Author name: Enthusiast

Perhaps the most important characteristic of wood is its grain. And grain orientation is undoubtedly the most critical consideration for charting a plan for cutting, milling and shaping wood. Therefore, reading the grain is paramount for good woodworking. When possible, we should always strive for planing, chiseling, rasping and gouging with the grain and not against it. Due to the critical importance of this guideline, the inverse, “going against the […]

The post Reading and Working with the Grain, a Simple Tip. appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

A lot of Danish Modern dressers are taller than your typical campaign chest because the designers added a drawer or two. But some of them look like the pieces shown here. After staring at the 25 campaign chests from part 1 of this series I hope you can see the connection. We have an unadorned dresser that is square and perched on a plinth. Just like a campaign chest, the […]

The post Design Brief No. 3: The Danish Campaign Chest appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

So after looking at the 25 campaign chests in the previous post, did you spot any patterns? What I see with these chests is that most of them are a square shape that is perched on some sort of plinth. After measuring a bunch of them, the typical size is 36” long x 40” high x 15” to 18” deep. The square shape of the carcase is 36” x 36”. […]

The post Design Brief No. 2: The Danish Campaign Chest appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

While there are a dozen good ways to design a piece of furniture, I can write intelligently only about my own methods. I designed my first piece of furniture in 1993 and have – surprisingly – stuck with the same basic technique for the last 23 years. It doesn’t involve formulas or ratios (though I believe those also work). Instead it relies on what I was trained to do as […]

The post Design Brief No. 1: The Danish Campaign Chest appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Who hasn’t found themselves fussing over a project – running a plane over it just one more time or fretting over whether or not it needs another sanding? As with anything in life, the quest for perfection is an illusive one. In this excerpt from “Build 25 Beautiful Boxes,” master box-maker Doug Stowe shares a few thoughts about the idea of perfection and what it means in his own woodworking […]

The post On Seeking Perfection appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Below is my “Out on a Limb” (the editor’s note) from the April 2016 issue, because I’ve had a couple folks ask me on social media recently what books I recommend. If I could apply in the shop the superabundance of knowledge I’ve gleaned through books, I’d be an excellent craftsperson. My job involves reading about woodworking, as does my freelance editing work. Then for fun, I open a book. […]

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