Back....and to the Left!!!!!!

When I wrote my first published column for Popular Woodworking, “The Boys in the Guild,” the character Video Bob was autobiographical. It sometimes seems I own nearly every woodworking video ever made. Before I started attending classes at Marc Adams School of Woodworking, my instruction came from David Marks on Woodworks and a massive stack of woodworking videos.

Today is one of those rare days around here when I offer you a posting that relates to woodworking. This entry is about SmartFlix dot com.

SmartFlix can most easily be described as the online video rental source for How-To videos. (Imagine if Netflix only carried instructional and how-to videos…. and then only charged you for the movies you wanted to rent as opposed to a monthly fee.)

The founder of SmartFlix (Travis Corcoran) is one of our regular Skiving Off readers, and his company has an amazing collection of videos available for rental. Their catalog has everything from Airbrushing to gunsmithing. SmartFlix has videos on rebuilding a Ford 9” to overhauling a C4 Tranny. Videos from all areas of woodworking are available. They have everything from Snowboard Instruction to Disaster Preparation. Their collection of approximately 6000 videos covers an amazing array of topics. (Please note, about the only obscure videos I was unable to find were the Zapruder home movies. Most of us have seen Abraham Zapruder’s Presidential snuff film, but very few people realize that he could shoot a kid’s birthday party like Fellini.)

So if you ever desire to spend a week learning the intricacies of intarsia or tie flying, but don’t want to drop a ton of coin to buy a video you’ll likely only watch one time… consider renting it from SmartFlix.

Finally, SmartFlix has a woodworking contest currently going on that is scheduled to end this week. If you have a few moments of web surfing time available, I encourage you to see what it is all about…you might still have time to win a prize.