Posts in the «techniques» Category

• Mallet Head Angle

I’ve seen this issue come up and get discussed on several forums.  A joiners mallet is pretty simple to make, so it is a quick and satisfying shop project to get one constructed, but then the question arises,  “what angle should be put on the head?”  This is an important question with advice ranging from [...]

• Making Square Stock Octagonal

As I’ve been practicing using my lathe for a little while, I find I can save a lot of work and prevent loose fillings by starting with stock that is octagonal in shape.  I have also found that octagons make for great tool handles.  So for either use, it is handy to be able to [...]

• Lathe Technique: Nothing but Skew

I built a spring lathe a little while back, then a mini spring lathe version and since then, I have been practicing my technique.  After I screw a bunch of stuff up, I often go browse YouTube to see examples of people doing it right.  One video that caught a lot of attention was the [...]

• 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 [...]

• 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 [...]

• 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 [...]