For the last 3 years since I’ve gotten into woodworking I’ve made do with an old 1HP Grizzly dust collector. It worked well enough when connected to one tool at a time. Up until recently that hasn’t been a problem. I left it connected to the table saw and used my shop vac on the router table. The only other power tool I had was a thickness planer with very poor dust collection anyway.

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During our recent entrance way renovations I had a lot of time to develop a hatred of the look of our doorbell. It’s a hunk of plastic covered in gaudy designes.

Having been long inspired by the Greene & Greene wall sconces I decided to embark on making my own as a cover to the doorbell hardware. I’m NOT a stained glass artist and as I looked at what went into making a piece I realized I didn’t have the time to learn (on this project, but I’ll definitely do so in the future). Read more…

Recently a lot of the cherry I’ve been working with has had a lot of curl and figure to it. As much as I love my Stanley Type 2 #604 the 45° bedding angle just isn’t steep enough to handle highly figured  hardwoods.

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Just a  quick frame I threw together for a piece of art we picked up for our neighbors while on Kauai. Curly Cherry with a few Greene and Green details. Took about 8 hours (need to get faster). Joinery done by hand, half lap joints. If I had more time I should have made through tenons that protruded a bit…. maybe the next one. Read more…

UPDATE: I finished my slab top for the workbench. See Here

For the last year or so I’ve been slowly sliding more into the Japanese side of Woodworking. My workbench isn’t always the most ideal work surface…. mostly due to the location of the tail vise… it aways seems to be in the way of where I want to saw. So I started researching what work surface Japanese woodworkers use.

Most japanese woodworkers, from what I can tell, just put a big hunk of wood on the floor and sit cross legged. Most westerners   (including me) don’t like sitting on the floor much though.

But when Japanese do work standing up, I found a number of different sawhorse styles. During my research I found a old plan by Jay van Arsdale published in American Woodworker Jan-Feb 1990. These sawhorse seems to fit my desires almost perfectly and they are all built using japanese compression joints, wedges and no glue. They are a fun fast(ish) joinery project that gives you something useful to work off of for future projects. Read more…