Today marks the second anniversary of this website and, as I did last year, I’m writing this blog entry to recap the year past and to talk about what will be happening in the coming months.
First, I want to sincerely thank those that have visited this site and continue to do so. Over the past few months I have not been able to do a lot of the more popular type of projects on this site (workshop jigs and tools), since I really didn’t have a workshop to do them in. Moving house and then having to convert a much smaller garage into my new workshop were the reasons for that, but now that the workshop is done, I can get back on track.
The year started off with four smaller projects in July, the beam compass, deep C clamps, tapering jig and, less of a project than an experiment, the worm gear / wooden thread machine. I made videos for each of these, with the worm gear / wooden thread ones getting the most attention. It was my intention to follow up on this experiment with a detailed build on the thread cutting machine and a project that would use the worm gear drive mechanism, but I got distracted with other things and it fell by the wayside. This will be one of the projects I will be doing at some point over the next twelve months, so stay tuned for that.
Also in July of last year, I did a preview video for a 1″ belt / 5″ disk sander powered by a regular hand drill. I only did a video of that, without any details on the build. The video has been very popular, with approximately 280,000 views at this time and many have asked when it will be ready. Once again, this is a project that got left behind, but it will be coming up over the next few months. It with be a detailed build article and plans for those that want to build their own will be available.

There were three fairly popular projects in August – the wooden drill press vise, chamfer plane and edge banding trimmer. The chamfer plane has received the most attention, both on this site and on the two videos of the build. I will be doing another hand plane project over the next year, though I’m not sure what type yet.
In September, I went over to the dark side with a pair of metal working projects: the steel work table and steel bench vise. These didn’t do well on this site, but are doing much better on YouTube, especially the bench vise. Based on that, I think I’ll stay away from full article write-ups of future metal working projects on this site and limit those to video only. For many of us, metal is just another material to work with, but it seems that most woodworkers have no interest or are intimidated by it. This is unfortunate, since metal really expands the scope of what you are able to do.
At the end of September I did the wooden edge clamp, probably the most popular small project of last year. Although I’ve made several different types, there’s a possibility I’ll do yet another clamp project this year.

Skipping ahead to the end of February and the release of the new version of the advanced box joint jig, which was the most popular project for the year. The new version was a bit easier to build and the plans were changed to a simpler format. There will be a build project for a larger version of the jig (more details here) and plans available for that as well, coming soon. Also in the works is a ready to assemble kit for the box joint jig, and that should be available before the end of the summer.

In this blog entry from December, I said that the site would be changing to monthly updates, rather than weekly, with the idea being to give me more time to devote to larger projects. That is still the loose plan, but the fact is that even though I would like for this website to be my main focus, the bulk of what I earn comes from the videos I do on YouTube. Earning money to buy materials for projects and other expenses is important, if I want to continue doing this. So, regardless of the project schedule for this site, I will be making regular projects for video. Some of these will be written up here in articles, and some will not. I would prefer to cover all of the projects here as well, but as I said earlier, some of them won’t do well on this site and it takes a lot of time to get an article together.
My thinking in the beginning was that eventually my audience for this website would diversify, but that has not happened to any great degree. It seems that most people are really only interested in one or two things, and gravitate to the sites that are very narrowly focused on those topics. Indeed, I’ve had emails from readers when I did articles on some of my house renovation projects, disappointed that it was not a jig or homemade tool.
This leaves me in a bit of a quandary, since I will be extensively covering the renovations on my new house here. I guess I’ll just have to do what I think will work, and we can look back at it again next year, at this time.