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Most of us share this pathological habit that’s hard to break. I have a problem. A compulsion, really. It’s not as serious as, say, alcoholism, a food addiction, or an...

Bow Blues After preparing the laminations, bending form and heat box for the fiberglass longbow I planned to build, I mixed the epoxy—and promptly began to mess up the entire...

Pants on Fire When Daylight Savings Time begins, I make it a point to change the batteries in the three smoke detectors in my workshop. It was that time again,...

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...

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...

There are many things we do wrong but we don’t know they’re wrong. In woodworking there are two kinds of mistakes: There’s the garden-variety gaffe where we simply cut a...

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...

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,...

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...

Quicker than starting from scratch, and you don’t waste any material. Editor’s note: Nancy Hiller passed away on August 29th, 2022 after a long battle with cancer. In honor of...

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...

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...