Woodworking Posts

Following a restructuring of the woodworking team by our parent company, three people have elected to leave the company. October 15 will be the last day as part of the F+W woodworking community for Robert Lang, Glen Huey and Chuck Bender. I, along with the rest of their co-workers, thank them for the excellent work they’ve done for Popular Woodworking Magazine and the F+W woodworking community, and wish them well […]

The post Wish You Well appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I can’t swear to there being a “cycle” for every Arts & Crafts woodworker. I can only speak to my own experience and add that I have had many nods of agreement when sharing my philosophy. I began building Arts & Crafts pieces, because the sturdy simplicity spoke to me, and the beauty of the quarter-sawn white oak was all the embellishment I required. A gentle curve here or there […]

The post Does the Arts & Crafts Cycle End with the Greenes? appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

This week I’m finishing up work on an aumbry for a future issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. More than anything, this project has been about exploring Gothic geometry. But as with any project, I always have a lot of detours and dead ends. The pierced carvings on the front of the aumbry are fairly simple, yet I was afraid they would be off-putting for some beginning woodworkers. So I started […]

The post An Introduction to Gothic Tracery (With a Router) appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

In the November issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine I wrote an article outlining the router bits I consider to be the core of any powered shop. The workhorse bits of that core set are the straight bits. Straight router bits come in three varieties: Spiral-upcut, spiral-downcut and straight-cut bits. The choice of which to use comes down to the specific job and your preferences. The difference between straight and spiral […]

The post Straight or Spiral appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Darrel Peart raised an interesting questions during my recent web seminar on “Unkown Arts & Crafts” for Popular Woodworking University. He noted the similarities between one of Rohlfs’ tables and the poppy table by Gustav Stickley and asked if one maker influenced the other. Both tables share a similar form — trunk-like slab legs support a flower-shaped top — executed in an Art Nouveau style, which suggests the possibility for […]

The post Rohlfs & Stickley: A Case of Flowery Inspiration appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Numbers are a big part of my job here, as is looking at data in new and different ways. In light of that, I thought I’d share some interesting information I found as I was getting ready to start at Popular Woodworking. Back in the ’90s, a couple of scientists decided to answer the burning question of “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck, if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” We know, of […]

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