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A friend needed a small tool to clean out glue inside small places. So I made him a mini-scraper using an indexable blade from my planer, screwed to a turned handle. Each blade is about $3, plus [...]

I had a project on which I needed to rout out a large area about 3⁄8” deep. It was a wooden case for a Nook reader, and the eReader had to fit into the excavation. I had …

Who says you can’t put a square peg in a round hole?  My scrap bin is made from round cardboard tubes made for concrete forms. These tubes are available at home centers; they’re [...]

“You can’t have too many clamps,” a wise cabinetmaker once said. That is certainly true, but in a small shop, you can easily run out of room to store them. On clamp is so different from [...]

A swing of an arc is the solution to many layout and construction problems. If you think a compass is only for drawing circles, think again. This simple and inexpensive device can divide almost [...]

Find magic in the mundane using this humble problem solver. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned as a woodworker is to never underestimate the seemingly mundane. I have found great [...]

When buying supplies for my shop, I often visit a store where stuff costs around $1. Many items sell for much more at a home improvement store, so I save a pile of money. You never know what [...]

When I teach beginners, one of the most common phrases I hear is, “I cannot get this (insert tool name) to work. What’s wrong?” They hand the tool to me and the fun begins. Though block planes [...]

Venetian blinds purchased from a home center come in a variety of standard sizes. They are cut to the correct width by the retailer, but to adjust the height you remove a number of the slats at [...]

Over the years, I’ve shortened a fair number of long bolts to some desired size rather than traipsing to the hardware store for just a few of the proper length. Unfortunately, I always [...]

I frequently need to clamp wood on edge to saw tenons or work the edge of a plank, but I don’t have a traditional woodworking bench. While studying at the Northwest School of Wooden Boatbuilding, [...]

One of the most accurate approaches for checking a case or other assembly for square is to compare the inside diagonal measurements for equidistance. The easiest way to do this is using pinch [...]