Build a tool chest that’s worthy of your tools. Customize it to fit exactly the tools you want. Project #2115 • Skill Level: Intermediate • Time: 4 days • Cost: $250 I have a confession. I like nice tools. There’s something about boutique tool makers that I love. I’m guessing it’s the combination of high-quality…

A system as elegant as the joint itself. Compound-angle dovetails are some of the most beguiling joints in all woodworking. But, as John Lennon once suggested, they can be as difficult to make as “fixing a hole in the ocean.” Well, maybe not that hard—but it all begins with figuring out  those odd angles. I’ve…

Fine furniture calls for an elegant drawer. A master cabinetmaker shares his approach to design and fitting. There are just a few things my partner at Philadelphia Furniture Workshops, Alan Turner, and I don’t see eye-to-eye on. But how to make a good drawer isn’t one of them. When building furniture, we probably spend as…

Tool: Quick-Release Pock-It Hole Clamp Shop Now Manufacturer: Rockler MSRP: $25.99 Pocket hole joints are quick and easy to make. For some applications, such as face frames, they’re perfect. But if you’ve ever tried to assemble a face frame with narrow rails and closely spaced screws, you know that holding the pieces together can be…

Save on clamps with this traditional technique for panel glue-ups. A “spring joint” is a traditional method where you join the edges of two boards to make a wider panel and leave a tiny gap in the middle of the joint. The gap reduces the number of clamps you need to make the panel and…

How to make strong mortise and tenon joints with a plunge router and a tablesaw. Imagine turning the clock back 500 years and visiting a fellow woodworker in any large European town. You could instantly strike up a conversation about the fine points of building a door with mortise and tenon joints—he’d know exactly what…

A hassle-free fast track to frameless cabinets. I’ve always liked the clean, modern look of cabinets built without face frames. My early attempts involved building plywood boxes first and applying hardwood edging later. But cutting, fitting, gluing and clamping each edging piece was frustratingly slow. But that was nothing compared to leveling the edging flush…

Puzzling lubrication. Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the August 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine I ran out of mutton tallow this morning! I searched my tool chests, under the benches and in the drawers hoping to find just enough white magic to ease the passage of the big jointer plane up and…

Practice Traditional Building Joinery on a Smaller Scale Project #2104 • Skill Level: Advanced • Time: 2 Weeks • Cost: $300 During my 14 years living in Europe, I marveled repeatedly at how these beautiful timber framed structures had withstood the test of time—I remember one awe-inspiring timber framed house near Wiesbaden, Germany, with a placard on…

I use biscuit joints in lots of small projects, particularly for joining rails to legs. I usually reference from the bottom of the plate joiner rather than use its fence. When I want to make an offset joint, I cut the slots in the rails first. Then I add a large shim plate to the…

Like many woodworkers, I own a basic half-blind dovetail jig, which I use only occasionally for making utility drawers. During the interim, I tend to forget the setup procedures and spacing required to create those elusive “perfect” dovetails. To help refresh my aging memory, I made up a full-width sample joint that I can refer…

Cutting your own dovetails is a right of passage for many woodworkers. Many out there find it intimidating when they first start though. Here are a few techniques that will help you out (or help you improve the skills you already have). 1. Cut By Hand When dovetailing by hand, be bold. Don’t bother with…

Hand tools are the way to go for this traditional joint. Tapered sliding dovetails are multipurpose joints traditionally used for drawer dividers, holding legs in place on a pedestal table and attaching tops to case pieces. The primary reason for a tapered joint (instead of a straight joint) is the reduced friction over its length….

Discover five cross-grain construction strategies to help keep your tabletops and chest lids flat. Cross-grain construction tends to freak out most beginning woodworkers, but it’s a viable construction method in many cases. Wide tables and chest lids often employ breadboard ends to keep things flat, as well as cover end grain. If it’s done right,…

Plow planes are some of the easiest joinery planes to use , once you know a few tricks to getting good results. I struggled with the tools until Don McConnell (now a planemaker at Clark & Williams) set me straight years ago with one simple piece of advice: “Each hand should have a separate job,”…

This versatile router joint is perfect for production work. When I need to batch out a bunch of drawer boxes, I use a lock miter router bit. Not only does this bit create a joint with a clean, mitered look on the outside, but the profile of the bit gives the drawer a good mechanical…

How do you make strong joints in wood like this? When I need wood for a project, my first stop is a small mill near my shop that specializes in local hardwoods. On one particular visit I noticed a pile of offcuts sitting out in the rain. As I pawed through the pile. A slab…

Your joints will last for decades if you know how to apply your glue. Much of woodworking is joinery: An edge-to-edge joint is used to join two or more boards to create a tabletop, dovetails are carefully cut and fit to create a box for a chest of drawers. And the corners of a door…

Some people get pretty worked up about using the right word for the right joint. Perhaps they have a point since imprecise use of terms can lead to confusion. So, to be precise, here are the proper definitions: A dado is a U-shaped, square-bottomed channel cut across the grain. A groove looks just like a…

Editor’s note: This dovetail method is referenced in the October 2021 issue of Popular Woodworking, so we are republishing it to the home page. The blog below was originally published in September 2012 to coincide with the release of the video.  I’m in the midst of making a place to put my woodworking stuff, a…

Destroying 10 joints taught us surprising lessons about joint design, wood failure and the tenacity of modern glue. Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the December 2005 issue of Popular Woodworking, when Robert W Lang decided he really felt like smashing things with an anvil. It has been said that we learn more from…

Our staff offers simple, strong and fast ways to make this important furniture component. In woodworking magazines, books and plans there’s almost always an omission that’s big enough to drive a truck through: How to build the drawers for the project. Usually the woodworking author (always well-intended, I can assure you) writes instructions such as:…

Simple joinery creates a compact cabinet with full-size storage.    When I spied an old machinist’s chest loaded with narrow drawers in my neighbor’s garage, I knew my small tools were finally going to have a permanent home. My version isn’t nearly as grand, but it’s just as useful, and it only took a couple…

An elegant exercise in bent lamination and joinery. When I started taking woodworking classes, I needed a convenient way to carry my tools. After looking for just the right toolbox, I decided to design something to meet my specific needs with some elements of style and craftsmanship to make it fun to build and use….

To build the ultimate jig, use a tap. When I build a jig or fixture that needs to come apart, I don’t use wood screws, I use machine screws–and tap holes in the wood to receive them. It’s very easy to do, and requires only a few special tools. Why do it? Maybe I’m just…

Research gives names to unknown artisans. David Rowley, Freegift Wells, Amos Stewart, Orren Haskens, Eli Kidder…ever hear of these guys? They were Shaker cabinetmakers, the names behind one of the most unified and influential movements in American furnituremaking. You might think that they would have been completely anonymous, like most woodworkers of that era, but…

This extra-long mortising fence helps you cut “blind” joints in your work. Cabinets and furniture often have “blind” joints − dados, grooves or rabbets that are stopped at one end so you can’t see the joint on the outside of the case. Sometimes these joints are  “double-blind,” meaning they are stopped at both ends. A…

Creative thinking and dirt-simple jigs make the joinery a straightforward task. Full-Size Plan:  Download I tend to think of Chippendale chairs as highly ornate. But there are startlingly simple examples of the style as well. After encountering some of the simpler versions of these chairs, I became fascinated. I love the interplay of curves and angles,…

A good substitute for traditional methods, this joint is strong and easy to make. A couple of hundred years ago, most drawers were assembled with hand-cut dovetail joints – half-blinds up front, through dovetails at the back. But it’s the 21st century now. Many of us don’t have time to hand-cut dovetails. We want something…

Build a dedicated setup that creates perfect joints every time. Imagine routing perfect box joints whenever you want, without having to waste time setting up your router table. This notion may seem half-baked, because box joints can be fussy to fit. But it isn’t! This jig allows you to go directly from milling the parts…

Simple joinery allows (time to add) cool design details. I like traditional joinery, and I enjoy working with hand tools. But I also like completing a project without having it drag on because the joinery is labor intensive. This table has all the earmarks of a traditional heirloom: beautiful hardwood, classic proportions and solid construction….

