Greetings Fediverse woodworkers

Our little corner of the internet remains a happy, friendly and mostly wholesome place, barring the occasional bawdy joke. Steady stream of project sharing and technique discussion.

I figure about once a season I'm going to check in with the community at large to ask y'all if we can make it better. Any ideas for community activities or events? Anything you'd like to see around here? Anything cool you want to build?

👋I’m not great at woodworking but I built a new door for my crawlspace. The old one was rotted out. I learned how to sort of use a speed square so I’m proud of myself.

A semiannual competition might be cool. Community poll to pick a project (small table, breadbox, bird house, etc), a few months to build and submit and then a winner gets chosen. I imagine the first few contests would be for the love of the game but eventually could figure out prizes like tools?

Nice! Could you create a post about it, with a picture or two?

The contests we've done in the past were for the community picture, like the cutting board currently there. I'd be down for prizes though we'd have to figure out some avenue for funding, I don't personally have a budget for that.

I'm recovering from a bout of bronchitis, but maybe this weekend I'll be in good enough shape to wear my dust mask for long enough to finish up the shooting board I need to help straighten the 1x2s for the next shop furniture project. (The longer-term project of curing my miserliness so that I don't feel obliged to straighten cheap lumber that's bowed instead of buying new is . . . a work in progress.)

I think this community is doing okay. Could use a few more posters, but that's the kind of thing that will only come with time.

Perhaps of interest to other posters here: Humble Bundle currently has a bundle of woodworking ebooks from Taunton Press available. I have paper copies of a couple from this lot already, and they're pretty good.

I hope you do get over that bronchitis. As for warped wood, I'll sometimes buy a crooked piece along with straighter ones because I know I'm going to chop one of them into smaller bits to make short little rails and such. IIRC the rails on the doors for the hutch I made last year were like 8 inches long. Cutting a board into relatively small pieces takes a surprising amount of the bow out.

My main aim is to encourage more of what we got.

And that book bundle looks like quite a deal. That sort of thing...I don't exactly want to flood the place with every $5 off power drills coupon issued in the world but please folks feel free to post great deals on books and such.