Archives

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 [...]

Egg-oh! My fiancé and I planned an April wedding. To celebrate our marriage, I decided to turn a very special Easter egg. In addition to segmented rings of maple and ebony, this egg would have a [...]

Quicker than starting from scratch, and you don’t waste any material. Editor’s note: Nancy Hiller passed away on August 29th, 2022 after a long battle with cancer. In honor of her [...]

HOUSE OF DUST To keep airborne dust from getting into the house, I bought a dust collector for my basement workshop. I wanted to start with a clean slate, so I decided to rid the shop of a [...]

Shocking Taste I turned on my shop vac to clean up the pile of sawdust that had accumulated while I ripped some pine boards for a cabinet. I live in Colorado, where the air is always dry, and my [...]

Runaway Router My first router, a 1968 Stanley, was a heavy, single-speed machine. I remember it well because of what happened the very first time I used it. I chucked up a Roman ogee bit and [...]

Shavings Shower Last spring I reorganized my shop and moved my planer near the garage door so it could spew its shavings harmlessly onto the driveway. Now that it’s colder, I work with the garage [...]

A long-time carpenter shares a repair trick to hide the mistakes made by ham-handed apprentices. For more than 30 years I was a traveling carpenter foreman in charge of installation of [...]

There are a number of things to think about when choosing wood for your woodworking project.  You can have a great design, but if the material you use in your woodworking project has flaws in it, [...]

In my furniture repair shop, I repair a lot of chairs.  I’ve seen many DIY mistakes over the years that didn’t need to happen.  Repairing a chair with loose joints is a relatively [...]

Disc Break Back when I bought my radial arm saw, onboard braking systems didn’t exist. But I’m a gadget freak, so I bought an electronic brake and mounted it on top of the saw. The [...]

Hammered Cat The handle on my favorite hammer needed to be refinished, so I sanded it, sprayed on a coat of polyurethane and hung it over the edge of the picnic table to dry. A moment later I [...]