Cut precision joints on a large top. Breadboard ends are old devices for improving a solid-wood top. They act like cleats to hold the top flat, which is particularly important when there’s minimal understructure, such as on a trestle table. They also cover end grain, which can help prevent a top from cracking. They’re often…

Methods that allow wood to move with the seasons. About a decade ago, I made a drop-leaf table for a book of projects. When it came time to mount the top, I just drilled pilot holes and drove cut nails through the top into the aprons. Are you horrified? Actually, the approach worked great. In…

Jointing with a Planer I across some wonderful oak boards for a small table I wanted to build. The problem was the boards were too wide for my jointer, and I didn’t want to rip them any narrower. I solved my dilemma with this planer sled that allows me to use my planer as jointer….

Board-Stretching Joint I bought a planer/molder so I could make my own moldings. My living room required one 28‘.-long molding, but all I had to make it were 12‘. boards. I didn’t want to settle for separate 12‘. molding sections mitered during installation. I wanted this molding to be one continuous piece. Joining the boards…

Kreg recently rolled out their new line of pocket hole jigs, meaning that the hold K3/4/5 hierarchy is no more. In its place is a new series of jigs aimed at woodworkers of all levels. So which one is right for you? Read on! Note: Each jig listed here can drill pocket holes in pieces…

Period woodworking trades in London were strictly regulated. I’ve temporarily put down my 5⁄16” joiner’s mortising chisel in favor of a 2″ chisel for chopping carpenter’s mortises. I’m timber framing a workshop, and while whomping away on 2″-wide mortises, I have time to think. My principal work has always been as a “joiner” in the…

Tool: Groove Center Buy Now Manufacturer: Prazi MSRP: $149 A lock miter is an excellent joint for building boxes and small cases. It creates lots of surface area for glue and a tight mechanical fit—the two requirements of any good woodworking joint. There’s one big downside, however. Setting up a lock miter bit in a router…

Baffle your friends with perplexing joints Press a dovetailed board into another board with matching sockets, and you’ve created woodworking’s most iconic joint. The dovetails and sockets wedge the boards together, so the joint can’t pull apart; the only way to disassemble it is to lift the dovetailed board back out of the sockets. So,…

b Tool: Beadlock Pro Manufacturer: Rockler MSRP: $149.99 I looked to the Beadlock Pro recently when I found myself needing four loose-tenon joints for a project – I wanted an economic but quick solution, and didn’t want to make a router jig. The Beadlock system, which cuts mortises up to 3 1⁄2” wide, uses a standard drill…

Conquer some fun joinery challenges with this geometric Baillie Scott build. As soon as I saw Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott’s 1901 occasional table on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I knew I had to make one. Baillie Scott (1865-1945) was an architect at the forefront of the Arts & Crafts…

Tool: Rectangular Mallet Manufacturer: Blue Spruce Toolworks MSRP: $85 For some woodworkers, building your own mallet is a rite of passage. After using dozens of student-made mallets, however, I wonder if many of us would be better off with a well-balanced, professionally made mallet. If you are a person who wants to buy a thing…

When you slide open a small drawer that fits nice and tight, it’s a pleasure to see well-crafted joints.  Small, handcut dovetails answer well, but sawing and chopping them requires a lot of skill and practice. Here’s a joint that’s far easier to make: a half-blind tongue and rabbet. It’s all done on the tablesaw….

Tips and techniques for beautiful bowties Furniture made from thick wood slabs, with gorgeous grain and natural edges, at once rustic and refined, has remained popular ever since George Nakashima first introduced it to U.S. woodworkers in the 1950s. Better yet, woodworkers of almost all skill levels can build something with a natural-edged slab. If…

With a router, straight bit and plywood scrap, turn a weak joint into a superhero of strength. One of the strongest joints in woodworking is a properly fit mortise-and-tenon and the opposite in strength is a simple butt joint. For years I built base frames with mortise-and-tenon joints at the rear and mitered corners at…

Though not traditional, router patterns make quick work of the inlay. In southeastern Pennsylvania, just northwest of Philadelphia, is Chester County. It was one of the original three counties formed by William Penn in 1682, under a charter signed by King Charles II. In 1729, a large portion of the western county was split off…

Many countries have their own woodworking traditions, which are often a combination of mythology and ideology. The Japanese  are no exception, and those traditions are part of the foundation of my work. There is a temple that ancient Japanese carpenters built. Its columns, hewn from trees, are positioned as when each was a standing tree….

Simple tools, techniques, and joinery deliver elegant results. It’s the stuff of arguments: Which tools in the shop are really the most important for joinery? It’s almost like arguing the top movie or the best shortstop of all time. There is no one answer that satisfies everyone (although “The Maltese Falcon” and “Ernie Banks” should)….

Tool: Kreg K5 Manufacturer: Kreg Price: $129 Pocket hole joinery has been synonymous with the name Kreg for years. Kreg’s jigs have always been affordable and user-friendly. With the new K5 jig, the folks at Kreg have managed to tweak their flagship kit to make it even more user-friendly. For starters, there’s the almost-automatically adjusting clamping…

Extra-large finger joints add a distinctive touch to any project. Every woodworker is going to ask, “How did you do that?” Most finger joints are pretty small in scale and easy to cut on a tablesaw or router table. But what if you want really, really big finger joints? Can you imagine making accurate cuts…

Editors note: This item no longer appears to be available. Dowels and loose tenons have been around for some time. Both have stood the test of time, making strong, simple, reliable joints. While there are a number of manufacturers, these Expansible Dowel Pins and Compressed Loose Tenons from Laurier Wood Craft are a nice, well-thought-out…

Sam Maloof’s sculpted rocking chairs are iconic, so much so that his name is synonymous with that furniture style. As his chair designs advanced, so did their construction.

You can use a router to joint two boards at once. This is a really handy trick if you don’t have a long-bed jointer or you don’t have a jointer at all, and you’re working with really long stock. The trick is to rout both boards at the same time, so the edges mirror each other….

The Brits love a bandsaw. Or rather they’re not all that fond of table saws (a much longer post…). But because of their love of bandsaws they use them. Not like we do here in the states. A bandsaw can sit in the corner of our shop waiting to cut a curve for much too…

These jigs help you hand cut flawless mortise-and-tenon joints. By Jeff Miller Mortise-and-tenon joints tend to frustrate woodworkers far more than dovetails do. That’s no mystery; they are genuinely harder to cut than dovetails. The large flat tenon cheeks and mortise walls need to be flat, smooth and parallel, the shoulders have to line up…

Editor’s note: We have some great content on drawboring – check out Chris’s article here and some of Chuck’s period furniture observations here. Andy Rawls submitted this video and caption to the Shop Blog – if you have a tip, commentary or any other type of content to submit to the blog, send me a…

I’ve long been struck by the aptness of our English word “cope” – “I just can’t cope,” “I’m barely coping” – in light of its meaning in a woodworker’s lexicon. Sure, some of us may use the word when describing our emotional state, but more often we use it to denote a technique for joining two…

Curvy furniture is great to look at and usually offers a tactile aesthetic that makes it appealing. Holding it all together is the joinery – and whether it’s dovetails, tenons or lap joinery, creating that joinery on a curve adds a new level of complication. Whether made by hand or by machine, most of our training on…

One of the first joints I learned to cut during my City & Guilds of London training was the T-bridle, which we used for the leg-to-rail connection on a modern end table, one of the projects that made up the curriculum. Like other variants of the bridle joint, this one is often used for table bases…

Let’s face it, a lot of woodworking is really box building. The good news is that a little bit of simple joinery and a little extra effort can make any box look incredible! The perfect example is a jewelry box, or other small-box build. By adding feet to the box it quickly becomes more than a…

