Blind Woodworkers Workshop

2013-06-04-Woodworking

Seminars@Hadley

Presented by Larry Martin

Moderated by Larry Muffet

June 4, 2013

Larry Muffet Welcome to Seminars at Hadley. My name is Larry Muffet. I’m a member of Hadley’s seminar team and I also work in curricular affairs and veteran’s outreach at Hadley. Today’s seminar topic is coming to you live from the annual Blind Woodworker’s Workshop in Deer Park, Illinois. We were fortunate enough to cover the workshop last year and we’re truly pleased to be back for this year’s edition.

Our presenters today will include the founder of the Blind Woodworker’s group, Larry Martin, as well as many of the participants. Today, they will all be sharing with you what projects they’ve been working on and the new set of tips and pointers to make this activity of woodworking more fun and rewarding.

Here’s the interesting point. Many of our panel members are not yet loaded up here around the table, so I’m going to get started with the founder of the blind woodworker’s group, Larry Martin, and let him explain how this workshop got started and sort of the history of his organization and hopefully while we’re having this conversation we’ll get everybody around the table and get ready to start to introducing the panelists.

I’m going to turn it over to you for a second, Larry, and just for the folks that didn’t listen to last year’s workshop, maybe give them some background on how this whole thing started.

Larry Martin Thank you, Larry. Good afternoon. We are in our eighth year now, Woodworking for the Blind. The organization began when I read an article in Woodcraft Magazine back in the days when Woodcraft was still quite a young magazine and they were trying to promote the magazine. They carried an article online about a blind woodworker and one of the things in the article that really struck me was when he said he toughest thing to do was learning new things because he couldn’t read the existing woodworking magazines. So, I got in touch with him

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 2 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking and we began doing projects together by email and telephone. And, later one, we then started to use some scanning that was a problem and finally at the genius bar a young girl suggested I record the material and that’s exactly what I began doing.

Since that time, I’ve recorded 54 CDs. On those, are about 185 magazine issues and about 400 hours of recording. The magazines have Fine Woodworking, Popular Woodworking, American Woodworker, Woodwork, Woodcraft and a few others which I’ve forgotten now. During the course of this, some of the members began communicating by email and then two of the members set up a website and a Yahoo forum and that’s the main way that we communicate now. We no longer actually issue CDs because we now post them online and members can easily download them. We maintain an index of all of the magazines so that it’s easy to retrieve information.

Someone will be working on a project and raise a question and within a couple of hours there are any number of answers to his problem already. So, the group works quite closely together, spread out across the country. We have probably around 50 really active members. Of those, most are skilled, but a good portion really are newbies who are just learning

Last year we started the first summer workshop. Three days of intensive training in the whole range of woodworking skills. This year will be the second annual one. The topics this year begin with cabinet making, then go on to joinery, primarily mortis and tendon and also dowel joinery, biscuit joinery and dovetails and miter joints.

Then onto some inlay and stringing, veneering, resawing, working safely with small parts and on Friday, finally, a full day of turning. We have nine members who are here this weekend. There will be five lathes, so two members to a lathe, each with their individual teacher. That is being provided by the Chicago Woodturners club which is extremely helpful in the things they’ve done. The projects will be turning a handle, turning a pen and turning a small bowl. The goal is that each participant will go home with those three items that they’ve made themselves.

Anyone interested in joining up with us, of course we’d love to have you. We can give you that information later in the program.

Larry Muffet

Great, fantastic Larry. I think it would be timely now since we’ve got everybody set up around the table now, let’s go around the table and I’d like for you all to just introduce yourself, say where you’re from and how long you’ve been doing woodworking. So, I’ll start with this gentleman right here.

Dan Rossie My name is Dan Rossie. I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I really am kind of new to the craft of woodworking. I mostly do carpentry type work, but I’d like to get to, you know, learn a little more about the finer parts of woodworking.

Larry Muffet Excellent, thanks. Next.

Max Robinson Max Robinson, I’m from Bowling Green, Kentucky. I have been woodworking I guess about 5 years. I’m retired.

Gale Walton Gale Walton, Denver, Colorado. Been woodworking I guess for two, three years.

Dennis Shwer

Dennis Shwer from Kalamazoo, Michigan. Actually, woodworking, most of my life. It just started when I was back in high school and I actually thank an excellent woodworking teacher back then for getting me interested. From then on it’s just been just a hobby, you know, a lot of—most of its been home remodeling, that type of woodworking, but with some actual project work.

Jim Norwick Jim Norwick, St. Paul, Minnesota. 42 years and maybe 6 now as a blind woodworker.

Gary Patterson Gary Patterson from Des Moines, Iowa. I’m just a real newbie. I’ve made kind of a little bit for maybe a year and a half or so.

Gale Levins I’m Gale Levins from Ontario, Canada. I’ve been woodworking since high school and I’m now 63 if that helps. I really enjoy large carpentry projects but I also like small woodworking projects as well.

