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My psychological oddities include: A fear of being tackled by females in elf suits and enmity toward all birdhouses. Perhaps my hostility to birdhouses springs from my days as a Cub Scout where I [...]

The woodworkers who are restoring the White Water Shaker Village are making significant progress , just in time for the Woodworking in America tour of the village on Oct. 3. Newly built and [...]

I thought I had a hammer-collecting problem until I met Scotty Fulton. Fulton set me straight: 50 hammers is not much of a collection. Try 12,000 hammers , virtually all of them different, all of [...]

In the debate of round bench dogs vs. square bench dogs, I have tried to remain neutral. But after years of working on both, I have decided to cast my …

In my 13 years with this magazine, I’ve never written about the magazine itself. You’ve never had to hear about how we tweaked the fonts, leading and kerning to spiff up our look. All that [...]

If you ever decide to delve into traditional woodworking, you quickly learn that wedges are your friend. Build chairs? You need to wedge all the joints. Traditional doors? Wedge your [...]

For this Roubo workbench to work, I’ve got 16 joints that have to come together all at once. There is not an option to glue things up in stages and still guarantee success. As a result, I [...]

If you’ve been trying to reach me during the last few weeks, I apologize. The answers to your questions are: 1. Almost any species of wood will do fine for your workbench. 2. There is no [...]

I love me some blue masking tape. I have at least four rolls of the stuff at my bench and use it for all sorts of tasks, from shimming a …

You know that you’ve been building a Roubo workbench when you chop a 1-1/4″ wide, 4″-long and 3″-deep blind mortise and it’s comically easy. Today I’m getting [...]

I don’t like adverbs , you know, words like “extremely,” “fallaciously” or “throbbingly.” But I am at a complete loss to otherwise describe the [...]

The hardest part of ripping (besides the exertion) is making a square cut through the thickness of the work. It’s fairly easy to follow your line when ripping, but it’s also easy to [...]