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21 Articles

Woodwork by the Book

If I could apply in the shop the superabundance of knowledge I’ve gleaned through books, I’d be an excellent craftsperson. My job involves reading about woodworking, as does my freelance editing work. Then for fun, I open a book. I’m a voracious reader. Here are a handful of the many books I find invaluable (specific to my interests and toolset – actual and metaphoric). Design • “Furniture Treasury,” by Wallace Nutting (Macmillan) • “Human Dimension & Interior Space,” by Julius Panero and Martin Zelnik (Watson-Guptill) (this one is new to me, but already a treasure) • “Measured Drawings of Shaker Furniture & Woodenware,” by Ejner Handberg (Berkshire House) • “The New Fine Points of Furniture: Early American,” by Albert Sack (Crown) Finishing • “Flexner on Finishing,” by Bob Flexner (Popular Woodworking) • “Understanding Wood Finishing,” by Bob Flexner (Reader’s…

Woodwork by the Book

Sharpening Pond’s Top Attachment

I am building William Ng’s “Sharpening Pond” from the November 2015 issue (#221). How is the top fastened to the base? Bob Wood, via email Bob, I’m sorry I missed that step. I took it for granted that people would use their preferred method for attaching any tabletop (shop-made buttons, metal fasteners or even pocket holes). I use “tabletop fasteners” (available at any woodworking supply store or online). I cut the slots using an 1/8" spiral bit at the router table. The slots are 7/8" in length x 1/4" deep. If the pond base is glued up, there’s enough head space to rout with a fence. I set the fence 1/2" from the top edge. William Ng, contributor Weight of Workbench Parts How much does each component of the November 2015 (issue #221) “Knockdown English Workbench” weigh? Browne Altman,…

Sharpening Pond’s Top Attachment

THE WINNER: Dust Collection for Ports of All Sizes

I made this adapter to hook up dust collection to the odd-size fitting (2") on my oscillating sander. Start with a hardwood block that is (in my case) is 3" x 4" x 1 1/4" thick. I required a 2" hole, so I used a 2" hole saw to drill in the middle of the block. The next thing is to drill the holes for the split-block-clamping and block-attachment holes. I drilled a 3/16" clearance hole, 1 5/8" deep. Drill the hole just more than halfway deep – that way, when you split the block, you’ll have a location for drilling the rest of the way through with a 3/32" drill bit for the pilot for the screw. Now drill holes on the face side to attach the 3/4" plywood piece; locate…

THE WINNER: Dust Collection for Ports of All Sizes

ETS EC125/3 Eccentric Sander

A well-sanded surface makes a huge difference on a finished piece. Unlike many woodworkers I know, I appreciate the relatively mindless nature of sanding. In addition to recently using the Mirka DEROS for benchmarking purposes, my go-to power sander has been a 10-year-old 6" Ridgid model. It’s heavy, has a high center of gravity and is less than graceful on small parts. So I was excited to take Festool’s new 5" brushless model for a test drive. The tool comes in Festool’s standard “Systainer” hard case, including a separate power cord. The kit included only one sheet of #120-grit sandpaper – considering the cost, it would have been nice for the factory to include a few more sheets. For this test, I used Festool’s #80-, #100-, #120-, #150- and #180-grit sanding…

ETS EC125/3 Eccentric Sander

Chestnut Tools Universal Sharpener

Sometimes a small advance in technology makes an enormous difference in everything. The Chestnut Tools Universal Sharpener – just $18.50 from Lee Valley Tools – will absolutely change the way you sharpen tools. It looks like a folding pocketknife, but instead of a blade the sharpener has a piece of sub-micron carbide about 1/8" wide and 7/8" long. The carbide has sharp corners, unlike a carbide burnisher. And it’s the combination of the incredibly fine carbide and its shape that makes it a game-changer when sharpening. For starters, it makes short work of marking knives, pocket knives, scissors and a variety of tools that are difficult to sharpen. The carbide works like a scraper. You tilt the tool slightly, rub it with gentle pressure on the steel and it shaves steel away…

Chestnut Tools Universal Sharpener

CMT’s Inexpensive Moisture Meter

If you ever work with wood from unreliable or unusual sources, such as one-person sawmills, it pays to own a moisture meter. I slip mine into my pocket whenever I head to the lumberyard and it has saved my skin several times in the last 20 years. But not everyone can afford an expensive pinless meter with all its features. So I was interested to try the new CMT DMM-001, a pin-activated moisture meter that costs about $40, or about one-fifth of the price of a nice commercial meter. On the plus side, the CMT has a rugged case, is simple to operate and comes with the 9-volt battery that runs it. On the minus side, all pin moisture meters have limitations. You have to drive the pins in fairly deep to activate the…