Larry Martin I’m the last, I’m Larry Martin. I am sighted. I began woodworking 15 years ago when I retired. I had done nothing before and I do not do any carpentry. I don’t

Larry Muffet Okay, gentlemen, here’s going to be sort of the general ground rules on this. We’re going to have kind of a free flowing discussion. I’ll throw some questions out on the table. We may get some questions from the audience. If you want to offer anything, probably be best just to raise your hand and then I can recognize you and say your piece. If other people want to follow in on that question, they’re welcome to do so.

I think the first thing, I know this came up a lot last year when we were talking about this, and it’s kind of yelp in the room, it’s the whole idea of using power tools and the safety issue and all that sort of thing, so what can you share with people who are thinking about this but they’re not sure, that whole idea of using power tools makes them a little skittish or makes their wife skittish or whoever. Why don’t you address that topic for us.

Jim Norwick Anyone can learn how to use a power tool safely with some experience and doing well. It took me a while to get reused to power tools, especially the table saw

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 7 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking which is a very loud tool with the spinning blade you know. I do teach people who are blind and we’ve never had an accident so far, a major one, in our course.

Larry Muffet All right, everybody hands on the table. We’ve got seven blind woodworkers here, one sighted woodworker, there are 79 and 31/32 fingers on the table and the only one that isn’t is the sighted woodworker who nipped off the end of his on a jointer a few years ago. Yes Dennis.

Dennis Rossie Just to add the power tool part. One thing I found that really, really helped to get comfortable with power tools and that’s the proper use of, I guess what I would call it, jigs, stops, hold downs, things that you can set up what you want to do, you lock it in place and then it’s under control. When you tool the on and work it, things aren’t going to fly off. You’re not sitting there with your hands an eighth of an inch from the blade—it’s all held in place. You just run it through, turn it off and it adds a lot to the confidence level and it’s the proper way to do it.

Larry Muffet Anyone else want to add? Yeah, sure.

Gale Levins One thing I was going to say is that it’s not impossible for blind people to get injured. It’s not unreasonable to assume that once in a while somebody will. If we’re not going to get injured that’s expecting a lot of performance of both like what sighted people achieve because lots of sighted people do. I worked as a physiotherapist for 40 years and in all that time we rehabilitated an awful lot injured hands and not one of them was blind. So, you know, I’m not saying that blind people can’t get hurt. It comes back down to the cost/benefit analysis and in many cases, I think misplaced anxiety, no just amongst ourselves, but from some of the people who, our loved ones for example, who are naturally anxious about us. If it’s something you wish to do and you’re motivated to do, then just learn how to do it safely and like everything else, you will succeed.

Larry Martin A couple of summers ago, we had a contest in making small boxes. Design was an important part of it and the quality of workmanship was important. The blind woodworkers that I, sighted, participate in the contest. But, I had to wear a sleep mask. I can tell you, after having talked about this for years with the recording, talked with so many blind woodworkers

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 9 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking over the forums, I was very, very nervous for that first cut, even though I knew precisely where the fence was, precisely where the blade was, had plenty of clearance for my hand, making the first cut was tough. Second cut wasn’t so tough and third and fourth cut were rather easy.

Larry Muffet I don’t remember which one of you, maybe it was somebody who wasn’t here, but they had the great story about doing woodworking in their basement at night with the lights off and using the power saw and just totally freaking the neighbors out. They could hear that ripsaw going and all the lights were out and it’s like totally freaked them out. But it was just a great story.

What I want to do now is, one of the things I want to do is just basically go around the room and talk about projects you’ve been working on now and things you’d like to share with the group and get people encouraged in this and what sort of activities you’ve been working on. I’ll start this time around with Darrel Vickers.

Darrel Vickers Darrel’s a latecomer. I just finished my kitchen which was a complete remodel, so I did all the cabinetry in it

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 10 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking and I’m back to doing some smaller projects, boxes and stuff like that. I’ve kind of taken a break from it. I didn’t want to do anything major again for a while. That was a lot of work. Twenty raised panel doors and it was a lot of work. So, working on some smaller things. But projects run the gamut from big to small. They’re all the same, basically.

Gale Levins Since we were here last year, I put a new porch on the front of our house with a little 8 x 12 cover with a vaulted ceiling which was very interesting to do. A couple of other small projects, coffee makers and things.

Larry Martin Gary is a newbie, so Gary what have you done?

Gary Patterson Well, I’ve been trying to figure out design. I want to make a small box and first I thought, well, that sounds so simple and, lots of different design and use things to consider. The guys in the group have been a lot of help to me. All you got to do is send the message out saying how do you do thus and so, and they’ve been real supportive.

Jim Norwick

I made a corner desk not too long ago out of some scrap cherry that was lying around. And, a porch— not as fancy as Dale’s porch—no roof on it. Just to get down to the side walk and I think I probably will do some home remodeling. The list calls for me to make a handrail and some spindles, so that’s probably where I’ll go. Inside work.

