Build A Bench with Jeff Miller this April

If you'd like to spend a couple weekends building a Roubo-style bench with Jeff Miller, here's your chance.

Over two weekends (March 31-April 2, and April 7-9) Jeff is offering the class at his shop in Chicago where you'll get instruction from one of today's best modern furniture makers. Jeff has extensive experience building this bench, and installing our vises. Most of the benches in Jeff's shop are outfitted with our stuff, and he has an intimate knowledge of how they install and function. Although Jeff will help you build a bench with whatever vises you wish, not just our stuff.

Jeff is also one of our favorite people. Always good-humored and cheery, two weekends with Jeff building stuff sounds like serious fun. And you'll walk away with not only a fine bench, but also a bunch of new skills and techniques.

For more info, see Jeff's website here. http://www.furnituremaking.com/workshophome.html

Photo by Narayan Nayar at FORP II.

Lead times, Crubber and dealers

First lead times.  Many of you may notice that in the past we have posted individual lead times for most of our products, especially vise products.  A short while back we changed this to nearly immediate shipping on all products because our production times have improved.  Most orders now ship within a couple days (and many of them ship the same day).

We tend to get a fair share of complaints when things aren't shipped immediately (like when we are closed for short breaks, which is fairly rare for us).  We apologize for these sometime delays.  On the other hand we rarely get any kudos for prompt order fulfillment.......that's ok though, we're used to it ;-)  We think the vast majority of our customers would give us high marks for the speed with which we not only fill orders but the lengths we often go to with special requests and responding to emails.

Crubber.  The demand for Crubber has been high.  That said, vise orders take priority for this stuff so that's where it goes first.  You will note that the ala cart Crubber now has a lead time.  We don't produce Crubber, so we have to wait just like you do.  We encourage anyone who needs to place a mixed order to make their Crubber order separate to speed up your order fulfillment, unless you are willing to wait, we won't ship other items in an order until the Crubber is in stock.

New dealers.  We have two new dealers, one for vise products the other for Mag-Bloks.

Vises.  Though they have actually been a dealer for about 2 years! we haven't added them to our dealer list merely out of stupid neglect.  Harvey is our China dealer and we're happy too say the dealer for MANY of our peers in tool making (Lie-Nielsen, Veritas, Bridge City, just to name a few).

Australia.  No specifics yet but we may be close to establishing a dealership in Australia.  We ship an inordinate amount of vise products to AUS/NZ and it's time we had a dealer there for our customers sake.

Mag-Bloks dealer.  We're happy to add The Cook's Edge of Prince Edward Sound to our Canadian dealer list for Mag-Bloks.  Quite a few dealers up North now so seeing a Blok in person is getting easier all the time.