This year when people ask me what they should get their woodworking family and friends for the holidays, my first answer is always a board of hardwood. But if they have a tool in mind, things get [...]
I bought my first set of nice joinery saws a decade ago. Since then, I’ve acquired a handful more. A saw till has been on the to-do list this entire time. Finally, when I discovered a design so [...]
Most of my income comes from weekend art/farmers markets where I sell mainly turned work (bowls). I’ve learned that you need to have a bell curve of prices from cheap to extravagant with the [...]
My turning ability is bound by my lathe – it has a maximum diameter capacity of 16”. That means all my accessory tools, such as my hollowing system and 50cc 20” chainsaw, were acquired because [...]
In my last article, I discussed big box store construction lumber (SYP – Southern yellow pine) and its use in furniture. I’ve found that it’s cheap, high in moisture and needs [...]
The circumference of a 12” bowl (2πr) is about 38”. Multiply that to a lathe’s speed and you’ll realize that wood turners are making almost a mile of shavings a minute. I think it’s fair to say [...]
Construction pine, the stuff you get at the big box stores, has a bad rap with woodworkers. It’s poorly dried, hard to work and moves way too much. It grows too fast so the grain is too wide and [...]
A year ago I built a glorified stump to hew spoon blanks. I spent weeks thinking about my needs, how to make the work safer and the construction robust. It needed to be high enough to so I wasn’t [...]
Woodworkers drill holes. We drill lots of holes. Small ones especially. And we spend lots of money on methods of drilling holes. In the modern era, we’ve progressed from eggbeater drills through [...]
On June 23-24, 2017, a bunch of YouTubers converged on a field in Oklahoma to abandon technology and go old school. The “Skiatook Adventure” differentiated itself from other events via its [...]
My skew and I have a troubled relationship. It is by far my favorite turning tool and when things go right I feel I can do anything. We also fight a lot. To the level where those “never again” [...]
I don’t like tool chests. There, I said it. Let’s see if I’m struck down by lightning from the woodworking gods. I’ve bought them in the past, built them, understand their logic. Protection from [...]