Dennis Shwer As far as current projects, as with, I think what somebody else said, that the big kitchen remodeling and what-not, that was done a couple of years ago, so that kind of set me back for a while. But for little stuff, the thing I like to do is something that I guess you can’t go out and just buy it. You want something done the way you want it and it’s not out there. I needed a small shelf in the bathroom to hold something, but because it’s a small space I didn’t want it sticking out. So, it’s a matter of, okay, I need a shelf that’s going to be inset into the wall. So, you cut the hole in the wall, you make a shelf that sets in and run the electric to it. It’s very nice, it’s built in, it looks good and it’s not anything that I could go out and buy. So, that was good. The other thing I’ve got on my list right now is we came back from a trip and I had some small souvenirs that I brought back with the intention I would just want to make a plaque. These happened to all be cork-type things, so I wanted to get hold of

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 12 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking some cork wood and then build a display rack that I put on the cork cards and a piece of the cork bar, just something to symbolize the actual trip. Just unusual things like that that are smaller in scope but they mean a lot more once you get them done and you can’t go out and buy them at any price.

Gale Walton Gale Walton here guys. One of the things I’m working on right now is retrimming the house, putting indoor trim around the doors, baseboards all that fun stuff. I get done with part of the hallway and the wife goes, God, that looks great. We need new doors. So, yeah, I’m in the process of finishing new doors, getting those hung. I’ve got a workshop being built and once that is built I’m going to be making some two-person picnic tables. That’s what’s going on with me right now.

Max Robinson I just finished my big project for the year between, since we were last on here. It’s my electronics workbench. That’s my other hobby and it’s a real nice workbench. It’s a sit down bench with knee clearance and 20 drawers underneath the work surface for storing of anything that needs to be stored there.

Caller

Only 20?

Max Robinson Only 20 [laughter] and wired for electricity and lighting, so I can turn everything off at one switch and be assured that I haven’t left anything on. That’s been my big project and now I’ve started on some roll around cabinets for the shop that will hold bench top tools, bench top machines. I have a mortising machine, a planer and a joiner and so the three roll around cabinets will hold those things and they have to be roll around because my shop is a little on the small side and so I need to be able to park them out of the way and then bring something out in the middle to use it.

Dennis Rossie Currently I’m working on finishing a room in my basement, so I’m down to the last part of working on the ceiling which has been a nightmare. There’s a lot of pipes and wires in a basement. In the past I’ve built a large deck on the side of my house and dug a basement door pit and so I’ve done just straight woodwork on the type of stuff you know these larger projects of ripping out walls and building new walls and that kind of stuff. I really hope to get a little better with some of the nicer projects. I was tempted to do my kitchen, but my wife said no.

Caller Not a good starter project.

Larry Muffet It sounds like there are a lot of people doing home repair type of things rather than what a lot of people would thing, oh, you know, building furniture or shelving or that sort thing. Who among you is making projects and selling them? Any of you? Pretty much making it for your own use instead of.

Caller I make things for my, for friends.

Larry Muffet Children, okay, but nobody using that as a supplement.

Larry Martin There were some guys on the list, I think, there are some people on the list who do sell their work.

Caller Dennis Walker out in Idaho, one thing he makes that’s rather unique that he sells is urns. He gets a lot of money for them, he sells them—matter of fact, he could sell a lot more, but he doesn’t want to work that

Larry Muffet I’ve got a question here in in the text box and we have some people that are interested in wood turning activities. I know that’s for Friday on here. Anybody doing anything in that regard? Anybody doing wood turning?

Caller No, my wife wants to buy me a lathe, but so far I’ve convinced her not to. [laughter]

Caller Well, we do have a lot of wood turners in the group. That is one thing that is actually very save and it’s very – you don’t really have to have a lot of eyesight to do it because you can pretty much follow everything with your fingers. Maybe after Friday I will, I have not bought a lathe because I had so many other projects, I’m afraid if I start with a lathe then nothing else—it seems like when people start turning, they stop doing everything else and I need to get everything else done first.

Larry Martin

Norm Abrams years ago had an article on how to furnish a shop. And when it came to the lathe, he said it’s a major choice. The trouble is if you buy one you probably don’t need the rest of the equipment. [laughter]

Larry Martin One of the members in the group, a fellow in Oklahoma has now won two blue ribbons at the Oklahoma State Fair for turning bowls. We have people making segmented bowls. Lots of people who make pens.

Caller Pepper mills, that kind of stuff.

Larry Martin And then a few who are making balusters for stairwells. Those are the projects that I’ve heard of.

Caller I have a shop smith machine which means I have a lathe. I haven’t quite worked up the courage to use it yet even though I had some turning experience here last year. I hope to get some more experience this year and then go home and actually convert my shopsmith over to a lathe and see what I can do with it on my own. That’s where I stand in wood turning.

Caller I would also say that I’ve noticed that if you really wanted to learn wood turning, then the turning equipment is a whole ‘nother facet of equipment. You don’t need a lot of the other equipment that we have for general woodworking if you want to do turning, because for those of us who have shops full of tools already it’s just another expense that with all the different attachments and things to go with them, but people certainly do beautiful stuff with them, though.