In the next few months, I’ve got a lot of furniture to make; Josselyn (my partner) and I just moved to Cincinnati from Maine. Last week, I built a new coffee table for our place. This week I’m building a new kitchen table, in between setting into my new job and figuring out where to buy…

The dovetail is the drawer joint of choice in many a classic drawer, but for a more mechanized world, the drawer joint of choice is often the half-blind tongue-in-groove. Sturdy, interlocking, mechanical without the need of nails, and quickly made on a table saw this joint often appears in commercial cabinetry (in a good way). This…

Frank Klausz reveals the family secret – how to make the watertight wood-on-wood joint for the bottom of his sharpening pond – a boatbuilder’s joint taught to him by his grandfather. It takes a special shop-made tool…from a material that you likely already have on hand. (I think I’ve enough of this particular thing to…

  My workbench project is now underway, but I’m going to avoid showing any detail or videos on the build process until it’s finished. However, I will be posting some of the methods I adopt that translate more broadly into other applications. With that in mind I needed to laminate 2x4s together to make the…

Normally, a planer can’t take the twist out of a board; it merely makes the top side parallel to the bottom. To get a board flat without a jointer, fool the planer into thinking the bottom of your board is already flat.

Woodworking is a craft steeped in knowledge handed down through generations. The techniques have been tested and rethought and retested time and time again. While experimentation is a wonderful thing for the craft, there is simultaneously a good deal of importance in attention to detail and being exact. Learning the old ways and time-tested woodworking techniques…

  I’ve wanted to make a new mallet for a while now and at last found a bit of time to take the project forward. I knew I’d want to make a joiner’s mallet. This style is the classic type that has been typically found in a carpenter or joiner’s toolbox for many a long year….

Any experience making or repairing chairs gives you a little bit of insight into how important the joinery is in chairs. And chairmakers have long used socket joints – joints made with a round hole and a round tenon – because they can be made quickly and easily. One problem: these are a rather weak type…

Q: I would like to try biscuit joinery but I do not own a biscuit joiner. Is it feasible to use a router to make the slots? A: A router with a 5/32-in. slot cutter will work fine for making an occasional biscuit joint. You can alter the slot depth to accommodate No. 0, No….

Router Table Box Joints Making box joints on a router table is a time-saving alternative to making them on the tablesaw. You don’t have to fuss with a dado set, for one. More importantly, using a router table leaves your tablesaw free for making those unexpected cuts that every project inevitably requires. This box joint…

Perfect Edge Joints A 6-step tune-up sets your jointer straight. By Dave Munkittrick   Jointers are simple machines with few moving parts, but the two beds, the fence and the cutterhead all have to be in alignment for a jointer to function properly. Few things are more frustrating or more common than problems with jointers….

Loose Tenon Joinery Rout 4 variations of these super-strong joints with a versatile shop made jig. By Bill Hylton I’ve used a number of different methods to create mortise and tenon joints, but I keep coming back to loose tenons, because they’re easy, strong and versatile. Instead of cutting a tenon on one part and…

Carbide Cutterheads for Jointers Cut manufactured materials and make fewer knife changes By Dave Munkittrick The latest thing in jointers is the segmented carbide insert cutterhead. Instead of high-speed steel (HSS) knives, the cutterhead is peppered with an array of solid-carbide inserts (photo at right). During our 8-in. jointer tool test, we had a chance…

In the lowboy build that I’m working on for the February 2014 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, I’ve decided to use pocket screws to attach the lowboy top instead of driving nails through the top into the parts below. When some woodworkers hear that, I get the wrinkled-nose effect, as in “What the hell are…

Miter joints can be a real source of frustration. The pieces need to be the exact length and the cut surfaces need to be as close to perfect as you can get them. If they don’t look great right off the saw, use a shooting board and a plane, or rub the surfaces on a…

In 2006, as I began my first round at Popular Woodworking Magazine (PWM), I was told I had to build a workbench. Even with then editor Christopher Schwarz chest deep in workbench publications, it wasn’t a mandate as much as it was a necessity. In the PWM shop, there was no usable bench empty and…

Tool snobs beware: This post is about an inexpensive tool that is useful for woodworking and without an ounce of style or charm. In the cabinet industry, plastic laminate files are used for filing the edges of plastic laminate after trimming with a router. In that world, they are a consumable item and are purchased…

It’s not often you get a chance to use egg-crate joinery in period furniture work. In fact, building the Carolina cellarette in the February 2013 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine is the first time I have used if I remember correctly. When the time came to build bottle dividers for the bottom of the case,…

Extra-Large Loose Tenons By Brad Holden Big parts require big joinery. The success of Festool’s Domino joiner, a portable machine that makes smallscale loose-tenon joints, has prompted Festool to up the ante. The new Domino XL makes much larger joints— large enough for almost any project. If you consider the original Domino to be the…

By Christopher Schwarz From the Spring 2004 issue of Woodworking Magazine, pages 8-11 When I was taught to cut rabbets in my first woodworking class, we made them with two cuts on the table saw. You’ve probably seen this technique in books and magazines before. For the first cut, the work is flat on the…

Joinery is one of the most important skills to have as a woodworker, and it’s also one of the most talked about, demonstrated and addressed. Now, you can get a complete library of joinery resources – 20 different items for less than $90, in Popular Woodworking’s Joinery Made Easy Value Pack.

In the world of design, you read a lot about the acceptance or rejection of symmetry. Wait, wait. Don’t go away. This blog entry, by the way, has to do with Audrey Hepburn’s gorgeous face. You can reject symmetry in design based on the fact that human beings are decidedly not symmetrical. A perfectly symmetrical…

I’ve been working on a cherry and bird’s-eye maple entry table for the October 2012 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, and as I was installing the upper drawer stretcher I remembered how puzzled I was when faced with cutting my first one. It’s just a single dovetail cut on the end of the stretcher that…

Slideshow: Keyed Miter Joints   I like the decorative effect that keyed miter joints lend to an otherwise simple box. But they also add a great deal of strength to a notoriously weak joint. Here’s a quick slideshow on cutting and installing keys in miter joints using a very simple jig featured in the August…

From mastering hand tools to router basics, 18th-century joinery to Japanese hand tools and joinery, you’ll find it all among the five new DVD selections now available  to order at ShopWoodworking.com (and four of them are on “pre-sale” which means you save 20 percent if you order before the DVDs arrive in the warehouse). “Handsaws:…

I started using stringed packing tape to glue up mitered joints on small jewelry boxes years ago. To glue up mitered boxes you just tape the points of the miters tight and add glue to the joint. Because you tape up all four joints and then roll up the box, it’s a tight assembly. Just…

Internet woodworking forums are great places. You can observe or enter into a debate about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and you can follow that on a tangent about what’s the best type of pin for the angels to dance on, and someone will likely come along to sell…

Anyone who has glued up a few doors knows how frustrating it can be attempting to build assemblies that turn out both flat and square. As I’m working on a cabinet article for the April issue of the magazine, I’m happy to have a few quick jigs on hand that make the process much less…

Table Saw Blades & The Laws of Physics If you wanted to make a device to throw pieces of wood at a high rate of speed, how would you design it? You could look at the machines used in sports for throwing things and start with a spinning disc, say 10″ in diameter. If you…

Perfect Edge Joints A 6-step tune-up sets your jointer straight. By Dave Munkittrick Purchase the complete version of this woodworking technique story from AWBookstore.com. Jointers are simple machines with few moving parts, but the two beds, the fence and the cutterhead all have to be in alignment for a jointer to function properly. Few things…

This is a stupid trick. In fact, I’m sure you have a better way to do this. But I don’t. This week I glued up a couple Welsh stick chairs – each had 12 spindles and 28 through-mortises that must be glued and wedged. The top spindle deck of each chair was one massive glue-up,…

