It was raining Saturday moring when I got out of bed, so I decided to go to the Long Island Woodworkers Club show. Let me get the really bad news out of the way & tell you up front I forgot to bring my camera. Sorry, I didn't get any pictures.
Mind you, I didn't make this decision lightly. It's about a 2 hour drive to get there in decent traffic. I live at the extreme northern end of Westchester county. In fact, crossing the town line north of here brings you into the next county. I have to drive all the way through the county, cross into the Bronx, and drive through there to one of the bridges to Queens. Then I have to drive out from Queens through Nassau county and into Suffolk county.
The good thing is it was a Saturday morning, so traffic was likely to be lighter than on a weekday. The bad thing is it was raining, meaning that traffic probably wasn't going to move as fast as it normally would on a Saturday morning. Long Island is a nice place to visit, but I hate driving there. It ended up taking about 2 hours each way.
I had gone to the show two years ago when it was in the basketball arena at Hofstra University, and it was a good show with lots of vendor booths & demonstrations. As I recall, the show was in April that time. There were a couple of guys outside the venue with a portable bandsaw mill. They were turning a log into planks. There was even a booth inside that had a CNC router they were selling. Very cool stuff, and I even got to sit in on a couple of seminars.
This year, the show is in October and it was at the Loyal Order of the Moose Lodge in Greenlawn. I had never been to Greenlawn before and it seemed like a very nice town. The show was a lot smaller than the previous show I had been to. There were only about 5 vendors there, and no CNC routers to be found. There was a group of guys from the LI Scroll Sawyers Club demonstrating scrolling.
And there were a lot of incredible projects on display. There was a fantastic tool chest that was made of curly maple and other colorful woods. It was full of hand tools & reminded me of the antique tool box that Norm showed on the episode of the New Yankee Workshop where he makes a hanging tool box.
There were some incredible examples of the scroll sawyer's art on display, including a scroll sawn version of the famous painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel where God reaches down from heaven to touch the hand of man. And there were scroll sawn portraits of the presidents on display, too.
Frankly, I felt the venue was too small. The place was too crowded, given the fragile nature of some of the exhibits. It would have been better if they could have put the projects on display in a space separate from the vendors. I never did find any of the seminars.
I only stayed an hour, but I did get a Kreg K3 Master System pocket hole jig kit while I was there. The show price was 10% off and I got a free box of screws with it. I played with the jig when I got home and cut a piece off of a scrap of ply and attached it to the rest using the jig. It works!
I hope to get into the shop tomorrow afternoon after church and cut some wood.
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