Techniques

Getting a load of freshly cut lumber can bring out several emotions - excitement, anticipation, panic. Fortunately, air drying your lumber outdoors is the easiest and cheapest way to dry lumber [...]

Learning to build shelving is a basic skill every woodworker must master. Here are the basic rules everyone must follow.

All my relationships usually start out rocky. On my first date with my future wife, I almost blew it by presuming to order for her at the IHOP. (I thought it Southern courtesy; she thought it [...]

Every Tuesday night we ritually torture our children with a meal that we call “New Food Night.” The kids have to eat something they’ve never eaten before , this week was coq au [...]

I’ve always been geeky about sharpening things, not in the sense of polishing chisel backs to #32,000 grit, but having a good edge before going to work. Before using a router bit, I dress [...]

Question: Looking over the current and past issues of Woodworking Magazine, I see how drawboring or wedging a mortise and tenon joint will improve the strength and fit of the joint.  But is [...]

Sometimes the laws of time, space and economics get bent. And, in the case of two little Zona saws I’ve been testing this week in the shop, sometimes these laws get broken. A couple weeks [...]

Question: I’ve noted that you’ve recently mentioned that you’ve been looking into scrapers, so I thought that maybe you could answer a question that I have about scraper-plane [...]

When I learned to sharpen planes, the mantra was: Bench planes need a curved cutting edge, joinery and block planes need a straight cutting edge. And in a lapse of journalistic crotchetiness, I [...]

In the Stickley side table from the November 2006 issue, there are enough variations of mortise and tenon joints to give your hands and your head a real workout. One of the things I enjoy most [...]

I’m a big fan of cut nails. They hold far better that modern wire nails and they really have the right look when it comes to building reproduction furniture, which is why I don’t use [...]

Sash saws are a bit of a mystery to the modern-day woodworker. These saws show up in early catalogs and inventories of cabinetmaker’s possessions, but that’s about all you get. [...]