Stuff We Used to Throw Away

Woodworking can be a wasteful process. If you cut down a tree for lumber, most of the it ends up on the forest floor or in a wood chipper. Less than 25% will be sent to the mill. More material is lost in processing before rough lumber can be sold, and as the wood is converted to furniture, every step produces almost as much waste as what gets used. Editing a woodworking magazine is a similar process; the finished product you read is only a small fraction of what we started with. One of the articles in the upcoming April issueis a good case in point.

Mario Rodriguez designed and built a beautiful writing desk, and we featured his methods for making first-class drawers in our February issue. The hard part of editing these articles is making all this information fit within a few magazine pages. The good news is that we realize the internet is useful for more than getting driving directions or settling arguments, so we’re using some bandwidth to share photos and drawings that we couldn’t squeeze into the printed page. The old saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a link to several thousand words worth of Mario’s original drawings.

Click Here to download a PDF file of additional drawings of the Providence Writing Desk

And of course we also had a bunch of extra photos, about 29,000 words worth by my count. It’s almost as good as looking over the shoulder of Mario as he works.

Click Here to download a PDF slide show of additional step photos of the construction of the Providence Writing Desk.

–Robert W. Lang