Creole Table: Closing in On Cooking this Crawdad
Like most home woodworkers, my dang day job tends to get in the way of my woodworking. Despite the fact that our magazine’s woodshop is exactly seven paces from my desk, getting in there [...]
Hardly Obsolete: Benjamin Seaton’s "Pannel" Saw
While learning to saw with a handsaw on our farm in Arkansas, I had one fond wish: Please Santa Claus, bring me a Skil saw for Christmas. (He never did.) So it surprises even my fellow hand-tool [...]
When Seen in the Right Light
Hand-tool work can be confusing and frustrating when you follow the power-tool rules. Here’s a good example: I was working on finishing up the transitions between the aprons and legs of a [...]
Creole Table: See, then Saw
My favorite part of woodworking is the anti-climax. This is the point where you do something risky, but you’re so prepared for it that the actual act is just a slight thing: brief and easy [...]
The Most Enormous Tenon Saw
One of the first projects I built for Popular Woodworking was an adaptation of Benjamin Seaton’s tool chest. The chest is most notable because of what its owner did not do, which was to use [...]
Chicken Creole Table
Some projects play along nicely; others tend to fight you all the way. The Creole Table is shaping up to be a bit of a raging Cajun. My goal this week was to complete the top of the table and …
The Venerable and Inscrutable Shinto Rasp
The Shinto “Saw-Rasp” has always been a curious thing to me. I first spotted it years ago hanging on the wall of our local Rockler store in the sandpaper section. It looks like (and [...]
Creole Table: Safe, Sound and Not a Bit Sorry
One of the big challenges in building a project for publication is to come up with techniques that use common tools and skills to produce results that others can replicate using the same tools [...]
Creole Table Update: Cutting Blind
I like working with walnut, but I hate marking it. Its dark color makes pencil lines disappear. And its open grain hide knife lines as well. Dovetailing is a particular problem for me. Part of [...]
Behind the Ink-stained Curtain
I always enjoy tours of tool factories to see people (or robots) make things that are useful to my work. How a company can harness hundreds of minds and hands and mechanical pincers to produce [...]
Our Infinite Power to Forget
After finishing college, two of my closest friends joined the Peace Corps and were posted to rural Morocco. But within a year they were back in the United States: 20 pounds lighter, two shades [...]
Tenons Rule! So Here Are the Rules on Tenons
In China, 2005 was the year of the rooster. In our shop, 2005 was the year of the anvil. We built a guillotine out of framing material and dropped anvils of three weights on joints to see how [...]
