January 2022: Volume 41, Issue 4

Have you ever wondered what the President of SDFWA is up to? Following is an example of recent weeks.

  

On a Sunday, I joined Pat Duffy to serve as a TA in a CNC classes. Pat has been instrumental in developing our digital tools program. I love using the laser and CNC machines so I’m starting to TA and will later be teaching myself. 

 

Monday, I talked with Mike Packard, our new webmaster, about his first month on the job. Mike was instrumental implementing the DIW gallery and has now agreed to take on the webmaster role. We previously spent time outlining the role and responsibilities and reviewing the plan with the Board. Monday, we discussed setting up our project tracking system to log and monitor tasks and priorities for website and information warehouse fixes. These tools are critical to our shop operations and our public face.

 

Tuesday, I followed up with Jeff Bratt to confirm we’re set for the AV (Audio Visual) work at our general meeting and a site visit at Josh Stotler’s shop, our next general meeting presenter. Jeff runs our AV team, and we need to understand what Josh will be doing to get good camera coverage. Jeff and his team are set to go. We’ll meet early at the Church on August 3rd to set up and test with Josh before the meeting starts.

 

I also wrote an email to Bob Stevenson to arrange a shop visit and pick his brain about ideas for the mentor program. As most people know, Bob is a world class woodworker and has so much to offer. I’m excited about the visit.

Wednesday, I joined Roger Solheid’s toy group at 8am. Roger and company have been making toys for years and donating them to organizations for distribution to children. This includes the fire and police who share them with children during stressful interactions. Community service is such a great part of SDFWA. Working with the toy group is also a chance for me to get away from the problems of day-to-day life, hang out with nice people, and learn a little woodworking myself. The operation runs like a well-tuned machine, with tools and jigs set up to churn out toys like a factory. 

Next, I joined Pete Sterling, VP, and Dallas Keck, Shop Director, for our biweekly board lunch. This is our forum to brainstorm, plan, discuss challenges and add to our action list. Among other things, we reviewed final revisions for the survey Pete is sending out to help identify what our members value and how we can better serve them. I really value the teamwork and wisdom of these men. The collaboration is great!

After lunch I met with Paul Duffield at the shop for some personal mentoring. Paul is such a nice guy and very informative. We started on sharpening, and I went from hating it to loving it! Next, we’ll be working on my project design, a table for my home. Paul has already been mentoring, but he’s agreed to be listed on our official mentor list. For those who’ve never been mentored, I encourage you to seek it out. For those of you with skills to share, I encourage you to volunteer as a mentor.

At 7pm I met with Mike Davis’ luthier SIG (special interest group). There were amazing guitars being built and I pitched the general meeting with Josh Stotler. I encouraged everyone to attend, bring their guitars, and pick Josh’s brain. His presentation and inlay demonstration will be inspiring for guitar making and any other woodworking project.

Thursday, I went to Jim Frantz’ home for a shop visit, to get some help with quadrant hinge installation on my latest box and talk about the mentoring program. While there, I got lots of ideas for shop organization, identified more tools to buy, got coached on box making, and solicited feedback on our general meetings. Jim also agreed to participate in the mentoring program. Thank you, Jim! We’ll be organizing the program more, stay tuned!

Next, I went to Josh Stotler’s shop in Spring Valley to discuss his general meeting presentation. Jeff Bratt joined us, and we had a great time discussing Josh’s history and adventures and got a look at his work. Josh is amazing, and we’re excited about the presentation. Additionally, Josh informed us he’s interested in getting more involved in SDFWA in various capacities. Leveraging him in our community is going to be great! After the meeting, Jeff and I stopped for a beer at Helix Brewery to talk more shop and unwind. Thursday is done!

I took Friday off, but Saturday I hit the monthly Eye Opener at the shop. These are on the last Saturday of each month, open to the public, and great events with donuts, coffee, networking, demonstrations, and equipment sales. This Saturday it was an equipment sale of donated items in mint condition. They’re usually priced at about 50% of retail so it’s a great way to acquire affordable, quality tools, and help fund the shop – a win-win for everybody. At the end of the meeting, we got a great scroll saw presentation from Alan Lewis. At this point, I’m thinking about budget and space in my shop for a new aspect of woodworking 😊.

