Olympic feats

I have been busy working with Glen Huey of Popular Woodworking on designing a Woodworking Olympics for the Woodworking in America Conference in St. Charles, Illinois.The conference takes place on August 14–16. We have come up with several fun events, a couple of which involve sawing. I am donating some saws so I have been busy rebuilding several handsaws to use during the competition and then award as prizes. They will be fine tuned and sharpened by Mark Harrell of TechnoPrimitives. My current project is designing saw benches that will hold the wood securely and safely and give every contestant equal “footing” as they saw. We will then have a mini-Olympics here in my shop to see how the saw benches work and make sure there are no surprises. Some of the questions to be answered include,how do you score a woodworking event, what makes it fair, how do we keep it fun? I will post information on this website about the different events and the equipment we will be using so you can practice if you so choose. See you in St. Charles! Mike