Archives

Plate Joiner Tips and Techniques 12 ways to build cabinets faster and better with biscuits By Jon Stumbras   Fast, Accurate Face Frames After you’ve put together a few face frames with [...]

In my DVD “Building Furniture With Hand Planes,” we offer plans for a Shaker Hanging Cabinet, which is what I’m working on throughout the DVD. However, as some viewers have [...]

This week I’ll be taking a sack back Windsor chair class with maestro Michael Dunbar at The Windsor Institute, his school in Hampton, New Hampshire (a state my daughter has re-named [...]

If you ever decide to delve into traditional woodworking, you quickly learn that wedges are your friend. Build chairs? You need to wedge all the joints. Traditional doors? Wedge your [...]

For this Roubo workbench to work, I’ve got 16 joints that have to come together all at once. There is not an option to glue things up in stages and still guarantee success. As a result, I [...]

If you’ve been trying to reach me during the last few weeks, I apologize. The answers to your questions are: 1. Almost any species of wood will do fine for your workbench. 2. There is no [...]

I don’t like adverbs , you know, words like “extremely,” “fallaciously” or “throbbingly.” But I am at a complete loss to otherwise describe the [...]

I’m thankful when I can see disaster coming. Being able to spot a potential problem is the gift of experience, but it is also like a tranquilizer dart used to take down a rabid African [...]

To modern eyes, old-school workbenches look like they are going to self-destruct. The legs are tenoned into the benchtop (which moves with the seasons). And stretchers (that don’t move) are [...]

After a little tweaking of the mortise, the first leg went in. You can see a gap at the shoulder (it’s about 1/16″ now). That’s actually what’s left of the rough underside [...]

I started cutting the mortises and the dovetail sockets in the benchtop today and I can tell you a few things: 1. The dovetail socket takes about half the time and effort to make compared to the [...]

Things I hate: Gouging my own eyes out with a spoon, and being pulled away from a project for more than a couple days. It’s been a week since I’ve been able to devote any time to the [...]