{"id":242,"date":"2024-03-13T22:59:23","date_gmt":"2024-03-14T02:59:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/?p=242"},"modified":"2026-05-24T11:26:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T11:26:11","slug":"a-walk-back-in-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/a-walk-back-in-time\/","title":{"rendered":"A walk back in time"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hi folks,

Well, I sent our esteemed webmaster Peter a copy of the only video we ever published, 16 years ago, of one of my oldest friends, Bill McCarthy, in the steam-powered woodworking shop that he set up in one of his barns.   An avid historian who ran “Restoration Millwork,” a cabinet shop and architectural woodworking business for many decades, and who has designed and engineered an amazing body of work — from flintlock rifles, including a breech loading model<\/a> — to authentic period millwork, to steam engines of his own design, Bill has been collecting vintage woodworking machines ever since I’ve known him. I remember one of the first times I was getting to know him back around 1973, he had retrofitted an old BSA motorcycle transmission to a 24″ Whitney planer to change feed speed on the fly. He also built a 29′ Friendship sloop from scratch, complete with white oak planking, oakum joints and a thousand-pound lead keel that he melted and poured from a bathtub. And can you imagine turning a mast for a boat that size? He also set up a 50″ circle mill on his property, hooked up to a diesel truck engine. All this said, Bill is still defying expectations, designing and building a combination wood- and metal-working shop at his home in PA, with the most extensive and exotic collection of machinery you can imagine. 

In retrospect, I think this is a pretty decent movie. You be the judge. All the credit for the video editing goes to Peter Parker Brodhead, the son of another old friend who now runs a large presentation business, with big-name clients all over the place. I was lucky to catch him at an early inflection point in his career to shoot this film with me. It looks like Peter Martin, our webmaestro, has done quite a lot of work on it too, to prepare it for streaming in this site.

Without further ado, please set aside 40 minutes and take a walk with me back into the nearly forgotten history of woodworking from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watch video<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Discuss in forums<\/a>

Ellis Walentine, Host<\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hi folks, Well, I sent our esteemed webmaster Peter a copy of the only video we ever published, 16 years ago, of one of my oldest friends, Bill McCarthy, in the steam-powered woodworking shop that he set up in one of his barns.   An avid historian who ran “Restoration Millwork,” a cabinet shop and architectural … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":1600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[83,33],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-shop","tag-tools"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.woodcentral.com\/-\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}