‘The Story of a Woodworking Shop’ –free download and free CD

Frank Pellow

Member
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Location
Toronto, Ontario, CANADA
Note inserted on the 28th of January: There is now a PDF version of the journal available for download. Look at post #20 in this thread for details.

This is a journal about planning, building, equipping, and using Frank Pellow’s shop. It is an update to an earlier version of the journal. The journal is probably best explained by the preambles to both versions:
Preamble to Issue 1: (Issue 1 was dated 28 May 2005 and was entitled “Planning, Building, and Equipping Frank Pellow’s Workshop”)
This document contains a condensed version of my notes about the planning, construction, population, and initial use of my new workshop. The notes cover a period of approximately two years. As you will see, the notes make extensive use of photographs.
While building the shop, I filed regular reports and asked many questions on Internet woodworker’s forums. In the past, almost all my construction projects have been undertaken with one or more other people. That has many benefits and, for me, the greatest benefit, is to be able to discuss design alternatives both initially and as unanticipated problems and opportunities arise. This time, I started out alone but, as soon as I utilized the Internet, many folks can to my assistance.

Preamble to Issue 2: I am updating this journal to reflect some changes to the shop in the year and a half since I released Issue 1. Also an index of sorts has been added, there has been some reorganization, some new material has been added, the title has been changed and several typos have been fixed (and, no doubt, new ones introduced).
If you would like a free copy of the journal, just send me your real mailing address by email (fpellow AT sympatico.ca) or by private message and I will send you a copy on a CD. The only string attached is that I would appreciate feedback. Feedback that I received from Issue 1 helped me to make improvements both to the journal and to my shop.

Warnings:
• Right now the journal is only available in Microsoft Word format. I may or may not convert it to html format as well. Version 1 was available in both formats but it took me considerable time to do the conversion.
• The printed version of the document is almost 200 pages long.​
 
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Frank, I'd love a copy, could you set it up to be FTPed somehow?

I'd not ask you to spend the money sending a CD to me, but if I could download it from you, that would be great!

Cheers!
 
Stu, the last time I did this, I tried FTPing a copy to a couple of folks without success. The CD route seemed to work better. I mailed them in inexpensive envelopes and experienced minimal damage. I would be happy to mail you a copy. The price of mailing these things to the expected number of requesters is already in my budget.
 
I'm curious, Frank, just how much of the CD-ROM is filled by this?

I wonder if there is a tool available for downloading and archiving an entire thread from vBulletin. I bet people would be interested in doing that on
certain threads - Marty's for instance.

What would be real cool would be if the tool could filter based on the original poster... So you'd end up with one stream of text, which would be the entire thread, and another stream of text, which would just be Marty's comments, and have both streams reference the same photos to save space. Hmmmmmm.

It sure save a lot of time in doing it yourself.

....art
 
Art,

At the risk of continuing to hijack Frank's thread, and generous offer, I'd be very interested to find such a tool. I have copies of my entire thread from SMC, but only as screen prints and Adobe Acrobat files.

(now back to your originally scheduled broadcast...:D )
- Marty -
 
Frank, that is just under 44Mb, not very big at all.

I don't understand why you could just not FTP it, but if you like, once you send me the CD, I could set it up as a download on my server, I NEVER go over about 10% of the bandwidth I have there.

Up to you.

I'll PM you my snail mail address.

Cheers!
 
Frank, that is just under 44Mb, not very big at all.

I don't understand why you could just not FTP it, but if you like, once you send me the CD, I could set it up as a download on my server, I NEVER go over about 10% of the bandwidth I have there.

Up to you.

I'll PM you my snail mail address.

Cheers!
Stu, I will mail the CD to you tomorrow (post office closed for Boxing Day today). And, yes, I would appreciate you setting it up for download off your server. We can try it and see how it works out.
 
Just in case you are waiting for Stu and I to set this document up for file transfer, you need not wait. I will be more than happy to mail a CD to you. Just send me a mailing address. I have stack of CDs ready to go :D and, so far, not many people who have asked for it. :(
 
CDs sent

After no activity for over a week, I received a flood of requests for the CD in the last four days :) . Today I mailed 16 CDs so, rather than responding to each requester, I am posting this note.

The CD has been sent in an ordinary envelope and experience has told me that about 1 in 15 CDs will arrive damaged. Please let me know when you get it and whether or not it arrived in good shape. If damaged, I will send a replacement.

Also, once you have read it I would appreciate feedback. A couple of folks have recently asked me just what type of feedback I am looking for. I responded to them as follows:
I would like to know what you think of the organization of the journal, whether or not you found it hard/easy/enjoyable/tedious/whatever to read, which (if any), material was of use to you, other things I should have included, and stuff that I should have left out. One specific thing that I would like feedback on is whether or not the "maps" that I included with the shop tour helped you to feel that you were taking a "real" tour.

And, if you have any suggestions or questions about the shop itself I would like to hear them.​
I should add that I have very thick skin and welcome all constructive criticism, be it positive or negative.

Oh yes, one more thing. You can either make your feedback public in this thread or respond to me in private. Either way is fine with me.
 
PDF version now available

Thanks to Louis Savard (a member of the Canadian Woodworking forum), I now have a PDF version of the document. I will be placing both the DOC and PDF versions on all disks that I create in the future. Of course, a free version of the PDF reader is availble from Adobe, so anyone should be able to read my journal.

So, if you did not ask me to mail you the disk becuase you did not have Microsoft Word, that problem has gone away.
 
Yes Geoff. Stu has put up a preliminary PDF version of the file at his WEB site, and I have downloaded it with success. I expect that it will be about another week before a final version can be made available to members. In the merantime, if you would like me to mail a copy to you, I will gladly do so.
 
Frank, I appreciate the offer, but with a horde of little kiddies and my schedule, I'd lose the CD before I could get it into my computer :) I'll d/l it once Stu has it up - I remember reading parts of it on SMC, and I look forward to reading the whole story and seeing the update.

- Geoff
 
Hi Frank,
Just yesterday I received the CD you mailed and have since put it in and it is in good shape. The blue with blue shingles is rather attractive. So far it has been well documented with important and regular updates. I'm taking a break since your car key broke off in the lock,:doh: 8-24-04. Will continue on later, thanks and well done.:thumb:
Shaz
 
Hi Frank,
Just yesterday I received the CD you mailed and have since put it in and it is in good shape. The blue with blue shingles is rather attractive. So far it has been well documented with important and regular updates. I'm taking a break since your car key broke off in the lock,:doh: 8-24-04. Will continue on later, thanks and well done.:thumb:
Shaz
Thanks for letting me know, Shaz. Yes, everyone I have spoken too likes the look of the siding and shingles. My neighbours think that the building enhances the place (whereas, I was quite concerned that they would think that the shop was a bit of an eye-sore). I hope that you enjoy the rest of journal.
 
Journal now available for download

Stuart Ablett has agreed to let people download a PDF version of my journal from his web site.

To do this: simply

(1) connect to: http://www.ablett.jp/frank/

(2) open the document: FrankPellow-v2.1.2.pdf

(3) select the “diskette” icon in the top left of the Adobe Acrobat tool bar in order to save the file to your computer

If you download this file, I would appreciate you sending me a note to tell me that you have done so (fpellow AT sympatico.ca) and, of course, I would also like to receive any feedback that you might have about the document.

If you wish to have a CD (with a Word version of the document as well as PDF), I will still mail you a copy upon request.

Thanks for doing this Stu!
 
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