Shop Blog

It’s a privilege to be invited into people’s homes to discuss a potential project. Often it’s just an enjoyable meet-up where ideas can be discussed and proposals put forth. [...]

Stick around long enough and many things come full circle. When I first joined the Popular Woodworking staff lo these many years ago (OK, as of August, it was 10 years), Christopher Schwarz was [...]

Like most latchkey kids who grew up in the ’80s, I watch too much TV. If you are ever in my shop you’ll likely see a small TV on in the background. Do I really pay attention to it? Not …

If you’re looking purely at durability, then an oil-based polyurethane is still superior, but only marginally.

A few weeks ago I was invited by the Yale University Art Gallery to do a presentation on colonial wood turning. The event took place at their legendary Furniture Study in lieu of their weekly [...]

It takes a special tool chest to get me to sit up straight – I’ve spent the last six or seven years of my life researching and writing about tool chests. But this one, presumably Swedish, is [...]

If your painted finish feels a little rough, you need to go to the liquor store. OK, that doesn’t make sense, so let’s back up a couple weeks when I was teaching a bunch of young woodworkers how [...]

What you do is attach a scribe to the end of the cabinet that goes into the corner.

I’ve been woodworking for a little over thirty-five years (I was barely out of diapers…I swear!), and in all that time I’ve done just enough veneering to know that there is a [...]

I’ve been cutting a lot of large-scale sliding dovetails and rabbets lately. And when these housed joints get to a certain size (think of a dovetail socket that is 4” wide and 30” long) it’s much [...]

As always I’m very grateful to anyone who makes the time to comment on my postings here, and I do my best to respond in a helpful manner. On the back of my last write up on the wooden try [...]

James Hamilton, also known as Stumpy Nubs to his throng of online fans, is an advocate for constantly finding new and innovative ways to streamline workflow in the shop. Whenever a problem arises [...]