Caller One of the biggest issues for blind woodworkers in turning, is sharpening the tools. The sharpening technique is not as demanding as for chisels or planes, but you have to do it a whole lot more frequently because the tool is getting a whole lot more use. There now are a series of new tools called easy wood tools so instead of having the edge where you sharpen it yourself, this is a carbide blade. You use it until it wears out and then you loosen a screw and turn it to a new edge and go again. A heavy duty turner can probably use a single blade for as much as a year. Secondly, because these tools don’t have sharp points on the edges they’re much more forgiving for a blind woodworker to use. The easy

Larry Muffet It looks like we have a couple questions in the audience so I’m going to take a few questions. I’m going to turn the microphone loose here for a minute and those of you in the audience who would like ask a question of our group today, of our panelists, hop on in there and do that and then we’ll have another question and answer period near the end. So, I’m going to turn loose of the microphone.

Dennis Evender Hello, this is Dennis Evender. Can you hear me?

Larry Muffet Yes, Dennis we can hear you. You’ve got to release the CTRL key after you speak. Dennis Evender I’m using, yeah, I’m sorry. I’m using the iPad so I have to remember after I ask a question to hit the button again. I asked the question about the wood turning and just as a plug, I have to tip my cap to the American Association of Woodturners. I participated in a program with them over the past year. It’s called the Accessible Lathe Program and we just published an article in their journal for this month on how to

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 19 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking adapt an environment for people who are blind to do wood turning and they’re promoting that amongst their groups, so if you can get hold of the American Association of Woodturners articles which is at the woodturner.org site, there’s some information there.

Larry Muffet Thanks Dennis for sharing. Other people have a question for the group?

Allen Yes, this is Allen. I’m just curious in the in the woodworkers group do you ever make things like, I guess you call them fun things, like trains, trucks, planes, that kind of thing?

Caller We do have several guys that make toys and so forth, children’s toys. I kind of like to do it, too, but I haven’t really made anything major except a rocking horse. We have a website we’ll give you later though that you can go out and all the projects are explained, so if you don’t have vision it gives you pretty good verbal descriptions of what’s out there that people have made.

Larry Muffet

Let’s talk about getting started. Let’s talk about what someone would need, sort of the bare minimum tools that they would need if they decide they want to take this up. So, any of you can jump in on this, but just basically you feel like, here’s what you basically, the bottom line what you got to have in order to do pretty much anything, and then here’s some things that are nice to have.

Jim Norwick I would say the table saw is probably the one tool that’s most important. However you can do the same thing with a skill saw and a straight edge, very similar things. I would say that the table saw is probably the most useful, or used tool in the woodshop.

Caller I’ve gone a little simpler than that, because I like my power tools and I use them all the time. Probably over hand tools, largely because it’s easier to get accurate work out of them. It’s a lot harder to saw a straight line with a hand saw, but I did do a lot of work. I started out very early on in my marriage. We were very, very poor and lived kind of in a slum, and we really did build shelving and all sorts of stuff with a hand saw. I did use an electric drill.

I also had a hand drill. I still have a one inch and a half inch chisel from those days and probably a handful of C clamps. It really depends on what level you wish to achieve, how quickly you wish to achieve it and how essential it is to get done what you want to do. I started that way because I needed to get stuff done and I couldn’t afford the tools. My work now is a lot more sophisticated and probably a lot more accurate and prettier, but it also costs a lot more money.

Caller I’d also like to add along those same lines. As I said, I started back in high school and it was kind of, I guess I say it’s equivalent to a scenario like in Math. You can do it on a calculator and what not, but if you know the techniques, you can do it by hand and you understand if the calculator’s working right how to use it. We learned everything by hand. A mag saw, a form that you would follow to cut it off, how to chisel a joint, you learned the importance of accuracy and of measurement. It also lets you find out if you really like it.

Once you build something simple, I mean, I can still remember my first project. It was a simple little bookshelf that was nothing more than a flat piece of wood with a back board that had been joined to it and

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 22 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking a couple of little triangle legs, but all the basic techniques for cutting joints, for gluing things together and the finishing work, it was all there and you got to experience those aspects before you invested very much money at all. And if it bites you, then you can go out and get the tools and do it better, do it faster, do it fancier.

But you already know the basics, so whatever that power tool’s going to do, I mean, you can do it by hand, and you learn the importance of doing it and there’s a lot of cases where you’ll fall back on those same things where the power tool won’t be able to handle a special case, so I think starting out by hand is an excellent way for somebody to try it.

Darrel Vickers Another thing too, it might one of the hardest things for people if you’ve never done it, is measuring. If you can’t see, they do have some special things. I own a talking tape measure that’s relatively accurate but then we have other a click rule and something called a roto-matic which are all available online and we have the addresses on our website. Measuring is really doing it by using hand tools and small simple projects are fun to do by hand. If you’re working with soft woods like cedar something, a hand saw is not

Larry Martin Popular Woodworking has a series called the I Can Do That Project and the theory behind it is that all materials used in it are available at a home center and they’re using simple but decent tools and they have a manual as well. All of that is available online for Popular Woodworking.com.

