WoodworkingONLINE.com

As “Danny in Houston” says so well, “….WOW ….(best) post of the month for sure!”
My Wife Finishes a Major Project (Warning: Lots of Pictures)

Did you know a Unisaw is a table saw, but a table saw isn’t necessarily a Uni..? (Submitted mostly for the pictures of Keith’s A100 Unisaw, presumably the very first one produced/sold by Delta.)
What is a Unisaw?

There are some true artists out there, and it seems like the Woodnet forums gets their fare share of them who build beautiful hand planes.
Damascus and Ivory Plane

At this point, Doug Hicks has glued up the laminated legs for the side table and cleaned up all of the excess glue on the legs by running them through his thickness planer. Then, before cutting the legs to length, he made one pass on all four edges of each leg with an 1/8″ roundover bit mounted in the router table. Let’s pick things up from there. Read the rest of this article »

Once Doug had the bending jig completed, he was ready to get started building the legs for the side table.

RIPPING THE LEG STRIPS

With the bending jig all done, I actually started making the legs. The first step was to rip a number of thin strips from 6/4 (1-5/16” thick) cherry. After some experimenting, I discovered that I could bend an 1/8”-thick strip around the arc of the jig. Any thicker than that and it wouldn’t bend around the jig without breaking. Since the finished legs were to be 1” thick, that meant I needed 8 strips per leg, or 32 strips for all four legs. Read the rest of this article »

When my wife says, “Can you build a cabinet with display shelves for that nook in the dining room?” I usually grab my tape measure, pencil, and pad of paper to take measurements and sketch out ideas. But I recently found out about a cool computer program by Google that’s great for trying out design ideas. It’s called SketchUp. Everybody is using it to draw three-dimensional models of everything from the Eiffel Tower to cars to furniture, like the entertainment cabinet shown here. Read the rest of this article »

Recently, Doug Hicks decided to build a much-needed end table for a spot between two easy chairs in his home. After spending some time with his wife Cathy, designing the table and making a cardboard mock-up, Doug got to work by making the bending jig. The jig makes bending the thin laminated leg strips to shape easy.

MAKING THE BENDING JIG

In building the table, I figured I would start with the most difficult part – the legs. And since the legs were to be relatively thin (1”) I decided that the strongest way to make them would be using a bent lamination technique. This involves gluing together a number of very thin, flexible strips and placing them in a bending jig to dry.

So the first step was to build the jig. I found some old exterior 3/4″ plywood left in the attic by the previous homeowner and decided to use that. Something like MDF (medium-density fiberboard) probably would have been better, but hey, “ya use what ya got,” right? Anyway the plywood worked fine. Read the rest of this article »

A few interesting links sent to me by Randy Maxey, an assistant editor with Woodsmith and ShopNotes magazines:

Creating Customer Trust

Ryobi Radial Arm Saw Recall

Porter-Cable Cordless Nailer Recall

Super Shop

Randy will be posting his thoughts soon as a regular contributing editor to WoodworkingONLINE.com

I work pretty closely with my boss, Doug Hicks. We share an interest in woodworking and digital photography. Each of us spends a lot of weekends in the shop working on projects for our homes. Recently, Doug mentioned he was going to build an end table using bent laminate legs. I asked him where he’d found plans and he explained that he had drawn up his own.

Now, I know Doug, and although he’s built hundreds of great woodworking projects, I know he’s not too handy with computers. So I asked him if he’d used a CAD program to draw them. (And wondered to myself how he’d figured out how to use it.) That’s when he told me he had used a low-tech method to design the table — a sketch on a scrap of paper and some cardboard!

Over the next few weeks, Doug is going to send images of his work to me and explain to us all how he solved some of the problems in building the table as he goes along. You’ll have to excuse a few of the photos though. Doug hasn’t purchased a tripod yet for his camera, so a few of the images are a bit out of focus and skewed to the left or right. (Especially the ones where he shows his hands in the photo while he’s taking the picture.) I hope you learn a little and enjoy this first WoodworkingONLINE construction article.

– Joel

Read the rest of this article »

Doug Hicks, executive editor at August Home Publishing, was asked this question recently at one of our woodworking seminars at the Woodsmith Store: If you could have just one tool on a deserted island (assuming it had electricity!), what would it be?

Doug’s answer was a band saw and he gave his reasons why in a seminar later that spring. Here are his reasons: Read the rest of this article »

Last week, Paul Sellers commented on whether or not there is still a demand for highly-crafted furniture items. He explained why he thinks there will always be a market for quality, custom-built furniture. According to Paul, people want furniture made with “… real wood and a quality that bespeaks the integrity of the men (who) make it.”

For some reason, a lot of woodworkers are only interested in completing a project as quickly as they possibly can. I know I was that way at one time. Then I’d jump right into the next project without taking any time to enjoy what I was doing. Read the rest of this article »

Last week, I began a discussion with Paul Sellers, director of the School of Woodworking at Homestead Heritage Craft Village near Waco, Texas. The Foundational course, in which Paul teaches hand tool usage at the school, is growing in popularity and his answer to last weeks question touches on how we need to get young people involved again in woodworking.

This week, I asked his opinions about craftsmanship.

Joel: Inexpensive, mass-produced furniture is everywhere these days. Is there still a need for the kind of craftsmanship your school promotes?

Paul: What you say is true. Today, most furniture is mass-produced in factories. All too often a mass-produced piece sells for a price similar to what most individuals might pay for the wood alone. Read the rest of this article »