Archives

Bending wood is great fun, but it can be frustrating when you need to work quickly (i.e. make a living at it). After you bend a piece of wood and clamp it to a form, you usually need to let …

We’ve all dented some important part of a project and hand to remove the dent with heat and steam. It’s a routine and and annoying fix. But what if we could use the same process to make our [...]

Recently one of the leg vises in my shop cracked. The vise chop snapped and the garter on the wooden screw gave way. While I could repair the damage, I decided to replace the entire mechanism [...]

For the many-hundredth time last week, I explained the virtues of simple workbenches to a skeptical audience of 10 workbench builders. They weren’t having it. Their benches were sketched out with [...]

Whenever I have a day off when I’m traveling, I gorge myself on museums. Yesterday I had a free day in Munich, Germany, and spent the whole day in three museums. The highlight was getting to see [...]

During the last decade, I’ve built a lot of six-board chests, including the examples found in this 2013 article in Popular Woodworking Magazine. For as long as I have been building these chests, [...]

In many ways, the Europeans are ahead of us in the United States (like it or no). Their recycling programs far outpace the ones in the Midwest. Public transport is worlds better. Even the basic [...]

This week I’m headed to Germany to teach a couple classes at Dictum in Bavaria. I don’t teach much anymore, but I make a grand exception for Dictum for several reasons. The biggest reason? The [...]

The hardware you use can make or break your project. Crappy hinges, lightweight pulls or cheesy locks have no place on a piece that you slaved over. While there are still some great hardware [...]

I recently finished building an Enzo Mari table from the 1970s as part of an article for Popular Woodworking Magazine, and I have only one worry about the project. It looks great. It feels stout. [...]

Shou sugi ban – the Japanese finishing process that chars the outside of wood – is an ideal surface finish for some furniture pieces. One of the unsung advantages of burning the wood is that you [...]

“Mari is right, everyone should have a project: after all it is the best way to avoid being designed yourself.” — G.C. Argan, L’Espresso, 1974 In 1974, Italian designer Enzo Mari published a [...]