Woodworking Posts

There are many ways to learn woodworking and I think making a project is way better than getting bogged down in theory, tool collecting or setting up the ultimate shop. A good project offers a challenge and more often than not you can work with the tools and shop you have. One of my all-time favorite projects is the three-legged stool seen here. You don’t need a ton of tools […]

The post Puzzle Stool Video – a Different Project, a Different Kind of Video appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

At the Lie-Nielsen show in our shop in April, 16-year-old Jalen Waggoner (whom you might remember for his Blacker House chair, which was featured in the November 2013 issue as a winner in the PWM Excellence Awards) stopped in, and brought with him his latest project in progress: a Greene & Greene-inspired games table. As you can see above, the work is now complete – and well worth sharing. The […]

The post Greene & Greene-inspired Games Table appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

I have lost track of how many vises I’ve built or installed on workbenches. So my early-morning giddiness about the Benchcrafted Crisscross is worth note. This week I’m putting a leg vise on my Holtzapffel workbench that will have both the new Benchcrafted Classic vise screw and the Crisscross Retro (instead of a parallel guide). I’ve used vises with the Crisscross installed, but this is the first Crisscross I’ve installed […]

The post It Floats. It’s Full of Stars…. appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

The headline is a bit misleading – this really took me only about two hours to build, start to finish, including a break to empty the dust collector. But I’m counting the one-and-a-half hours in between when I dropped off the metal bits to be cut to length and when they were ready to be picked up, plus the 20 minutes I had to wait for my neighbor to finish […]

The post Four-hour Pot Rack appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Last Friday I talked about through mortise-and-tenon joinery in 18th century chairs in my post “Furniture Details: Why Philadelphia is Just Better.” In the post I mentioned through mortises are not the only differences between Philadelphia chairs and chairs from other regions. This week I wanted to discuss another difference – seat construction. I’m not referring to the actual slip seat on which you sit; I’m talking about how the chair […]

The post Furniture Details: Yep, Philly Wins Again appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

When I teach beginners, one of the most common phrases I hear is, “I cannot get this (insert tool name) to work. What’s wrong?” They hand the tool to me and the fun begins. Though block planes are dirt-simple handplanes, there are some important points about them that are rarely discussed in the literature. Here are the five most common problems I see with students’ block planes. 1. Too tight. […]

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