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Dave and I had just sat down for our usual bagels, coffee, and conversation at the local diner. He was looking pretty good, considering his recent treatment for a tenacious form of brain cancer detected a few months earlier. This tough old ex-Navy pilot didn’t talk about it much though, and I sometimes wondered if his illness shook me more than him.

With a little bit of walnut and maple, you can craft a cutting board that’s sure to be a big hit with any football fan. Cutting the cross stitch slots in the joining halves of the football blank involve a technique that is similar to making finger joints, and the nifty trick for bending and applying the maple stripes allows the walnut football shape to expand and contract without restriction. Now let’s give this project a proper kickoff.

At the JD Lohr School of Woodworking, we use this hall table project as a vehicle to teach fundamental approaches to furniture making. By building this piece, you’ll learn a slew of great techniques that will give you a jump start in your woodworking education.

Cigar box guitars have been around for a long time; the earliest versions date back to the Civil War era. Two centuries haven’t diminished the appeal of this homespun instrument. Though a box guitar won’t have the same acoustic properties as a standard version, it provides just the same playability, in a compact, rugged package. Building your own version is a great way to get started as a luthier.

Is it possible to simultaneously feel as if you own too many and too few clamps? If your clamps are piled more than a few steps away from your assembly table, then you already know the truth behind this woodworking paradox. When a glue-up goes smoothly, lugging clamps from one end of the shop to another (and cleaning them up at the end of the job) can feel like an endless chore. When things go south, the seconds lost searching for a few more clamps can result in disappointment, or even disaster.

Jet’s new 14" bandsaw enters a tool category with a large number of competitive models. But this saw has some innovative features that woodworkers will appreciate, especially with regard to heavy-duty resawing. For starters, there’s just over 13" of resaw height, and the saw can accept 3/4" blades. 

Traditional F-style clamps are a fixture in most woodshops for good reason. Thanks to their stone-simple design, these clamps reliably deliver pressure wherever it’s needed—most of the time. Whether you own a few clamps, or your collection numbers in the dozens, odds are good that you’ve encountered a few situations where the handle got in the way. 

It’s a joy to use a chisel with a razor-sharp edge, and a tragedy when a perfect edge gets ruined by an accidental drop or ding. WoodRiver chisel guards provide cheap insurance against damage. For less than ten bucks, you get a set of ten guards that will fit chisels from 1/8" to 1-1/4". These flexible silicone guards will fit and tenaciously grip a range of different chisel shapes, unlike hard plastic chisel guards. If you hate regrinding chisels as much as I do, you’ll appreciate these top-notch tips.

I’ve started to work on laying out and cutting dovetail joints by hand, and I’m confused about the proper angle to use for dovetail joinery. What are the most common angles, and what are the factors that determine what angle to choose?