Author name: Enthusiast

I have lost track of how many vises I’ve built or installed on workbenches. So my early-morning giddiness about the Benchcrafted Crisscross is worth note. This week I’m putting a leg vise on my Holtzapffel workbench that will have both the new Benchcrafted Classic vise screw and the Crisscross Retro (instead of a parallel guide). I’ve used vises with the Crisscross installed, but this is the first Crisscross I’ve installed […]

The post It Floats. It’s Full of Stars…. appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

The headline is a bit misleading – this really took me only about two hours to build, start to finish, including a break to empty the dust collector. But I’m counting the one-and-a-half hours in between when I dropped off the metal bits to be cut to length and when they were ready to be picked up, plus the 20 minutes I had to wait for my neighbor to finish […]

The post Four-hour Pot Rack appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Last Friday I talked about through mortise-and-tenon joinery in 18th century chairs in my post “Furniture Details: Why Philadelphia is Just Better.” In the post I mentioned through mortises are not the only differences between Philadelphia chairs and chairs from other regions. This week I wanted to discuss another difference – seat construction. I’m not referring to the actual slip seat on which you sit; I’m talking about how the chair […]

The post Furniture Details: Yep, Philly Wins Again appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

When I teach beginners, one of the most common phrases I hear is, “I cannot get this (insert tool name) to work. What’s wrong?” They hand the tool to me and the fun begins. Though block planes are dirt-simple handplanes, there are some important points about them that are rarely discussed in the literature. Here are the five most common problems I see with students’ block planes. 1. Too tight. […]

The post 5 Mistakes Beginners Make with Block Planes appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

As good as I think our magazine is, it’s not worth $59.95 a year*. A scam company is perpetrating fraud with the spurious renewal offer pictured above. Do not respond. (And please know that we are taking steps with the U.S. Postal Service and consumer agencies to address the problem and take appropriate legal action.) Our subscription fulfillment service is Palm Coast Data (also rendered as PCD in some places), […]

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I started making the wooden vise chop for a new leg vise for my Holtzapffel workbench (featured in “The Workbench Design Book”) using some crazy new hardware from Benchcrafted: the Classic vise screw and the Crisscross. The only downside to the Crisscross part of the assembly is that you need a vise chop that is quite thick – 3” is a good thickness. I don’t have any maple in my […]

The post Making a Vise Chop for a Benchcrafted Classic appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.