Dan Shapiro's Blog

I’m a big fan of Woodweb’s forums. Here you can find anything from reclaimed antique pine timbers, 10,000 boardfeet at a time, to a box of snakewood selling for an unbelievable $4/lb (that’s $18/bf).

Today I was working with a walnut burl piece, about 11″x15″x0.355″, give or take 0.0015″. Unfortunately, it had a big old hole in it.

I’ve been making dovetails for the past week, which means I’ve screwed up a lot of dovetails. In no particular order, here are some of the lessons I’ve learned.

There’s two things to understand about the Incra system. One is that it is a router fence, not a jig. Two is the near-perfect accuracy of the positioning system.

This guy pulled together literally dozens of different websites from woodworkers who’ve built their own poker tables of all different designs and sizes. Most have instructions; all have pictures.

This is one of the easiest upgrades you can make to any of your belt driven machinery and gets a lot of bang for the buck. The belts are available in a range of standard profiles to fit any machinery you’re likely to run across.

Tablesaws can be loud, viscious beasts. My old Grizzly contractor saw was so loud that I had neighbors complain when I fired it up. These days, my saw hums quietly to itself. I can rip 8/4 maple while my wife sleeps soundly in the bedroom upstairs. If your tablesaw is shaking the shack, here’s what…

These guys are selling Tetris-piece shelving.

The back is as shown, and the front has a simple “NothingSeveredYet.com” over the pocket. Take your choice of a range of colors and styles. Infant sizes are even available for the budding woodworker.

You have to deal with brushes. While Brian posted a lovely article about how to make this suck less, there’s no denying that it sucks. You have to kick out $15 for a nice brush. Then you have to tug and make sure there are no bristles.