About

My mother dubbed me William D. Kandler. But, unless you're speaking legally, please call me Bill. I started out developing software in 1965 when the Apple computer was just a gleam in the eye of Steve Jobs. Working basically for just two large firms during my entire development career, I designed, built, and fielded all kinds of software until 2001. Now the software I build is mostly for fun or to make my life easier.

When I first got married in 1965, (here's the old poor as church mice story), I enrolled in an adult wood shop and made all of the furniture for our first home. One of the projects that was particularly fun was a funky looking Walnut lamp. That was my first lathe project. Then I got too busy to play with wood; but I never forgot the pleasure.  

Now I have time...

In early 2000 I started outfitting my woodshop and one of the items had to be a wood lathe. And when I starting looking around for a project to do, a segmented bowl popped into view. I made it. I was hooked by the requirement for precision assembly and of the beauty of the result. It was very much like my career in software development.

I made very precise and beautiful drawings of what was to be built, but the number of measurements made deciphering the cutting instructions a bit confusing. That caused me to cut and glue up bad pieces. Being a software "guru," I reasoned that I could build a piece of software to make designing and constructing segmented projects easier. The Segmented Project Planner is the result. It worked so well I decided to see if it could help others and started selling the program in November of 2001. Since then it has undergone many revisions and the support it provides to the design process has grown significantly.

The Planner continues to grow as I explore new design alterntives and there are now over 2000 copies being used by customers world wide.

You can find out all the details of my software as well as a book, a DVD, and other items useful in segmented woodturning at http://www.segmentedturning.com