I do only a little production work in my shop, so I don’t have a lot of jigs and fixtures. In fact, I think I can count them on one hand: a sliding table for my table saw, a shooting board/bench hook, my doe’s feet for my workbench and a V-block for planing objects to octagons. But when I build a jig, I want it to last. This week I […]
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Woodworkers drill holes. We drill lots of holes. Small ones especially. And we spend lots of money on methods of drilling holes. In the modern era, we’ve progressed from eggbeater drills through the tailed revolution and are now obsessed with compact and powerful battery-juiced motors. Yet these designs pale in comparison to ones perfected in the 1800s and mass produced up until a half century ago. Imagine a drilling tool […]
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Why does so much factory furniture, made with dowel joinery in the last forty or fifty years, often not hold up well? I have two explanations, both of which are shown in these pictures of chair arms. The first is that the dowels aren’t coated well with glue. The way gluing on a production line so often works is that a little glue is dropped into the dowel hole as […]
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My PWM baseball cap has already seen heavy use – it’s my go-to hair-containment method while working in the shop and on my house (and given the state of my home and large number of projects to go, I’d best get another cap or three…). We have a limited number of these caps available through ShopWoodworking.com ($12). They’re 100-percent cotton, slate blue (my favorite color…so yes, I picked it) and […]
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Professionals in the field of fine woodworking, with a minimum of four years of experience, are invited to apply for a $2,500 grant from the Krenov Foundation to use for a stint as an artist-in-residence or visiting scholar or faculty collaborator at a nationally recognized woodworking school or craft center. Applications are available at thekrenovfoundation.org/professionaldevelopmentaward, and must be submitted along with a statement of purpose, resume, financial forms, digital photographs of […]
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Woodworkers use waxes (and other things) to decrease friction, but what about when we want to increase friction? Lately I’ve been trying inexpensive rosin – intended for the bows of stringed instruments – with excellent results. Rosin is a byproduct of heating tree sap to make turpentine or a variety of other products and has a variety of uses in industry and the arts – everything from ballet dancers to […]
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