Author name: Enthusiast

Let’s continue the story of my student Chad’s coffee table built at a live edge class at Peters Valley. In this entry I will show how we found a convenient way to trace the shape of the shelf, cut it and connect it to the legs. Because the shelf was intended to span an irregular trapezoid-shaped gap between the four legs, it had to be custom cut. We had to devise […]

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Show off your woodworking skills at your next dinner party with these beautiful hardwood kitchen utensils (instructions excerpted from “The Woodworker’s Kitchen: 24 Projects You Can Make” by A.J. Hamler). Hardwood kitchen utensils, often called treenware, are a staple of high-end craft markets and upscale kitchen shops. Guess what? As elegant as these are, they’re not difficult to create at all. Cherry is probably the most popular wood used for […]

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I’ve had bad days wrestling with my sketchbook where it was impossible for me to draw anything but junk. Junk I didn’t want to build and junk that no one would ever buy. Sometimes I leave those stepchild pages in my sketchbook as a reminder of how awful I am. Sometimes I crumple the pages up because someone might see the drawing if I die before destroying the evidence. And […]

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A couple weeks ago – just two days after Popular Woodworking in America, in fact – I had a Skype audio chat with woodworker, author and actor Nick Offerman. His latest book, “Good Clean Fun,” will be released on October 18 (I’ve a review ready to post here when the book is available, and we’ll have “Good Clean Fun” in the store at ShopWoodworking.com – but in short, the book is a […]

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Last night while drinking some wine with Christopher Schwarz (I’d stopped by to return a chair we’d borrowed for a photo shoot), we got in a semantics discussion (do we know how to have fun or what?!)*. Is a shooting board a “jig?” Not really; it’s an appliance – yet most magazines (us included from time to time) call hand-tool appliances a “jig” or “fixture,” because those are better-known terms […]

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Here’s a glued up leg and apron assembly for a sofa table being milled with a CNC router. Here’s the big picture: A CNC is a digitally controlled router that cuts from its highest to its lowest point in three dimensions over the entire area of its bed. What would any woodworker do with that capability? It turns out you can do quite a lot. Below are some of the […]

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