accidental mis-posting

thoughts on FWW

Bill Tindall, E. TN

>Our club recently bought a set of FWW up to issue 110. I had them at my house for a while and went through them in order. What struck me was how the magazine has lost the "edge" it had in the early years. People used to make critical comments about work and techniques, and opinions were stated and defended. Now it seems bland by comparison, unwilling to risk offending any opinion, author or reader.

I wrote a constructively critical letter in response to a wood drying article. The artlcle was obviously written by someone that had little experience and it had many errors, not the least of which was how to calculate moisture content (the correct calculation had appeared in several previous issues of which the editiors were apparently unaware). The edited letter that appeared barely resembled what I had written. What was published was edited to provide no risk of offending the original author at the expense of failing to correct errors. I have not bothered responding to other articles with errors, for example the shallow piece on shop lighting. Bob Flexner has told me that he has quite trying to correct errors in finishing articles because they won't publish the corrections.

This Forum is a lot more useful to me than the magazine.