Author name: Enthusiast

At Woodworking in America 2015 (for which I leave in one week…and to which I’m possibly driving the truck with the benches), in addition to the education sessions in the classrooms from such woodworking luminaries as Will Neptune, Roy Underhill, Drew Langsner, Phil Lowe, Patrick Edwards, Don Williams and more, we’re offering a variety of hour-long Shop Talk sessions in the Marketplace (included with admission). Here’s the schedule: Friday, Sept. […]

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  The more I study workbenches, the more I’m convinced there is no end to the clever vises out there. This week I have two vises that are worth a close look. One is a ratcheting leg vise made by Will Myers, a woodworker who teaches at The Woodwright’s School and is one of the assistants at the French Oak Roubo Project. Will writes a lot for WKFineTools.com – check […]

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I’ve watched a lot of beginners glue up panels and end up disappointed with their results. Their routine goes something like this: Find two boards the correct length. Work the boards’ edges until they come together perfectly. Glue them together. While the glue seam might be perfect and tight, the panel itself usually looks jarring. The color or the grain flow is mismatched. Sometimes the problem isn’t obvious until there […]

The post Better Panel Glue-ups Have Little to do With Glue appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Each year at Woodworking in America (WIA) there are prizes awarded in the marketplace. You know we have give-a-ways in the cards this year as well. But this year we upped or game – technically SawStop and JET upped our game, one great prize awarded to a WIA participant simply for attending the conference, and a second “cutting edge” machine to a lucky attendee of the marketplace. (Where else can […]

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Congratulations to Silas Kopf, who has been named the winner in the wood category of the 2015 James Renwick Alliance of the Smithsonian Institution’s Master of the Medium Award. The cabinet above, “Bad Hare Day,” was acquired by the Renwick in 2008, and his work is on display in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum, and he’s represented in many […]

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When I die, I want to leave this world in the same way I lived in it. As a woodworker who has spent his entire life building furniture for myself and others, I couldn’t imagine being placed into a box that someone else made. In 2005, I read this article in TheNew York Times about Chinese coffins that were made much like a dugout canoe (and were banned by the […]

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