When stuff flies off my lathe, I hang it on the wall to remind me.

If you don't already have one, it's time to get a face shield!

Awhile back I bought a name-brand high pressure airless sprayer and it works well, but I am about half scared of it. When I opened the box, it had more warnings than you have ever seen about the pressures involved. This thing operates at something around 2000 psi. There is actually a little plastic card to take with you to the emergency room if you happen to stick this thing in the palm of your hand and pull the trigger. The little card instructs the surgeon who to call and warns that paint injected into your body with this thing can only be removed by amputating the affected part. What if you shoot yourself in the head with it? Are you kidding me?

Enter the Earlex 2900 HVLP paint sprayer currently available only at Highland Woodworking. They loaned me one to try out for a few weeks and I like it. I felt great relief and relaxation when I was using this thing. When I first turned it on and it was blowing this gentle breeze from the nozzle, in spite of all my negative instincts, I very gingerly stuck my hand in the air stream. Nothing!! When I first filled it, I used a bottle of water because I didn't want to clean it. In the past I have spent upwards of two hours cleaning my high pressure system and if this sprayer was going to take that long to clean, I wasn't interested.

When I sprayed it, the water went out about two feet in a nicely formed spray. No trauma, no high pressure, no fear, no amputations. I played with it enough to use up the bottle of water and then I figured I would try some real paint. I had a new quart of interior white latex and thought that might be a good test. Without any fine furniture underway that I wanted to paint white, I had two metal sawhorses that I very much dislike at the shop, so painting them white seemed to be ample revenge for all those pinched fingers while setting them up. After using the viscosity cup as directed in the instructions, I wasn't satisfied with the results, so I thinned it down a little more and tried again. Now those nasty metal sawhorses have never looked so good. I put two thin coats on, had most of the paint left in the cup and was ready to paint anything else I could find.

I got done painting, all the while dreading the cleanup. I took the cup to the kitchen and rinsed it out in about two minutes. After that I filled the cup with clean water and sprayed that through the system and it was done. I kept looking for something else to clean, but I couldn't find it. I was going to take the gun apart and clean it, but it didn't need it. I was going to take the hose off and clean that, but no paint goes there. I was going to take the needle out and clean that, but it was already clean. No more than ten minutes max and it was done.

This really fine Earlex sprayer is available from Highland for $149.99 including a book on spraying and a demo DVD. Get your wife one of these for her birthday and she can stain the deck next time it needs it. Shouldn't take her more than ten minutes to clean the sprayer after she finishes.

Let me tell you about this little adventure. Some friends down the road who know I enjoy wood working offered me two walnut trees off the family farm. The trees were out by the barn and blacksmith shop and had some electrical wires through one of them, so I knew taking them down was beyond me. I hired a professional tree service fellow to take them down and haul the good parts over to a friend who has a portable sawmill. Tree guy came out last week with his bucket truck and his small tractor and trimmed them up and then put the trunks on the ground. The grapple hook on the front of his tractor made short work of loading the tree trunks and they were soon at the sawmill.

Now understand the problem with walnut trees and particularly trees close to a house or a barn and in this case, a blacksmith shop, is metal. People hang horseshoes on limbs (that's good luck for most people--just not for sawyers), drive nails in tree trunks, and nail fences to them. The sawmill guy is willing to saw them for me, but he knows about metal and before he starts, he wants me to stand good for the blades at about $30 each.

When I count up to see if this whole deal was worthwhile, I think it was. I spent about $600 and I have 23 boards which average 12 inches wide and 6 feet long. That computes to around 138 board feet. Plus I have enough for about 20 bowl blanks four to five inches deep. Even allowing for waste, I think you could not buy this lumber for $600. Maybe I can sell some of that dern metal and recoup part of my cost.

Well, here's the verdict. If you ask the right question, this thing is the answer. First of all, I started out by asking the wrong question. Am I going to use this instead of my Delta Unisaw? Not if I am in my shop. Would I use it instead of my band saw to cut a curve in 8/4 cherry? Not if I can help it. But if I have to repair the upstairs bath cabinet in my rental house, then I will put this thing over my shoulder and save three trips back to the shop.

When I was in the store to pick this up last week, we had a good discussion about who would buy this thing. I never felt I had a clear answer until I got it home and started thinking outside the box (so to speak). (It's all in one box, don't you see?)

