Last weekend we spend a good amount of time over 3 days at The Woodworking Show basically to learn how little we really actually know about woodworking. The show covers all levels of woodworking from very basics that even young kids can get started with, up to very advance techniques, processes & equipment. Booths ranged from teaching workshops to cutting lumber to bulk supply dealers to every kind of product demonstrations and of course one of the highlights the Bosch Tool booth from Ohio Power Tool. Check out this photo album for all our pictures from the show.
Sporting her I Heart PowerTools tee, this nice young lady, was very popular with the predominately older male crowd the woodworking show typically brings in. The big tool attractions at the Ohio Power Tool / Bosch booth were definitely the Glide Saw GCM12SD and the new 2.3HP Bosch Routers MRC23EVSK also see the video below.
We got word from the router product manager himself these are targeted to ship in early March. The holdup is apparently on the parts supply chain side not a design issue and we expect with the years of heavy testing behind this new router it will be problem free out of the gate. Just need to wait a little longer.
One of the most popular speaker / instructors that was at the show was Jim Heavey from Wood Magazine who ran several classes each day on various topics. We had a chance to sit in on a few presentations and speak with Jim personally, a really nice guy who definitely knows his stuff. He also has his own Blog on WoodMagazine.com and recently did a post on his take from the Columbus show you can check out. He even mentions the Idea Foundry, Tool Racing & several pictures of the Coptool.com racer, The Reaver; we built for last year’s race.
Another interesting side attraction at the show is the Show Off Showcase, where local woodworkers can enter their own handy work and all the attendees get to vote on their favorite. The Columbus show winner was Phillip Traudt who built an amazing Carousel Rocking Horse (you can kind of see in the pic above), Phillip best of luck at the finals, we hope you bring one home for Columbus!
If you are looking to improve your skills you might also consider a couple day work shop. We had some good conversations with Chuck Bender from the Acanthus Workshop and also got to watch him make dovetails by hand a few time (he was the booth across from us), very impressive stuff. His school offers classes from basic all the way to master craftsman level; we might just have to sign up ourselves. Check out this abbreviated video from the dovetail DVD below.
Obviously there were tons of other really cool things from the show we didn’t touch on at all but if it took us 3 days to see everything at the show, we’d be working for weeks to cover it all. We will be back next year for sure and in the mean time we’ll buff up on our woodworking skills.
