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Seeking Comfort This year hasn’t been easy. There have been times I’ve really identified with Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog’s Day, doing the same things over and over again, with no real [...]

My oscillating spindle sander’s auxiliary table makes quick work of edge sanding short boards and forming perfect circles. Make the table from melamine or a laminate-covered material and fasten [...]

Get a perfect fit using a shop-made jig. Oval and circular inlays are a time-honored method of adding class to a project, such as the top of a jewelry box. It’s an interesting challenge to [...]

I devised a new way to fit a shelf into a dado. I use my router to make a tiny adjustment to the shelf’s thickness instead of fine-tuning my dado set with shims to match the plywood’s thickness. [...]

Pattern-Cut Finials The traditional way to make a square finial on a bandsaw is to mark and cut the pattern on one side of the blank, then tape the offcut back on to the blank in order to guide [...]

Staple Set Pneumatic staplers don’t always set 1/4” crown staples flush.  Driving them the rest of the way with a hammer causes the staples to kink,  so I designed this easy-to-make tool, which I [...]

Being an impatient sort, waiting for glue to reach the bottle’s spout became a pet peeve of mine. To put an end to this, I made a stand with a hole in the top matching the diameter of the [...]

When stropping my plane and chisel blades for that final honing, I always want to be sure that there is little to no chance that a freshly sharpened blade will slide off of the strop and [...]

There’s never enough storage space in a shop, is there? When I recycled some old kitchen cabinets to use in my shop, I added one more drawer to each one—in the toe-kick space.

Sharpening the bevel of a drawknife can be a challenge. Lap the flat side then use this method to do the bevel side. Using 3⁄8” or 1⁄2” or 3⁄4” PEX …

Use a CNC service to make perfect patterns. Woodworkers who make things consisting of more than straight lines need patterns. Patterns open up the worlds of form, shape and detail. They make [...]

I am making a bed headboard which requires multiple mortise and tenon joints on different wood thicknesses. I am routing my mortises and seeing the stop line that was laid out for the mortise was [...]