Author name: Enthusiast

There are two sources of air to power a spray gun: a compressor and a turbine. Compressors are much less irritating; simply plug them in or turn them on and leave them. The motor will come on only when the amount of air in the tank gets low (after you have been using the spray gun for a while), so there’s no unnecessary noise in your shop. A turbine, on […]

The post Turbine Solution: Use a Remote Control appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

People use the term salvaged to describe a variety of lumber. Salvaged lumber can be cut out of beams, joists, or other parts of buildings, whether remodeled or demolished. It can come from cabinets, furniture, packing crates, or other objects no longer in use. It can come from a tree felled by a bulldozer to make way for new construction or uprooted by a storm. Using material from any of […]

The post Salvaged Lumber: Part One appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

This past week I’ve been out in the Popular Woodworking shop, doing a bit of maintenance. Many of our machines were bought many years ago – while they’ve been maintained well and used by careful workers, every machine needs a bit of TLC every once in a while. The biggest hurdle in adjusting and maintaining machines is often figuring out the various set screws, rollers and shrouds, and finding the […]

The post Machine Manuals and Old Tools appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

As an aerospace engineer I don’t often get the opportunity to sprinkle snippets of beauty into my day job – “I mean, isn’t a missile going super-sonic beautiful enough?” Definitely not when it comes to woodworking!  I’m starting to realize that one of my weaknesses is my inability to interject design aspects into my woodworking while maintaining structural integrity.  But truthfully, these two things don’t need to be separate and […]

The post Tackling the Houndstooth Dovetail: An Engineer’s Approach to Form and Function appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

In the first post of this series, I explained the process that I use to make paper patterns for parts. Simply put, output your design to your printer, use the tiling feature to divide larger drawings into printer size pages, splice the pages together, glue it onto MDF or plywood, cut close to the line on a bandsaw and finally, fair the results with rasps and files. The most important […]

The post Easy Entry Digital Woodworking – Outsource Perfect patterns appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

The city council candidate was screaming at me through her phone as I sat hunched over my desk in the newspaper’s newsroom. “How about I pull down my pants and you come and watch me go to the bathroom?” she screamed. “You’d like that wouldn’t you?” This impolite invitation was issued after I inquired about a long string of tax troubles the candidate had suffered during the last few years. […]

The post It’s OK (Good Even!) When They Hate Your Work appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.