Woodworking Posts

We released a video on YouTube yesterday all about nails. Christopher Schwarz presented a short lesson on the various types of nails available and why we might use them in different applications. To continue the conversation, I thought I’d pull together some of Chris’s posts on nails from his years of blogging on the subject. Check out what I found and leave a comment about your experience with nails in […]

The post 8 Articles on Nails: You Might Consider Using Nails in Your Next Project appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I do only a little production work in my shop, so I don’t have a lot of jigs and fixtures. In fact, I think I can count them on one hand: a sliding table for my table saw, a shooting board/bench hook, my doe’s feet for my workbench and a V-block for planing objects to octagons. But when I build a jig, I want it to last. This week I […]

The post Notes on a Steam-bending Jig appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Woodworkers drill holes. We drill lots of holes. Small ones especially. And we spend lots of money on methods of drilling holes. In the modern era, we’ve progressed from eggbeater drills through the tailed revolution and are now obsessed with compact and powerful battery-juiced motors. Yet these designs pale in comparison to ones perfected in the 1800s and mass produced up until a half century ago. Imagine a drilling tool […]

The post Push Drills: Good Design, Timeless and Forgotten appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Why does so much factory furniture, made with dowel joinery in the last forty or fifty years, often not hold up well? I have two explanations, both of which are shown in these pictures of chair arms. The first is that the dowels aren’t coated well with glue. The way gluing on a production line so often works is that a little glue is dropped into the dowel hole as […]

The post Gluing Dowel Joints: Why Factory Furniture Dowel Joints Loose so Quickly appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

My PWM baseball cap has already seen heavy use – it’s my go-to hair-containment method while working in the shop and on my house (and given the state of my home and large number of projects to go, I’d best get another cap or three…). We have a limited number of these caps available through ShopWoodworking.com ($12). They’re 100-percent cotton, slate blue (my favorite color…so yes, I picked it) and […]

The post PWM Baseball Caps – Limited Edition appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Professionals in the field of fine woodworking, with a minimum of four years of experience, are invited to apply for a $2,500 grant from the Krenov Foundation to use for a stint as an artist-in-residence or visiting scholar or faculty collaborator at a nationally recognized woodworking school or craft center. Applications are available at thekrenovfoundation.org/professionaldevelopmentaward, and must be submitted along with a statement of purpose, resume, financial forms, digital photographs of […]

The post Krenov Foundation Professional Development Award appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.