If you approach it from the standpoint of one of those kits of portable tools you might see on sale at the big box store around Father's Day and Christmas, then it makes a huge amount of sense. The total price is right in line with the name brands for a kit that includes a cordless jig saw, circular saw, drill driver, and flashlight, all running on an 18 volt battery.

And then on top of that (and beyond any of the other kits), you can turn the drill driver into a drill press, the circular saw into a table saw, the jigsaw into a scroll saw and the flashlight into a table light, and you can see where this is going. If I want to get a set of portable tools, then why not add the table saw/scroll saw/drill press/table light functions on top of it for no additional charge?

If you are a handy-person with limited funds, live in an apartment or small house with little space and big dreams, or a student starting out in woodworking, or a modelmaker, then this would make an excellent tool system for you. And say if you have a cabin at the lake or in the mountains, or work on boats, or go traveling in a motor home, or handle other folks' home repairs out of the back of your truck, well, you get the idea.

It's versatile, it's very compact, and it's highly portable, and there are really cool functions built into this box. A large canvas tool bag containing all the basic tools stores in a sturdy steel-reinforced padded case with a total weight of about 30 pounds.

Take the soft bag out of the box and plug the battery/handle into the corner of the table where it powers any of the tools mounted on the table. If you purchase an extra battery/handle (for $49.99), you can plug the second battery into an alternate extension on the back corner of the table so it will charge while you use the table.

Changing tools is a snap – lift the table top, pull back one slide, pop in the tool, plug it up inside and you're ready to go. I timed myself changing from the table saw to the jig saw and it took me 29.2 seconds.

The saw fence is the post for the drill press, a saw fence, a carpenter's level, a post for the light, an iPod speaker system, (well, maybe not) and it stores out of sight on the bottom of the box when not in use. The miter gauge doubles as a protractor, there is a plastic shield for the scroll saw that fits onto the post, there is a plastic blade guard for the table saw in addition to the retractable blade guard for the circular saw, the push stick for the saw is also the handle for the drill press – it just goes on and on.

Oh yes, there are two plastic storage boxes full of drill bits, nut drivers and jig saw blades and they snap neatly into the back of the hard case. I love the way this thing fits together.

So, do you need versatility? Compactness? Portability? Affordability?

And hey, Father's Day is just around the corner.

The compact Earlex HVLP unit is an exceptional value with its aluminum spray gun, teflon-coated paint cup and 13 foot spray hose, all of which store neatly onboard the turbine unit.

HVLP technology now makes it easy for woodworkers and do-it-yourselfers to step up to spray finishing without the expense and steep learning curve once associated with spray finishing.

We supply the Earlex 2900 HVLP sprayer with a quick start guide as well as master finisher Jeff Jewitt's excellent DVD and illustrated guide to spray finishing. The entire package deal is priced at only $149.99.

Just in time for the first week of the Major League baseball season, Jack Masten provides a step-by-step tutorial on turning your own classic baseball bat from Northern White Ash.

And that's just one of many fascinating articles in this month's Wood News. We've got a new shop featured - Jim Chandler built his workshop in a fully restored 111-year-old barn.

There's also a nice introduction to the Power8 cordless workshop, a versatile piece of new innovation merged with good solid craftsmanship that will almost certainly make your work as an experienced woodworker or a do-it-yourselfer easier, incorporating a table saw, a circular saw, a drill press, and many other useful functions into one compact portable workshop.

Catch up with the latest news on our favorite Brazilian Woodworker - Dilo Fernandino, take a look at Mike Henderson's quick course in shop made cauls, review the new additions to our 2010 woodworking class schedule or take advantage of some of the great deals at Highland Woodworking for Festool, Steel City, Earlex, Kreg, and many more!

Check it out!

What brought this on was a visit to the shop last week by a couple of potential customers. I was wearing my new apron ($49.99 on sale at Highland) when they came in about some custom turning work. Now when you are considering hiring someone to do custom work, you want an experienced worker, someone who has been around the bend, a dirty apron kind of person. You don't want someone learning how to do wood work on your dime. A couple of hundred years ago, when you asked for proposals on work, the bidders brought their tool boxes with them for your inspection. They would spread their tools out for you to inspect, including the tool box itself as a sort of portfolio of the type of work you could expect. Probably not a bad idea.

Even today, when you go to a Habitat site you can tell in the first five minutes who knows what they are doing by the tool belt they are wearing. If you want to get something done, find someone with an old leather belt and a smooth worn hammer handle and follow them around.

