Mitered frames can be a challenge to build without specialized equipment. Even without the specialized miter trimming machines that are used by professional picture framers, the home woodworker can still make frames using a few simple common workshop appliances and techniques.
My most popular video on YouTube to date has been making the French style marking gauge. So here’s that original video for your enjoyment.
One of my subscribers asked a question about making compound angled dovetails. These are actually just as easy to saw out as dovetails on square corners. The difficulty is in laying out and making the compound angled butt joint that is necessary to make before laying out the dovetails. In this video I go over the process for laying out the compound angled butt joint and then cutting the subsequent dovetails.
I just finished building a Welsh style stick chair, but when assembling the arm and spindles to the seat, a small crack opened up in the arm. Here’s a cool trick for repairing these small cracks when a glue brush or syringe won’t fit.
It’s inevitable. No matter how careful you are fitting your joinery, doing dry assemblies to check fit, and rehearsing your assembly process to make sure you have everything in place and ready to go, Murphy is going to show up from time to time and throw a little hiccup into things.
Part 2 of a two part series on making a wooden bodied spokeshave from scratch.
Part 1 of a two part series on making a wooden bodied spokeshave from scratch.
If you’ve been around woodworking hand tools for a while, you’ve likely heard of the hand saw hack that lets you saw perfectly square across a board without the aid of a pencil line to guide your cut. Wait! You haven’t seen this before? Here, hold my beer.
Try these three tips to improve your hand sawing.
While sawing precisely by hand may seem like black magic when you’re first learning, the secret to precision hand sawing, if you can call it that, is starting the cut precisely, and proper body mechanics during the cut.
In this video, I demonstrate an exercise I call “saw without sawing”. This short exercise helps to teach the new hand saw user what it feels like to take the weight of the saw off of the wood when starting a cut with a hand saw, and makes for more precise cuts.
A common struggle for new hand saw users is starting the saw cut cleanly and accurately. While the symptoms being experienced might seem like a problem with the saw itself, they are all caused by improper technique.