About

I'm Frank. I build things in wood — mostly furniture, sometimes larger pieces like a pergola — slowly and by hand, designing each one myself and treating every project as a chance to try something I haven't done before.

Some of those somethings are old techniques worth reviving: a spring joint, Katawa Tsugi, approaches that fell out of practice but still hold a lot of wisdom. Others don't exist yet — like the dovetail grid in the teak desk, or the mechanism in the height-adjustable workbench — and I get to invent them on the bench.

What I really enjoy is the process. Smoothing a surface with a No. 4 after the scrub plane and No. 7 have done their work. Reading old joinery and working out why it was done that way. Sketching an idea and then testing it in a real piece. I love the wood itself too — the scent of rosewood, the sharp contrast between sap and heart in desert ironwood, the out-of-this-world figure of ziricote — and I turn those woods into furniture I get to live with every day.

I also like sharing ideas with other woodworkers who care about this kind of thing. I happen to be able to build agentic tools, so I made Shopprentice — an AI skill for Fusion 360 furniture modeling. It's the one non-woodworking thing here.

Why "Morningwood"

My family name is 查. It splits cleanly into two characters: 木 (wood) on top of 旦 (morning, the sun rising over the horizon). Morningwood Studio is a literal translation of my name.