Shop Blog

Grammy-winning musician and luthier Guy Clark died this morning in his Nashville home – a home I had the very great privilege of visiting for “Songs from the Workbench.” While Clark [...]

One of the biggest problems woodworkers have is runs and sags drying in their finishes, especially with slower drying finishes such as varnish (including polyurethane and wiping varnish) and [...]

My third day on the job, a co-worker asked me, “So, are you a woodworker?” Am I? My inclination is to answer in the negative. The term just feels so hallowed, a label earned through decades spent [...]

Sometimes the journey of becoming a skilled woodworker takes you down paths that didn’t seem important at first. Sharpening hand tools was one of those paths for me. Actually, there were two [...]

I have a hammer that looks like a squirrel. And I wish I had one that looked like a goat (alas, those are pretty rare and expensive). A little bit of whimsy in your tools is a good thing – …

Here’s a tip that you will thank me for if you aren’t already doing it. When you want to secure the lid on a paint, stain or finish can, step on it rather than hammer it closed. Using your body [...]

When you’re building casework, your parts really need dead square ends if you hope to fit drawers, dividers or a gallery inside. I don’t trust any table saw gizmo to give me square cuts. [...]

Before I developed the tool tote project, I did some online research and discovered that there are two major trends in the design of simple wooden totes: (A) Those whose tall end-walls flank the [...]

I have a confession to make. I am not a hand-tool woodworker…but I want to be. I have been around only power tools for most of my life. I worked for a contractor through college. The only [...]

Sometimes I feel the need to test myself, particularly when it comes to crap I say and crap I do. For many years I’ve contended that using handplanes is faster in almost every workshop [...]

I’m delighted to welcome to the pages of Popular Woodworking Magazine James “Jim” McConnell, whom you may know from his blog “The Daily Skep,” where he writes thoughtful [...]

Making joinery by hand is a satisfying process, so I thought I’d share a method for hand made dado joints. In the early days of my apprenticeship we would practice joints on short ends of [...]