Author name: Enthusiast

Woodworkers love their routers, and it seems they love to learn new ways to use their routers. Yes, I will admit to being one of those woodworkers. I’ve used a variety of replacement router bases over the years (decades, ack!), for trimming laminate, for making circles, for flushing plugs. Some were store-bought, many were shop-made, so it very much surprised me when I found a router plate option that I hadn’t […]

The post Router Base Adds New Dimension appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

This is pretty basic, but here goes anyway. When you have a situation of peeling paint, you have to remove it before applying fresh paint, or your efforts will be ineffective. Scraping usually works best, but in these situations, it’s pretty clear that the wood has deteriorated due to the exposure to sun and rain, so paint isn’t going to hold well unless you sand first. A few passes with […]

The post Painting Over Peeling Paint: You Must Remove it First appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Whenever I have a day off when I’m traveling, I gorge myself on museums. Yesterday I had a free day in Munich, Germany, and spent the whole day in three museums. The highlight was getting to see work by Richard Riemerschmid in person. Riemerschmid (1868-1957) was one of the leading designers of Germany’s Art Nouveau movements (Jugendstil) and was heavily influenced by the English Arts & Crafts movement. I’ve found […]

The post Meet Munich Designer Richard Riemerschmid appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Knew concepts fret saws belongs to a small group of truly revolutionary tools such as Tite-Mark Marking Gauge and the veritas® PM-V11® Bench Chisels. Whether they were the brainchild of a maverick innovator or an outcome of a long process of a company’s teamwork, these newcomers rightly joined a pantheon of inspiring tools whose material, mechanism or shape were truly novel, and who potentially could launch, once a mundane tool […]

The post Two Modifications to the Knew Concepts Fret Saw appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

During the last decade, I’ve built a lot of six-board chests, including the examples found in this 2013 article in Popular Woodworking Magazine. For as long as I have been building these chests, I’ve been criticized for the way I fasten them with headed nails, which can result in the wood splintering a bit. The crux of the question is this: Do you want to assemble an item so it […]

The post It’s OK if the Wood Splinters a Bit appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I’m interrupting the garden gate series to delve into a matter that arose in the comments on a previous post, where I mentioned that I sometimes use a black Sharpie felt-tip pen to make the stripes on inlaid bees. A couple of readers responded that applying shellac on top of the marker would dissolve the ink, leading to smudges. Having used this technique many times over the years without producing […]

The post Bleeding Sharpies & Shellac appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.