On Saturday, August 26, Val and Laura Matthews will host the annual picnic and tool auction from 1-4pm. See the August newsletter for directions.

Our traditional combined Northwest Corner Woodworkers Association (NCWA) and Northwest Washington Woodturners (NWW) event takes the place of our normal monthly meeting. There is lots of room for parking. Bring tools you want to auction, and bid on something you find that you can’t live without. All you have to do is show up with a side dish (salad, desert or whatever), something cool to drink, and a lawn chair or two. Burgers, hotdogs, brats, fixings, soft drinks, water, paper plates, plastic ware and napkins are provided. Details on the auction process and entry form are in this newsletter.

Serving will begin earlier this year, as last year the wait time was too long. Expect to eat about 2 PM.

This year the Woodturners are cooking!.

Our July 11th meeting will be held at NorthStar Woodworks, a custom door and window manufacturer located in Ferndale. NorthStar is owned and operated by two founding members of NCWA, Frank Chambers and Mike Anderson. Frank and Mike started their business in 1980 in a small custom furniture shop that occasionally made entry doors. When the demand for custom doors outpaced furniture, they began specializing in crafting fine wood doors. They have operated in their current state-of-the-art facility since 2001 and are recognized as one of the premier custom door and window shops on the west coast. They will give us a guided tour of their facility which includes some amazing production machines, many CNC operated. Since this is a field trip, our meeting will be abbreviated: THERE WILL BE NO BRING AND BRAG SESSION and THE LIBRARY WILL NOT BE AVAILABLE. Please arrive well before 7 pm to get your coffee and cookies and your ticket for the monthly tool raffle, which we will conduct. There will not be any chairs available, so you may want to bring your own for the short business meeting prior to the tour.

June’s presenter will be Phil Kezele.

Have you ever been offered somebody’s old woodworking machine from an estate of a friend or loved one or just saw something on Craigslist that reminded you of your high school shop class? Are you on a budget and can’t afford to buy the latest and greatest shop equipment? If that’s you, you may be interested in old woodworking machines or ‘old arn’ as I prefer to call them. Learn a little bit of what some might call a voyage of discovery by using old woodworking machines in your woodworking. What you won’t get is factory support, dust collection, riving knife or flesh sensing technology but you will get is history, style, design, cast iron—and lots of it. Come join me for a night when we will look at machines of old still used today.

On May 2nd Tom Fulk and Tim Whittman will show us some of the tricks needed to make fly fishing rods from bamboo. The precision necessary to join six pieces of wood into a tiny rod tip 1/16” in diameter is daunting. Each piece is tapered as well!

Also, we will have NCWA hats for sale — $15 each (cash or check).