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Elegant wooden chair with carved details.
Colwin Way Turns a Traditional Chair from Ash As a professional woodturner, I find...
12
Feb
Man working vintage log splitting machine outdoors.
Wood, a material from trees, grown by the energy of the sun, is the beginning of...
11
Feb
Illustration of a traditional yurt with trees.
For centuries, the yurt has been the portable home of choice throughout central Asia....
10
Feb
Wooden bird sculpture flying elegantly
Peter Benson carves a large sea bird on the wing The wandering albatross and other...
10
Feb
Chisel cutting precise wood joint.
Each week we bring you a round-up of interesting and entertaining woodworking content...
10
Feb

Furniture & Cabinetmaking

Wooden chisel box with assorted chisels inside.

How to Make a Tool Chest

When you are demonstrating you need to show off your talents so David Barron’s toolbox had to feature through dovetail and mortice & tenon joints Storing and transporting my tools to shows and demonstrations used to be a juggling act involving cardboard boxes and bubble wrap. It was time to make a purpose-built toolbox. I have always fancied constructing one and there are some beautiful examples in The Toolbox Book by Jim Tolpin. The danger with any purpose-made box is that you forget some essential tool or you add a new tool which doesn’t fit. Conversely you can try to anticipate future needs and end up with a box that is too big to move.I laid out all the tools I needed to accommodate, photo 1, and then thought hard about the style of the Bandsaw Upgrade The bandsaw is the latest machinery upgrade in my workshop and I am

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Three-tier wooden folding shelf unit.

Wood Restoration: a Cake Stand

Louise Biggs shows us you can have your cake and eat it too. This cake stand is made of quartersawn London plane (Platanus hybrid) also known as  ‘lacewood’. My customer had made the cake stand at sixth-form college, with all the parts being produced between his woodwork and metalwork classes. Some decades later the frame sections had warped and twisted. Eager to keep it complete we embarked on a journey to try straightening them. I felt there was little we could do with the twist even if we succeeded in straightening them. Assessment Tool list For the turning Stages of Restoration Attempting to straighten the uprights Further reading

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Woodcarving

Gray and brown bird on pumpkin in grass.

How to Carve a Fieldfare – Thrush

The author shows how to carve this striking member of the thrush family. The fieldfare (Turdis pilaris) is a migratory bird that breeds in Scandinavia, central and northern Europe and as far as parts of China. The fieldfare’s name derives from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘feldeware’, meaning ‘traveller of the fields’. They can be found feeding in hedgerows and fields and they also like woodlands. They are a highly social species with some flocks numbering hundreds of birds. To avoid the harsh winters they migrate and large numbers come to Britain in October/November, but are mostly returned to their breeding grounds by April/May. I chose to use jelutong (Dyera costulata) for this project. It is a timber that is easy to carve and holds detail, including fine pyrography markings. If you do not have jelutong, lime (Tilia vulgaris) would work well too, but you need to be a bit more careful

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Close-up of intricately carved wooden flower.

Wild Rose Appliqué

Mark Ivan Fortune takes you through the steps to carve this beautiful decoration. All things in the natural world, whether animal, plant, crystal or snowflake, have a growth pattern. They grow outward in any and all directions, depending on the inherent nature of the form. Working with this in mind will greatly assist in invoking life and character in your carving. Here I have created a strong enclosed form that, although it may appear quite delicate, is in fact robust and durable and suitable for a wide range of applications. Employing the use of some well-executed undercutting lifts the flower head from its surrounding, which is our main focal point. The subtle but clear distinction between background, middle ground and foreground gives a good sense of depth to the overall piece. Begin by sketching the design to gain an understanding of the form. This will enable you to rough out

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Woodturning

Hand spraying aerosol can with fine mist.

Oils, Wax & Grease – Lubricants and Rust Protection

We wax lyrical about the sticky subject of keeping your tools shiny and running smoothly. An email from a reader querying my advocacy of WD-40, set me on a train of thought about how we can keep the wheels of woodworking turning, so to speak. Ever since human beings have had a need to get objects to move, or tools to function well, there has been a need to lubricate and protect. As tools and technology get more sophisticated, so newer more specialised lubricants have become available to help do this. I haven’t written an exhaustive list of lubricants and rust protection, but I hope it will be a guide to help ease the way. The first thing is to consider what the general descriptions of different materials means as shown below. These descriptions have been written in a rather academic way, trying to encapsulate all the relevant properties of

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Close-up of pine cones on a tree

Trees for Life: Cedarwood

Cedar is a catch-all name for many different species of often unrelated tree – we show you a few of them In this series we have looked at a very few species of tree in each article. There cannot be a single, named tree in the world that isn’t related to others or, in some cases such as cedar, frequently ‘unrelated’. It does get very complicated – so much so that we thought it might be better to take several different ‘cedars’ as examples because they have such diverse properties that are useful to the woodworker. Pinaceae family (Cedrus or Cedar) Cedar of Lebanon There are five species in this group, but Cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani) is well known and liked as workable timber. Location Over the centuries, extensive deforestation has occurred, with only small remnants of the original forests surviving. Deforestation has been particularly severe in Lebanon and

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Woodworking Crafts

Open book on wooden stand in front of bookshelves.

How to Make a Book Stand

Although I have called this a book stand, it could be multifunctional. It could be used to hold books, magazines, a tablet, drawings – all the possibilities are there. Even the size isn’t critical. It took me only a few hours to make and the result is pleasing to look at as well as functional. Now read on… Hinges You end up with a nice neat book stand that looks like this… …or folded up, like this. You can carry it with you or pop it on the bookshelf, it’s always ready as a reading aid! Further reading

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Glass of red wine on wooden coasters.

End Grain Coasters

Paul Purnell makes coasters using pen blanks. Large end-grain projects are reasonably straightforward if you possess a planer/thicknesser and a huge industrial drum sander, but not everyone does (including me). These coasters are an introduction to working with end-grain without access to this equipment. Once you are able to manage these, an end-grain chopping board is feasible. It is crucial that edges are flat and at 90° to each other. Without this, there will inevitably be gaps in the finished piece. This project is a challenge, but a worthwhile one. Anyway, a few gaps will show the coasters were handmade. If you have an accurate bandsaw or tablesaw, you could cut the blanks from your own wood stock. However, this will limit you to the types of wood you have. I experimented by ordering 30 pen blanks via the internet. Their size and 90° accuracy varied, and strangely the more

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