Archives

A dedicated sharpening station makes your work so much easier, but since leaving the magazine in 2011 I’ve never had the space (or a sink) for one. One day I saw this $20 boot tray at my home [...]

Well-made high-carbon scissors are a joy to use and are indispensable in my shop for cutting paper patterns to shape, trimming veneer and 100 other tasks. For years I used junky office scissors [...]

There are dozens of ways to drill dog holes that dead-nuts plumb, and I’ve written about many of them during the last 17 years. My favorites use the fewest tools and jiggery – not everyone has a [...]

Getting all four feet of a chair or table in the same plane can be a challenge. What makes the task more difficult is that it can be difficult to figure out when you are done with the job of …

We’re always looking for ways to improve the grip of the vises on our workbenches. During the last decade I’ve discussed how to use suede or adhesive-backed cork to improve a vise’s gripping [...]

There are many reasons that factory-made chairs fall apart, but I think the biggest reason is they lack what handmade chairs have in droves: tension in their assemblies due to imperfections in [...]

The trickiest cut when building a chair or stool is leveling the feet. This cut is always a wacky compound angle. And when you combine a compound angle with a foot that is an odd shape, such as [...]

I don’t like gizmos that try to make one tool (like a drill press) do the job of another tool (like a hollow-chisel mortiser). The results are usually sub-optimal. But the Milwaukee Right-angle [...]

After working with woodworkers all over the world for short periods of time and (in some cases) many years, I can say these four words that might make your woodworking easier: Clean up your crap. [...]

There are lots of tests for when your liquid hide glue has gone bad – the most common one that I know of is to put some glue between your index finger and thumb. Tap your finger and thumb [...]

I’ve just finished writing an article on liquid hide hide glue for Popular Woodworking Magazine that takes a critical look at the adhesive compared to yellow glues. My hope is that it’s a fairly [...]

During the last seven years, I’ve slowly become a fan of using a monolithic slab for the top of a workbench. And I’ve also slowly begun to ignore all the criticisms of slab tops. I built my first [...]