Mike Siemsen's blog

In working on my goal to make entry level woodworking simple and accesible I am pondering the inexpensive workbench again. I am giving a demonstration on workbenches for the Minnesota Woodworkers Guild here at my shop. We are making a Nicholson bench at this meeting and giving it away at the guilds HTO in January. The entire bench will cost less than $100 and can be built in a day or two with handtools. I have decided to eliminate any vises attached to the bench and work with 2 holdfasts, a crochet and a double screw vise like Moxon or Holme show in their writings.

I would like to thank my friends Dean Jansa, Emily Bonham, Bob Rozaieski, Tom Howard, Steve Schwabacher and Nick Stahlman for all the work you do in the booth to make this happen. I would like to thank Popular woodworking for gathering up the prizes and giving us booth space and I would like to thank the vendors who donated prizes, Bad Axe Tool Works, Lee Valley, Rob Cosman and Ron Herman. It was a fun weekend!

Everyone that participated in Nageltreffen and the HTO is a winner.

In a couple of weeks we will be in our booth in the Northern Kentucky Convention Center running the Hand Tool Olympics for the fifth time.

This is going to be awesome!! Free admission, great demonstrators and vendors, interesting setting. All handtools, all the time! Tell your friends!

We have been making a few hammers just for fun. The heads are made from O-1 steel hack sawed, turned on the lathe and filed to shape. The eye is drilled out on a mill/drill machine, They are then heated red hot and quenched in peanut oil. After cooloing they are polished a bit so you can see then metal and then heated at the center of the head until the head and pein reach straw color and are quenched again in peanut oil. This gives the head a diferential hardening with the center being softer than the head and pein.

Under the greenwood tree, Who loves to lie with me, And turn his merry note Unto the sweet bird's throat, (Shakespeare)

It is my never ending quest to find interesting classes that cover skills that people seek to acquire, while making something valuable to take home and treasure. I have designed a great class for green woodworking. How does one get wood from the log to a project with those beautiful, tactile, faceted, shimmering surfaces from hand planes? This „unplugged“ class will cover riving timber from the log using froes, mallets, gluts and wedges.

Great news for those interested in tool chests and old tools!

My friends and I will be demonstrating at a few events this year. For Starters February 11th will see us at the Midwest Tool Collectors Association(mwtca­.org) meet at The Medina Ballroom in Medina, MN. The meet opens at 7:30 am with selling starting at 8:30. this is a great place to look for tools or learn about the ones you have! 500 Highway 55, Medina, MN 55340

We will be running a Hand Tool Olympics for the Minnesota Woodworkers Guild on February 22nd. Business meeting will start at 6:30 pm.

From the 1927 book, How to Work With Tools and Wood, published by Stanley Rule and Level. This photo pretty much speaks for itself. 

Getting started in woodworking can be a bit like the the old song „There's a Hole In the Bucket“, at every turn there is an excuse or stumbling block to success until you come back to the beginning and start over with the same litany of excuses. We are here to break that cycle and help beginning woodworkers get started. We will build up our tool kit and skills as we build a pair of sawhorses. In later posts we will build a Nicholson style workbench and a tool box as we add to our skills and tools. With that old song playing in the background we will help you get past the excuses and into woodworking.