Contributing Editor Glen D. Huey made this short video while working on the cover project for the upcoming November 2011 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine (which should start arriving in subscriber mailboxes the week of Oct. 10). The piece of furniture is called a “Lady’s Desk,” and it’s among the 27 projects in in our…

Last winter, I was puzzling out a way to make edge joints that are just the opposite of what we normally want – perfectly straight. I wanted free-flowing curves and I wanted to join contrasting colors of wood species. So the question was how to match the two joint lines on the different pieces of…

New Connector System from Lamello New Clamex® P biscuit shaped connector system from Lamello allows users to quickly and easily create nearly invisible Ready To Assemble (RTA) connections. Made from rugged fiberglass reinforced plastic, with a new metal cam lever, Clamex P can join any miter angle without the use of glue or screws. This…

I’ve been working, albeit slowly, on a small desk from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) – I wrote about full-blind dovetails found on the desk in an early post (read it here). The base of the desk holds two drawers set side-by-side. That means there is a drawer runner centered in the…

Iron Out Those Dents Here’s a classic tip that everyone should know: It’s not hard to make a dent in wood and fortunately, it’s not hard to get one out, either. All you need is a household iron (don’t worry, it won’t get wrecked, but you may want to ask permission if it’s not yours)…

I’ve told this story to many woodworkers, but I have yet to post it in a blog. One day before Dad passed, he called me to complain that he was having to fit every tenon to it’s mortise by hand. (Many woodworkers choose to work that way, but to us it was a detriment in…

“The Joinery Challenge,” a new DVD from Ron Herman, is now available for pre-order at ShopWoodworking.com (and on sale for $5 off the regular price through the end of June). This exercise is one Ron had to pass when he was in his apprenticeship on his way to becoming a journeyman housewright (he’s now a…

If you’re interested in learning to cut dovetails by hand, boy do you have choices. Google hand-cut dovetail videos and the returns total more than 100,000 (no, I didn’t count them). Yesterday I watched Rob Cosman’s second DVD on dovetails, hence the name “Hand-cut Dovetails 2.0.” It’s been 10 years since his first dovetail video….

What makes woodworking fun for me is that I learn something new nearly every day. This past week, Monday was a day filled with learning – I spent the day with Ron Herman as he filmed the first of two new DVDs. The project for the day was a joinery exercise that walks through nine…

As I’ve written before in this blog, many woodworkers are amazed to learn that I hand-cut my dovetails even though I consider myself mostly a power-tool woodworker – I would say I’m about 70 percent power and 30 percent hand. One area that I have used hand tools primarily is for dovetail work. At this…

Between meetings, classes and regular living, I’ve cut 132 dovetails during the last couple weeks to build my next project, which will be featured on the cover of the June 2011 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. Many of these dovetails have been mitered at their front corners, which I cut freehand (thank you Joseph Moxon)….

“Now let us drink to the success of our hopeless endeavor.”— Russian dissident toast My plan for the June 2011 cover project was a 17th-century “book press” from Samuel Pepys library – considered by many historians to be the first glass-doored bookcase ever built. It is a massive example of carved oak and many mullions….

When I first started working here at the magazine we actually had time to go out for lunch each week (we now eat at our desks), and one day after eating at a Thai restaurant we wandered into a hippie-run gallery. Before being overcome by patchouli and someone’s very intrusive orange aura, I spied something…

I’m just about to resaw my maple version of Roubo’s Folding Bookstand that’s based on Roy Underhill’s article, and I made a full-size pattern of the elevation of the project. Want it? It’s a pdf that shows the scrollwork at the top and bottom of the bookstand, plus it shows where you should make the…

After making the down-and-dirty folding bookstand in a video last week, I decided to make another pair as a very late Christmas gift. I am not a good friend. These will be maple and sized more like the one from Roy Underhill’s article in the February 2011 issue. Of course, after building the first bookstand,…

If you are having trouble with the Roubo’s Folding Bookstand article from the February 2011 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, I urge you to attempt to lay out the joints on some wood and give it a try. If it still vexes you, however, then this short video might help. Disclaimer: This may or may…

One of the most-popular projects I made last year was the Moxon Double-screw Vise from the December 2010 issue. It’s popularity was eclipsed only by the Handplane Birdhouse in the August 2010 issue. One guy built 12 of them. I have received some complaints about the Moxon Double-screw. Not about how it works – I…

I have four bookcases filled with woodworking books in my office at home, another two bookcases in my office at work and boxes and boxes of them in the basement. And the list of the woodworking books I’m hunting for grows only longer. It is time to do something radical. It’s time to start a…

Clenching a nail – sometimes spelled “clinching” – is an essential traditional woodworking skill. But until you are clenching like a pro, there are some baby steps you can take. In the video above, I show how I clenched the 4d cut headless brads from Tremont Nail Co. that secure the battens to the flat-panel…

Whenever I teach a class, at least one student will say to me “you really don’t like measuring, do you?” I don’t dislike measuring, but I try to avoid it whenever I can. When I’m trying to get one part to fit another, the numbers become irrelevant and measuring often becomes an opportunity to make…

Peter Follansbee and Mike Siemsen have cleared up the mystery of the pinwheel-shaped wooden nails. The pinwheel shape of the nails is caused by the shell or gimlet bit used to make the hole. The long edges of the bit bite into the grain, tearing it. When the peg is driven into the hole, it…

The pegs that hold the joinery of old furniture together are always interesting. I’ve seen pegs with their heads shaped square and octagonal, which are obviously the product of either splitting and whittling. A perfectly round headed peg says “Home Depot dowel” to me, though many Arts & Crafts pieces use a round-headed peg and…

Whenever I stink at something in woodworking, it becomes my lunch-hour obsession. While chomping an apple, I’ll read everything I can about the topic. Then I’ll steal off to the shop to practice what I’ve read. This is how I learned to saw, to sharpen, to cut moulding by hand, clean my ears, mortising and…

If you ever needed more evidence that woodworkers have always been a parsimonious lot, look no further than the December 1901 issue of the British magazine The Woodworker. In an article on wedging tenons the author offers the above illustration with the comment: Fig. 21 shows how to cut the wedges from the waste wood…

General Tools recently announced the release of the E

There are few things worse than too-soft screwdrivers. Lima beans, Care Bears and eye surgery with a teaspoon immediately come to mind. When I blogged about my favorite “perfect handle” screwdrivers before I headed off into the great Sausage Kingdom, I mentioned that I didn’t have the heart to test the imported ones sold by…

I have four sets of screwdrivers. Three for loaning and one for using. The set I never loan is made up of tools that were made (mostly) by the H.D. Smith & Co. company of Plantsville, Conn. Usually these are referred to as “perfect handle” screwdrivers. They are single drop-forged pieces of steel with a…

Plate Joiner Tips and Techniques 12 ways to build cabinets faster and better with biscuits By Jon Stumbras   Fast, Accurate Face Frames After you’ve put together a few face frames with dowels or pocket screws and discovered that the pieces don’t line up, you may hear a faint inner voice. It will be saying…

In my DVD “Building Furniture With Hand Planes,” we offer plans for a Shaker Hanging Cabinet, which is what I’m working on throughout the DVD. However, as some viewers have pointed out, the plans on the DVD are for a cabinet with a solid-panel door. In the DVD, I’m building a divided-light door. If you…

This week I’ll be taking a sack back Windsor chair class with maestro Michael Dunbar at The Windsor Institute, his school in Hampton, New Hampshire (a state my daughter has re-named “New Hampster”). This is my third chair class. I took my first one in Canada with David Fleming. My second class was with bodger…

If you ever decide to delve into traditional woodworking, you quickly learn that wedges are your friend. Build chairs? You need to wedge all the joints. Traditional doors? Wedge your through-tenons. Workbenches? Wedge everything you can. But where do wedges come from? There’s no wedge store or magical government wedge repository. You don’t want to…

For this Roubo workbench to work, I’ve got 16 joints that have to come together all at once. There is not an option to glue things up in stages and still guarantee success. As a result, I tried to give myself some wiggle room. I fit the edge cheeks of the tenons a little looser…

If you’ve been trying to reach me during the last few weeks, I apologize. The answers to your questions are: 1. Almost any species of wood will do fine for your workbench. 2. There is no quality difference between Veritas and Lie-Nielsen handplanes. 3. Eagle, and sometimes plov. When I stop answering my phone and…

I don’t like adverbs , you know, words like “extremely,” “fallaciously” or “throbbingly.” But I am at a complete loss to otherwise describe the wack-nutty bendable wood that Jeff Miller showed me this weekend during the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Chicago. Here’s what it looked like: Jeff took a hunk out of a plastic…

I’m thankful when I can see disaster coming. Being able to spot a potential problem is the gift of experience, but it is also like a tranquilizer dart used to take down a rabid African elephant. Today I was cleaning up the sliding dovetail socket for the fourth and final leg of this French-style workbench….

