Author name: Enthusiast

I know a woodworker who said he saved himself hundreds of steps a day merely by moving his pencil sharpener so it is under his table saw. I had a similar “duh” moment today when I was wiping down a handsaw to put it in my tool chest. For the last 15 years I’ve kept an oily rag hanging on the frame of my articulated bench light. The position of […]

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With shellac and lacquer finishes, which are the finishes used on almost all old furniture and woodwork, you can use their solvent for stripping instead of a paint-and-varnish remover. Depending on the object being stripped, I often find this method easier in the sense of spending less total time. It’s also less messy. Use denatured alcohol for shellac and lacquer thinner for lacquer. You can test the finish to find […]

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On Tuesday online editor Jon Russelburg and I piled into a rented red Ford and drove from Cincinnati, OH, to Atlanta, GA, for the 2016 International Woodworking Fair at the Georgia World Congress Center. If you’ve never been (and this was a first for both Jon and me), let me summarize the event for you in one word: HUGE. In a professional capacity, I made sure to stop by some […]

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There are so many old wives’ tales in our craft that you could write an entire book that lists and debunks them. Students constantly bombard me with them, and it makes me wonder: How do these begin? After a slip of the tongue the other day, I think I have a good idea. This week I’m assembling a Roman workbench and had a couple woodworking friends over as we drove […]

The post How to Start a Woodworking Myth appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Live edge boards, like so many other organisms, can also suffer from stress. And while stress in humans can be mitigated with a moderate consumption of alcohol or a visit to the shrink (or both), inner-stresses in wood, which manifests themselves among other ways (cracks or splitting), need a mechanical remedy from a woodworker. My student Christina’s live edge board was no stranger to splits or cracks, and since it was […]

The post Live Edge Class at Peters Valley Part 3: Christina’s Butterflies appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

The world of hand tools can be a bit daunting at first. If you like the idea of a hybrid approach to woodworking and want to add hand tools to your arsenal, you may find yourself not knowing where to start. Fortunately Internet woodworking star Marc Spagnuolo (a.k.a. The Wood Whisperer) has a few words of advice to help point you in the right direction. (Excerpted from “Hybrid Woodworking: Blending Power & Hand Tools […]

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