Posts in the «techniques» Category

• Sun and Tung Oil

This is a simple project of making a live edge shelf for my son.  I had nicely prepped a piece of Cypress with a plane.   When I asked what color he wanted it, he said “Black, let’s torch it.”  So we burned it with a weedburner, brushed it off with a blue nyalox drill brush, […]

• What most Tung Oil articles get wrong

I have been using Tung oil as my go-to finish for a dozen years or so.    As far as I am concerned it is a great finish for more things than it usually gets credit for.  Thankfully its virtues are getting shared more often now in recent years.  In my experience it is far […]

• Kerfing a live edge joint
This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Cypress Trestle Table

I am in the middle of working on a live edge table, but I have the live edges interior to the table rather than at the table edge.  So I have one live edge that needs to join up to another piece of wood.   A lot of woodworkers solve this with a river of epoxy.  […]

• Easy Sliding Dovetail Jig

As a result of my constant fascination/challenge to make furniture without metal fasteners, I often turn to using sliding dovetails.  Generally making sliding dovetails is a little finicky. Too tight and you can’t slide the joint together.  To loose and the joint is wobbly.  Recently I came up with a solution that makes the process […]

• $4 Planing Stop

I have a bunch of dog holes on my bench and a bunch of bench dogs of various thickness.  However, in practice when I am face planing a board I can almost guarantee that the bench dog will either be too thick, causing the plane to catch the top of the dog, or in the […]

• Making a Tapered Slab

You can’t throw a stick without hitting someone that has posted a youtube video about making a router sled and using a router to plane a slab of wood flat.  They have become very common.  I have covered making a router planing sled and what router bits to use for planing.  Usually router sleds are […]

• Curvy Bow Ties – Fun with Woodworking Keys

I have seen a few variations on keys. The wood bow ties that are mortised in cross-grain to prevent further splitting of a crack in a slab of wood (aka dutchman).    I’ve seen dark wood keys in light wood, light keys places in dark wood.  I have seen fancy carved keys in the shape […]

• Alcohol Based Tea Stain

As I started planning my next projects using the Oak that I had slabbed, I knew I would want a bit of color.  I wanted to accent the grain of the wood and not hide it, so I was leaning toward using a dye rather than a stain.  My only problem was that I have […]

• Slabbing Some Oak by Hand

In April of 2016, a neighbor around the block was cutting off parts of an Oak tree in his yard.  I offered to help him.    While I was helping him move some of it, the wood started speaking to me, and several large pieces ended up following me home.  The log on the left saidi […]

• 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 […]