Using Winding Sticks to Check Wood Warps
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I'm not sure if anyone really knows where or how winding sticks came into being, but I would be willing to bet it was in ancient boat building. Boat builders use all sorts of tricks to figure out the best angles, curves and lines on boats and to do this they need to start with straight lines, which is where winding sticks would be helpful.
Winding sticks are used to help show where boards are warped or twisted and the way they work is simply to set them up on a board which is lying on a flat surface, then sight down the tops of the 2 sticks. If they line up perfectly, the board is flat, if the sticks are uneven, then the board is warped.
Oddly enough, it is boards that are only slightly warped that are the hardest to determine and this is where winding sticks really shine. Boards that are wildly warped are pretty easy to see, it's the ones that "look" flat that can be challenging ones to work with.
In the past winging sticks were useful to a woodworker or carpenter who was hand planing boards to make them flat, and that really hasn't changed, only now we often use machinery to make boards flat, and winding sticks are still useful in ...
One of the joys of woodworking is being able to work with all sorts of different woods, and with woods that have different figures within them. I never get tired of looking at all the different designs and shapes that are comprised of different figured woods. It's almost like looking at clouds, they are all different, the beauty of wood, is they don't change like clouds do, they remain constant. 
Normally I would publish an article that relates to the video posted here that would include details not covered in the video. This time we are only going to publish a link to an excellent article that is posted on the West Wind Hardwood website entitled The Art of Buying Lumber by Dick Burrows.
Who wants free wood? Pretty much anyone who does woodworking right! Well, there is a catch, like anything else that is free. What I am talking about using Pallet Lumber. All over the world there are free pallets, and some of them have some great wood. I was so intrigued with collecting and re-cycling pallet wood at one time in my life, I wrote a business plan for starting up a Pallet Furniture Manufacturing business. What I discovered was, there is often a lot of waste in trying to salvage pallet wood, there is a big cost in acquisition (finding the pallets), the wood is extremely hard on all woodworking tools, particularly jointers and planers because of all the ground in dirt and small rocks. But for individual woodworkers who are aware of the problems of working with pallet woods, there can still be many rewards.
