Dan Shapiro's Blog

Lars Liden did a ton of work to redo his walk-in closet, including building an outdoor hutch for his hot water heater.

I’m happy to share that as of tomorrow, I will be working for my new company, Ontela Inc., fulltime! This means that I will be working my butt off at just one job instead of two, leaving dozens of minutes a week for woodworking and blogging and personal hygene.

After spending 2 weeks stripping paint from the exposed beams in my living room I have devised a 3 step process for refinishing painted wood.

Sorry for the long period without any posts! My non-woodworking real life has been too busy to spend much time in the shop, and I just returned from a long vacation in Vietnam.

Bosch has released a new battery system for their line of cordless tools. These new batteries have a lifetime that is 50% longer than traditional batteries and includes chargers that charge in just 30 minutes. The secret to the two packs is a combination of new heat rods inside the batteries and a microchip to…

It seems that sticking a router under a hole in a table and using it from the top should be a simple bit of engineering, but until recently it eluded most router manufactures. Your two options were to spend a few hundred dollars on a router lift or to bolt your fixed base under the…

Back in ‘the day’, if you wanted a basic overview of a subject like woodworking, you might find yourself looking for a book titled something like this. “Introduction to Woodworking” “Get Started in Woodworking” “Woodworking for Beginners” That was before the ingenious discovery by the book industry that people prefered to buy introductory reading material…

The Good: The best way to join two pieces of wood together, period. The Bad: The price. The Bottom Line: One of those cases where the best really is that good. NSY rating: FIVE THUMBS UP (5/5)

This has absolutely nothing to do with woodworking. I’m terribly sorry. I try to stay on topic, really I do. But sometimes something comes along that’s just so odd, I have to share it with everyone, even though there isn’t even the faintest connection between woodworking and the subject at hand.

What can I say… it’s plans to make baby wipes with your table saw. How cool is that.