That’s a wrap for that week!  

As you can see, I’m having lots of fun connecting with talented people and trying to move the ball forward for our association. As I grow and learn as president, it’s more and more obvious that it’s all about the people. Thank you all for your participation. I hope this sheds some light on what’s going on and inspires you to take advantage of this incredible association and volunteer to help make it better and better!

Jeff.

Overall, we had a very successful Design In Wood (DIW) show this year; our 39th DIW appearance at the San Diego Fair. There were a lot of challenges this year as we were without many of the same fair support people as in the past. However, our DIW staff and volunteers did an excellent job, filling in where needed and we ended up with an excellent show. We did have some problems along the way. My assistant, Dale Stauffer and I came down with Covid just before the fair started. Dale was in the hospital for several days and never returned to the fair until teardown. This is Dale’s last year working at DIW. After 20 plus years he has decided to hang it up. Be sure to thank him when you see him at the meetings. He assures me that he will still be around at least during setup and teardown. My Covid experience was less severe. It felt like a bad cold with a lot of sneezing and coughing. I did come back to the fair, maybe a bit too soon and had to take more time off. Since then I have been fine except for a lingering cough which is getting less and less severe. In our absence, Jim Strawn and Joe Sobkowiak took over completely and did an outstanding job managing DIW.

This year we had 269 entries accepted for the show. This is down about 100 entries from 2019. I doubt too many people noticed as the show was as spectacular as always. We continue to draw the crowds and continue to hear compliments like “We always are sure to visit DIW,” or “This is our favorite thing at the fair.” Overall attendance at the fair was down from past fairs. This was by design as the attendance was limited by fair management. The reason given was that it was to give the attendees a better experience. No big lines at the food stands and rides, less crowding. In addition, they had less available parking this year. There was reduced parking at Horse Park. Overall people tended to stay longer and spend more money. I guess time will tell how successful this year’s fair has been. I can say however that our Design In Wood show was the same as always, Magnificent!

Ed Gladney

Coordinator, Design In Wood

EdGladney@san.rr.com

The very beginnings of Shop were in 2014 – when there were a series of meetings devoted to long-range planning. While SDFWA as an organization was in fairly good shape with successful activities – including the best woodworking exhibition in the US – many were worried about our stagnant membership numbers and trying to figure out how appeal to a wider variety of people, how to expand our education and mentoring offerings, and see if there were new activities that SDFWA members would want to participate in. And especially to create more chances to work together and build a stronger sense of community.

So many of the suggestions in the meetings rested on “if only we had a community shop”. Then there was a timely magazine article in Popular Woodworking about the Kansas City Guild Shop which posed a question for SDFWA leadership – if they can do it, why can’t we?

It was quite a stretch – as there were entrenched opinions about insurance, finances, organization and staffing, fundraising, and more. But we looked and discovered three other woodworking guilds across the US who had shops – Kansas City MI, Greenville SC, and Portland OR. (And we’ve since discovered a couple more.) But the more we looked, and the more questions we asked, the answers kept coming back - why not?

SDFWA had previously tried to organize a Shop – but those efforts met with insurmountable difficulties. And there were a lot of things to worry about – but Gary Anderson and I decided to give it a real go. We had many months of planning lunches over beers, looking at rental properties, drafting a business plan, getting legal advice, figuring out fundraising, answering questions about how to protect existing SDFWA financial interests, surveying the SDFWA membership to see what kind of Shop tools and activities they were interested in, mapping what locations might work for most of our members, what should membership cost and what hours to be open – many questions for which we needed at least preliminary answers. The lunches started with Gary and me, but quickly expanded to include Pete Sterling. And all through 2015 the Shop plans started to take shape.

We also received some significant financial contributions from current SDFWA members and couple of people who had bequeathed funds to SDFWA in their will. I remember opening one particular envelope – then calling Gary and asking if he was expecting a donation like this. He was not, but for me, that was the moment that I knew the Shop was going to become a reality. We were nearing our fund-raising goals, but this pushed us close enough to be able to commit to the Shop project by the end of 2016, then sign our lease in February 2017 and start building. Besides, Ann really wanted me to get that big CNC machine – our first tool donation – out of our garage.