To modern eyes, old-school workbenches look like they are going to self-destruct. The legs are tenoned into the benchtop (which moves with the seasons). And stretchers (that don’t move) are tenoned into the legs. Something has to give, right? Otherwise your benchtop will be cleaved asunder, creating a “split-top Roubo” a la naturel. I’ve dealt…

After a little tweaking of the mortise, the first leg went in. You can see a gap at the shoulder (it’s about 1/16″ now). That’s actually what’s left of the rough underside of the top. I’ll take down the middle hump on the underside and it should close right back up. Assuming, that is, I…

I started cutting the mortises and the dovetail sockets in the benchtop today and I can tell you a few things: 1. The dovetail socket takes about half the time and effort to make compared to the 5″ x 5″ x 1-1/2″ mortise. And it’s a cinch to get it crisp and perfect. 2. I’m…

Things I hate: Gouging my own eyes out with a spoon, and being pulled away from a project for more than a couple days. It’s been a week since I’ve been able to devote any time to the legs of my workbench. This morning I sneaked into the shop and hid there for three hours….

All week I’ve been itching to saw these joints that connect the legs to the benchtop. I’ve never cut a 5″-deep dovetail joint in a 6×6, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It was easy going until my enormous saw suddenly stopped cutting. Had the flesh-detecting technology in my tenon saw kicked in? (Ye…

A few weeks ago I posted a blog entry about using a flush-cut saw to slice tenon shoulders. I must have written it poorly because several readers requested a video of the process. So here you go. A couple details and thoughts: 1. You can use a chisel to help position the saw’s guide on…

I’m think I’m a decent dovetailer. My joints are tight and I get things done. Heck, I can even teach dovetailing to others when pressed. So why don’t I post a video of how quickly I can cut a dovetail joint? Because we’d likely run out of videotape. Truth is, I think I’m a bit…

Many woodworkers think it’s bonkers to use a curved cutting edge in a jointer plane. After all, the plane is designed to make things straight and flat, so using a curved cutter seems … let’s say “counterintuitive.” But the more I use a curved iron, the more I like it. I’m always stumbling on little…

Perhaps I’m the oddball here, but I’ve always found cutting tenons by hand to be more challenging than any sort of dovetailing. Tenons require a lot of precision sawing if you want to avoid farting around with a shoulder plane, chisel or float. And teaching others to cut perfect shoulders is a challenge. I usually…

My next project is a close copy of a walnut side table from the White Water Shaker community. We’ll be publishing the plans in an upcoming issue and donating the finished project to the nonprofit group of volunteers who are restoring the amazingly intact Shaker buildings. I spent a summer afternoon measuring the project and…

Dovetail maestro Rob Cosman again makes us all feel inadequate with his latest video in which he cuts a half-blind dovetail joint in 6 minutes and 52 seconds. Cosman uses Northern white pine, which you might think is cheating , he can cut the tail in one stroke. However, his pins are so skinny (just…

My sister-in-law killed her college landlord with a voodoo doll, so don’t try tell me that curses don’t exist. The curse du jour is an innocent flat-panel door I’m building for a wall-hung cabinet. It couldn’t be a simpler piece of work. It’s a single panel of cherry with two battens on the backside that…

One of my favorite advertisements shows a guy with a handsaw staring at a chair that has legs that are about 4″ long. In his efforts to stop the chair from wobbling, he kept cutting down the legs until they would look about right if they were attached to an opossum. (The ad is a…

10 Techniques for Tighter, Faster, Stronger Miter Joints By Gary Wentz Miter joints provide one main advantage over other joints: A miter joint hides end grain and brings face grain neatly together. Everything else about miter joints is a hassle. They’re fussy, time-consuming and easy to screw up. But there are ways to minimize those…

Tablesaw Box Joints A shop-made jig with micro-adjust guarantees perfect joints. By Tim Johnson   Box joints are the savvy woodworker’s alternative to dovetails. Strong, great-looking and quickly made, box joints are an especially good choice when you have a large number of items to produce. To make them, you need your tablesaw, a miter…

Perfect Butt Joints in Laminate An underscribe router attachment guarantees success. By Brad Holden   Long countertops or those that turn corners need butt joints. You can use several methods to make this joint, but the easiest way to get tight-fitting, professional-looking results is with an underscribe attachment on a trim router. The term underscribe…

During the Woodworking in America Conference, there were two quotes that really stood out from all the bon mots that were hurled. First up, Toshio Odate: “I speak broke English. I don’t speak bull***t.” And Roy Underhill: “We had a saying at Colonial Williamsburg: Stop trying to improve the 18th century.” It was that second…

Even though I am 100-percent confident in my ability to join two boards together using the tail-of-the-bird joint, I am always riveted when I get to see how other accomplished woodworkers go about the task. In fact, when I watch others work, I never fail to pick up some important details. On Saturday at our…

Back in June, some of you might remember that I was building an Ohio copy of a fascinating three-legged Chinese stool. And some of you might also remember how I flamed out at the very end of the project, cutting a single tenon at the wrong angle, ruining the entire thing with no time to…

Question: I often see dovetail layout lines left showing on the exterior of pieces. As I’m in final cleanup up of a blanket chest (yes, the Union Village chest from your article) the layout lines are still visible after I’ve got the piece smooth.  However, the lines do not uniformly show on all edges. What…

This morning I decided to repair the vintage Chinese stool that we knocked apart earlier this year. Senior Editor Robert W. “Bob” Lang is building a couple reproductions for the winter 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine, and the parts of this vintage stool have been gathering dust on one of my sawbenches. I need that…

10 Tricks for Tighter Joints By Luke Hartle 1. Cauls distribute pressure It’s not easy to get enough squeeze in the middle of a big box to force home dado or biscuit joints. Big cauls are the answer. A caul is simply a thick, straight board. I make my cauls from stiff wood, such as…

3 Tapered Legs on the Jointer Advanced jointer techniques yield smooth, consistent tapers. By Seth Keller After I learned to cut tapered legs on the jointer, I never went back to my bandsaw or tablesaw. Legs cut on the jointer take less time and, best of all, require a whole lot less sanding. This is…

One of best ways to learn how a piece of furniture is put together is to take it apart. Many of the best furniture makers I know who work in historical styles have done a fair bit of restoration or conservation work Last week at the Woodworking in America: Furniture Construction and Design conference, all…

In early Gustav Stickley pieces, doors with divided lights were joined with mitered mullions. It’s an intriguing look, but was used only for a few years. My next project for the magazine has a divided door, and even though I haven’t been able to find an original example of the piece I’m building with mitered…

I have never used the right amount of glue , well that’s the way everyone else sees it. Whenever Publisher Steve Shanesy comes in while I’m gluing, he’s bound to make a comment that I’ve got too much glue on a surface. My reply has always been: Better too much than too little. I’ve never…

Though Charleston is the most ethnically diverse and open Southern city I’ve ever visited, its taste in furniture has long been English. And because I am working on a book (which should be out this fall) on English furniture construction circa 1839, I took an afternoon during my visit to prowl one of the largest…

