Fluted Beams LLC produces bendable hardwood and bentwood products and fabrications using a proprietary Extreme Wood Bending™ process that produces the worlds most dramatic and ambitions bentwood parts from thick, solid hardwoods.
Fluted Beams LLC is owned and managed by Chris Mroz (BS, MSc, MBA) in Gig Harbor, Washington, USA. Mroz is Canadian, but has

been a permanent resident of the USA since 1994. With a background in Arts, Sciences and Business, Mroz invented the Fluted Beam while developing a lightweight and strong curved rail for a boat building project. The idea was scaled up to architectural sized projects including prototype projects for Frank Gehry and Martha Schwartz. Other Extreme Bent Wood products are being utilized for grid shell buildings, interior landscape designs, trellis, canopies, curved walls, curved surfaces, and other large scale architectural fabrications.

Mroz also consults with academics, engineers, architects and designers regarding his specialized field of architectural extreme bent wood fabrication, and guest lectures on the subject at colleges and universities. Recently, Mroz has spoken at the annual meeting of the American Furniture Society, the American Timber framers Guild, and at the Wood Construction Center in Seattle.

“I’m retired and live on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. I’ve been creating miniature tools for 10 years, learning the basics of table-top machining in the process. Each of the miniature tools that I have produced are part of that education and are part of my personal collection.”

Come see John’s exquisite work and a presentation of his on his methods and techniques.

This is your opportunity to get answers to your questions about selecting wood, cutting wood to achieve the best figure, dealing with difficult milling, or whatever is on your mind.

Steph is a custom sawyer who specializes in burls, figured, rare and Hawaiian woods. He has a scientific background that he brings to his self taught knowledge of wood. He has the ability to “read wood” and mill it for its unique qualities. He has built mills and specialize equipment, run a millworks business and taught classes.

He travels the world to acquire these unique and rare woods, ships the material to his mill in North Bend, saws and dries the wood to get the greatest value for his customers/clients.

The Woodpecker, as it was named, usually ran about four pages. Back then, it was mailed to members by the good ‘ol US Postal Service. Rob Stokes was the Guild President, and helped to make the meetings fun, enjoyable and informative. Besides Rob as the president, Roger Goad was VP and Program Coordinator, Loren Sisley was the Treasurer, the Secretary was Gary Roth, and Joe Gagner was the Librarian. The web site had just gone ‘live’ a month before on January 22, 2002.

The Board of Directors included Bob Mitchell, Gordon Patnude, Michael Dresdner, John McCoy, and Calvin Brodie. We had just had our first super raffle and just announced that we were moving our meetings to the Sumner Woodworking Store.

Six years later, I am still the newsletter editor. I also manage the web site. The two naturally go together. As editor, I have had what I thought were ‘good runs’ and some not so good. Lately, I have been on what I think is a good streak, maybe one of the best. Thanks to the help of Joyce and David Lamberson, who have taken on the copying and distribution part of the process, I can focus. I have managed to produce from eight to ten pages each month. I am again starting to enjoy the work. For the first time, people even sent email or came up to me in meetings and said how much they enjoyed reading the newsletter.

I still believe that there is room to improve.

I often hold onto to news items too long, waiting for the next newsletter. It seems that updates or tools for sale came in just after I send the last email. There is sometimes a wait until the next issue. Sometimes, things get lost in the waves of emails during the wait.

I do not get much in the way of feedback. Sure, there was a survey, and everyone was very positive. However, if someone reads an article and has a comment, they should have a way to respond right away. This ‘one way’ communication seems to me to be blocking a lot of good woodworking exchange among the members.

Third, there is no easy way to go back and find information in the previous newsletters. Many of them are in Adobe PDF, and some are in web page format and some are in email. I tried out different styles and vehicles to communicate over the years.

So, what?

So, I believe that this format, a blogging format, can solve these issues.

Messages can be communicates without delay. People can comment back immediately. Guild members can contribute freely. I hope you all do. A blog can be searched. Members, or anyone for that matter, can sign up to get email notices whenever something new is posted. I hope you all do that too.

The EWWG web site won’t be affected. I will just add a link from there to here. This is the main story; the Woodpecker is retiring. For those few members still without email, we will find a point in time before the meeting to print this out and mail it to them.

I hope you all like it. And I hope that it encourages more timely discussion about information that is current and of interest. So, tell me what you think won’t you? The comment button is just below this section…

Work safely,

Bill Cogswell