Woodworking Mistakes

Kick the Can When I was a boy, my dad taught me a great way to re-seal a can of stain. He would place the open can on the floor with the loose lid in position on the can, …

SURE SHOT When I found out my wife was pregnant with our first child, I decided to make a cradle. Nine months seemed like plenty of time, but naturally, I finished building the cradle with only a [...]

Snake Surprise While I was visiting my brother in Florida, he showed me his latest toy, a Wood-Mizer portable sawmill. A huge hickory log was mounted on the cutting platform. Sawdust puffed as [...]

SUPER GLUED After making a small repair with super glue, I put the tube in my pocket and forgot about it. Later, when I saw the tube’s cap sitting on my workbench, I instinctively reached into my [...]

Backside Out After dabbling with woodworking for a couple of years, I finally got up the courage to build some kitchen cabinets, starting with an 8′ long upper unit. I composed a detailed [...]

Kitchen Kalamity The cherry salad tongs I’d made needed repairs. They were steam-bent, so they would “spring” when you squeezed them together. But the top portion where the two arms attached was [...]

Clamp-Ka-Bob This morning I glued up a 4′ x 6′ tabletop made of maple 2x2s on my assembly table. I positioned 6′ pipe clamps alternately on the top and bottom faces of the [...]

While visiting the local Habitat for Humanity store I noticed a woodturning lathe. The store manager told me it had come from an estate and was almost new, so I bought it and took it home in the [...]

Self Portrait Seeing that it was a very fine day, I began to carve a gnome. This little guy would be my masterpiece. Hours, then days passed as I worked on my gnome. From his ridiculously long [...]

Inside Job While building kitchen cabinets, I purposefully chose straight-grained lumber for the doors’ stiles and rails and bought expensive, highly-figured boards to make the panels. In [...]

Dust Bomb My neighbor has had a woodworking shop in his garage since I was a kid. Recently, when he discovered that mice and other furry critters were living in its cinder block foundation, he [...]

One Coat Coverage I had finished building new frame and panel doors for my kitchen cabinets and knew the stain would really make the grain pop. I laid the first door on my workbench, with the [...]