Now it happens that I know what I am doing in the turning field, but the problem is that my apron does not yet convey my skill level to potential customers. It needs more wear and signs of usage and I am doing everything I can to get it there. If I can just find a muddy dirt road.

And then just as a lark, I put it up on my Etsy site (www.thewoodshop.etsy.com) and put a price on it. Well, guess what! It is still a couple of weeks until Easter (everyone wants them for the Easter season) and I have sold three more of them. Churches in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Massachusetts will enjoy my handiwork during the Easter season. I had to set up a virtual assembly line. Thank goodness I measured the original and made a quick drawing of it before I sent it off. (Guess I coulda used Sketch-Up.) In fact I will try to make an extra one or two in case I get more orders in the next few days.

Here are the facts. First of all it is free. Google offers a basic version free in hopes you will buy the more robust professional version later (for $495). You can buy the pro version if you want, but the free one will do 99% of woodworking stuff. Just go to Google and type SketchUp in the search box. That will take you to the download area and it is painless to get loaded and running. Just open it up and go to work. Once you learn probably four basic tools in the program, you can design most things you will want to do in your shop. If you draw all the joints in detail, it is just like building them in the shop. Plus you can get a really good sense of the scale of any project by adding people, trees, furniture, cabinets and anything else which might be helpful. You can look at your piece from any angle, turn it 360, put it in x-ray mode to see inside (if you drew the joints), add texture and color, and pretty much anything else you may have ever wished you could do when drawing plans on paper. If you are careful with the scale of everything as you draw, you can pull any dimension directly off the drawing. Plus you can take a file of your drawing to a blue print/engineering printer company and they can plot it for you at full scale. When you have that, tape it to the floor and build the project on top of it like lofting a boat.

Sean Headrick writes a very good monthly column in Wood News Online published every month by Highland Woodworking. Follow his detailed instructions to get a good start and get an idea of what this thing can do. Another site I found on the internet is sketchupforwoodworkers which has excellent tutorials for rank beginners. Spend a little time with these tutorials and the ones inside the program and you will be up to speed very quickly.

When I narrow the field to woodworking, I met Norm Abram once, and I've taken a class at Highland from Roy Underhill and another one from Mike Mahoney. I read several books by James Krenov and bought one of the planes he made, and once I sat in that Sam Maloof chair at Highland.

I picked one up and the weight and feel is such that you just know they are the best. The finish is outstanding and the blades are honed to perfection. After I picked out the one I wanted, a No. 102 low angle block plane, Thomas autographed it for me with one of those electric engraving pens right on the spot. I suppose I will have to decide whether to frame this one or actually use it like I do with my Fuller hammer.

Given enough time and energy, I can pretty much make anything I want out of wood. But when I look at one of these planes, I cannot even imagine how to begin. The scope of the metal work, the foundry work, the machining, the fitting, not to mention the actual design to make it beautiful, is just beyond me. Then on top of all that, it has to cut wood perfectly. Oh, and by the way, the Lie-Nielsen factory makes a hundred planes a day, which to me is amazing!

I really enjoyed talking to Thomas and I admire his work, but I feel like he did leave all of us short on one thing. Go look at Chris Schwartz, the editor over at Popular Woodworking magazine and see the clip of him throwing double bit axes at a target. Thomas taught him how to throw this week when Chris went to visit the Lie-Nielsen factory. (By the way, we've got plenty of those kinds of axes at Highland. You'll need one of the double bit ones.)

It just occurred to me to wonder: Will Thomas ever be back down here to show the rest of us how to throw an axe?

I must admit that grandfather laziness is high in my gene list, but father stupid works quicker for me than the other two. Fifteen years ago, in the very first two minutes I had my brand new table saw in the shop, I stuck a scrap of 1/4 inch plywood in the blade free hand. It kicked back into my midsection and the palm of my hand and I learned a good lesson very early. I instantly gained an immense respect for the tool with thankfully little damage. Good lesson not soon forgotten.

Then yesterday when I put a new piece of old wood on the lathe, I failed to note sufficiently the crack across the top of the wood. Ever stand out in the yard and watch a vee formation of geese fly over (never do that with your mouth open) heading away for winter vacation? I remember standing there and watching that chunk of wood fly across the top of the shop like a flock of geese. Seemed like it took a week. I have learned instinctively to stand out of the line of fire and I always wear a full face shield and thank goodness for that.