Author name: Enthusiast

During the last few months I’ve been revising “Handplane Essentials,” an out-of print book that we published while I was the editor at Popular Woodworking Magazine. The revisions, additions and subtractions will be significant. We’re removing a lot of the reviews and features on planemakers who are no longer in business. And I hope we’ll replace them with articles on those who are. On the technique side of things, I’m […]

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I’m building a pair of Roman workbenches in my shop that I’ll be demonstrating at Woodworking in America this fall (Sept. 16-18 in Covington, Ky.). This will be my only public appearance in 2016 – I am in full-on hermit mode right now. Why the heck would an Arkansas boy build Roman workbenches? Easy. They were the dominant form of workbench for about 1,500 years, they are simpler to build […]

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To maximize the beauty of curly maple (also bird’s-eye maple), you want the curls to “pop” – that is, be significantly darker than the rest of the wood. To do this you need to get more color into the curls. To some extent this happens naturally with any stain when you wipe off the excess. Though it’s a lot more work, you can significantly increase the darkness, or pop, by […]

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What do you do when the critters outside eat your flowers? If you ask Jon Slaton, he will tell you that the best thing to do is to make some wooden flowers and stick them in your pots. Jon, who lives in the Ozark mountains in Missouri, wrote to me after reading the story on the frame saws that my students had built. He wanted to share with me one of […]

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Here’s a caution when stripping paint or finish from furniture or woodwork. Most of the newer “safer” strippers are sold in plastic containers and contain the solvent n-methyl pyrrolidone (NMP) as the active ingredient. This solvent is relatively expensive, so manufacturers often mix in other solvents to reduce the cost. But it’s the NMP that does the majority of the work. NMP has less solvent strength than methylene chloride and […]

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When I build a piece for a customer I show them the drawing and build it (mostly) to the print. But when I build a spec piece, such as this modern campaign chest, the customer is my eyeballs. And so this is the part about design that doesn’t get talked about much: If something bugs you about a piece you’ve made, fix it or destroy it. I am happy to […]

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