I started out building houses in Kansas City, and moved to Nixa, MO to start a family. I created Ozark Woodworker. I starting getting creating architectural pieces, and making products for wood carvers in Branson. I built a bigger shop, that my son and I work. It’s currently a 5,000 sq/ft work shop full of machines that I’ve collected in 50+ years of experience working with metal and wood.
Now we are getting into making very small and precise inlay work and ornamental turning. We had to get into metal working and CNC to help with the production of our shop, and build some of the machines and fixtures we use.
To learn even more about our inlay and shop work,
plus see more photos, please checkout:
I acquired a lot of manuals over the years, and I received a bunch from a man that serviced all kinds of machines. We weren’t sure what to do with all of them, and we knew that there was a need for the information. We were also tired of the overpriced, photocopied manuals that were available at the time. We had to purchase some of these for our machines and were very disappointed, but it was better than nothing.
Over 18 years ago we started reproducing manuals, and we wanted to be different than what other people were doing with manuals at the time. We wanted to provide the best quality manuals possible at a reasonable price.
All of our manuals are printed on heavy, white paper, and each page has been hand scanned. We digitally remove every hole punch, crease in the page, greasy fingerprints, hand writing, tears, etc… from every page of every manual, or we won’t sell it. Often we have to redraw parts of drawings, and retype entire pages at times.
We originally started this under the Ozark Woodworker name that I already had, but figured that it would make more sense under it’s own name Ozark Tool Manuals. We also wanted to clarify things for metalworkers and machinist by taking out the woodworker. We are planning on selling other products from our shop that aren’t related to manuals, and we figured this would be a good time to separate products out.
They don’t make machines like they used to and we want to do what we can to keep them operating. We started the Ozark Shop Talk Blog to share our knowledge that accumulated over the years of providing these manuals and helping others. We learn something everyday dealing with these manuals.
The Team
