Author name: Enthusiast

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 […]

The post Wooden Flowers to Keep the Critters Away appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

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 […]

The post Wash off NMP Residue appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

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 […]

The post Danish Campaign Chest (The Afterword) appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Now that I have been at Popular Woodworking for a while, and finally settling into my new home, it’s time to do some actual woodworking. While it’s true that I have a laundry list of furniture that I want to build (or my better half wants built), I think I will wait a bit longer to get started on that list. Instead, I decided I would restore an old handsaw […]

The post Restoring a Vintage Saw Part 1: Assessing the Damage appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Seasoned, well-dried wood is good, but not for all things. For the last two years I’ve been editing a book called “Woodworking in Estonia,” which is about the pre-industrial woodworking cultural heritage of a small Northern European nation. The book is not a review of the historical literature sprinkled with speculation about how people worked. Instead, the author spent his entire life interviewing people who still worked in traditional ways, […]

The post Green Wood and Roubo Workbenches, Part 2 appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Here is a question that has been going through my mind for more than a decade: When an 18th-century French woodworker started building a workbench, what was the moisture content of the wood? Had it been seasoned for many years? Freshly cut? Something between? Lots of modern people have speculated about the answer, but I have yet to find an historical source that answers the question to my satisfaction. A.J. […]

The post A Roubo Workbench from Green Wood appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.