The Woodworking Shows are midway through their 2008-2009 calendar season. The following shows are scheduled in the coming weeks:

• Columbus Jan. 16-18
• Atlanta Jan. 23-25
• Indianapolis Jan. 30 - Feb. 1
• St. Louis Feb. 6-8
• Kansas City Feb. 13-15
• Boston Feb. 20-22
• Somerset, NJ Feb. 27-Mar. 1
• Hartford Mar. 6-8
• Tampa Mar. 13-15
• Charlotte Mar. 20-22
• Chantilly Mar. 27-29
• Houston Apr. 3-5
• Seattle Apr. 17-19
• Sacramento Apr. 24-26
• Los Angeles May 1-3

For more information on each individual show, visit The Woodworking Shows website.

A considerable number of fine furniture projects such as tables, chairs, bed posts, etc., call for tapered legs. While there are a number of ways to create tapered legs, probably the easiest and most consistent is to build a tapering jig for your table saw.

In this set of free woodworking plans, learn how to Build a Tapering Jig that will allow you to cut tapers of up to 15-degrees on your table saw, safely and consistently. It's an easy jig to build, one that you'll probably keep around to use for numerous woodworking projects in the future.

(c) 2009 Chris Baylor licensed to About.com, Inc.

The United States Forestry Service has developed a very useful online book on the properties of wood, including sections on timber resources, the structure of wood, physical properties and moisture content of wood, the mechanical properties of wood and much more. Best of all, it is available free for download from the Forestry Service's home page (along with a wealth of other available information).

The Wood Handbook is available as a single download, which is a very large 14.3 MB PDF file, or it can be downloaded in much smaller, chapter-by-chapter sections. You can download the "Wood Handbook" here, in either the full-length form, or by chapter. This page also includes a summary of each chapter.

NOTE: To access the online book, you will need a an application that will read PDF files such as Adobe Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded free from Adobe's Acrobat Reader page.

When Delta decided to redesign their UNISAW a few years ago, they did something that I wish more companies would do - they pulled their engineers out of their offices and factories and put them in the field with woodworkers who make their living using the exact same tools that Delta was seeking to redesign. When the woodworkers had suggestions, the engineers went back to their offices and came up with solutions, put them into prototypes and went back to the field to test their ideas.

The all-new Delta UNISAW is the result of three years of development and testing, and if the tool lives up to the promise, this is going to be one fine piece of woodworking machinery. While the UNISAW is expected to be released in March, I recently had an opportunity to visit with some of these same engineers and get a first-hand look at the new UNISAW.

Get a preview of the innovative features and improvements in this First Look at the New Delta UNISAW. Rest assured that when the saw becomes available, I'll give it a complete test and post the results on About Woodworking.

Photo courtesy of Delta Machinery