In my last post I mentioned that we had taken a steam bending and bent laminations class from Seth Rolland at the Port Townsend School of Woodworking. My friend Vic Hubbard recently posted his blog about the class, which you can find here. I could write a great deal about the class, but I won’t, as Vic did a great job giving a thorough synopsis. What I will say is that if you get a chance and you are interested in learning new techniques to improve or to add to your woodworking knowledge you need instruction from those with that experience. PTSW is a great place to learn. I consider myself a pretty decent professional furniture maker and see the instructors as peers, yet every time I take a class there I end up leaving with some new tidbit to help make me better at what I do. This class is one of those times. I’ve always been hesitant to add curved work to my designs, because, at least for me, the learning curve was too great to go out and just muddle through it. The old time versus cost issue. It’s more cost efficient for me to build what I know and am comfortable with, than it is to spend time trying, failing, guessing, re-trying, re-failing, etc. If you are trying to make it as a professional, you have to be cognizant of your labor costs and try to minimize time wasted. Taking a class is not cheap, but in the long term, this cost is not only negated, I actually find that most times it is an investment that pays dividends.

As for the class…I took about 80 photos and 15 short video snippets covering many of the aspects of the class using my older Sony cybershot DSC-w200. The pictures aren’t great and the video quality isn’t the best but at least you can get an idea of what went on. What can I say; I’m a woodworker not a photographer, that’s why they get the big bucks! Any way I’ve decided that instead of posting all the photos and video to this blog, I am going to provide a link to my Photoshop page. I don’t like driving traffic away from my blog and I apologize for not knowing how to imbed the gallery into the blog, but this is the easiest way for me to load over a gigabyte worth of photos and videos to the web. Actually Photoshop does it for me, so that’s nice. If you click on the following photo it will take you to my page. You can go through each of the folders. I broke them down by activity. The photo is of Seth doing what Seth does, which is smiling. He brought such an easy going, creative and positive energy to the class. One of the best instructors I’ve ever learned from and a genuinely good person. Thanks for reading. Enjoy the photos!