Of all the furniture of the 18th and 19th centuries, the work of Boston chair maker Samuel Gragg (1772-1855) is some of the most shocking to modern eyes. His elastic, steam-bent chairs are based on the ancient Greek “klismos” chair,” yet they have unexpected curves and a lightness that is contemporary. There aren’t many Gragg [...]
In the great battle to make the best router plane (what, you weren’t aware of the war?), Lie-Nielsen has raised the stakes by introducing two new closed-throat routers. For those of you who don’t follow router plane minutiae like I do, the throat of a router plane can be either open or closed. Closed-throat routers, [...]
I was in a rock ‘n’ roll band in college, and we dreamed about getting a record deal, selling dozens of copies of our album and ending up in the cut-out bin. For those of you who aren’t music nerds, the cut-out bin is where a record store puts albums that have been dumped on [...]
Attention woodworkers in and around the Great Falls, Montana, area: Have you noticed a curious lack of vintage handsaws in your flea markets and antique malls? Well there’s a reason that greater Great Falls is the black hole of vintage saws. The saw painters have made a 22’-high mechanical shrine to the craft using 208 [...]
Around the Popular Woodworking Magazine office we used to joke about how red oak (Quercus rubra) wasn’t really a wood. It was more like a weed. It’s stringy, kinda homely, cheap and – most of all – everywhere. I have been in far too many kitchens around the world where every piece of wood that [...]