Author name: Enthusiast

Most repairs to furniture during the construction process are a drag because I am kicking myself for making an error in the first place. Not so when adding wooden keys to a slab tabletop. Big wood tends to split. And left unchecked, the split can continue to open during the seasonal expansion and contraction cycle. The traditional fix is a wooden key that looks like two dovetails kissing. Or a […]

The post Stop Splits with a Wooden Key appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Wood, being a natural product, is not without it’s defects. Many are obvious and some (such as the upset above) can be harder to detect. I’ve always known them to be called an “upset” but “thunder shakes” and “compression failure” are also terms used to describe it. The thing I hate about upsets is how hard they can be to detect, especially when the wood is rough-sawn. Most often I […]

The post Upsetting ‘Upsets’ appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Last week I wrote about our baby boy’s first workbench, which is more of an amusement park than a real bench. Today I am going to show you his next bench. Soon after baby Asher got his Fisher Price bench, coincidence brought about his first semi-true workbench – a wooden one we found on the street in Brooklyn, N.Y. It was part of a group of items left available for […]

The post Spaghetti, Q-Tip or Toothpick? appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

For Chad Stanton, professional furniture maker and licensed contractor – and the host of the “I Can Do That” (ICDT) series – a chance encounter showed him that he was on the right track with the simple projects and techniques he teaches in these videoa. After returning to his home in Toledo after taping several ICDT episodes, Chad was unloading a project when a neighbor spotted it – and immediately offered to […]

The post ‘I Can Do That’ appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

One of the Tricks of the Trade in the June 2015 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine discusses how you can use denatured alcohol to stop crumbling end grain while chopping out dovetails. The trick states it’s best for softwoods, which is where you see the most crumbling. As my students are always worried about this aspect of their dovetails, I decided to give it a try today in some finger […]

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This weekend I drew up the plans to make a new tote for my No. 2 plane, and I realized I need to order a $10 drill bit to do the job. So instead I decided to modify the existing tote to see how far I could take it. After studying the tote for the No. 2-sized Millers Falls tote, I drew some lines on the existing tote and fetched […]

The post New No. 2 Tote; New Finish appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.