I used to post quite often. But lately, life, family and work has kept me very busy. I have not had much piddling time to make furniture.
Being a novice, I used to run into woodworking problems all the time. I would spend a lot of time just solving problems. Sometime, just to make sure I had the right solution, I would pose the problem to the forum just to see what others thought about it, or what they would do to solve it. Most of the time, someone on forum would have a way better solution, and that made me glad I had asked the question.
We used to have more of these types of conversations. People would post their questions, and that would start conversations. Also, we used to list woodworking events, new books or supplies, news about people, news about suppliers, and we had several running dialog like “Dog on it”.
I think some people may be afraid to ask their basic questions for fear of embarrassing themselves. I am not. I am ignorant, not stupid. But, I have run into people who think they are not worthy enough to be in SAPFM. I then explain that that is exactly why I am in SAPFM. I want to learn, and the best place to do that is to find the most knowledgeable people you can and then learn from them.
So to get the conversations going again, people just need to start posting. If you are a novice like me, go ahead and ask your questions. You will be very glad you did! For the pros, post a special homemade jig, pictures of your latest project, a finishing experiment, repair work, a new tool, an old tool, something that went wrong, or an interesting solution.
If you enjoy reading these posts and want to revive this form, then I request that you start a new forum topic within the next month. And after that, make it a habit to post. But we all have to start doing it, if we want to revive this forum.
I just started a new thread about a mystery tool that I got in a bundle of chisels from Ebay about 10 years ago. I could not figure it out until I needed it. Then, it was the perfect tool! See this thread in the Hand Tool section.
Cheers all,
David