Shooting the ends of long table tops and sawing cork bumpers.

To clean up the end of a table top with a plane is easy if it can stand vertically. After a certain height it becomes impractical. I use this set up for situations where the board lays flat on a bench with the end overhanging.

A panel of plywood six inches wide and […]

Maybe you don’t need those long clamps.

There are ways to create long clamps, such as coupling sections of threaded pipe for Jorgensen clamps.

Body Clamp Extenders, making a custom clamp bar from timber using the Record Clamp Heads

or hooking the ends of Parallel Clamps together. They all work and have come in useful for me at times, especially […]

Face grain.

I know that, technically speaking, face grain runs parallel to the longest direction of a board.

Bob Van Dyke sees faces in the carvings that Peter Follansbee does on face grain surfaces.

In cutting thousands of logs and branches (generally from trees I planted eighteen years ago) I see myriad faces, not along the […]

No Bad Wood.

A few years ago I tried to look up information on wood craftsman Hank Gilpin, whose work and attitudes about wood and living a life of craft have always appealed to me. It turns out that he keeps a very low digital profile. This article about him, written by a former apprentice, gets us up […]