Larry Muffet The talking tools got mentioned here, and that was something that I wanted to get into a little bit today. What’s new in that particular area, what are people using, what do they like, what they don’t like, so let’s open that topic up.

Caller There isn’t much new. We have a talking tape measure, a couple of them actually, but only one that’s readily available I believe. There are some audible tools, a lateral or two, but limited functionality. They certainly don’t have the functionality of the digital versions that our sighted colleagues use. What am I missing guys?

Caller

We do have, yeah, the iPhone with some apps on it that can be helpful, but we have some protractors that are in the prototype stage that talk. Not too many tools actually need to talk. It’s more of a luxury than a necessity. Angles though is one of those that would be a little easier for us if we had to protractor which I think we’ll have within a year or two. For the most part, you know, the tools don’t have to talk. A lot of times we want something to talk because everything now days is digital and people can look at the screen and go how easy is that, so we want that screen, but we want it to talk, but in reality we don’t really need it.

We need it if it’s not going to cost hundreds of dollars. But things that talk, all of us who are blind who have bar code scanners and other things that talk know how expensive they can be and tools are along those same lines. There is a talking volt meter, that I think most of have and it’s one of the most handy things that and it’s only $39.

Caller It’s audible to beeping levels.

Caller They don’t talk, they just beep.

Caller The nice thing about the levels and the volt meter are that they are off the shelf products. Specially adapted. Particularly these, they are made by brand name manufacturers and so that’s why they’re relatively inexpensive and easy to get. The other tools like the talking tape measures are somewhat more expensive and more specialized but they are useful and their use on a digital level gives you a lot of information that a blind person can access. It does at least give you the more important things of plum and level, so to be able to pick one of those off a website for what any sighted person could get it for is pretty convenient.

Darrel Vickers That’s also because they can use it. It’s just like that volt meter. It’s not just for blind people it just happens to talk because when you’ve got both hands on probes and the thing is somewhere where you can’t see it, you used have to—I remember doing this—you have to do all these contortions to try to get the thing set up somewhere where you can look at your probe so you don’t electrocute yourself and try to look at the display at the same time, so, things that are universal like that where they have a much bigger market tend to be faster on the market and less expensive.

Caller Why aren’t there more talking tools? What’s the problem?

Caller Well, there are quite a few things on the market that do talk. It just depends on how big your budget is and how important it is to you. Dennis Walker again, out in Idaho, loves things that talk. His table saw fence talks, his planer height talks, his miter saw fence talks, there’s companies out there that commercially make this stuff, not specifically for the blind, but they’re easily adapted to be able to talk just by the way they’re made. Where other things are not.

Caller I think the answer to your question though, Larry, is that because the market just isn’t there. For the most part, they’re being built for one person’s use, and not multi manufactured. The stuff that Darrel Vickers’s talking about maybe the only person on the continent who has such devices, I don’t really know. And so that company has adapted their equipment and they’d adapt it for me, too, for a similar price, but you want like are willing or able to pay.

Darrel Vickers Yeah, it comes down to so much of that is convenience and how much to you want to pay for convenience?

Jim Norwalk My table saw has got scales on it that if I could see I would use all the time. Larry uses his all the time I’m quite sure. And if my table saw had an accessible scale that I could use accurately, and it has to be more than just lining up two dots with my finger because that’s not accurate enough, then I would have that.

Darrel Vickers But you don’t have to have it, do you?

Jim Norwalk I don’t have to have it, but it’s a lot harder to do and to reproduce without it. But again, the demand from blind people is so small that that’s not out there. And so until it becomes a mainstream product, until everybody wants this capability, we’re not going to see that made for the general marketplace and the price is going to stay high.

Darrel Vickers

Proscale makes all these things I was talking about, but the table fence and so forth they make those products. It doesn’t cost that much to actually get them. It’s about $50 to make them talk. It’s just that they’re expensive to begin with because they’re all digital. And they’re all very high end stuff. It’s for commercial work.

Larry Muffet Dan, weren’t you working on something like that, though, with those raspberry pie?

Dan Rossie And Darrel Vickers as well. We are messing around with that, but I have a full time job and hobby and it’s not my—I’m not an electronic specialist and will have to learn everything as I go. I do some programming and so I know what is doable, but hopefully one day that will turn into something but I’m not promising anybody anything right now.

Darrel Vickers The one that we’re trying to make and hopefully somewhere down the road when we get a little bit better with the pie. For anybody who doesn’t know, raspberry pie is just a computer just about the size of a credit card, but it’s become a universal speech synthesizer because when we talk about these talking

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 29 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking tools with the Proscale, other things out there that talk, everybody wants to use, like Mitchitoil has digital calipers, digital micrometers, all this stuff, but in order to get them to talk, they all want to sell you their own box, which is another very big expense.

To have a universal box that will work with anything because we can switch the programming on it would cut the cost down to almost what a normal sighted would buy the same exact tool for. That’s one of the things we’d like to accomplish.

