Author name: Enthusiast

You may recall Tom Calisto (pictured above holding a Shaker chair he made; Ozzie is holding a sock), a woodworker in Chapel Hill, N.C., from his April 2013 Popular Woodworking Magazine article on cutting compound dovetails for a small, handled tote, or perhaps you saw his cherry kitchen table build in Fine Woodworking‘s December 2000 issue. Maybe you’ve even taken a class from him on sawmaking or compound dovetails at […]

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I’m working on an upcoming article for Popular Woodworking Magazine that includes router-bit storage. There are scads of ways to store router bits; some are worthy of discussion and keep the bits out of harm’s way while other solutions are simply a jumbled mess. But before we get into how bits are stored, I’d like to find out how many router bits our blog readers actually own. Do you have […]

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With the glue dry, it’s time to see if your square is square – or if it’s a doorstop. Squaring a wooden square is a simple operation if you plan to use it for woodworking – not for building equipment for a nuclear reactor. It’s easy to go overboard with squareness. Here’s how I do it. I get a big sheet of termite barf (MDF), which is what I use […]

The post Wierix Square, Part 3 appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Making the blade of the Wierix square is the most creative part of the construction process, when you can get in touch with your inner fledermaus (aka bat). While you can argue about whether or not the curves on the blade have any purpose, I am pretty certain of the reason the overall blade is triangular: to conserve wood and make the square easier to use. You can easily saw […]

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A customer asked me to make a Wierix try square for him this week, and because it’s silly to make just one wooden square, I’m making a batch of five this week and am documenting the process here on the blog. If you don’t know what a Wierix square is, it’s an old style of try square that shows up in drawings of “The Childhood of Jesus” by Hieronymous Wierix, […]

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The entries are in; it’s now time to cast your votes in the 2014 PWM Reader Excellence Awards. Your picks in each of the five categories will be featured in the November 2014 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, and the overall Readers’ Choice winner gets a $100 gift certificate to ShopWoodworking.com. Plus, we take your votes into consideration when selecting the Editors’ Choice winners, and the Grand-Prize winner. You can […]

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