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Welcome to The Splinter Report, where I gather the assorted interesting and amusing things I’ve seen in the woodworking world. This week we’re looking at new tools, crafty magazine projects, and worlds colliding.
Tool News Quick Bites
Milwaukee Introduces M18 Handheld Vacuum: The continual march of brushless tech has now reached the world of handheld vacuums, as demonstrated by this new launch from Milwaukee. I actually own a similar type of vac from Ryobi, and I must admit I like using the batteries I already own instead of buying into yet another system.
Blue Spruce Releases Midi Card Scrapers: As the name implies, they’re smaller than a normal card scraper, but not quite “miniature”.The 4-piece set includes a 1-1/2″ x 2-1/2″ rectangle with relieved corners, a 2-1/2″ French curve, a 1-1/2″ x 2-1/2″ ellipse and a “bowtie” with 2 concave surfaces and 2 convex surfaces.
Makita Has A New Miter Saw: The Makita LS1110F is a 10″ slider aimed squarely at the jobsite market. It’s corded(!) which also helps keep weight down. For the occasional miter saw user in the woodshop, it would be a great choice as well.
From the Archives: The Pinterest Years
Woodworking magazines today tend to follow a similar playbook for each issue: hero (cover) project, smaller furniture project, shop project, and a smattering of technique articles. That wasn’t always the case though. Go back 40 or so years and you’d find something closer to a Pinterest page than what you’d recognize today. Back then it was more like: small furniture, toy, tchotchke, wall art, another tchotchke, a larger piece of furniture, another toy, carving article, etc. (Before everyone gets too up in arms about the amount of content we used have, most of those project articles were only a few pages long, and only had a handful of photos. Today, most projects are 8-10 pages long and have 30+ photographs.) Even the covers looked more Pinteresteque:
Sometime in the mid-90s the artsy-craftsy “DIY” style projects disappeared from the pages of PopWood and many of the other purely woodworking magazines. So what changed? Part of it might have been due to the rising woodworking Renaissance that saw the return of quality hand tools in the early 2000s, and the demand for more complex projects. The other part probably has to do with Martha Stewart.
In 1990 Martha Stewart launched the Martha Stewart Living magazine, followed by the Martha Stewart Living TV show in 1993. They both became huge sensations, and created a boom of DIY culture centered around women. And while I lack any concrete evidence, I suspect the “intrusion” of women into that realm of woodworking left some men feeling emasculated, lowering the demand for those projects. To this day, they remain more niche in traditional woodworking circles, though clearly that style of project is alive and well on Pinterest and elsewhere.
As a thank you for reading all of that, here are the plans for the Nativity Puzzle from the November 1989 issue.
Out of Context Christopher Schwarz Quote
Video of the Week: Team-Up
This week’s video combines two people I’ve featured in the Splinter Report previously. Former Mythbuster Adam Savage was in the June 6th edition, and YouTuber Andrew Klein had a video in the September 5th report. As it turns out, Andrew had built Adam’s woodworking bench 5 years ago, but they had never met in person oddly enough. The video below shows them going through the bench history and construction. Plus while Andrew is there, they upgrade the bench workholding with a new vise.
Anything interesting I missed this week, or that you want me to highlight in a future Splinter Report? Let me know on social media or drop me an email at cknoff@aimmedia.com.
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