Video: Bending the Wiggle Wood, Solo
After not burning down the city with my lightbulb-in-a-box scheme, my first CompWood armbow dropped to 8 percent moisture content overnight. I removed it from its form and put one clamp on it [...]
Make the Arkansas Insty-Kiln
I was surprised by how much my CompWood arm bow dried out overnight. It went from 20 percent moisture content to 12 percent moisture content. But I’m not ready to take it out of the clamps [...]
Two Men & Their Wiggly Wood
I’ve been working with some slabs of CompWood I purchased late last year to make some arm bows for some Welsh stick chairs (and an article in the April 2011 issue). Don’t know about [...]
Quartersawn Animation
Quartersawn white oak is one of my favorite woods, and we’re fortunate in Cincinnati that the largest source for this wood in North America is just a couple hours away. Frank Miller Lumber [...]
That is Some Texas-sized Ebony
During the Woodworking in America conference, several readers brought along some boards of nasty wood for me to try to tame during my lecture on scraper planes. I was able to plane or scrape all [...]
The Science of Rented Mules (aka Chisels)
Sometimes when I write, I come to a question that paralyzes me – and I cannot continue until I get it answered. As a newspaper journalist, I was trained to “write my way around the [...]
The Traditional Tool Section of Lowe’s
When I teach classes, I tell my students to buy their winding sticks in the “18th-century Tool Section” of their local home center. They look puzzled until I pull out my winding [...]
The Long Squiggly Yellow Line
People often divide our country into North and South using a variety of metrics. There’s the Mason-Dixon line, of course. The Barbecue Line (the word means “grilled meat” in the [...]
Get Bent! OK, I Will
Steam-bending wood is awesome, but I’ve never been a big fan of having a potential bomb in my house (or in the office). So I’ve worked at mastering cold-lamination bending, but [...]
Video: Visit to the David R. Webb Veneer Mill
This week I’m working with Marc Adams on a series of articles for Popular Woodworking Magazine on veneer. Marc did all the work , I’m just editing and helping with the photos. I hope [...]
The MDF of the 19th Century?
In college I had a girlfriend who was half Japanese, half German and entirely unpredictable. And for a kid raised in Arkansas, she was quite the exotic Axis-power antidote to my small-town [...]
Building Strategies Part 2 Using a Cut List
If you look at the video I made about buying lumber, you can see how I approach that task. If the piece were more complicated, I would have had my cut list in hand. The most important part of the [...]