In my review of drawbore pins in the Summer 2009 issue, one of my gripes with many of the tools were the round handles. A round handle plus a round pin equals a tool on the floor. My vintage pins had tapered octagonal handles. They stay put on the bench. I praised the Lee Valley…

Don’t buy the knife shown above. You’ll likely find it useless for dovetailing. It will languish at the bottom of your tool box, mocking you every time you push it and the Black & Decker battery-powered tape measure aside. Heck, I don’t even know who makes the knife. The handle says “KST,” but my catalogs…

The words “always” and “never” will get you in trouble , so you should always endeavor to never use them. During the early stages of learning to cut dovetails, I foolishly tried to read everything I could on the topic. It was foolish because it would probably take two lifetimes (in dog years even) to…

Do you like stories about gladiators? How about stories about idiot woodworking editors? This week I was finishing up work on the joined Chinese stool for the cover of the Autumn 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. I took the components to my shop at home , mostly to avoid all the scatological jokes we all…

With every project there is always some tool that deserves an Academy Award-style acceptance speech. “In building this chest of drawers I’d like to thank my mom for birthing me, Hanes for making the underwear that needed storing and my shoulder plane for fitting all the tenons in the web frames.” As I wrap up…

Traditional cut nails can be made from pretty soft steel, especially the useful cut headless brads. As a result, you have to be careful when installing them. Here are some of the things that can go wrong and how I deal with them. 1. Your pilot hole is too shallow. One early book on woodworking…

When making through-mortises by hand, one of the occasional problems is that you get a little mallet happy, you drive the mortise chisel a little too deep and you blow out a piece of grain on the exit side. Or you drive a too-tight tenon into the through-mortise, the tenon hits the rim of the…

One of my hobbies is chairmaking. That statement might sound kinda dumb. After all, I’m a long-time woodworker and making wooden chairs is woodworking. No? No. Making stick chairs uses another part of my brain. And any time I venture into building chairs I have to re-learn some of the rules. In some ways, chairmaking…

In the tool world there is an ugly (and erroneous) slur. When one company copies the tool of another company, they call it a “cheap Chinese copy.” Never mind that the copy was almost certainly commissioned by aggressive Westerners. Anyway, I have no dog in this fight. The real point was that today while I…

I like a good carcase saw in the same way I like to eat most parts of the pig. I like the way that its well-tuned crosscut teeth slice into the grain and leave behind a glassy smooth cut. I like how easy the saws are to start. I like the fact that they don’t…

When I build a frame-and-panel assembly such as a door, face frame or back, I almost always add “horns” to the stiles. As a result I almost always get the stink eye from the others in the shop. What are horns? This is when you make your stiles longer than they need to be, usually…

While I own an electric plunge router and all manner of bits and guides, I tend to cut my stopped dados using hand tools for a couple reasons. One: I’ve found that it doesn’t take much more time when I have less than a dozen dados to do. And two: The hand-tool method involves less…

For those of you who chisel out all your waste when dovetailing, this post is not for you. Please move along. There’s nothing to see here. OK, now that we’re alone: Have you ever been confused about which frame saw you should use to remove the waste between your pins and tails? I have. For…

There are lots of people who will show you how to handplane the edge of a board. A few less who will show you how to really flatten the wide face of a board. A smaller number will show you how to flatten a glued-up panel (stay tuned , that tutorial is already written) and…

The hardest thing about dovetailing isn’t the sawing or the chiseling or the layout. It’s the seeing. I don’t think I can teach anyone to see, but I can show you where to look. Developing your eye , plus your ability to sense the perpendicular , will do more for your dovetailing skills than any…

While my dad was sleeping off the flu in February, I was plundering his drawers. The man has an English chest problem like I have a hammer problem. I pulled out all the drawers of his six or seven 19th-century chests of drawers and gave a close look at their construction details. One of the…

The last few weeks I’ve been doing lots of hand joinery, and in that short period of time I have completely fallen for my Blue Spruce Toolworks mallet. It’s the perfect weight (1 lb.) and size (8-1/2″ long). It’s beautifully finished. It’s perfectly balanced. But what is really astonishing about the mallet is how it…

In the shop, my mechanical pencil is as important as my eyeglasses. I use a mechanical pencil with a 0.5mm lead to darken in my knife lines when cutting dovetails, tenons or other joinery. I like the really thin lead because I can usually drop it into a knife line and , with just light…

When most people think about cutting dovetails, they think: handsaws. However, there’s more to dovetailing than sawing. You also need to be mindful of your handplanes when you’re dovetailing. They can create gaps or help prevent them. This week I’m dovetailing a bunch of drawers and smallish boxes, so my planes are heavy on my…

How to tune up your band saw and  get it sweetly singing .

Milford Brown writes: Since you are interested in the older hand-powered woodworking, I wonder what, if anything, you know about the history of marking knife use? I recently had occasion to dismantle an old pine blanket chest (because of extensive powderpost beetle damage in the sapwood edges of its top and bottom boards) that had…

While teaching a class on handsawing a couple years ago, one student lost his cool. He was cutting a tenon for his sawbench, and he strayed over the line and the result looked rough to him. He grunted, threw his saw down with a clatter and stomped away from the bench. The classroom got real…

When I glue up panels from several narrow boards, I use my jointer plane to dress all the mating edges. While our power jointer is fairly well tuned, it’s rarely perfect , we have a busy shop. So I find it easier to dress my edges by hand than to fuss with the powered jointer….

I noticed the head on my trusty Hamilton hammer was loose last weekend as I was driving a bunch of nails (good thing I have an extra hammer or two). This morning I decided to do something about it. Conventional wisdom is that the head works loose because of the shock that the tool is…

In my kindergarten class, someone was snitching cookies from the lunchboxes of the rest of the class. (Spoiler alert: It was the fat kid.) While the teacher’s investigation was ongoing, she gave us a speech that I still remember. “I once had a student who stole cookies,” she said. “Then he stole lunch money. Then…

Despite the fact that monkeys were as rare as hen’s teeth in the mountains of Arkansas, the highest praise for intelligence there was to be called a “clever monkey.” To wit: “When Clem saw the Law, he slammed on brakes. That clever monkey got out of a speeding ticket by saying he was trying to…

Blacksmith David Maydole was the SawStop of the 19th century. Sometimes hammerheads would fly loose from their handles on the job site. This could be troublesome or deadly because occasionally the steel head would strike a fleshy one (the steel usually wins this competition). So there were many efforts to improve how the tool’s head…

Some of the best workholding ideas rely on simple wedging action. This weekend I stumbled onto one more great wedging trick using cut nails. This might be old hat for you. If so, forgive my waste of bandwidth (which should be the motto of my blog). I’m creating some wide panels from narrow boards using…

The most stressful glue-up of my life was assembling my tool chest in 1998. The main carcase had 120 mating surfaces that had to be glued. Foolishly, I chose yellow glue as the adhesive. As a result, another editor and I spent an hour furiously beating and clamping the chest together. In the end, there…

Some day I expect one of my little girls to tell a school counselor (between sobs): “Daddy has a hammer problem.” My, ahem, problem started innocently enough years ago. I got interested in David Maydole, the father of the legendary adze-eye hammer. I read James Parton’s 1884 article about Maydole and thought: Wouldn’t it be…

This week I’m at my father’s house in Charleston, S.C., to get my USRDA of grits, tasso and shrimp. Whenever I visit the Holy City, I always make sure to pack comfortable shoes and a tape measure , I never know what I’ll find. This morning I’ve been poring over my father’s small collection of…

There are so many ways to construct a drawer that someone could write an entire book on the variations across time and cultures. I’d buy it. One curious drawer detail that I quite like is to house a drawer’s bottom in slips. Drawer slips are narrow pieces of wood that are grooved to accept the…

