Woodworker's Journal 2008-32-4, страница 6

Our Dumb Ash Design

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The selection of a gaudily grained base wood, I consider a severe detraction from the beautiful top. If you should happen to err and give it to me, I would change it.

/./,. Beetle Volcano, California

The bubinga sideboard was indeed a simple yet very elegant design, and it was well executed by Frank Grant. However, I think the choice of ash for the base was a poor one and takes away from the beauty of the piece.

Perhaps you might want to follow up with some future projects, keeping the same design and bubinga top piece, but using a different base.

Ronald V. Sullivan Atlanta, Georgia

Cabinet Starting Point

Enjoyed your article "Building a Base Cabinet for the Kitchen" [April 2008]. When making a custom kitchen for your home, ask what the cook doesn't like about the current cabinet setup.

If you are making custom-made cabinets, that's always the first tiling you do.

Terry A. Taylor Colon a, Illinois

One reader suggests that proper kitchen cabinetmaking doesn't really begin until you've interviewed the cook.

A Real Do-over

The bubinga is beautiful, and the design is just right ["Waterfall Bubinga Sideboard," April 2008). Why in the heck did (Frank) use scrap pine for the base? The grain of the base clashes with the bubinga horribly. Sorry to be critical, but this is a do-over.

Dan Friedrichsen West Chester, Pennsylvania

Centers: Dead or Live?

I have to find fault with Betty Scarpino's "Common Misunderstandings" [April 2008).

The headstock is where the power resides, and its center is properly called the

drive center or live center. The tailstock or dead center is inert, moving only passively under the forcc coming from the live center in the headstock. There is nothing "live" about the tailstock center, even if it has bearings to allow it to rotate freely.

This is how I learned the terms about 45 years ago, from the limited references available at that time. Just now, I blew an inch of dust off my 1953 Fundamentals of Wood Turning by Milton and Wohlers to verity the point.

I must say that, in the course of my career, I have moved many human corpses without ever thinking that I had made them "live"!

Thomas F. Higby, M.D.

Fowlerville, Michigan

Betty Scarpino Responds:

I assigned that label because that's what the new type of tailstock center is called these days by many of us turners to differentiate between a tailstock center that moves and one that

doesn't move (the new and the old). The terminology is confusing, and it is changing because of new gadgets and improvements.

Perhaps a less confusing term would be

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