See the Pacific Northwest and Learn to Saw

There are still spaces left for a week-long summer course in handsawing at the Northwest Woodworking School in Portland, Ore. It is the only class I’m teaching this year that has not sold out.

During the five days of instruction I’ll be diving deeply into saws and joinery , weaving together the historical facts about the art that I’ve dug up with the hands-on exercises I’ve been practicing since I picked up my first handsaw at age 8.

Unlike my other weekend classes on sawing, I’ll be covering the entire gamut of the craft, from breaking down rough stock with an 8-point crosscut handsaw to cutting dovetails that are tight and made with a minimum of fuss. (I’ve actually just posted a blog entry on dovetail cutting angles on my personal blog that you might find interesting.)

The other interesting aspect of this course is we explore the joinery planes that are used in conjunction with handsaws to make perfect , and I mean perfect , hand-cut tenons, half-laps, dados, notches and sliding dovetails. (In other words, you’ll finally learn what your router plane is really good for.)

Plus, we’ll be building two projects: a traditional English sawbench for your shop and a hand-dovetailed silverware tray for your family.

The class runs from July 14 to 18 and costs $725 plus the materials for the sawbench and silverware tray. You can read more information about the class at the Northwest Woodworking Studio’s web site. Or you can drop me a line via e-mail if you have any questions.

Hope you can join us. If you’d like to see photos of past classes I’ve taught on sawing, check out this link to a weekend class I taught recently at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking and a one-day seminar at the Woodcraft in Sterling Heights, Mich. Also, there’s a short podcast about the class at Matt’s Basement Workshop you can listen to. Matt Vanderlist, the host of the shop, was one of the students in the Woodcraft show. (He made some wicked-tight half-laps.)

– Christopher Schwarz