Caller What I was going to say has already been pretty much said, it’s just the market is too small and if something is made, the price is very high, but everybody thinks that talking thing are—there are talking clocks and talking scales and talking kitchen timers that are just cheap--$10, $20. So, blind woodworkers tend to think well why can’t we get something like that for us? But it’s just a case where these things have been made for the mass market, sighed people like the novelty of them, but when it comes to something like a talking dial indicator, or talking caliper, talking angle gauge, those things just….

Caller

Well, the blind market is actually a huge market and especially if you go worldwide. We have 20 million just in this country. But we have very few blind wood workers. Caller So, it’s your fault [laughter] you guys’ fault.

Caller No, it’s the people listening to this that need to get more involved and start.

Caller For new woodworkers, here’s the reverse approach to it. Measuring has to be one of the scariest things for a blind woodworker. On the other hand, measuring really isn’t all that important in the sense that you want something about this big. Well, this big happens to be around 26 inches. It doesn’t make any difference whether it’s 25 ¾, whether it’s 26 3/16, it just has to be about this big. So, you get something, a piece of wood, about the size of what you’d like and then you duplicate that. And the duplicating of it is fairly easy to do. That can be learned very quickly.

Caller How about Braille? Are there Braille rulers, Braille- marked tools out there on the market?

Caller Yes, there are some. And they’re not that expensive by comparison. A Braille-marked carpenter tool, a typical 24-inch folding rule that sighted carpenters would use, I think they’re about $3.50 or $3.00— under $4.00 at my local hardware store and they’re about $30 to buy from an agency for the drawings. They work quite well, the only problem is that again using your fingers as a means of aligning something is not nearly as accurate as using your eyes.

Although lots of sighted people get parallax wrong and they don’t measure so well, either. At least with the proper skill if you look down at your ruler in the right way, you’re accuracy can be better. It’s a lot of money for something that’s not quite as accurate, but it is available and I don’t fault those people for making them.

Caller That same thing about why aren’t there more things available and it really comes down to what the manufacturer designs in, what the concepts are. I talked to a lot of companies about this kind of stuff back when I was doing different things in IT and a lot of it isn’t intentional on their part. They don’t think that way. It wasn’t in their mindset when they put the design in. It’s like digital readouts now. When they

Now they’re so universally accepted by everybody including—a lot of it has to do with our aging population and that kind of stuff that can’t see the mechanical dials to dial this and that, so the manufacturers are starting to put it into their initial designs for just pennies on the unit. That’s the big thing I think needs to be done here. Not that it has to be talking for everybody, but if the capability is in there from the initial design then you can plug in your own speech output, you can plug in all this stuff just very inexpensively. But until you can get the mindset of the manufacturing industry to understand that this is a basic design that should be incorporated right at the initial design of the equipment, you’re never going to get around—anything custom made is expensive, anything mass produced is cheap. And you’ve got to get in there at that point.

Caller There are alternate methods, too, that aren’t exactly Braille. I was just thinking when I was making my fancy porch roof, I had to calculate some pretty interesting angles. And for that, I have some angled block that they run from 35 degrees down to 1 degree and you can gang them together to get other angles

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 33 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking in between and I found that with my compound miter saw I can flip it around the—significant angles are in raised lettering so I can find that, and then I can use my fingernail and kind of work it between the arrow and the pointer and get close and then the final little bit is to slap one of these little angle blocks into place and fine tune it.

But even that’s really difficult because again, you’re using something thin like a fingernail or the edge—I have a particular putty knife that I’ve sharpened down to be really fine that I can use. Can I squeeze it between the block and the blade at each end or not? Down to that little, whereas with a digital gauge, the number is right there and just flip it to that position. So, there are workarounds. You can get accurate. With practice, you get better at it. Like Darrel Vickers said, is it a matter of convenience or, well I don’t know.

Darrel Vickers Well, it is, but what I’m saying is how much do you want to pay for the convenience. That’s the problem.

Larry Muffet Thomas has a question. Would you recommend the click rule or RotoMatic over Braille rulers? I’m considering buying some for our students. We

Darrel Vickers I can answer that one. Well, I would say to get the click rule. The RotoMatic—I have both—I bought the RotoMatic first. The RotoMatic you can actually get down to a 64th of an inch, which isn’t too important in woodworking because the wood will move that much in an hour anyway, but it’s a little more difficult to use and you have to do a lot of counting. It’s just a nut on a rod that’s 16 press to the inch, but the click rule which is the same principle only works in 16ths of an inch, but you can adjust it a lot faster. It’s a lot simpler to understand it.

Caller Yeah, with the Roto rule you actually have to spin the nut up and down to make a movement on two or three inches you’ve got to spin the nut all the way along where the click rule it just—

Darrel Vickers And count the rotations while you’re doing it. [laughter]

Caller

With the click rule, you know, it’s a threaded rod that slides within another tube so you can slide it in and out very rapidly so it’s much faster and again, it’s accurate to a 16th which is pretty good.

