White Water Meeting House Bench
This coming week I’m starting to build a pair of close reproductions of the White Water Shaker Meeting House benches. Earlier this summer I measured the original bench, which is in a [...]
Review: 'Trees of North America'
Woodworkers are like the undertakers of the tree world. We dissect the living tissue and prepare it (some might say mummify it) for its trip to the afterlife as a highboy or napkin basket. [...]
'Wood Smart' Wood Samples
Growing up in Arkansas, it seemed we had two kinds of wood: yellow pine and pine that was yellow. I didn’t really start to understand the crazy diversity of lumber available until my [...]
Faces in the Face Grain
As a 4-year-old, the woods behind my grandparents’ house in Bronxville, N.Y., was both foreboding and magical to me. My grandfather would take me for walks there almost every day during the [...]
LVL: Getting Under My Skin
Today we glued up two chunks of what will become Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick’s workbench. For those of you just tuning in, I haven’t broken my vow of workbench chastity. The [...]
The Angel Oak Meets the Dukes of Hazzard
After pestering my flu-infested father for three days, he finally felt well enough for us to visit the Angel Oak on John’s Island , which some people consider to be the oldest living thing [...]
A Prize at the Top of the Pile
I was about 12′ up in the rafters of a barn, climbing on the biggest mountain of Eastern white pine I’ve ever seen. Then I saw it above me: a monster 5/4 board that was at least [...]
What's the Deal With Deal?
Poke around enough old woodworking books and two things will happen. You’ll become a tremendous bore at parties (“Aye, but I could find no mention of the ‘pricker’ tool in [...]
The Roubo Meets the EyeClops
It’s perhaps the ugliest photo of my Roubo-style workbench ever taken, but the image above is a picture of its Southern yellow pine benchtop that’s magnified 200x. It looks a bit like [...]
Knot a Problem
On Halloween night in 1993 I went to the lumberyard in search of wood to build a sitting bench for our kitchen in Lexington, Ky. Like any good woodworker, I sorted through the entire pile of 1 x [...]
Taming the Wild Pine
When I first got serious about woodworking after college, I remember reading a dire warning in a woodworking book about working with pine: “If you work with pine, be sure to purchase your [...]
‘When Beetles Attack’ Vol. I
Our shop is thick with the sweet odor of Eastern white pine this week as I’m milling about 70 board feet of the stuff for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine. The smell (Megan [...]