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One of the most salient points of the recent survey of the membership, of which more will be reported in the upcoming months, is that the main reason that you have joined BAWA is to improve your technical skill as a woodworker. As the editor of the newsletter I have a responsibility to help with that information exchange. Several ways of accomplishing this occur to me immediately. One would be to form a group of contributing editors, who would be some of the more experienced woodworkers in our organization. They could be called upon to write short essays on woodworking skills and offer tips on techniques and skill building. Another would be to have this group of experts answer written questions sent in by the membership. A third idea would be to provide links to interesting articles on woodworking technical skills at online sites.

Because of the limited space available in the mailed version of the newsletter, this added content might need to be abbreviated somewhat to fit into the maximum four pages of text. The online version could be more voluminous and include content such as photos and videos. We could also consider setting up an index to the discussion subjects on our website so that members could refer back to the items when they had a future need.

Any experienced members that are interested in helping provide this material are welcome to contact me by e-mail or by phone or in person at the next meeting to give me an idea of what they are willing to do. Of course, any feedback from members about these ideas or other ideas they might have in this regard are also welcome.

In any case, I would like to kick off the discussion and test the waters by proposing an issue for discussion which has been plaguing me lately, which is that of controlling glue squeezeout. Most of us use one of the Titebond series of aliphatic wood glues to hold our wood joints together. There is a delicate balance between getting too much glue in place leading to a mess around the joint which later needs to be chiseled, scraped, and/or sanded away, or having a glue-starved joint which might be weak and fail. If anyone has some good ideas that they have used and found to be helpful in this regard, please send them to me and we will get them published in one of the upcoming newsletters.