Splinters with Gary Rogowski

By Gary Rogowski

Arts Education

What's Splinters with Gary Rogowski about?

This podcast series is a look at furniture building from a veteran maker, designer, and author. The episodes are practical, philosophic, witty, and irreverent. Gary was a former contributing editor at Fine Woodworking Magazine, and founded The Northwest Woodworking Studio, A School for Woodworkers, in Portland, Oregon in 1997. He has no illusions about the value of this work in today’s culture of fast and furious and disposable. Making art, building furniture, is work that is useless and beautiful, and necessary for those who produce it. Creativity feeds the soul like nothing else can.

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LAST EPISODE

The Lowly Scraper

06.30.2020

Splinters with Gary Rogowski episodes:

06.30.2020 The Lowly Scraper
06.15.2020 Milling Lumber
06.01.2020 Shadows Again
05.18.2020 Stay the Course
05.04.2020 Stuck
04.20.2020 That's the This The beauty of language.
04.06.2020 Straight The concept of straight is as important as any at the bench. Get that straight.
03.23.2020 Balance How do we find balance in a world that has gone topsy turvy? How do we find balance in our work at the bench?
03.09.2020 Don't Think
02.24.2020 Slow Down The best way to move quickly is to move slowly with purpose. Fast work of things usually makes mistakes.
02.10.2020 Restraint Restraint refers to so many things in our life. But also to breadboard ends.
01.27.2020 Mastery A chat about the Mastery Program at the Studio. Its values and value.
01.13.2020 The Bandsaw Bandsaws are the most versatile machine in the furnituremaking shop.
12.30.2019 Resistententialism You know it when your tools hide from you, resist your efforts, thwart your progress.
12.16.2019 The Nature of Quality To be involved with one's work is not just a question of what gets produced but how it gets produced. This is in the nature of Quality.
12.02.2019 Gathering Inspiration Our muses can be difficult to locate on some days. Pay close attention to them.
11.18.2019 The Screwdriver The screwdriver. One of our most indispensable tools.
11.04.2019 On Creativity Molly Major, metalsmith, and Gary discuss creativity.
10.28.2019 Mistakes You can handle a mistake in several different ways. Choose the one that yields the most for you.
10.21.2019 On Beginning Starting out can be a challenge. Keep an eye on the prize.
10.14.2019 Starting Out There is no shortcut to learning skills. It's just like taking a hike. All the steps have to be made.
09.30.2019 ReCo Bklyn Lumber Roger Benton runs a wood resource center in Brooklyn, New York. His sawmill saws up tons of wood every year rescuing these trees from the landfill. He does this to save beautiful wood to produce incredible slabs, dimensional lumber, and ...
09.16.2019 The Jointer Revealed The jointer is as sensitive a piece of cast iron as exists in the shop. Learn how to tune and use yours to get the results you are after.
09.09.2019 My Top Five Hand Planes These hand planes I find indispensable at the bench. They are time savers for me.
09.02.2019 Get On With the Work There are a lot of tools one needs at the bench. Being able to bounce back from a mistake or two is one of them.
08.26.2019 Glue Changes Everything Too A reprise of a favorite episode, our Season Two opener.
08.19.2019 Which Wood Why, Rewind Picking out your lumber and milling it makes a difference in the look and longevity of your piece. Learn some of the qualities of wood to watch for.
08.12.2019 Accuracy Too Slow down, I'm in a hurry.
08.05.2019 Chapter 12 Reprise, Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction
07.29.2019 Sharp, Dull, Sharp Again Time to sharpen again. Not because I've been using so many of my tools and made them dull. No, it's our summer break now and this is a podcast broadcast in Season One. Enjoy.
07.22.2019 Chiseled Twice Chisels, the wedge, the most important hand tool in the shop.
07.15.2019 The Top 5 Machines Not Named the Table Saw, Once More This is a list of the top machines that a furniture maker needs in the shop.
07.08.2019 Splinters Again This podcast came out in Season One. During a short summer break, please listen to this story of not paying attention and the cost.
07.01.2019 Intention A recorded DESIGN: Open House chat about Intention with John Eisemann, choral master, and Gary Rogowski, furniture maker. Two very different perspectives on considering the creative process.
06.24.2019 Shadows Forgetting your last mistake.
06.17.2019 Best Books Encyclopedia of Furniture Making Ernest Joyce Cabinetmaking for Beginners Charles Hayward Understanding Wood Bruce Hoadley Sharpening Leonard Lee Hand Applied Finishes Jeff Jewett A Reverence for Wood Eric Sloane Tools of the Trade Jeff Taylor 18th Century Furniture Making Jeffrey ...
06.10.2019 Blade Geometry Tear-out when hand planing can be a frustration. There are simple techniques you can use to change the cutting angle of your blade or your chipbreaker. These will eliminate tear-out in the nastiest of grains.
06.03.2019 Sawstop Saws with CEO Matt Howard This is a fascinating chat with Matt Howard, CEO of Sawstop Saws. They have blade technology that shuts off a saw before it can cut through a finger. Crazy and interesting stuff.
05.27.2019 Problem Solving Problem solving, planning, strategizing: these things take up the time at the bench. And when done well, the results make that investment of time well worth it.
05.20.2019 The Mastery Program At The Northwest Woodworking Studio, we offer a school of thought and practice in the skills of design and woodworking.
05.13.2019 The Nature of Workmanship The very act of building/ creating/ making furniture is an act filled with implications about you and your goals.
05.06.2019 Models and Design Front end load your design work and you will feel better at the back end when you finish a piece. Sketching, full scale modeling in cardboard, and quarter scale models are enormous aids in discovering what's right and what's wrong ...
04.29.2019 Getting Directions Few of us end up where we had imagined ourselves from the start.
04.22.2019 Pad Sanders I Have Known I know plenty of pad sanders. But I'd trade them all away for a sharp hand plane. Hand planes can be time savers when it comes to smoothing surfaces. They also fight that perfectionism that pad sanders lead you to.
04.15.2019 10 Things to Know about Wood Wood doesn't just sit there. It's alive. It moves, it changes dimension, it colors over time. Learns some essential facts about wood so you can choose your wood for your next project with more information at hand.
04.08.2019 Beginner's Mind Everyone starts at the beginning. Yet our expectations rarely match our skills then. The hardest thing is to be patient as we learn.
04.01.2019 The Total Body Work-out This April Fool's Day lecture is on the value of working out with your woodworking.
03.25.2019 Brian Boggs, Master Craftsman Brian Boggs is a chairmaker, artist, designer, and engineer extraordinaire. He is also quite a philosopher on the nature of work and workmanship, the value of excellent work, and how tooling affects design.
03.18.2019 Discipline and Practice Practice is what brings us first to competency and then to mastery. Listen to some stories of discipline that allowed practitioners to work through their own limitations. Quality doesn't have a shortcut to it.
03.11.2019 The Lowly Scraper The scraper is a small wonder. It is capable of cutting in most any direction without tear-out. How to get one sharp can be frustrating. Listen to one simple tip that will change your method and make sharpening a scraper ...

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