Posts in the «techniques» Category

• Shaving Ladder

A while back I did a post on how I shave larger pieces of wood using the crotch of an oak tree

Peter Follansbee has a great post on his blog about using a shaving ladder (paring ladder).

I am intrigued by how it works.  It seems to be used for thinner stock than the logs I [...]

• Woodworking with Old Eyes

A few years ago, I joined that club where I had to start holding things farther away in order to see them, or had to peer over my distance glasses in order to read something.  I have also noticed I need more light, there just never seems to be enough light.  Where I really noticed [...]

• Woodworker Safety Week: Best practice is a Safety Habit

Thanks to TheWoodWhisperer.com for encouraging us all to re-consider woodworking safety.
The elders in a shop, and especially the employers in a shop need to make sure their employees are actively practicing shop safety.  The problem though with “enforced safety” is that it is an afterthought.  Safety has to become a habit and in order to [...]

• Four square lumber

Squaring lumber without the use of power tools.  Sounds at first like a fool’s errand.  Sure it is not as fast as using a Jointer and a thickness planer, but you aren’t limited by the widths of these tools, nor are you deafened by their roar.  The process, as long as you are not in [...]

• Sawing Square to What?

Every time I start a “natural timber” project where logs and branches are used without flat surfaces, I end up dealing with issues related to cutting “square” to something that is round or at least round-ish.   They are seldom perfectly round, and rarely straight.  So when cutting them to length or cutting shoulders for a [...]

• Drilling Straight

When you need to drill straight, and by that I mean plumb to the surface … err even more precisely I mean Normal to the surface, the drill press really is the best tool for the job.  And even if the wood can’t be brought to the drill press, a hand drill press can be [...]

• Drawshaving Larger Posts

I’ve done quite a bit of work around here using old cedar logs as posts for deck railing, gates and light posts.  The wood is readily available as the forests near by seem full of old dead cedar trees that couldn’t keep up with the oaks and other giants.  When the cedars died, their roots [...]

• Sharpening a Card Scraper

There were several times when working on my timber frame project that I used a card scraper to clean up a bit of wood that had some nice grain or knot detail that I wanted to bring out. In the soft semi-green pine, the scraper worked pretty well without requiring me to pay a lot [...]

• Tongue & Groove Planes : Match Planes

Tongue and Groove is a method of joining boards that predates modern wood glue, biscuits and doweling jigs.  I’ve seen Norm Abrams demonstrate how he creates tongue & groove using a table saw with a dado set installed, and I’ve seen others use a router table with a tongue and groove pair of router bits [...]

• Making a Mortise

As I’ve said before, a large part of timber framing centers around making round holes into rectangles.
It usually starts with a drill to get rid of most of the wood. Then you finish up with a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other.
Here is a video of someone using large chisel [...]