The truck is loaded and we're on the road this morning: 430 miles north to Newport, Kentucky, with the booth going up this afternoon so it's ready when everyone arrives. SplinterCon opens tonight at the Aloft Hotel on the Levee and runs through Saturday. It's the third year of the weekend Jason Bent, Brian Sedgeley and Ronnie Fulton put on for the people who listen to Three Splinters, and we've been part of every one.
Not your usual show
SplinterCon isn't a convention center with a ticket line at the door. It's three days in one hotel with woodworkers who found each other through a podcast, and three hosts who wanted to meet them. The program is loose on purpose. As Jason put it to everyone coming, the schedule is an outline, and the point of the weekend is the people.
The outline is a good one. Thursday is a welcome, pizza, and a community giveaway, where attendees bring tools they've stopped using and pass them on to someone who will use them. Friday carpools up the road to Dayton for tours of Gerstner and Sons, still building wooden tool chests in the same factory a century on. Back at the hotel, Sedge runs a Rubio session, Ronnie gives a tour of his van, and there's a hands-on Festool Conturo edge banding demo, before dinner at the Hofbräuhaus. Saturday is an open Q&A with the hosts, sharpening on the T8, wood repair with Ronnie, Conturo with Jason, and the final drawings that night.
The full booth, anyway
None of that means we pack light. We're bringing the same booth we take to every show, the full kit, set up and running rather than laid out for display. The pieces make sense on a product page. The system only makes sense when a Systainer stack, a work surface and a set of pods are in front of you doing one job together, and this is a room that wants to see it work.
This year it comes with a pair of Dash-Board Portable Workshops, the newest version, which landed in the shop last week with a few new refinements and features. One anchors the booth. The other goes to work in the Conturo sessions, with a full SYS-GRP setup holding the panels down by vacuum while the edge banding goes on. It's the clearest way we know to show what vacuum workholding does: the face stays open, the edge stays clear, and both hands stay on the machine.
We're also bringing a stack of Systainer³ XXS cases left over from Austin. Sign up at the booth and one goes home with you.
We're putting four setups into the SplinterCon sponsor giveaways, too:
-
The AnchorPod Magnus FORG3D Edition, with a 50 L/min vacuum pump to run it
-
A SYS-ORG fitout in a Systainer³ Organizer M 89
-
A SYS-FIT ROS 150 sander rack and a SYS-FIT TRK guide rail rack
Why we go
Three years in, this is still one of the weekends we look forward to most. The people in that room are our core audience. They tune in to hear three woodworkers talk shop, they care how a system works and not just what it costs, and they'll pick a thing up and tell you exactly how it handles. That's our market, and it's the room we build for.
And we like putting on a show. Setting the booth up, putting the work in people's hands, and talking it through for three days is one of the best parts of the job. We had dinner with Jason, Sedge and Ronnie in Austin in September, and we've been counting down to Newport since.
The road there
Leaving in the morning puts us in Newport with the afternoon to build the booth before the welcome happy hour at five. That's a lot of time on the road, and most of it goes to catching up on podcasts, which feels about right for where we're headed. At the end of it is a room full of people who do what we do.
If you're there
Come find the booth. Pick something up, sign up for an XXS, and tell us what you're building. If you're holding Jason's handout, there's something from us on it, good through the 18th.
Your Workflow. Without Limits.