut TS Stock Guide (currently a little over $300), which help to make rip cuts safer and straighter by holding boards down to the table and into the fence (greatly improves safety on right-tilt table saws when ripping with the blade angled, but otherwise helpful for many rip cuts to prevent boards from drifting away from the fence). * Created multiple zero clearance blade inserts from plywood for both regular saw blades and dado blades. * Created several wooden push sticks that are similar in shape to the push stick that came with your SawStop (they were actually patterned from memory after push sticks that were available when I took woodworking classes back in high school). Some plastic push sticks will shatter when saw blades make contact with them, use wooden push sticks and don't be afraid to allow the blade to cut into them if doing so improves the safety of the cut. * Added the Harvey crosscut table to help manage sheet stock on the table saw. It might be cutting at 90 degrees now. * Added a thin rip jig, which attaches to a miter slot), to improve the safety of creating multiple narrow boards that are the same width when using the rip fence. I have a Rip-it 2.0 automated table saw rip fence on order, which will have the same capability built into the rip fence's automated motion control, but that product is not shipping yet.

Do more work to get better????

Howdy Gerald, It looks like you have found a good method of cutting dovetailed joints. I do it a bit differently using hand tools exclusively but yours look at least as good as mine or better. I had to learn without the benefit of electric power and don't want to change what has work for me for many years. Thanks for the superb instruction. Keep them coming and I will keep on watching. --Jim

The Domino busting jig

I don’t own any Festool tools because of price but the Domino is definitely one that I’d love to get. Until then, I use the router as you have in this video but built a different type of jig. Thanks for the video Gerald. God bless.

Another interesting video - thanks for taking so much time to put the videos together. I noticed that your Sawstop table saw has a crosscut table attached to it that is very similar to the Harvey ST-1500 crosscut table. A few weeks ago, I installed a Harvey ST-1500 crosscut table to the left wing on my late 1980s Delta Unisaw. I had to freehand drill three holes into the left wing of the saw to mount the crosscut table. I then must have spent at least 10 hours trying to fix the alignment of the crosscut table. I first found that it was dropping 1/16" lower than the table of the saw at the back of the saw, requiring one of the mounting holes to be drilled 1/32" larger. Then I found that the table's travel was not parallel to the miter slots, requiring shims to be added to the front edge of the table saw wing. The addition of those shims then caused the tilt angle of the table to change, leading to the miter bar colliding with the front of the table saw. After getting the table traveling true to the blade, I had to remove the miter bar to make a wide rip cut, and when the miter bar was returned to the table, I had to spend considerable time trying to get it to cut at a true 90 degrees again. After getting the table squared up again, I created a jig using MDF and red oak that fits into the miter bar slots on the crosscut sled to set the fence to 90 degrees. I then found that the jig was slightly off 90 degrees when crosscutting a 30" wide panel, where the leading edge of the panel was 1/32" narrower than the trailing edge (it was off by 1/16" when both ends were cut after flipping the board side-for-side with the same edge against the fence). I then calculated that I need to use a 0.023" feeler gauge (that is about 1/3 of a 1/16") between one end of the fence and the jig I created to set the miter bar for a 90 degree cut. I have been working with wood on and off for about 35 years, and never imagined that I would be using feeler gauges to achieve a 90 degree cut on a board - an accurate framing square is usually enough. How well do you like the crosscut sled on your Sawstop table saw? Do you have any difficulty setting it to a true 90 degrees after having to remove the miter bar for a wide rip cut?

Hi Gerald, just found your channel and enjoying the videos. I will be looking back at your previous visits. Regards Ian from Aotearoa (New Zealand).

Great video, Gerald. You have a new subscriber.

Good video Gerald. Thanks for your time. What is your background? I can tell you’ve done this a while.

Excellent work. I love this joint. I used it in my Moravian workbench. I also love me some Brisket!!! Nothing like doing it on a traditional offset 👍

Planing is important too. Using cranky Australian timbers means you need to plan around all manner of grain directions.

Another great video. Googling dowel plates right now.

just came across your channel 2 days ago. Thank you for sharing. I will definitely watch future videos of yours.

Great tips on the half blind dovetail. Your channel needs more eyeballs and subscribers.

7:50 Those shavings 👌

Just found your channel and 2min in you’ve covered woodworking, brisket, and ribs. Can we be best friends?

How much wood should you leave on the sides of the tenon. Im pretty sure you left a 1/4". Was just wondering if the the lowest amount you should leave?

Well done. Extra points for using handscrew clamps as vises. Though I take some points off for making me want brisket when there is none in my house :)

The algorithm brought me here! Sir, your skills and positive attitude won me over. I'm happy to sub! I'm looking forward to seeing more. I could almost smell that BBQ! 😊 Thanks for sharing your knowledge and talent.

This is the third video of yours that I have watched in the last two days, and thoroughly enjoyed watching each one. I like your use of models in the video, and your general approach to explaining things. Reminds me a bit of the way that Norm Abram would present woodworking information. Regarding the dowel making plate that you showed, a few months ago I bought a similar dowel making plate from DFM Toolworks that has smaller increments between the dowel hole sizes. The directions for that dowel making plate suggest running the dowels through the holes for the next two larger holes first, and then run the dowels through the desired dowel size, using either a drill to spin the dowel stock or a mallet to drive the dowel stock through the holes. I noticed that you went directly to the desired dowel size, rather than starting at a larger dowel size. Does the Lie Nielsen dowel making plate produce dowels with a smooth surface that is suitable for displaying in the project, or are the dowel sides grooved a bit (which is probably ideal if the dowels are to be glued in place and hidden)? For the black walnut dowels that I created with the DFM Toolworks plate, the resulting dowel surface was a bit rough, which is fine for hidden dowels, but not ideal for exposed dowels. Also, I noticed in another video that you were using regular bench chisels rather than mortising chisels when cleaning out a mortise. Do you not commonly use mortising chisels for cleaning out mortises? (Asking because I just recently bought an expensive set of eight mortising chisels, and I am now wondering if those are not needed very often.)

Mind telling me about the brass "pull plane" that you used for smoothing the key.

Great video, you articulate very well. I could see your channel blowing up in the next couple years as you hone in on the video production process. Will try this joint in the future, really appreciate glueless joints.

Salt also will work ,

Welcome to TH-cam Gerry. Nice job of explaining the somewhat daunting task of doing hand cut dovetails. Look forward to future content. Enjoy your retirement 😊

Recently found your channel. Really enjoy your work. If i may? Watch your video and count the times you say "uuum" "aaaah" Really detracts from your story. Just my humble opinion.

Thank you

Looks great

Just subscribed, love your work, and especially your teachings. I am no craftsman like yourself do a little wood turning, anyway I am staying tuned to learn. Thank you! David

I’m new. Great work