Author name: Enthusiast

Some finishes are impenetrable by any stripper. That’s when you turn to stripping with a heat gun. My daughter-in-law found a dining table she really loved and wanted to refinish it. I was visiting, so naturally, she asked me how to remove the old finish, which was damaged. It turned out that the table was a reproduction made in Asia, nice enough looking, and well enough made, but the finish was […]

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To initiate our fourth graders into woodworking, we offer them a branch and show them how to shape it into a mallet. The branch-mallet is a great project to introduce students of any age to woodworking. It familiarizes them to saws, chisels, gouges, rasps and sandpaper. And, once finished, they can use the tool on their future projects or just proudly take it home and place it on the mantel or […]

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Perhaps it’s the American love for excess. But no matter how many examples I cite or pleas I make, most beginning woodworkers seek to build workbenches that are entirely too wide. Most historical workbenches are 18” to 22” wide – and they are that wide for functional reasons that I’ll explain in a minute. And yet, sawyers I know who cut slabs for benches are regularly asked for 32”-wide slabs […]

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When you make furniture in order to eat or meet a deadline (such as birthdays), it’s difficult to stop yourself from crossing the finish line as soon as possible. Years ago I discovered that taking a day to simply “make pretty” did wonders for my work. What’s “make pretty?” It’s an expression I first heard from chairmaker Peter Galbert to describe how he fusses all the little details of his […]

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Wedging joints adds great strength, but it also is risky. A wedge can split the work, it can fail to dive into the tenon (sometimes popping out of the tenon), or the tenon itself can split when you hit it, making a mess of things. Here are three things I do to reduce the risk. 1. Make lots of wedges. When I make wedges, I usually make at least 100 […]

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A Good Year for Digital Woodworking Tools Using a 3-axis CNC, the underside of a sofa table’s ovoid shaped top is being rough cut in 3D. The edge is a combination of a tapered angular bevel on the sides that graduates to a progressively curved taper over the length of the top. Sounds complicated, but once you work out the design in 3D CAD software and do the CAM programming, it’s an easy […]

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