After fine-tuning the quirks with the new replacement lock and its brass catch plate, I turned my attention to the cedar hope chest’s half-mortise. I measured and compared the existing depth and [...]
Last winter, a friend gifted me an old cedar hope chest. The piece was made by her late father-in-law, an amateur woodworker. Since she and her husband were preparing to sell their home and move [...]
One staple you’ll likely find in most woodworking shops is a fasteners/hardware bin filled with small plastic drawers. These drawers hold everything from nails and screws to hinges and glue [...]
Knowing how to hang a new handle on a hammer or an axe opens up numerous opportunities to restore your old tools and allows you to bring back to active duty eBay and flea market-bought heads of [...]
After completing step (F), I used a gouge to hollow out the cove portion of the molding. I selected a gouge with a sweep that matched the cove radius and carefully shaved the wood in the [...]
Read part 1 After allowing the glue to set, I carefully removed the clamped molding from the guitar maker’s vise. At this point, I removed excess wood from the glued-up block using a bandsaw to [...]
A few months ago, I restored a tall case of drawers in green. While the piece was not old, antique, or of substantial emotional value, it was still quite practical as it was tall and had several [...]
Filling knots with colored epoxy usually works quite well, but sometimes the void is in a spot that’s difficult to fill, like the edge of a board. Here’s how to do it. First, apply some paste wax [...]
As you recall, a few months ago, I wrote about a beautiful chair made of solid mahogany that we bought and found out that it was sadly damaged during shipping. The vendor sent us a replacement, [...]
Bringing an old hand plane back to life is simple to do, and will yield a top-not tool. When I build a project, I use a variety of “fancy” tools (readers’ words, not mine). Lie-Nielsen, [...]
If you recall, a few weeks ago, I wrote about the unexpected repair job I performed on one of our newly bought solid mahogany chairs (read parts one and two here). What I didn’t expect is that I [...]
Most of the clamps in our woodworking arsenal are designed to produce tons of pressure per square inch. While we use them to hold pieces over the workbench, close joints, or keep glued parts from [...]