Shop Blog

My mother, Elizabeth F. (“Penny”) Jones, is an architectural historian and collector of all things historic…and not. When I was a kid, she was one of the driving forces behind...

  When I think of a hobbyist woodworker I tend to think of a middle aged guy with a mix of tools parked in a corner of a basement or...

The magazine’s August 2014 article by Mario Rodriguez on building a mid-century coffee table features a terrific section about working with veneer for a patterned top. You can read Mario’s...

You can never get too many perspectives on this topic. Everything we do as woodworkers starts with the substrate, the wood itself. I caught up with Ron Herman this week to...

A couple of weeks ago I posted why Philly chairs were just better (read it by clicking here). In the comments pmac mentioned including a SketchUp drawing in future posts...

Restore a Chest of Drawers Make broken-down drawers fit and work like new By Tim Johnson At first glance, the broken-down chest of drawers looks like a lost cause—a wreck...

Photo Album By Dave Munkittrick   Do you have a pile of photos waiting to be put in an album? We all do. That’s why you can’t go wrong making...

Woodworkers ask me a lot of questions on routing wood, and many of the questions are similar, so here’s a short list of FAQs and answers to help you. Question...

Hmm, must have run out of room , so, here is the rest of the story ( I hope)   Carving the top was just a few saw cuts, and...

And after awhile, you wind up with a wood bodied edge plane.     Almost a skewed Rebate plane.    Say this being built on a youtube show from [...]

Shop-Made Sanding Blocks   Q: Commercial sanding blocks all have some kind of padded bottom. Do my shop-made blocks need to be padded, too?   A: Yes they do. Padded...

Air-Drying Lumber It’s the low-cost, low-tech way to dry lumber. Here’s how to do it right. By Dave Munkittrick Want a truly cheap and easy way to dry lumber? Consider...