Author name: Enthusiast

When it comes to pushing our handplanes, I think we are candy-bottomed wussies compared to the joiners of the 17th century. We are obsessed with how thin a shaving we can make. Early joiners, however, wanted to take the thickest, gnarliest shaving possible for the tool, the bench and his or her arms. For proof, take a look at the first English-language woodworking book, “The Art of Joinery” (1678) by […]

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The Grand Prize Winner of Popular Woodworking’s 31 Days of Christmas 2013 was….. Richard Wienhold! Congratulations to Richard for winning a Custom-made Hanging Tool Cabinet AND a $1,000 Gift Card from Lee Valley Tools.  Richard has a Lee Valley wish list already filled and ready to go! Richard grew up woodworking with his Dad but got serious about woodworking over the last 6 years. Richard focuses in on hand tool […]

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I’ve been associated with this magazine in one capacity or another for the past 20 plus years. As a new year begins, I’ve made it a habit to look back through the previous seven issues to pick out which articles caught my interest. I grabbed a copy of the Popular Woodworking Magazine 1995 – 2013 DVD and began reminiscing. (There’s also a one year CD available, click here.) I’ll take […]

The post 2013 Popular Woodworking Magazine Favs – Part 1 appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Some time ago I posted about the Lee Valley Shooting Plane. In that post I used a shop-made shooting board. That will be the subject of today’s lesson…err, blog post. When I made the quick video about the Lee Valley plane, I had no shooting board in the shop. I was still in the midst of moving from Pennsylvania and mine were either packed away somewhere or still to be packed. […]

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Today, I was coding the “Great Woodshops” article on Jeff Miller that Christopher Schwarz wrote for our February 2012 issue, and I categorized it in our back end under “interviews.” (It’s an online extra to go with Jeff’s February 2014 article…yes, I’m a little late on getting that done.) On the front end, when I went to view the post to make sure I didn’t screw up any paragraphs returns […]

The post Good Woodworking Reads appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I try to keep Adam Bowett’s book “Woods in British Furniture-Making 1400-1900” closed tight as much as possible. That’s because every time I open it, I lose at least an hour of my day reading a section of the book that I hadn’t yet discovered. “Woods in British Furniture-Making 1400-1900” (Oblong Creative, 2012) is a massive text in every sense. Measuring 9-3/4” x 13” with 360 pages of extensively footnoted […]

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