Author name: Enthusiast

Drilling a mortise, gluing and finishing a live-edge waterfall coffee table. A few months ago I began telling you stories of the furniture built in the live-edge class that I taught at Peters Valley this past summer. Among the furniture created there was a waterfall mitered coffee table that my assistant, Anneloes, and I built. Today I will show you the final stages of our coffee table story.  After turning the […]

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The Shaper Tools Origin: A Hand-held CNC Designed for Woodworkers Last week I took a trip to California to check out the latest in digital woodworking tools: the Shaper Tools Origin. Essentially, the Origin is a very high-tech router. It uses a touch screen to guide you through a cut and CNC motion for accuracy. As you’re cutting, tiny corrections to your position are made along the way. After using one […]

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I was looking through vintage issues of the magazine this morning and stumbled upon “A Workshop Wish List” from 1996 wherein we randomly selected 500 subscribers to tell us the tools and equipment they wanted in seven price categories, chosen from a list that we provided. I don’t know what all the choices were; we didn’t list them. But what I find most interesting is that in every price category […]

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Sure, you can use a thin, flexible offcut of wood to make a drawing bow – and I’ve done that a number of times (sometimes pinning it in place with nails so I don’t need three hands to draw a curve). But a piece of wood doesn’t always bend symmetrically. So when I built a Krenov-inspired live-edge hanging cabinet for which I needed perfectly matching curves on the doors and […]

The post The Anarchist’s Editor’s Gift Guide, Item 5: Lee Valley Drawing Bow appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

There’s probably no phrase in finishing that irritates me more than this one: Get a perfect finish every time. It’s commonly used by editors and publishers to title articles, sub-title books, and in general to promote information they want you to look at. You rarely see this type of phrase in reference to woodworking: Get perfect saw cuts every time. Learn how to cut perfect dovetails every time. Produce perfect […]

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While at Bloodline Merchants we also investigated this English workbench, which is almost certainly an early manual training bench. The face vise is a Parkinsons Perfect Vise (and yes, it is spelled “vise” not “vice” on the casting). Parkinsons were made in the 1880s and this example features early metal screw threads that are not the familiar Acme thread we use today. The vise is a quick-release model and opens […]

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