I had a great trip to the MFA on Friday. I visited a friend from my NBSS woodworking class who works in the furniture conservation department and got a behind-the-scenes tour of the furniture lab. They have some amazing pieces, and, of course, most are in storage ’cause there’s not enough room to show all of them at once. I was very impressed with the work he does – it’s a tough combination of history (art history, really), chemistry, and studio art with a good deal of craftsmanship required.

A friend of his at the museum was selling their jointer/planer (link goes to a similar but not identical machine) for cheap, so I picked that up on the same trip. Though it had rusted a tiny bit sitting in the guy’s basement, a little cleaning and oiling got the machine up and running in no time. We’ll see if it’s something I really even need, but for forty bucks (!), it would’ve been hard to justify not buying it (tool-buying problem? nope, not me).