Woodworking Posts

Like most latchkey kids who grew up in the ’80s, I watch too much TV. If you are ever in my shop you’ll likely see a small TV on in the background. Do I really pay attention to it? Not really. I’ll catch 10 or 15 seconds, remember the plot and move on. It’s white noise – my generation’s version of an “El Lector” (reader) in a cigar factory. You’d be amazed […]

The post Woodworking: A Tool for Developing Imagination appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

A few weeks ago I was invited by the Yale University Art Gallery to do a presentation on colonial wood turning. The event took place at their legendary Furniture Study in lieu of their weekly public tour. During the presentation, I highlighted the differences between the work of the cabinetmaker and the work of the turner and then discussed how lathe turning uniquely satisfied the demands of the preindustrial artisan […]

The post Dawks at the Yale Furniture Study appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

It takes a special tool chest to get me to sit up straight – I’ve spent the last six or seven years of my life researching and writing about tool chests. But this one, presumably Swedish, is fantastic. It was recently sold on this auction site for an astonishing sum. While the composition of all the tools, burl handles and color scheme is nice, what is most fascinating is the […]

The post Boarded Scandinavian Tool Chest – Too Cool appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

If your painted finish feels a little rough, you need to go to the liquor store. OK, that doesn’t make sense, so let’s back up a couple weeks when I was teaching a bunch of young woodworkers how to build a tool chest by hand at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. After building the 18 chests, we finished most of them with milk paint, a modern and quite easy […]

The post Smoothing Milk Paint & Other Rough Surfaces appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I’ve been woodworking for a little over thirty-five years (I was barely out of diapers…I swear!), and in all that time I’ve done just enough veneering to know that there is a lot more about veneering that I don’t know. It’s one of those specialty woodworking areas that has it’s own set of tools, expectations and base of knowledge. While I know how to rip and crosscut a board to size on […]

The post What I Don’t Know About Veneering appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I’ve been cutting a lot of large-scale sliding dovetails and rabbets lately. And when these housed joints get to a certain size (think of a dovetail socket that is 4” wide and 30” long) it’s much more efficient to saw out the walls by hand. When I need the rabbets or sliding dovetails to be bang-on, I clamp a batten to my work to guide the saw. I use a […]

The post A Tip for Handsawing Rabbets & Sliding Dovetails appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.