Archives

Breezy Bandsawing Reasoning that I’d only be cutting small stuff in my basement shop, I parked my bandsaw diagonally in a corner. Then I decided to make one of those arched-top garden arbors. My [...]

Super Sander After years of hard use, my tablesaw’s 120-volt motor finally expired. Eureka! This was the perfect opportunity to acquire a more powerful machine. I purchased a new 240-volt [...]

Wedged Woodworker Winter comes early here in Oregon, a fact I’d forgotten as I carried a custom kitchen cabinet to my truck. This cabinet was long and slender, to go above an extra-wide range. As [...]

Flaming Scroll Saw When I work in my garage shop, I keep the garage door open to let the sunlight stream in. After working for several hours one fine afternoon, I smelled something burning—that [...]

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 unhealthy fascination with [...]

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 project. First, I [...]

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, so I bought new 9-volt batteries [...]

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 motor. Before I could release 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 legs and stretchers. The joints were a bit [...]

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 board too short or botch [...]

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 tools are on mobile [...]

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, the saw sat under the shed [...]