What are you trying to sell on your website?
My goal for the website is to use it like a brochure, updating it often, allowing new people to find out about my work through web search engines, and surfing. My goal is to further expand my customer base, locating collectors that first see my work through the Internet. I am learning that people will not call me, or email, before they have first looked at my website many times, trying to decide whether to contact me.

My main business is Commissioned Art-Furniture, building an item in accordance to someone's fairly specific need. So, I hope to use the website to sell my abilities so that others will want to collect my work.

How Can I buy Something From You?
You can email me and we will discuss your ideas and what you would like to purchase. You can also visit the retail stores that have a few examples of my work. Internet based selling is not a high percentage of my work, so I don't have the ability to do secure selling over the website. I do have a PayPal account that can be utilized if that is a method you would like to use. Normally, I receive a personal check and when the check clears, I ship the work. If it is a commissioned project involving a long process of labor, I will ask for 50% down, and progress payments as needed for the situation.

Where did you Learn Woodworking?
I grew up in the home of a woodshop teacher, so my dad was the first teacher. I remember having real tools and a workbench in my bedroom where I experimented making things in wood. This was before video games, or I might have gone another direction, who knows? I enjoyed 4 years of High School Wood Shop Class, a dying entity in this country. I have read magazines, books, and watched anything on TV that provides instructional information about woodworking, or furniture design. I have also attended the Mark Adams School of Woodworking, which I highly recommend. The rest has been trial and error, learning on my own.

What are your favorite Styles of work?
I can't say that I specifically like a style for its appearance. I am more drawn to the romance and story behind a style, a person's work, or a design movement. I am drawn to the people that made the movement happen. For instance, I enjoy studying the thoughts and work of Sam Maloof, and also of George Nakashima, who both have inspired many ideas in my mind. I am mostly drawn to the Arts & Crafts movement due to their original ideal of using a network of self-employed artisans producing hand-made items in their home shops for sale to the elite and Industry Giants of England. Unfortunately, that movement's ideals seems to have been more fiction than reality, but I like the idea of anyone making anything by hand, without lots of employees, and schedules, and computerized factory equipment. I am drawn to any item hand made, whether sculpture, blacksmithing, canvas paintings, woodworking, glass blowing, leather work, Luthier work, and so on. I am more drawn to people's work that had the ability to design & build their own work, not just drawing their ideas for others to build, or for a factory to produce for them. Those are the types of style movements that are inspiring to me.

Why are you doing Scrimshaw?
My venture into Scrimshaw came from an invitation from a local friend that told me about the art form and gave me a few spare steer horns and told me how to get started. I then built a powder horn for my black powder shooting hobby, because I needed something to hold the black powder. I decided to decorate this first horn by spending about an hour scratching some artwork on it, following the directions offered by my friend, taking the powder horn the next morning to a Mountain Man Rendezvous. I had so many compliments on my powder horn and scrimshaw artwork that I was encouraged to do more them, and so it was just an accidental process. My powder horns have gotten so expensive with the large number of hours it takes to do them now, that I generally only do them on commission, and rarely have an unsold example to show, so I often borrow them back from the owner if I am attending an art show, or Rendezvous.

What role does woodworking play in your life?
This answer is in three parts:
1. Income production.
2. A Creative Outlet.
3. Personal "Niche" in this world.

First, I have bills, so I need an income. Secondly, as I have tried to determine what is "it" with woodworking that really gets me "going," I found that it is the process of "creating" that I like the best. And lastly, I believe that all people are created with a purpose, driven to live out their lives in a direction that glorifies and exalts the Creator. Having that priority, finding that "Niche", and living within that purpose is, in my opinion, the success that all of us wish for.

I believe that each of us has a special "thing" that we are good at, something that is provided in our DNA by the Creator. For me to pursue the woodworking path, I had to give up the idea of making a lot of money, wearing suits to work, and striving for a "management" position. I had to change my mindset about what made me "important" in this culture, and I discovered that serving the needs of the Creator was that path, leaving the "importance" up to Him.

Our culture strives to get our kids to college so that they don't have to do hard manual labor the rest of their lives. I too started out in that direction. Our culture holds the ideal that we have "arrived" only when we can hire out all of the manual labor we need, making ourselves a "manager" of our estate. However, in my own experience, it has been the manual labor that was the best thing for my mind, and heart. For instance, I am left with little thought of mischief when I get in the house after a long hard day of manual labor. So, I decided to step in line with the Creator's purpose for my life, and I believe at this point that it is woodworking.