Making Cathedral Doors A complete recipe for making beautiful cathedral raised-panel doors. By George Vondriska Cathedral raised-panel doors are beautiful, but they can be intimidating to make. After many years of teaching students how to make these doors, I’ve got a trick or two up my sleeve to simplify the process and remove some of…

Stile and Rail Joinery A reversible stile and rail cutter makes perfect-fitting frames for doors and cabinets without dowels, mortises or biscuits. By Tim Johnson One of the best buys you can make for your tablemounted router is a set of stile and rail cutters. These cutters allow you to join frame pieces together at…

You can do fancy things with a hammer and the right nails. And lately, I’ve been doing a lot of practicing with cut nails for a series of projects I’m working on that feature nails (including the dry sink in the next issue of Woodworking Magazine). The more I learn about nails, the more I…

Making Lipped Drawers With A Dovetail Jig By Tom Caspar You can do more with your half-blind dovetail jig than meets the eye. You’ve probably used it to make drawers with plain, inset fronts, but it’s really quite simple to make lipped drawer fronts, too. Even though most dovetail jigs are basically the same, some…

Tips for Building Cabinets with Pocket-Hole Joinery New tools and improved techniques make pocket-screw assembly faster than ever. By Brad Holden Many production shops use pocket-hole joinery to build cabinets because it’s fast, easy and efficient. You don’t need an armload of pipe clamps. There are no unsightly face-frame nail holes to fill. And you…

Lock Miters This simple set-up process guarantees perfect joints! By George Vondriska Lock miters are strong, attractive joints that make assembly easy. So why the heck don’t we use lock miters more? I think it’s because they can be a pain to set up.Well,no more excuses.Here’s a clever technique, sent to us by Jim Rodgers…

After watching Frank Klausz cut a set of dovetails in three minutes using a special bowsaw blade (see the video here in our video section), Rob Cosman decided to show that it can be done by cutting the tails first. (Frank cuts his pins first.) For those who don’t know Cosman, he has produced a…

I’m passionate about cooking, but I don’t get excited about cooking equipment. I’ve got decent cookware, questionable Far East knives bought from an infomercial and (somehow) enough silicone basting brushes for the whole neighborhood. Want one? But when it comes to marking knives for woodworking, I’m tough to please. Exhibit A is over at WKfinetools.com….

10 Tips for Perfect Miter Joints Make Micro Adjustments with a Disc Sander No tool can tweak a miter’s fit as easily as a disc sander can. You can shorten the workpiece a hair with a quick touch of the disc. You can also adjust the angle by a fraction of a degree. Instead of…

I’ve spent a good deal of energy investigating through-tenons. When I started collecting Arts & Crafts furniture in 1990, I quickly became attuned to spotting the joint in pieces for my collection. Even better, I had a mentor with an incredible collection. Owen Riley was a photographer at the newspaper where I worked, and he…

Whenever John Economaki of Bridge City Tools teaches classes about furniture design, he always asks his students a question that seems to have no good answer. The question goes something like this: Would you rather have a piece of furniture with great lines but so-so craftsmanship, or a somewhat dumpy-looking project with perfect and crisp…

When it comes to dovetailing, I’ve never really had a dog in the fight between dovetailers who cut the pins first and those who cut the tails first. I was first taught to cut my tails first, though I’m also comfortable cutting the pins first (I spent a whole year cutting pins first so I…

One of the best recommendations I’ve ever received in the world of hand tools came from a power-tool user who has 660-volt three-phase pumping through his veins. It’s 1996, and I’m a newly minted managing editor at Popular Woodworking. David Thiel, then an associate editor at the magazine, has been assigned to give me a…

When I first opened the package, I assumed that the tool inside was a prototype that had a plastic blade. That happens occasionally here at the magazine when a manufacturer wants our opinion on a tool’s ergonomics before they crank up production. But no, the white chunk of stuff at the end of the Gladstone…

As woodworkers dive into handwork, they usually start with a block plane, then the bench planes, the saws and the joinery planes. Joinery planes , such as plow planes, router planes, shoulder planes and rabbeting planes, are some of the easiest planes to set up and use. Their irons are straightforward to sharpen (no curves…

In our June issue, our I Can Do That feature is a mitered CD/DVD rack. Our goal for these columns is to show that attractive, well made projects can be made with a minimal amount of tools and time. Most people want something to show for their effort while they are learning and you won’t…

For me, finger joints have always been the nerdy, square cousin to the dovetail. Finger joints are immensely strong when glued properly. But they are usually used by beginning woodworkers in places where a dovetail would be more appropriate, such as on a piece of 18th-century casework. Add to that the fact that finger joints…

If you haven’t surmised it yet, one of the themes running through the Spring 2008 issue is the fact that accurate sawing has a lot more to do with accurate chisel work than anything else. When you cut a tenon shoulder, it’s the chisel that cuts the part of the joint that shows , the…

I’m always looking for little tricks to improve dovetailing, especially the part I dislike: transferring the tails’ locations to the pin board. Sawmaker Mike Wenzloff stumbled across this interesting short entry in William Fairham’s book “Woodwork Joints, How they are Set Out, How Made and Where Used” (available for free download here at the most…

There is something deep inside our DNA that ties us to the chest as a form of furniture. First off, how many other kinds of furniture do we have that are named after critical parts of our own bodies? We are all, in essence, “chests on stands.” The feet give way to the legs. The…

I am planning to order a corner chisel, to use when I install hinges, and have seen several styles.  Which do you prefer? That’s a question I received from a reader, and the picture above shows the scenario he’s asking about. The piece of wood has a routed mortise with rounded corners. The corners need…

Some tools are like high school girlfriends. It’s all hot and heavy and kissy-kissy for the first few weeks, and then things cool off and you wonder what you were thinking. Other tools are like good spouses. The relationship gets better with time, even when you are both a little worn around the edges. I’m…

Adrian Mariano writes: I just watched your DVD (“Forgotten Hand Tools” from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks) in which you advocate the use of nails and drawbores to overcome the flaws in the glue. And there were a couple things I was wondering about. One is the question of glue longevity. If I glue together a tabletop with…

This weekend I put the finishing touches on two Stickley tabourets; and while the little tables turned out to my satisfaction, the construction process proved quite vexing considering there are only nine pieces of wood in each. The theme of Issue 9 is sawing , understanding sawtooth technology and how to use that knowledge in…

This week I’m getting ready to build a Shaker firewood box for the I Can Do That column in our sister publication, Popular Woodworking. I really like building projects for this column because you’re limited to hand-held tools and a Workmate to do the job. Plus the projects are fast and , if I do…

Sometimes your woodworking improves like a slow and steady climb up a mountain. Sometimes, however, you get to ride the elevator. When I first started woodworking, I used a carpenter’s pencil I sharpened with a knife. Then I traded up to a mechanical pencil, which never needed sharpening. Then one day I found my old…

Whenever I get into some serious handwork, I always try to boil down the processes so that I can 1) remember it myself and 2) occasionally explain it to others (including a couple children who are slack-jawed with boredom). Today as I was cleaning up the half-lap joints for the Stickley 603 tabouret on my…

“But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.”– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Walden” When I started building furniture on my back porch after college, I was sure of only one thing: I didn’t want to use a radial-arm saw. My aversion to the machine had nothing to do with safety, accuracy, philosophy or…

I enjoy a good beating. Chopping dovetails or mortises is almost as pleasurable as sawing or planing. So, as you can imagine, I’m picky about my mallet. For years I tried to make myself like the traditional round mallet used in carving and cabinetmaking. But I couldn’t grow to enjoy using it. I’d be more…

This weekend we gave away our antique Arts & Crafts sideboard to some friends who have just bought a house and I installed the new Gustav Stickley 802 sideboard I’d built with the help of Harvey Ellis’s pen and German technology. Like every other woodworking magazine, we’ve been heavily testing the Festool Domino since it…

Editor’s note: I know that some of you are having difficulty posting comments on occasion. Sometimes, the captcha function rejects your code on the first try. When this happens, it takes you back to the blog entry, but your comment is still unposted and at the bottom of the page. If you enter your code…

