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My son Oliver has been fascinated by my woodworking projects for years now, but has always been resistant to the idea of building anything of his own. I decided to take advantage of his love of [...]

Last week I showed how to make wooden scales for a marking knife’s blade, then glue them in place, and this week we will see the culmination of this project.  After removing the clamps I held the [...]

Read part 2 here There are plenty of high-quality marking knives on the market. Some have plastic handles, others come with wooden handle scales, and a third kind is just a simple thin piece of [...]

Since my early days in architecture school, I have been fascinated with masonry and stone arches. Arches are a wonder of both simplicity and complexity. How seemingly impossible is it that a [...]

Modify a skew chisel to bend a curl; then leave the shavings attached. These trees come all the way from the Erzgebirge (‘erts-gə-bir-gə). Actually, I made them in Wisconsin, but the unique [...]

Dado a few sticks, then practice your ABCs. Think twice before you take this puzzle apart. It has six faces, each face has nine squares and each square is lettered. That’s two complete alphabets [...]

Take your box-making and scroll saw skills to a new level. “Trompe l’oeil” is an old French phrase that literally means “it fools the eye.” Trompe l’oeil has a long tradition in the art [...]

Add sparkle outside and protect what’s inside. Whether your wine bottle is half-empty or half-full, here’s an elegant way to preserve the contents until you answer that age-old question. You can [...]

A scraper’s edge is very delicate. I used to keep my card scrapers loose in a drawer, but to avoid nicking their edges, I decided to make a simple stand for them. I cut a few slots in a [...]

After I finished painting the waterline, the faux keel, and the funnels I turned to the Red Crosses and the bridge’s windows.  My initial idea for the windows was to craft a stamp of a window [...]

Milk Paint is one of my most favorite paints. I like it for the fact that it is a water-based medium, that it dries to a hard and chalky-like surface, that it is easy to sand, and that it is …

After I finished shaping the hull of the USNS Comfort (read about it in Part 1 and Part 2)  I turned to make all the elements that construct the superstructure. Below (Sketch #1) are a few of my [...]