Are you currently working on an interesting woodworking project?
I think for any of us who create something from scratch, whatever we are working on is interesting, or we wouldn't put forth the effort. For me, an interesting project involves a few key factors:
1. Is it complicated enough to challenge me in several ways? For instance, throughout the project, I like to experience the sinking feeling, "oh no, how do I do that?"
2. Is it something that families of my customers will fight each other for, instead of selling at the estate sale?
3. Does it avoid, or minimize, the use of plywood?
4. Does it offer enough financial reward to pay for the bills that will come in over the time I am working on the project? Sometimes, this is the top priority.

Currently, I'm finishing up a Refined Rustic Dining Table and Carved Back Chairs to complete an ensemble for the Western Design Conference show in Cody, WY this September. This table and chair set will match the Refined Rustic China Hutch already shown in Indoor Furniture section. I have just finished a Sam Maloof-inspired walnut rocking chair. I also just finished at George Nakashima-inspired slab coffee table. I have started a Refined Rustic walnut Console Cabinet with a Spalted Sycamore slab top. I have parts made for a Native-American inspired Morris Chair. I have parts cut out for a Native-American inspired dining chair. I also have a couple of powder horns started that I am doing scrimshaw artwork on. I am working on a large Bowie Knife with scrimshaw inlay on ivory. I have parts cut out for a Refined Rustic Hall Tree with a Seat. Somewhere in that mix, I need to retune my old 1972 GMC pickup as it miss-fires once in a while. I also have an old 1963 Ford Galaxie that I try to keep running. I only mow grass when it gets too dangerous to walk through the yard.

What are your woodworking plans or goals over the coming years?
Long-Term planning is hard for me. I have many dreams, but doing the planning is the hard part. I once heard myself say, "it isn't the dreams that chart our course in life, it is rather the decisions that we make." By that I mean that I may "dream" to do a lot of things, but if I don't purpose to save and plan to get to that point, then the dreams were just wasted thinking time.

I am "planning" to establish a legacy of work that will have been the best and most challenging work I could do at the time I did it. I am planning to get a bigger wood planer. I am planning to get a bigger bandsaw. I am planning to market my work to the point that I can pursue the limits of my abilities, and not settle for the ordinary, or repetitive things, to pay the current bills.

Most of my long-term, and short-term, planning, is focused on trying to find out where the Creator wants me to go. If I get to the end of this present life and find that I only focused on my own dreams, without first determining whether or not they were first the Creator's purpose for my life, then the rest of eternity will be a disappointing time for me in some respects. Have I found the right path? It is too early to tell, but I am trying, dreaming, and planning to get there.

What is my favorite tool?
I think that my favorite tool to use is probably the Hand Plane. I don't use this tool as often as would be fun, because with deadlines and bills, I tend to use a power tool in most situations if it will do the job. However, the feel and sound of a thin curl of hardwood from the blade of a hand plane is hard to beat when it is adjusted correctly, sharpened right, pointed in the right direction, and pushed with the right speed and amount of pressure, with the grain of the wood running in the downward direction.

I have been dreaming of making a few hand planes just for the "craft" of it. David Marks (www.djmarks.com) on his DIY Woodworks show did a great episode on building a hand plane, so at some point, I intend to make a few, then the desire to use it would be even greater.

Also, for several years a Hand Plane making course has been offered at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking (www.marcadams.com) in which I would be taught to make hand planes, including the blades, so that is a dream I hope to fulfill someday.

I have been ridiculed in the past by a few woodworkers for asserting that a large-table jointer is necessary to make professional quality furniture for sale these days. Despite the caustic comments, I still believe that to be true. I used to build furniture without a jointer, just a cabinet saw with a Forrest saw blade, and a hand plane. However, after I put a 12" wide x 80" long Grizzly carbide-toothed spiral cutting jointer in my shop, I was ashamed at how I had in the past insisted to other woodworkers that I did not need a jointer (www.grizzly.com/products/G9860ZX). I definitely learned that I did. This tool is probably my favorite power tool to use, although without my Grizzly 10" Cabinet Saw, I wouldn't be able to use it. Future purchases will be a larger thickness planer and a bigger bandsaw. A long-term dream would be a wide-surfacing belt sander, which many small, professional shops find to be very valuable to their work.