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While visiting with chairmaker Bob Erickson (pictured above with his son Tor), it seems appropriate to ask, “What chair are you sitting in right now?” He explains it’s an [...]

I moved to Kentucky/Cincinnati on July 1st, and by the 15th of the month, I was already starting out on building the furniture for my new house here. Josselyn (my partner) and I had committed to [...]

Traditional chairmaking starts with a shaving horse and a drawknife. Used with both green and dried wood, woodworkers have relied on these two tools for centuries. Simple to use, there are just a [...]

One of the challenges when building a chair is clamping the dang thing down so you can work on it. I’ve seen lots of solutions that use band clamps. But I dislike band clamps (perhaps I had a bad [...]

When you make a table it’s fairly straightforward. Four legs (or some variation thereof) and a top. Not too hard. If you choose to splay the legs, then you’ve added some geometry and math to the [...]

Successful wood bending with heat and water is more art than science. Long ago, some caveman made a curious discovery: Wood becomes pliable when it is both hot and wet, allowing it to be bent to [...]

Before you read beyond the first few sentences of this blog entry, there a couple things you should know: I have no problems sharpening a drawknife. Never have (except that time in the 1990s [...]

Mario Rodriguez of the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop has an article in our August 2013 issue that shows you how to build a clever table saw jig he uses to carve the chair seat for his [...]

  No matter what your political bent, you’ll want to check out the latest episode of Charles Brock’s The Highland Woodworker, which Popular Woodworking proudly sponsors, and [...]

Because chairs take abuse like a rented mule, the simple mortise-and-tenon joint is sometimes not enough. In traditional Windsor chair construction, the legs and spindles are attached to the [...]

Gluing and clamping angled assemblies – like most chairs – can be a hassle. There are some great strategies for approaching glue-ups, angled and otherwise, in various books including “Glue [...]

Where is the craftsmanship line crossed between between handwork, machine work, and machine work driven by computers? Or, is there a line at all? I certainly don’t know the answer. But I [...]