Author name: Enthusiast

When I teach dovetailing to a class, one of the common questions is why I saw out the majority of the waste between the tails and pins, instead of chopping with a chisel. The simple answer is: That’s how I learned to do it, I’m fast at it and coping saws are easier to sharpen than chisels (the last part is a bit of a joke, by the way). There’s […]

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Glen Huey (pictured above), Chuck Bender, Bob Lang and I got the shop maybe halfway done in yesterday’s frenzy of cleaning and reorganizing, but we did run into a couple problems. Neglecting to measure, for example. (Yes, we took the vise off, then had no trouble getting that bench into the storeroom.) We moved the miter saw rack off the back wall where the garage door will go (soon, I […]

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I spent some time this past weekend at The Woodworking Shows in Columbus, Ohio. First off, trekking to the show is much better now that Columbus is an hour and a half away (as opposed to the 7 hours it took to get there when I lived outside Philadelphia). The second thing that struck me about the show as I arrived was the size of the crowd. It was huge. […]

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In the short video posted last Thursday (1/30/2014), Christopher Schwarz talks about chisels. At the tail end of the clip, he talks about butt chisels where he mentions that these chisels are shorter and have great balance when knocking out dovetail waste, but you use a bench chisel for that, too. So why do we have butt chisels? The term is said to originate from the carpenter trade where short […]

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Jacques writes: I have your workbench book, and I am currently working on my version of the French bench. I had soft maple cut down from my woods, so I had it sawn, and I am working with it for the top. For the legs, a friend of mine gave me four beams that are about 9″ x 9″, out of some resinous wood. They are cracked and dry (must […]

The post Can Workbench Legs be too Big? appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

If cleanliness is truly next to godliness, then we are lords of the underworld. I took this picture (and shot the video below) whilst standing atop my bench…my bench to which one must take a wholly circuitous route past large builds, old projects, my pile of plywood, machinery…my fault for choosing the windows at the far side of the shop, I suppose. But the trip got a little harder after […]

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