CMT’s Inexpensive Moisture Meter

Graduated Drawers

Far back in our past, one of our early ancestors cobbled together a box with a lid and created a furniture form still in use today. Wooden chests, sometimes equipped with fancy locks and hinges, were used store everything from blankets to tools, toys, treasure and grain. Chests perform basic storage tasks by keeping our valued possessions safe from the elements and unwanted critters, while providing a handy bench to sit on and don our shoes in the morning. But as useful a piece of furniture as it is, the chest form has some drawbacks. For one, its height is usually limited to the length of our arm. Any deeper and we cannot easily retrieve items that migrate to the bottom. This also points to another drawback. A chest at its simplest…

Graduated Drawers

Roubo Hollows & Rounds

Hollows and rounds are making a strong comeback in the hand tool woodworking world. However, many woodworkers are scared off from jumping in by either a limited tool budget or the limited availability of antique ones in good condition. Don’t let that hold you back any longer. You don’t need a whole set to get started anyway. The three sizes in this article – Nos. 4, 6 and 8 – are the ones I most often reach for. (A No. 4 cuts a 1/4" profile, a No. 6 cuts 3/8" and a No. 8 cuts/2".) After you make a pair or two, you may find you never need another size to suit your working needs. I’ll teach you how to make your own planes – just like early craftsmen did. They…

Roubo Hollows & Rounds

Heat treating O1 tool steel is simple. In short, bring it to critical temperature, quench it in vegetable oil, then temper it in an toaster oven or regular kitchen oven for one hour at 400› Hardening steel is the easy part; minimizing warpage is another. The road to success is to evenly heat the metal. Creating an enclosure with something such as fire brick will help you achieve this. Heat the steel slowly using a simple MAPP gas torch. Heat it more slowly than you think you should. If one side is hotter than the other when you quench it in the oil it will warp. So heat slowly. There are a few methods to determine when you have reached critical temperature. Avoid relying on color because ambient light will affect the color…

Guerrilla Guide to Spray Finishing

The hardest part about learning to spray finishes is becoming convinced that you can learn to spray finishes. Of all the ways to apply finishes – brush, rag, rubber and spraying – there’s only one method easier than spraying: ragging on oil. Spraying finish is always faster than any other application method – astonishingly so. I can spray two coats of lacquer on a chest of drawers and have the thing assembled in just a few hours (compare to a few days with a hand-applied finish). Oh and one more thing: In my opinion, spraying produces better results. Plus, with good spray systems now costing about as much as a half-decent cordless drill, you just ran out of reasons to avoid spraying. If you’re a professional finisher or refinisher, this story is not for…

Guerrilla Guide to Spray Finishing

Arts & Crafts Occasional Table

As soon as I saw Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott’s 1901 occasional table on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I knew I had to make one. Baillie Scott (1865-1945) was an architect at the forefront of the Arts & Crafts movement in England. His diminutive and elegant table is uncharacteristic of the often substantial and earthy furniture of the Arts & Crafts style. The lightness and movement of the table, which come from a play between positive and negative space, make it a true piece of sculpture that looks different from every perspective. Though it is made from only seven parts, this little table presents several challenges. First, there is not a single right angle in sight. The three legs are splayed and joined with curved stretchers angled upward…

Arts & Crafts Occasional Table

INDEXED TAPERING JIG

To solve the puzzle of how to cut tapered, hexagonal legs, I designed a taper-cutting jig that cuts the facets in six passes on my table saw. It works a lot like the indexing head on a lathe. The jig holds the leg on its axis so it can be turned at pre-set angles and adjusted to different tapers and leg lengths. It also holds the leg in place for mortising and sanding. The jig is a simple frame. At one end is a movable carriage that has a hole and a threaded insert for a mounting bolt that goes into the top of the leg. At the other end is mounting hole plus a 1/4" indexing hole that will lock in a particular angle of rotation. The rotation of the leg…

INDEXED TAPERING JIG

The Core Hand Tools

Setting up a hand-tool-oriented shop is a fraction of the investment of setting up a power-tool shop. For the price of one large quality piece of power machinery, you can buy all of the hand tools you need to build things – from rough lumber all the way to assembly and final surface finishing. And that is if you are buying the best-quality new tools available. To do the same work with power tools, you’d need three to four machines, a bunch of small powered hand tools, plus good dust collection to deal with all the small particles. On top of that, you need the space to put everything. And for the home woodworker, hand tools can be just as fast as power tools. Woodworking as a craft was fully formed long…

