Woodworking Posts

In “Gravity by Design” (June 2015, Issue 218), Darrell Peart shares his thought on how the bottom of a piece is the most interesting and telling – how what’s at the ground level (or close to it) has a significant effect on the design as a whole. One of the furniture pieces Darrell employs to illustrate his theory is the Aurora Desk – a pedestal desk of his own design […]

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Most repairs to furniture during the construction process are a drag because I am kicking myself for making an error in the first place. Not so when adding wooden keys to a slab tabletop. Big wood tends to split. And left unchecked, the split can continue to open during the seasonal expansion and contraction cycle. The traditional fix is a wooden key that looks like two dovetails kissing. Or a […]

The post Stop Splits with a Wooden Key appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Wood, being a natural product, is not without it’s defects. Many are obvious and some (such as the upset above) can be harder to detect. I’ve always known them to be called an “upset” but “thunder shakes” and “compression failure” are also terms used to describe it. The thing I hate about upsets is how hard they can be to detect, especially when the wood is rough-sawn. Most often I […]

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Last week I wrote about our baby boy’s first workbench, which is more of an amusement park than a real bench. Today I am going to show you his next bench. Soon after baby Asher got his Fisher Price bench, coincidence brought about his first semi-true workbench – a wooden one we found on the street in Brooklyn, N.Y. It was part of a group of items left available for […]

The post Spaghetti, Q-Tip or Toothpick? appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

For Chad Stanton, professional furniture maker and licensed contractor – and the host of the “I Can Do That” (ICDT) series – a chance encounter showed him that he was on the right track with the simple projects and techniques he teaches in these videoa. After returning to his home in Toledo after taping several ICDT episodes, Chad was unloading a project when a neighbor spotted it – and immediately offered to […]

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One of the Tricks of the Trade in the June 2015 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine discusses how you can use denatured alcohol to stop crumbling end grain while chopping out dovetails. The trick states it’s best for softwoods, which is where you see the most crumbling. As my students are always worried about this aspect of their dovetails, I decided to give it a try today in some finger […]

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