Contemporary writing on woodworking, of which I am woefully guilty, always seeks to make the craft as simple as possible. We try to make the joints easy, quick and straightforward. We tend to promote furniture designs that have straight lines and wide appeal. But if you’ve never studied any book on joinery that’s more than…

Today is “Blasphemy Friday.” I’m preparing the panels to start assembling this Gustav Stickley No. 802 sideboard and wondering if my project is going to self-destruct after a couple years. Here’s the problem: The sides of this piece have the grain running vertically. Yet the grain in the stretchers near the floor runs horizontally. It…

I’ve always been geeky about sharpening things, not in the sense of polishing chisel backs to #32,000 grit, but having a good edge before going to work. Before using a router bit, I dress the edge with a diamond file, and I usually touch up the chisel before machine cutting mortises. Sharp is good, but…

Question: Looking over the current and past issues of Woodworking Magazine, I see how drawboring or wedging a mortise and tenon joint will improve the strength and fit of the joint.  But is there a reason to pick either drawboring or wedging over the other technique in terms of the strength or durability of the…

In the Stickley side table from the November 2006 issue, there are enough variations of mortise and tenon joints to give your hands and your head a real workout. One of the things I enjoy most about woodworking is puzzing out how to do things.This is the top of one of the back legs. The…

I’m a big fan of cut nails. They hold far better that modern wire nails and they really have the right look when it comes to building reproduction furniture, which is why I don’t use square-drive brass screws when installing reproduction hinges. However, cut nails can sometimes be difficult to find. Tremont Nail is an…

If you do any work at all with hand tools, a good marking gauge is an essential piece of equipment. It is the tool that guides all your other tools: It marks your baselines when dovetailing, your mortises for chopping, your tenons for sawing, your boards’ thicknesses when planing. I’ve tried a lot of marking…

One of the best things about going to an exhibit of new or antique furniture is getting to examine the joinery , closely and from the inside of the piece. I will pull every drawer out (if allowed), stick my head in a carcase and send my fingers probing into the darkest voids. I’m deeply…

Like most home woodworkers, my dang day job tends to get in the way of my woodworking. Despite the fact that our magazine’s woodshop is exactly seven paces from my desk, getting in there has been a monumental struggle. Gerunds, appositives and dangling participles have all conspired to keep me chained to this keyboard. But…

Some projects play along nicely; others tend to fight you all the way. The Creole Table is shaping up to be a bit of a raging Cajun. My goal this week was to complete the top of the table and cut the curved transitions between the apron and cabriole legs. The walnut for the top…

One of the big challenges in building a project for publication is to come up with techniques that use common tools and skills to produce results that others can replicate using the same tools and techniques. It’s a bit like being a scientist, but without the sexy lab coats, pocket protectors and slide rules. These…

I like working with walnut, but I hate marking it. Its dark color makes pencil lines disappear. And its open grain hide knife lines as well. Dovetailing is a particular problem for me. Part of this is personal , my vision is quite poor; I’m legally blind without my glasses on. But even if I…

I always enjoy tours of tool factories to see people (or robots) make things that are useful to my work. How a company can harness hundreds of minds and hands and mechanical pincers to produce things is fascinating, and every tour is surprising and different. In that spirit, I’ve decided to draw back the curtain…

After finishing college, two of my closest friends joined the Peace Corps and were posted to rural Morocco. But within a year they were back in the United States: 20 pounds lighter, two shades paler and singularly disillusioned. Their job in Morocco could be boiled down to one simple lesson for the villagers: Do not…

In China, 2005 was the year of the rooster. In our shop, 2005 was the year of the anvil. We built a guillotine out of framing material and dropped anvils of three weights on joints to see how they fail. We learned a few things. First: You can get paid for doing juvenile stuff with…

Trestle tables have always looked notoriously spindly and rickety to my eye. Compared to a traditional apron table, there’s just not much material there. Add to the fact that they are normally quite lengthy, and it seems like you have a recipe for a wobbly mealtime. But after inspecting a fair number of historical examples…

I get called a Luddite all the time for my affection for hand tools (Recent quip from spouse: “You know, we own a blender for a good reason”). I certainly don’t consider myself anti-technology , I just bristle at “inventions” that solve “problems” that don’t actually exist. So it should come as no surprise that…

One of my favorite movies as a teen-ager had a scene where a 1940s-era G-man goes to a mystic for help in becoming a superhero. The G-man shows the mystic , named Sombra , a photo of a caped hero and asks for a magic word to become like him. Without hesitation, Sombra says: “I…

One of the themes coursing through the next issue of Woodworking Magazine is rethinking the role of nails in woodworking. And so I’ve been whacking a lot of cut nails lately and setting them below the surface of my work with a nice nail set. Perhaps the most frustrating part of using cut nails was…

Thanks to my daughter’s fourth-grade class, I’ve discovered another good source of small-scale drawbore pins for cabinet work. This morning I had to give a small chat about my job at a woodworking magazine to my daughter’s class and I decided to bring along some unassembled mortise-and-tenon joints and drawbore them during class as a…

When you are making big mortises, such as those in the Roubo-style Workbench in Issue 4, it’s a good idea to bore out as much of the waste as possible. This isn’t exclusively a power-tool perspective, either. A fair number of historical texts recommend this with large-scale joints (particularly in timber framing). When I do…

Have you ever wondered why there are specific rules for the sizes of mortise-and-tenon joints? Did you know there are rules? If you consult the 19th and early 20th century texts, they state that tenons should be one-third the thickness of your stock. And that the tenons should be five times as long as they…

One of the curious aspects of investigating drawboring has been the mystery surrounding antique drawbore pins. Almost all of the examples of pins I come across are big , too big for cabinet work, really. They would require a 3/8″-diameter peg, which would be bucky for most furniture. I do have set of boxwood-handles pins…

I’ve been doing quite a bit of drawboring lately while building a couple cabinets for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine. And it’s given me a chance to try a couple of new tactics, one of which has turned out to be a bit daft. During a demonstration of drawboring I gave a few weeks…

The historically correct shape of the drawbore pin shown in our Autumn 2005 issue has come into question this week. Joel Moskowitz, a tool historian (correction: and a user) and the owner of Tools for Working Wood, reports that his pins are not a straight taper but are eccentric in cross-section instead (“eccentric” is my…

There is a lot to know about nails. Don’t laugh or scoff. I’ve been digging deep into my library this week and have come up with some stuff that is wild and weird from the world of nails. Here’s a taste of stuff I bet you didn’t know from Paul N. Hasluck’s “Handyman’s Book”: –…

So many woodworkers resist using hammers, and I suspect it’s because they use one that’s more suited for framing a house or cracking walnuts. In browsing through old tool catalogs, it’s obvious that cabinetmakers in England and Europe preferred a kind of hammer that’s uncommon in hardware stores today. We’ve been buying a lot of…

Question: I am building the Shaker Side Table (Issue #2). I built the cabinet from the first issue (I used cherry and spalted maple – it came out pretty nice). The table calls out for two 3/16″ x 3/4″ x 11″ spacers. I have looked and looked and can not find a reference to these…

Many cabinets with shelves are built using a common method: You plow dados in the sides of the cabinet. And then you glue the shelves into the dados. Perhaps you glue on a face frame to the carcase; perhaps not. With glue alone, this is a questionable joint. The end grain of the shelf joins…

In looking at a lot of old fine furniture, you might be surprised how much of it is made using nails. In fact, I’m often shocked at how bad a reputation the nail has among woodworkers. I think the problem comes from the fact that we are using the wrong nail. Most nails today are…

Question: Why doesn’t your article recommend pinned mortise and tenon, at least for the back three pieces? Instead you show pocket screws. – Pam Niedermayer Short answer: Because that would be a tricky or weak solution to the problem we faced. Long answer: The original Gustav Stickley #79 magazine stand was available in a few…