I have an online woodworking friend, Chris Wong of Flair Woodworks. He asked me recently about something that I’ve been doing on my blog since almost the beginning – the quick poll.

Now, if you have been following along, a typical week for me starts on Sunday with the quick poll, followed by a pair of articles and the link of the week. I put the quick poll up because it gives each of you the chance to weigh in and participate in what goes on with the blog.  That’s am important thing for me… if you are involved, you’ll stick around!

But, now that you have voted, what exactly am I doing with the information?  Selling it to some secret woodworking cabal for nefarious purposes?  Nah… I’m doing it so we can learn about each other.

For instance, how many readers cut their dovetails by hand?  With all of those awesome dovetail jigs, surely it has to be a small fringe that hangs on to their old ways.  Uhh, you’d be wrong.  Of the 237 votes we got, 116 – nearly half – cut ’em by hand.  Unreal.  The next highest total was those who don’t cut dovetails… unbelievable..

I can remember a discussion I had with another woodworker who was adamant that the piece of wood that joins two mortises should NEVER be called a loose tenon.. but, that’s what 188 of 320 voters call it.  So much for that…

And, another surprising finding was that 328 of 394 voters either kept their users’ manuals handy or stashed someplace convenient for their power tools.  I thought for sure that those babies would have been long gone by the time they were working well.

Some questions were funny. Others were dead serious. Hopefully, all of them will make you think about what you are doing in your shop, and how others tackle the challenges you face.

If you would like to check out some of the results, simply follow the link to the quick poll link under the categories setting on my site.  You might just be surprised with what you will find.