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While lounging at the pool one afternoon, I had an inspiration. I “borrowed” one of my kids’ floating pool noodles, cut it into sections and used the pieces as universal connectors for vacuum [...]

Over the years, I have often clamped stops on my drill-press fence to register hole locations in workpieces. Unfortunately, I always seemed to lose the stops. Flip stops always seemed like a good [...]

Wooden wing nuts are so much easier on your hands than metal ones. Plus, it’s a great way to use up shop scraps and leftover hex nuts while avoiding a trip to the hardware store. Start with a [...]

If you can build it yourself, why would you want to buy it? I’ve always gotten “in a mood” whenever my wife would buy something online – whether wooden, or not – that I could have built cheaper, [...]

I like to use carpenter’s pencils until they’re worn down to stubs. Stubs aren’t very handy, though–they’re hard to dig out of a pocket. To solve this problem, I gathered up all [...]

A mobile workbench is handy in a small shop, until you want it to stand still! After outfitting my bench with casters, I found that their locks didn’t prevent the bench from wiggling. My [...]

After hooking up my new dust collector to my contractor’s saw, I found that it just didn’t pull as much air as I’d like, even after sealing up the most obvious leaks. After further inspection, I [...]

My dust collector, though pieced-together, is the perfect solution for my one-car garage shop. I use a cyclone separator and 5-gallon bucket in conjunction with my shop vacuum. For easy mobility, [...]

How do you know when your miter gauge is set exactly at 90°? Here’s a method I learned years ago, before I could afford a precision square to check the cut. You’ll need a 24″ [...]

With sweat equity and a few simple tools, you can split strong, stable stock. Though sawn lumber was available to 17th- and 18th-century European woodworkers in Colonial America, many American [...]

While turning wooden pens, students in my woodshop classes kept wearing out the points on the live centers of our mini lathes. The points fit into the hollowed end of the pen mandrel. If the [...]

I buy glue in gallon jugs and, having tried about every glue bottle on the market, I thought I would never find the perfect one. My search ended while washing dishes with my wife one evening.  [...]