Woodworking Mistakes

Cordless Curler As I leaned over to press down while drilling some holes in a board, my long hair slipped into the drill’s vent slots and got caught in the motor. Before I could release the [...]

Back Leg Boo-Boo My wife asked me to repair a wobbly kitchen chair. All the joints below the seat had failed, so it didn’t take much to knock apart the legs and stretchers. The joints were a bit [...]

Planer-Puss After my friend Jason and I purchased a truckload of rough lumber, we headed for his garage workshop to plane the boards before divvying them up. All of Jason’s tools are on mobile [...]

Flying Sawdust Last summer, due to the heat, I covered my portable saw with a canvas tarp and retreated to the cooler air inside my basement shop.  For two months, the saw sat under the shed [...]

Egg-oh! My fiancé and I planned an April wedding. To celebrate our marriage, I decided to turn a very special Easter egg. In addition to segmented rings of maple and ebony, this egg would have a [...]

HOUSE OF DUST To keep airborne dust from getting into the house, I bought a dust collector for my basement workshop. I wanted to start with a clean slate, so I decided to rid the shop of a [...]

Shocking Taste I turned on my shop vac to clean up the pile of sawdust that had accumulated while I ripped some pine boards for a cabinet. I live in Colorado, where the air is always dry, and my [...]

Runaway Router My first router, a 1968 Stanley, was a heavy, single-speed machine. I remember it well because of what happened the very first time I used it. I chucked up a Roman ogee bit and [...]

Shavings Shower Last spring I reorganized my shop and moved my planer near the garage door so it could spew its shavings harmlessly onto the driveway. Now that it’s colder, I work with the garage [...]

Disc Break Back when I bought my radial arm saw, onboard braking systems didn’t exist. But I’m a gadget freak, so I bought an electronic brake and mounted it on top of the saw. The [...]

Hammered Cat The handle on my favorite hammer needed to be refinished, so I sanded it, sprayed on a coat of polyurethane and hung it over the edge of the picnic table to dry. A moment later I [...]

The Ol’ 1–2 I volunteered to drill the holes for the halogen light fixtures in the 6′ tall display cabinet that my cohorts and I were building at the architectural millwork company where we [...]