Our cover story for the February 2012 issue of Popular Woodworking is Serpentine Chest, by Glen D. Huey, contributing editor. Expand your casework repertoire by learning how to make a curvaceous front – it looks a lot trickier than it really is.
In Handle With Care, Gary Rogowski shows how to design, make and install custom handles for your doors and drawers – pulls perfectly suited to your project.
In A Frame With Architectural Interest, Mark Arnold shows how “crossetted” corners add a bold visual statement – and arresting grain pattern – to a picture or mirror frame.
Charles Bender demonstrates how an exercise in dowel-making without a lathe is an excellent way to improve your handplaning techniques in Just Plane Round.
In Mirrors in Multiples, Robert W. Lang, executive editor, shows how designing the process for making multiples of a project can be as challenging as designing the object itself.
In Return of the Passer Drill, Roy Underhill revives this venerable tool, which was used in times past to pattern rout for brass insets, with a modern replica.
In this issue’s Tool Test, we take a look at Festool ZOBO Forstner-style bits, Veritas’s 6″ precision square, Blockkz’s Clamping Blocks and Earlex’s steam generator.
In Design Matters, George R. Walker shows how sketching is all in your mind.
In Arts & Mysteries, Adam Cherubini shows how London’s clever carpenters found a way around the laws regarding “boarded” furniture.
This issue’s I Can Do That project is a message center designed and built by Steve Shanesy, senior editor.
In Great Woodshops, Christopher Schwarz, contributing editor, shows how Jeff Miller, a former musician, brings an improvisational skill to the craft of custom woodworking.
In Flexner on Finishing, Bob Flexner shows how “green” solvents are environmentally friendly and surprisingly effective.
In End Grain, Eric Heydorn paddles through his woodworking past.
[description]Articles from the February 2012 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine[/description][keywords]Popular Woodworking Magazine, Magazine Articles, Technique Articles, Project Articles, Tool Reviews, Finishing[/keywords]
Somewhere between street musician and the symphony orchestra, between an 18th-century hand woodworker and a contemporary designer, is Jeff Miller, a Chicago furniture maker, teacher and author who defi es every pigeonhole. In fact, if given the chance, he might just redesign that hole to better fit the pigeon.
The three primary solvents we use in wood finishing are paint thinner (mineral spirits), lacquer thinner and denatured alcohol. Paint thinner thins and cleans up oils, oil stains and varnishes, including oil-based polyurethane. Lacquer thinner thins and cleans up lacquers and lacquer stains. Denatured alcohol dissolves, thins and cleans up shellac.
In the first century B.C.E., a military architect named Vitruvius captured the distinction between a designer’s mind and the minds of the rest of us.
“For all men, not just architects, are capable of appreciating quality; but there is a difference between laymen and architects (designers) in that the former cannot know what a building will be like unless he has seen it completed; while the architect knows perfectly well what it will be like … from the instant he conceives it in his mind, and before he begins it.”
“Boarded” is an archaic English term that was used to describe a form of woodwork characterized by the use of fasteners as the principle means of attachment. The iconic six-board chest is probably the most familiar boarded furniture form.
In earliest times, the fasteners may have been wooden pegs. In the Middle Ages, nails were used, sometimes decoratively. Metal straps were also sometimes applied to the corners. The basic form of these chests remained unchanged for easily 1,000 years.
I was 3 years old and I was in toddler heaven – the dirty, dangerous, totally awesome garage. My dad had actually invited me out to the garage to help him make … something. I didn’t know what and I didn’t care. Having already broken the rear window of my dad’s pickup truck while playing with a wrench, I wasn’t usually a welcome guest in the garage.
Until Colt came out with its aggressive Forstner bits a while back, this was a sleepy tool category. Now, Festool has introduced its own aggressive bits and taken the tool’s capability to another level. ZOBO bits have a unique feature – interchangeable centers in the cutting end.
I’ve made dozens of clamping cauls over the years to address the wide variety of oddball clamping conditions we run into in the shop. Some were simple and quick to make; others took more time. Some worked perfectly; others just got me through.
