Develop Your Shop Skills
Make smoothing wood just plane simple. Sand less by tackling tricky wood grains with a scraping plane.
When staining and finishing, nobody likes surprises. But snipe, chatter marks, and more can show up to mar your finest craftsmanship. Following these simple precautions, you can remove the goofs before they pose a problem.
You don't need fancy equipment to turn away from straight lines. In this article, we'll show you how to mark curves and arcs with a trammel, string and pins, compass, flexible curve, and French curve.
We've got ten super-simple shop skills that will improve your marking accuracy.
Aligning drawers doesn't have to be a time-consuming process. With this simple technique, we show you how to quickly install perfectly-aligned drawers.
Not all lighting is the same. To match finishes perfectly, coordinate your workshop lights with the light where you'll place your project.
Create your own solid panels with help from this free video.
There's no need for a drill press with this the low-cost solution. Learn to drill accurate perpendicular holes with this free video.
Woodworkers have used bevels for centuries, and with good reason. This simple hand tool transfers and duplicates angles with dead-on precision. In this article, we'll show you how to set the bevel for angles taken off workpieces, full-sized plans, and written instructions.
Cope-and-stick joinery produces great-looking frames for cabinet doors, but you need specialized router bits or shaper cutters to do the job the traditional way. Read this step-by-step story on how to do it.
Too much clamping pressure can result in glue-starved joints. Here's how to keep cool under pressure.
Your brad nailer keeps firing long after the last brad has left. Here's a handy tip to find which hole contains the little bugger.
Follow our seven-step process for creating even reveals when hanging flush-mounted cabinet doors.
Our readers have shown us several ways of folding bandsaw blades. Here's how one of them, Werner Zinn of Orlando, Florida, described it.
Plagued by cracks in a piece of old furniture? Unless it's a museum piece, this simple repair might fill the bill.
Chucks also can grip most common sizes of turning squares.
Faced with a seriously bowed workpiece? The tricks you learn here will straighten things out.
How do you section and cut your way from an irregular-shaped hunk of wood to stock you can actually use to make something with?
Age bright brass hardware in hours, not years. The solution is only five easy steps away.
Five surefire pointers from the team that reinvented intarsia in North America!
Washington State utility-company lineman Britt Comer's projects realistically portray the tools he works with every day.
See how WOOD magazine reader, Joe Barbish creates a lip on the fronts of shelves to keep items from sliding off.
Here's a great low-tech solution for securing work to your workbench.
For the times when you want to use a compass to drawer a circle, but don't want a center indentation in your wood, this tip does the trick.
To avoid wasting wood and ensure quality results, every woodworker hould develop good habits for measuring and marking cuts. Read the following five pointers to find out how well you "measure up" in this area.
Thinking about designing a chair but struggling with determining the dimensions and angles that will guarantee maximum comfort? Then let us introduce you to the guidelines established by the furniture industries.
Here's a simple way to create a beaded board look without beading a solid-wood panel with a router.
Keep stock edges perfectly aligned when gluing panels face to face.
As a woodworker, you may feel slightly lost venturing into the foreign territory of sheet-metal fabrication. Because you'll need to wander in there a little way when you build the cyclone dust collector, we've put together a few pointers to ease your trek.
Clamp scrap hardwood in place to sandwich the glass next to the score line, then snap it for professional- looking cut glass edges.
Shop space at a premium? Use this innovative approach to make the most of your limited work area.
Is your tablesaw blade parallel to your miter-gauge slot? Here's a quick way to find out.
Have you ever tried to draw a straight line down a length of dowel to mark hole locations? Not only is that tough, but dowels are rarely straight. Here's the solution.
Circles, or portions of them, often turn up in woodworking projects. Whether you're dealing with wheels for a toy or a round top for a table, here's how to work your way around a circle.
Let a pro do the resharpening, but between trips keep then tuned up with a few file strokes.
Wixey recently introduced the WR2000 Digital Height Gauge, which allows you to dial in tablesaw-blade and router-bit heights to within 0.001 of an inch.
Align drawer fronts and doors perfectly every time with ready-made spacers.
Learn about making, handling and cutting veneer in this free video.
