Author name: Enthusiast

Asher, who turned two last week, shows a promising appetite for woodworking tools. He is a frequent visitor to my home shop, where he examines the tools that he can reach. Mainly he’s drawn to clamps, bench bulls and, recently, a great looking Craftsman hand drill that I salvaged from the trash two months ago. When I say “I salvaged from the trash” I mean I actually picked it up […]

The post Tool Lubrication & Asher’s First Eggbeater Hand Drill – Part 1 appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I got a call from a fellow who made a Sam Maloof-style chair and screwed up the finish using Maloof’s formula. I thought, how can you screw up a Maloof finish? Maloof combined three products – polyurethane, linseed oil and tung oil – to give him the look he liked on his chairs. Then he wiped on and wiped off several coats of the finish, rubbing each coat with his […]

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Sometimes, a smoothing plane just can’t get things smooth enough (think reversing grain) – and if you’re a handplane user, you probably prefer not to pick up the sandpaper (thought it’s sometimes unavoidable). In that case, you turn to the handy card scraper. A scraper can perform miracles that a plane cannot…except that Ron Hock says once you turn a burr on the business edge of a scraper, you’ve basically […]

The post Sharpen a Scraper – Ron Hock Shows You How appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Chris Wong of Flair Woodworks has set up another fun 2-day “build-off” for January 28 & 29 – and this time, it’s for a wall shelf. The idea is to have all participants simultaneously build a piece over a 48-hour period and share pictures along the way. A similar contest in 2013 – the Shop Stool Build-Off – was a lot of fun. I followed along over the weekend on […]

The post 2-Day Contest: Wall Shelf Build-Off from Chris Wong appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I was thrilled to see the article by Bill Rainford in the current issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine in which he gives directions for making a traditional Danish workbench. It’s been a long time (more than three decades) since Tage Frid provided these directions, and lots of new people have taken up woodworking in the meantime. For my money, this Danish style is the most user-friendly of all workbench styles […]

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A name stamp is a great investment to mark your tools as your own, especially if you attend woodworking classes or work in a shop with others. It’s also a good way to stamp your finished workpieces for posterity. Most woodworkers, however, approach the task like Thor might. They raise their hammer high and swing a mighty blow against the stamp to do the deed in one whack. And they […]

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