It’s been quite an adventure since then – the initial team expanded to include a lot more people – many of whom are still active in the Shop. There were work parties for building walls, painting, building cabinets, putting together tools and dust collector ducts, building Shop furniture, and much more. We needed to figure out how to train Shift Supervisors, how to start teaching classes, what hours we were going to operate, how to handle maintenance, how to keep track of Shop memberships and shifts. There were dozens of things to do and almost enough people to do them. The Shop first opened its doors in June 2017, and in 2022 we celebrated its 5th anniversary. Gary was Shop Chairman and Pete was the first Shop Director, keeping things going and building up the team of people who are running the shop today. Some things we did well right from the beginning, others we changed and adapted, as we continue to do – Shop 3.0 will fix some of the Shop layout plans we didn’t get right the first time.

We also got help from the other guilds with shops. If you visit the Portland shop – like Gary and Pete and I did during the planning stages – you’ll see a rack of name tags on their wall that looks very much like ours. The idea for HOST was developed in Kansas City, who gave it to Portland, who then shared it with us. Gary also built up a network of woodworking guilds across the US who still share information and help each other out.

Another thing we learned in our exploration stages was that there’s not just one right answer for how a guild Shop works. Greenville had a system where all the guild members supported the Shop, and their facility included a meeting space, a small lumber yard, plus extra space they could rent out. Kansas City did projects for local businesses – running a kind of woodworking business. Portland concentrated on education; they were teaching introductory woodworking classes even before they even had a shop. And they had a paper based PunchPass process that inspired our Shop Shifts scheduling system. So one thing we made sure of is that the SDFWA Member Shop had multiple ways to pay the rent – beyond our Shop Memberships. A couple of those have succeeded for us in a big way – like our Introduction to Woodworking class, and our annual Holiday Gift Sale. And we continue to improve and expand – with the completion of Shop 3.0 we expect to be hosting regular woodworking presentations and also hands-on seminars in the new, larger spaces.

A big addition to the Shop capabilities that was not in our original plans is our Digital Tools. While we had always envisioned a CNC router as a tool that most SDFWA members won’t have in their garage, Travis Good really pushed to build a great Digital Tools section of the Shop. These machines – CNC routers, lasers, and 3D printers – have become very popular offerings with Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and classes to support them. Maybe it’s not traditional woodworking, but there have been amazing things produced on our Digital Tools, and people have joined the Shop just to have access to them.

A major goal for establishing our Shop was to expand SDFWA’s education program. We have a long history of teaching – seminars, mentoring sessions, skill-building sessions, General Meeting presentations and more. One of our chartered goals is to educate the community in all aspects of woodworking. Starting with our extremely popular Intro to Woodworking class, the Shop education department has expanded to offer a long list of classes covering a wide variety of topics. And we are continuing to develop more classes all the time.

Another thing we focused on right from the beginning was to building a woodworking community – not just a shop space. Our goals included getting people together for woodworking, forming SIGs, setting up an education department, introducing new people to woodworking, and helping existing members learn new skills. Gary also emphasized customer service – making sure everyone worked together – members, supervisors, instructors, maintenance and support people – making a whole community. And I think we can all be very proud of what we’ve built. The Shop is currently kind of bursting at the seams, and we have long waiting lists of members wanting to take classes or join – we must be doing something right.

While Gary and Pete have stepped back from their roles as Shop Chair and Shop Director, Dallas, Rick, Sharon, Scott, and all the rest of the team have taken on the responsibilities of keeping the Shop running – including pulling off the amazing Shop 3.0 expansion in 2022. Looking around the new spaces, I see what we were envisioning several years ago – and it’s really happening. Gary’s most recent contribution to the future of the Member Shop was securing an extension of our lease for 3 more years, with our option of extending for another 3 years beyond that. I cannot overstate how much better off we are doing this expansion here – instead of trying to move to another place. I can honestly say that we have wildly exceeded all of the goals we originally had for the SDFWA Member Shop – and its future looks very bright indeed.

Jeff Bratt

SDFWA Historian