Techniques

1. Lubricate a Bandsaw Blade It’s safe and easy to cut brass and aluminum with a bandsaw and a regular woodworking blade. Using a miter gauge, you can make a very straight cut. Be sure to [...]

Perhaps woodturners should sell naming rights. The field has never standardized the names of woodturning tools (or measurements of their widths or how to describe their angles), so they often go [...]

Clogged sandpaper is really a pain, rendering useless your sandpaper and your effort. I was mindlessly sanding a project a while ago when I looked at my pile of discarded paper and had a [...]

In bowl turning, good craftsmanship requires that the bottom show no evidence of how the bowl was mounted. It’s also important to learn how to keep the chuck from dictating key aspects of [...]

The modern router didn’t arrive on the scene fully evolved; it descended from a hand-powered tool called the router plane. A quick glance at the router plane’s handles – and the tasks [...]

Bowl turning is a blast! Thanks to advances in lathes and tooling, lots of woodworkers have now discovered how fun it is to turn a hunk of green wood into a beautiful bowl. Start to finish, it [...]

“Scary sharp”—sharpening on sandpaper adhered to glass—works really well, but one thing has always bothered me. I’ve tried spray adhesives as well as PSA (pressure sensitive [...]

Cutting precisely to a line on a miter saw isn’t easy. Usually, you have to make multiple cuts and sneak up to it. My solution is to use this universal gauge block; one cut is all [...]

There are lots of excuses for not using dovetails; cutting them by hand takes time, patience, and lots of practice. A dovetail jig is relatively fool proof, but if you don’t use it [...]

Mark the End Grain When you’re jointing, mark each board’s grain direction by drawing a line on its end. The line means “Start here.” A mark on a board’s face or [...]

While enjoying a leisurely lunch the Sunday before Christmas, it hit me. Something was missing. Nope, it wasn’t the usual holiday panic — a forgotten gift or missed greeting card, but an urge for [...]

The Star Wars Universe Not long ago, in a small workshop far, far away… As new technology spread rapidly throughout a galaxy of centuries-old traditions, the woodworking world was in a [...]