The Core Hand Tools

PLANE SELECTION

While the section on bench planes explains which type of plane to use for each type of cut, it doesn’t explain which plane is best in each category. This is where personal preference starts to come into play. I reach for the heaviest plane in any category, because I find the heavier a plane is, the easier it is to use. I would grab a No. 5 1/2 jack, a No. 8 jointer and a No. 4 1/2 smoother – but you must also consider low-angle planes and high-angle frogs. In very hard or highly figured woods, higher effective cutting angles (the combination of the bedding angle of the tool to the sharpened bevel on the blade) work better than lower angles. You can manipulate that angle on a bevel-up or low-angle…

PLANE SELECTION

‘Melencolia’ Try Square

A surprising number of woodworking tools and furniture forms have been lost to time. Some for the better (the motorized coping saw?) and others for no apparent reason. A lot of my research into early woodworking consists of examining old texts, paintings and drawings. Before the Industrial Revolution, almost everything was made out of wood, and almost everyone’s job had something to do with the material. So paintings are a rich source of information. Several years ago, a fellow researcher named Jeff Burks told me to take a close look at Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1514 engraving “Melencolia I,” and my life has never been the same. This German engraving has a lot of interesting woodworking stuff in it, including an early straightedge, a now-disappeared fastener called the “clasp nail” and a fantastic…

‘Melencolia’ Try Square

King of Windsors

It all started in 1971 with a black chair Mike Dunbar spotted at a yard sale in Sutton, Mass. He was looking for things to furnish his student apartment at Worcester State University in Worcester, Mass. “It was one of those times when your life turns on a dime,” Mike says. “That chair so engaged me that I had to buy it. It was a quarter of my monthly rent.” If you’d suggested to a 24-year-old Dunbar that he was going to become a woodworker, he’d have scoffed. He started out as a journalist before going to college to study French (he’s read Roubo in the original), and planned a life of academia. But that chair? He couldn’t stop looking at it and examining it. So Dunbar did some research and discovered…

King of Windsors

Custom Push Pads

Let’s face it: Many of us all too often see safety as…well, just plain boring. We always seem to be anxious to use that little bit of free time to get to the shop and work on that next pressing project for our spouse, kids or grandkids, and safety takes a back seat. But you can’t do woodworking from a hospital bed; every bit of safety exercised actually lets you maximize your precious free time to do woodworking. Push pads are one common safety aid. There are good push pads and there are better push pads. Commercial push pads (the good), which are readily available and economically priced, are often used when face jointing on the jointer. The angled handle helps the operator keep the stock against the fence as the stock is fed…

Custom Push Pads

WOODWORKER’S MARKETPLACE

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Give Me a Brake

Reach for a froe, and you should immediately think, “Give me a brake.” The brake can be a constructed workholding device, or just a couple of logs. Its function is to trap your workpiece in such a way that you can exert leverage on a section of a log as it’s splitting. The froe – used to split a piece when it’s in a brake – is a tool that requires some nuance to really get the most from it; the brake helps make that happen. There are many kinds and configurations of brakes. The first one I learned is just a forked section of a tree, propped up with crossed timbers underneath. Jam your billet into the fork with its other end on the ground, and drive the froe into the…

Give Me a Brake

Water-based Finish isn’t Lacquer

BY BOB FLEXNER Dating back at least 100 years, the term “lacquer” has referred to a non-crosslinking finish that thins with lacquer thinner. The most common type is nitrocellulose lacquer. In the late 1980s water-based (or waterborne) finishes became available and some were labeled “lacquer.” The reason, as one manufacturer confided at the time, was to make woodworkers think they were using a familiar finish, one that would apply and perform like the traditional lacquer they were used to. This might make them more likely to try it. To justify the name, manufacturers claimed that their water-based finish “burned in” like traditional lacquer. That is, each freshly applied coat dissolved into the previous coat, creating in effect one thicker coat. So the example of equivalency was burning in. To some degree this is true.…

Water-based Finish isn’t Lacquer

Humble Job Endures 1,000 Years

A few years ago I visited England with my wife, daughter and a few friends. It is a fascinating country – some parts of it seem right out of a mid-20th-century television show, while other places are so modern that they should be in California. My favorite places, however, were the ancient ones – castles, Roman walls, cobblestone streets. While visiting the Tower of London, I was astonished by the amazing size of the posts and beams supporting the floor and walls. I was most intrigued by the huge oak pillar at the center of the base of the tower itself. While everyone else was admiring tapestries, I asked one of the docents if that particular piece of wood was original to the building. “Oh no!” he said. “That’s new…It was…

Humble Job Endures 1,000 Years

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