Caller You can count the 16ths with your fingernail, so—

Darrel Vickers You can do that with the RotoMatic, too, it’s just that, you know—

Gale Levins I love my Roto ruler just throw that. In case anybody cares, I love the Roto ruler.

Darrel Vickers You’re from Canada—we don’t listen. [laughter]

Caller I used to be afraid of sixteenths of an inch. I would always do my design so I had quarter inch or even if I could eliminate eighth inches I would. I’ve got a click rule and now I can design any of those sixteenth inches and measure to them.

Gale Levins I think the difference between a Braille ruler say and either the click ruler or the Roto, whatever it’s called—

Darrel Vickers RotoMatic

Gale Levins RotoMatic. The real difference is the problems of what the sighted would call parallax. It’s a little bit

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 37 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking different when you’re doing it by finger, but you just can’t easily get those small increments accurately every time with a Braille ruler. I built a whole addition on a house using the Braille ruler before I had any of these things. I know of which I speak. I did it and I did it well enough, but, there are times when you make mistakes and you realize they’re errors in the way you measured an judged. But you just don’t have with the RotoMatic or the click ruler.

Darrel Vickers I have found that someone like me still can’t measure no matter what he has. [laughter]

Caller So, measure three times, cut four times…

Gale Levins That’s right. [laughter]

Darrel Vickers Throw it in the scrap bin and start over.

Caller Break out the wood stretcher.

Larry Muffet

All right, now. I’m going to open this up, turn loose of the microphone here in a minute to see if we have any questions from those in the audience, but, what I want you all to be doing in the meantime is thinking of a little short 30 second to a minute elevator speech as they all it, if you were trying to make a sales presentation and the only chance you got with the guy you wanted to sell something to is riding in the elevator with him. They call that an elevator speech.

I want you to make your best elevator speech as to why people should get involved in woodworking. So, right now I’m going to turn the microphone over and see if we have some questions out in the audience but when we come back and we get done with the question period, I’m going to go around the table and I want to hear these elevator speeches.

Okay, so anyone in the audience? I’m going to turn the microphone loose.

Dennis Devender This is Dennis Devender again. How about finishing? Like different shellacs or other kinds of things.

Fred This is Fred. I was going to make the point with the click rule because I have a pretty well-equipped shop

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 39 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking and the click rule is about my favorite most used tool. But I’d like to know if you have any ways of using a band saw or a sabre saw, saws of that type.

Darrel Vickers On that last question, there, Larry gives us our website out at the end, we have some little jigs and safety things that other people have used and they kind of build them theirself, but they’re like guides for either a sabre saw or a band saw and for some of the other stuff that we use. You might check that out and then if you’ve got questions, get back to us.

Larry Martin Ropler has a tool called a duplicating pin for a band saw. You attach a small rod to the guide blocks. The screws that hold the guide blocks in and you attach this bracket with a rod in it and the rod simply lets you then run a template against the edge of it to reproduce an easy design. It doesn’t take sharp curves, but the gradual curves it works very nicely with. It’s offset roughly a quarter inch from the front of the blade.

Gale Levins You see the real problem there Larry, and it’s the same with the sabre saw, and that’s coming up with the original shape, the original design. So, when we

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 40 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking look at woodworking plans, for example, and often you will have blow ups that you can print on your printer and trace it onto, and you would normally follow that. And I haven’t come up with a really good solution to that one either except to use soft materials and shape a lot of it by hand and then duplicate that, but more usually with a rotor than with a jigsaw.

Caller Exactly the way a sighted person would do it. You’re going to roughly draw it by hand, cut it out with the band saw, and it’s going to have an irregular edge, and then you’re going to use sandpaper or a sanding block or a sanding drum to fair the curve. And you’re not going to get it exactly the way you drew it, but you’re going to get it where it’s going to look real good.

Gale Levins It’s the original that’s the problem. Like really to get that first pattern I think is the really difficult part.

Larry Muffet Bob Schuler out in the audience has a question. Can you list any websites concerning, what he says, how to or products available.

Caller

There’s hundreds of them. We’ll put the plug in for our website first. It’s www.ww4b.org. There’s lots of information there exactly on those topics. We have posted there the beginning draft of a manual for blind woodworkers which has lots of reference to measuring devices for blind woodworkers. And then simply Google something like woodworking and you’re going to come up with tremendous numbers that lead you directly to sites. The quick names would be rockler.com; woodcraft.com; leevalley.com; toolsforworkingwood.com; highlandhardware.com and it goes on and on after that.

Darrel Vickers A lot of those are listed on our website, however, I assume if you’re on this cast you can use a computer. I was thinking a lot of our, some people can’t.

Max Robinson I’d like to get in and talk about finishing. I have my own solution to the problem. And it’s called Polystain. It’s waterbased, so you don’t have bad fumes from it. And that’s the name it’s sold under is Polystain. It’s a polyurethane finish with stain built in. So, it’s pretty much a one-step process. I make my project so that I can finish it before the final assembly so I’m always working on a flat horizontal surface and that, for me, was always the big problem with finishing.

