Author name: Enthusiast

I use round-head mallets almost all of the time. I find that they are very effective in driving my gouges and chisels decisively into the wood. There are cases where I prefer to use rectangular-head hammers and mallets, but most of the time I reach for one of my “rounds.” I bought my first rounds from William Alden back in 1998. They were turned from hard tropical wood and their […]

The post Improve the Comfort & Feel of Your Tool Handles appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I count myself among the luckier people in the world for having had the chance to hang out with Toshio Odate and Laure Olender for a couple of days in Connecticut. Sure, we were there to film “Woodworking Legends: An Interview with Toshio Odate” (and “Talking Japanese Tools with Toshio Odate“), but it felt quite a bit like a vacation with friends (except for that mike I had attached to […]

The post Toshio Odate: Woodworking Legend appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

There’s something very graphical about the design of the Mid-Century Modern Bookcase I built for the October 2015 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. Viewed head on, the arrangement of dividers and shelves suggests a grid-based page layout. Although the analogy falls a bit short (the short divider is placed in such a way to form irregularly-spaced columns), I can imagine a graphic designer trained in the International Typographic Style applying […]

The post Off the Grid: Variations on a Mid-Century Modern Bookcase appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

If you read Don Williams’ blog, you already know that he lost a fight a with a wheelbarrow. Unfortunately, Don broke his hip last week, and while the doctors have given him every indication of a full recovery, he won’t be 100-percent healed by Woodworking in America (it is, after all, just more than a month away). Don will, I’m glad to say, still be joining us at the conference […]

The post Freddy Roman at Woodworking in America 2015 appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I decided to avoid giving a written comprehensive lesson in how to prepare stock by hand (although I did record a video for you to watch – see below). I want to instead discuss the mindset of the process ,and things to consider with the aim of maximising your time in the shop. If you want the full written process you could do worse than read any decent woodworking book […]

The post Stock Preparation By Hand appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

One of my favorite parts of teaching woodworking is showing up at a school the day before my class begins to see what the previous instructor is doing. Today I arrived at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking in Manchester, Conn., to find Peter Follansbee teaching the final day of a long class (months!) in building a reproduction of a piece from the Strong-Howard House in Windsor, Conn. The piece […]

The post Peter Follansbee: Rebuilding the Past appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.