New Years Newsletter 2011

From us to you, Happy New Year!!! We at The Patriot Woodworker would like to wish each and every one of you a wonderful and Happy New Year ahead. May your year of 2012 be as wonderful as 2011 and if 2011 was not all that great for you, may 2012 be better.

We would like to thank you all again for supporting The Patriot Woodworker and our Troops. Without our members, we don't exist, simple as that. And without our members, we are not able to help our fighting men and women returning home from war as much as we have.

 

We have some great things coming up for the 2012 year here on The Patriot Woodworker. Mr John Moody and myself are finally going to get into some video production and create some "How To" Videos for "Members Only" use. We will be featuring Table Saw Techniques, Routers, Hand Tools and much more. It will be slow going at first so please be patient with us as we are both diving into new territory here.

We are also going to work closely with our premier affiliate Woodcraft and their Turn For Troops campaigns. We hope to get our members involved in this great project. Woodcraft stores nationwide host a day of turning pens for our troops overseas. And The Patriot Woodworker is going to make this an all year effort amongst our members, so please standby for details on how you can participate in this great adventure! And speaking of great adventures, have you seen the blog site Woodworking Adventures ? Check it out, it's a great place for informative blogs and rescources for woodworkers.

We are also going to concentrate on building up our membership base folks. We need new members! We have been live now for over a year and a half and it seems the word is still not getting out that we exist. I am hopping all over the www trying to rile folks up and to come on over and check us out. We have a pretty good presence on Face Book and Twitter. But the honest to goodness truth is, no matter what I do, nothing will work as good as word of mouth invites and mentions by our members. So we would like to make a small request of our members. Howabout we make just 5 invites a week to your friends. Pull up 5 contacts out of your email contacts list and send them an invite to come on over to The Patriot Woodworker. And if you have a Face Book or Twitter account, please share our site with your friends there. We have excellent "Share" features all over our site where with the click of a mouse, you can share a post, a photo, a blog, virtually anything on our site you can share directly with your social networking friends.

As you know we have teamed up with Homes For Our Troops in the past month. We will be going into full tilt mode supporting this great organization along with The Wounded Warriors Project during the 2012 year. Homes For Our Troops is a great outfit that builds homes for returning disabled vets who served in the Iraq and Afghansitan wars. Homes For Our Troops builds these homes from our monetary donations, materials and supplies donations, and land grants from donors. The disabled soldier gets a home, free and clear, with title in hand.

And we are getting ready to embark on our 4th Military Challenge Coin Display Build! So be ready. We are going to have new requirments for the construction of these much appreciated displays by our troops so stand by for your marching orders Patriot Woodworkers! These displays have been a hit in the hospitals where they have been handed out and most recently here where I live, we handed the last shipment out on at our local Air Force Base where the troops there just raved about them. Great work guys!!!

During a part of this last year we had some incredible help with our site and without the help of these fine gentlemen we could not have made it as far as we did and with the site improvements we made. I would like to thank our members Bob Kloes, Ronald Dudelston, and Wayne Mahler for their neverending support when called upon and their patience. Thank you gents for your hard work, we appreciate you, and we are a better place becuase of the work you put in.

And last but not least, I want to thank our Assistant Administrator John Moody and our Scroll Saw Forum Host Greg Aksdal for their continued hard work and support to help make our forum grow and be successful.

There is so much we want to do, for our members and our troops, but we can't do it without your help. We need our members to keep showing up and posting great content, that attracts more visitors.  We don't have sponsers, nor advertisers that help us pay our bills either. We have formed a terrific partnership with Woodcraft, they give us a commission of sales made through our site and that helps. But the main help needs to come from our members. So if you like what you see in our site, if you believe in our cause, and if you like hanging out with us and talk wood, then please consider a small donation at Support The Patriot Woodworker $5, $10, $15 Dollars . If you can't no probelm, we just want you here, with us, talking wood and having fun. This site has become a labor of love for those involved in running it. And we are just simply grateful that you all are a part of us and our lives.

Please be safe tonight, watch out for the crazies if your going out, and Have a Wonderful Happy New Year!!!!

John Morris and Gang

The Patriot Woodworker