If you try to paint on a vertical surface you get drips that you can’t see and you don’t know they’re there until after it’s dry. So, work on a flat horizontal surface and use masking tape to mask off the areas that you’re going to glue together. And then put the finish on and then take off the masking tape and put it together. Additional advantages that you’re glue squeeze out won’t stick to the finish so you can wipe it off before it gets dry and it won’t absorb into the finish and it won’t eat it either. That’s how I do finishing and it has worked very well for me. Outstanding.

Larry Muffet So, Max to you wipe it on or use a brush or different?

Max Robinson I brush it on. But could wipe it on just as well.

Larry Muffet We’re very quickly running out of time here and I want to hear these elevator speeches. So, I’m going to start with Dennis off to my left here, and let’s see how many people he can convince to get into woodworking.

Dennis Shwer

I think people need to get into it because creating is, to me, is a part of the human experience, to be able to create. Some people create music and some people create parks and some people—I just like the idea of being to build and create things and to be able to point at that and touch it when I’m done and say I did that. I made that. So, I think it’s very important. And it’s important to know that as a blind woodworker, you’re going to have to it differently than a sighted woodworker and if you start out with that knowledge it’s a very accessible hobby to have.

Max Robinson Well, if you want something say a cabinet to put your TV set on, with storage with DVDs underneath it. You could go around to about half a dozen stores and maybe you’d find something that’s sort of like what you want, but you just can’t find exactly what you have in mind. You end up, if you just buy, then you end up buying something that’s close to what you want but you’re really not satisfied with it. If you’re a woodworker, you can build it yourself however you want it. And you can build it exactly the way want it and that’s yours.

Darrel Vickers I guess the best thing I could say is it is a good stress reliever. That’s what got me into it. It’s just getting

©2013 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 44 of 49 2013-06-04-Woodworking out there, working with my hands, working with the wood, seeing the end product. Knowing that I did the end product is what made me get into it. I like going out there, seeing my mind’s eye, creating it, making it exist and showing everybody else, you know, this is what I did, I’m proud of it.

Caller Well, I guess these guys have just about, and you notice they’ve covered different aspects, they just about really have covered, there’s pride and there’s satisfaction, there’s stress relief, all the things that make whatever you’re doing, it’s not chore it’s a work of love. You can get it the way you want it, you can create while you’re doing it and I very often do that.

The design will change as I go along. Even the household stuff. I can’t pay anybody to do that kind of stuff because I don’t have it until I get working on it. So, there’s the creativity, the relaxation and really, that long term it’s yours, it’s in your house, you see it every single day. It’s all those factors that you just don’t get by going out and buying off of a store floor someplace.

Caller It builds confidence, woodworking, because you get comfortable enough with power or hand tools or

Caller Pride in accomplishment and an additional thing I think is just it’s an indirect way of selling your ability to the public and that can open a lot of doors.

Caller If you’re tone deaf and don’t have any musical talent like me, then what else you going to do? [laughter] Caller Are you done?

Caller Yeah, I’m done.

Caller I’d say that the last thing is that it’s very tactile. You can feel these things with your hands as you doing them, when you’re done what you have. It’s sort of like a sculpture or working with clay. You have the satisfaction that everybody talked about but it’s very tactile. You really can see what it is that you’re doing even if you can’t see.

Caller

Nobody mentioned that it smells good. There’s a lot hobbies that you can do and they don’t smell this good. The wood smells good.

Larry Martin They can do it safely and there are lots and lots of resources available to help you learn.

Larry Muffet I hope we got everybody fired up on that, I know I am, so I want to let everybody know that this seminar, like all of our seminars, will be archived on our website and available for your use anytime around the clock. Also, each Hadley seminar is now made available as a podcast which you can download to your computer or mobile device. If today’s seminar has got you interested in hearing more, please check out the Hadley website, Seminar Archives, and Hadley’s course list. Also, check your email for the next seminar at Hadley.

Our panelists here and I, we all want to thank you for your participation. The questions were outstanding and really added a lot to today’s seminar. Hadley values your feedback. Please let us know what you thought about today’s seminar and please give us suggestions for future topics.

One way you can do that is by dropping us an email to [email protected]. I want to turn the microphone back over to the panel or Larry for anyone that wants to make any closing remarks.

Caller Our only comment is www.ww4b.org or simply Google woodworking for the blind and you’ll get to us. There’s lots of resources there.

Larry Martin And we’re always willing to help.

Larry Muffet Thanks to you Larry Martin to be one of those huge resources that we all fall back on. Having access to those magazines has been a major motivator for me and for a lot of other guys.

Darrel Vickers Yeah, if you start reading those, the bug might bite you just like it did me.

Larry Muffet I want to personally thank you for taking the time to be a part of this today. Really enjoyed it. This is the type of thing that, part of my job that I particularly enjoy. Again, I think you for your participation today, for your questions and your attentiveness and I want to thank the members of the panel. This was, again, outstanding and hopefully we can look forward to doing this again next year.

For now, bye, bye.

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