Woodworking Posts

The doors on the rest of my kitchen cabinets were constructed with stub tenons. But the pantry doors that I (finally) hung over my holiday break are 82″ tall and will get used a lot (the pantry shelves were built in part to house boxes of kitty litter); stub tenons aren’t up to the task. So, for these, I cut traditional mortise-and-tenon joints. The poplar rails and stiles are 3/4″ […]

The post Doors Built to Last (Though They Probably Needn’t Be) appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

During the last two weeks, I’ve been perfecting my impression of the common garden slug. I’ve become quite good at it. Pretty much the only thing woodworking-related I’ve accomplished is to hang the doors on the pantry shelves I built just before Thanksgiving. I’m not done fitting them, mind you (if only I’d made each 1/16″ narrower, darn it!). I’ve been feeling too lazy to take them back down to […]

The post A Supremely Lazy Holiday appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

This week I am finishing up the carcase for a special tool chest for an upcoming pair of articles in Popular Woodworking Magazine and I turned my attention to the lifts – the handles you use to grab the chest when you have to move it. There are three common ways to create chest lifts. You can use metallic hardware, you can make “beckets” with rope or you can make […]

The post Make ‘Dog Bone’ Chest Lifts appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

“Could I do it,” I thought? A half-reasonable set of through-dovetails in thre minutes? Needless to say, I could not do it the first time of asking (and if you are interested you can watch my best attempt below). But the lessons to be drawn, reflections and the benefits of such a challenge are beyond a quick set of dovetails in pine. Here are some of my thoughts. An analogy would be […]

The post 3-Minute Dovetail – Pointless? appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I wish I could send Frank Klausz to the shop of every reader to teach you the following lesson, but I think he’s busy. The first time I met Klausz was at a woodworking show on the East Coast about 15 years ago. He was demonstrating wooden moulding planes; I was demonstrating some infill planes I had built. At one point during my demonstration, Klausz walked up to my bench […]

The post The Best Defense Against Rust: Frank Klausz appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I get more questions about workbenches than any other – and among those, many of them are about the LVL (Laminated Veneer Lumber) bench Christopher Schwarz and I built in 2009, that appeared in the November issue. After more than five years in use, the top remains dead flat. It has a few dings from chisels and the like, but it had not needed flattening. in contrast, my pine “roubo” […]

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