Archives

Seeking Comfort This year hasn’t been easy. There have been times I’ve really identified with Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog’s Day, doing the same things over and over again, with no real [...]

My oscillating spindle sander’s auxiliary table makes quick work of edge sanding short boards and forming perfect circles. Make the table from melamine or a laminate-covered material and fasten [...]

I devised a new way to fit a shelf into a dado. I use my router to make a tiny adjustment to the shelf’s thickness instead of fine-tuning my dado set with shims to match the plywood’s thickness. [...]

Pattern-Cut Finials The traditional way to make a square finial on a bandsaw is to mark and cut the pattern on one side of the blank, then tape the offcut back on to the blank in order to guide [...]

Staple Set Pneumatic staplers don’t always set 1/4” crown staples flush.  Driving them the rest of the way with a hammer causes the staples to kink,  so I designed this easy-to-make tool, which I [...]

Being an impatient sort, waiting for glue to reach the bottle’s spout became a pet peeve of mine. To put an end to this, I made a stand with a hole in the top matching the diameter of the [...]

There’s never enough storage space in a shop, is there? When I recycled some old kitchen cabinets to use in my shop, I added one more drawer to each one—in the toe-kick space.

I often lubricate the soles of my planes with paraffin wax to make them slide easier. While ripping a board that was insistent on pinching just enough to make sawing difficult, it occurred to me [...]

Shop-Made Rocker Jaw One simple board, cut into the shape of a seesaw, can make a huge improvement to your vise. It allows you to firmly hold tapered work and long, upright boards off to the side [...]

To make a quick and easy drying rack, or to raise a project off your bench while applying a finish, use blocks of rigid foam insulation and drywall screws. For stability, the screws should be no [...]

The thought of emptying my dust collector’s plastic bag used to make me cringe. Many times I’d go through my entire repertoire of colorful language two or three times, and that darn bag still [...]

To Get the most from my limited shop space, I built a two-sided “mobile tool wall” to park in front of my overhead garage door. The wall is just basic carpentry construction, with a 3/4″ [...]