Tricks of the Trade

When you don’t need an absolutely accurate line drawn on a piece (say for a shooting/nailing line or layout line) all you need is a wooden folding ruler, a pencil and your two hands. Lay the rule [...]

Tools for measuring. Tools for Accuracy. Precision Instruments for Woodworkers is a 4-part series. I’ve been working as a furniture maker for quite a while, now. Along the way, you refine your [...]

I needed to cut long boards on the table saw, but had only a small table for the outfeed and none for the infeed. So I built this handy infeed table using scrap plywood and a sawhorse, both of …

There’s really no substitute for a nice, dialed-in shooting board. It’s a bench appliance that every woodworker with a handplane should have for sneaking up to a line and making [...]

Over the years, we have amassed a huge collection of handy tips from the Tricks of the Trade column in our magazine. We recently started to film some of these tricks in the Pop Wood shop to give [...]

I recently completed a seven-drawer dresser. The drawers featured hand-cut dovetails and are of graduated heights from top to bottom. Cleaning up the drawers with my handplanes was initially [...]

Instead of storing your freshly sharpened scrapers loose in a drawer (or tight in a wallet), this easy-to-make storage unit, shared with me by my friend Bob Lee, holds them at the ready over the [...]

Featherboard Ripping Stop I’m always on the lookout for different ways to use the things I already own. I found that I didn’t need to buy or make an extra jig for ripping thin, uniform strips on [...]

If you’ve got the right tools, frameless kitchen cabinets are easy to build. They’re just boxes, and if you don’t want to use any fancy joinery, you can glue and screw them together. The tricky [...]

A plunge router is a versatile tool, but setting an exact depth can be perplexing. There are a bunch of knobs and levers that control how far down the bit will go, but if you’re trying to [...]

Many layout problems that seem to call for math can be quickly solved with a compass and a straightedge. Numbers can confuse and complicate the situation. What you need to know is how to make [...]

Wood movement can ruin a seemingly well-constructed project. Luckily getting ahead of the material and calculating wood shrinkage and expansion is fairly easy – all you need to do is multiply [...]