Author name: Enthusiast

A friend called with a finish question. He had just made a guitar in a guitar-making class and wanted to know the best finish for it. He began with the statement that he didn’t have a spray gun and didn’t want to use aerosol lacquer because he didn’t want to stink up his house. So right away he eliminated about half the finish possibilities because they dry very rapidly so […]

The post Tru-Oil for Finishing a Guitar: It Should Work Well appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Hot dog! Popular Woodworking’s 2018 Excellence Awards entry is now open. Submissions are accepted now through June 16, 2018. The grand prize winner, chosen by the editors, wins $1000. Top winners in five categories, as well as a reader’s choice winner, each receive $100. Start submitting your projects and pieces – and I’ll start looking at them. Enter the contest and show us what you’ve made this year. I’m excited […]

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Last week I paid a visit to RRAW Roughcut Lumber/Davison Hardwood Quality Specialist in Spencer, Indiana to see what had become of the massive oak burl they’d shown me a few months earlier. Back then they hadn’t sawn the log (beyond cutting it into two pieces – a 9’ section of trunk and the butt) but the very idea of burly oak was enough to get me salivating. Walking up […]

The post Lumber Yard Visit: RRAW Roughcut Lumber/Davison HQS appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

First, let me say that I am guilty of the behavior that I am discussing below. When I reviewed tools for Popular Woodworking Magazine for 20 years, I fell into the trap I’m about to describe. After decades of woodworking, I have achieved a bit of wisdom. And I think this entry is some of it. Here we go. Reviews of new cars are generally crap. Most new cars drive […]

The post Reviewing Saws (and Automobiles) is Kinda Dumb appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

If you’ve got the worst of the worst, we’ll send you the best of the best. My Popular Woodworking blog series about measuring tools, squares, and tapes we use: “Precision Instruments” is now complete.  Now, I thought it would be fun to have a little contest for readers of this blog. As I confessed, I’m a bit of an obsessive when it comes to quality tape measures having spent years searching […]

The post The Ugly Tape Measure Contest appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

In my ongoing quest for finding adequate substitutions for the vanishing North American clamp manufacturers, I recently discovered an exceptionally strong forged steel C-clamp that will surely give us decades of dependable use. Woodworkers rarely use large capacity C-Clamps. Instead, we prefer the more rapid to open and close F-clamps, or the Parallel jaws clamps. However, C-clamps are better for repeated clamping of materials of similar thicknesses. Think about a […]

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