Shop Blog

I got a call recently from a friend who runs a mid-size woodworking shop. He was making several dozen walnut tables for a restaurant and finishing them with pre-catalyzed lacquer....

Let’s continue the story of my student Chad’s coffee table built at a live edge class at Peters Valley. In this entry I will show how we found a convenient way...

Show off your woodworking skills at your next dinner party with these beautiful hardwood kitchen utensils (instructions excerpted from “The Woodworker’s Kitchen: 24 Projects You Can [...]

I’ve had bad days wrestling with my sketchbook where it was impossible for me to draw anything but junk. Junk I didn’t want to build and junk that no one...

A couple weeks ago – just two days after Popular Woodworking in America, in fact – I had a Skype audio chat with woodworker, author and actor Nick Offerman. His latest book,...

Last night while drinking some wine with Christopher Schwarz (I’d stopped by to return a chair we’d borrowed for a photo shoot), we got in a semantics discussion (do we...

Here’s a glued up leg and apron assembly for a sofa table being milled with a CNC router. Here’s the big picture: A CNC is a digitally controlled router that...

  After Popular Woodworking in America, my desire to get back in the shop was insatiable. As soon as I returned to the office and caught up on work, I...

The November issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine just mailed to subscribers, and it’s live now in our online store. There’s a lot of great content in this issue (the campaign...

Walnut is probably my favorite wood. It is rich in color and texture, easy to work with, grows domestically and has the right density and strength to serve well in...

In my first blog post I told you about a new smart-coating technology that causes liquids, including pee, to bounce off surfaces. In the case of pee, it bounces back...

Part Two. Decisions to Make I’ve been using CNC services since the late ’90s to create patterns, jigs and fixture components and a few furniture parts. After years of use,...