The Renaissance Woodworker

My Hepplewhite book case is out of the clamps and I have been playing around with my new scrumtrulescent Super Chute shooting board to miter the integral bead inlays. I took a break from that detail to glue up the pediment so I could fit it to the bottom of the case. Technically speaking this [...]

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Enough of these ear drum smashing, dust spitting machines. The rough and tumble work is done on this book shelf so now it’s on the the work I truly love with my faithful hand tools. Maybe I will still do some ear drum smashing, but that will be the fault of The Who and maybe [...]

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So what good are some pretty French feet without a case to sit upon them? I had already started the casework before the feet but took a detour from it to build the feet because my set up for the sliding dovetail that secures the center shelf was being fussy. Rather than obsess over it, [...]

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I got to spend a lovely few minutes in the shop last night to finish up the shaping of the french feet for this Hepplewhite book case. When I last left off, I had just glued the mitered feet together but had yet to shape the outer compound curve. It is certainly possible to do [...]

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Now that I have the grain aligned for the best strength it is time to begin cutting the feet to size and mitering them into the typical bracket foot. I need a 90 degree edge on this parallelogram so I clip off the back edge of the blank using the miter gauge at the table [...]

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I am adding a French foot to the Hepplewhite bookcase that will be placed in my wife’s voice studio. In my last post about this little piece I teased you all with the pattern for the front apron and foot and now I turn my sights to building the feet. The key to making these [...]

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I have always thought of myself as a pretty slow woodworker. I am constantly amazed by the time in which my fellows crank out furniture. I don’t attribute this to my penchant for hand tools either because I have seen some of my neanderthal colleagues tear through a project as well. I am not adverse [...]

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I cut one of these feet by hand while working at The Steppingstone Museum using a turning saw. I cut the other 3 by band saw using a 1/4″ skip tooth blade. One took 4 hours with visitor interruptions and burned a lot of calories in 95 degree heat. The other 3 took 15 minutes [...]

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The Wood Whisperer Guild is at is again and embarking on its summer group build. This time it is a chest of drawers. The “approved” plan is actually almost identical to the chest I built in July of 2009 and you can find a 3 part series on it starting here. In my non-stop effort [...]

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Here is the final episode in my unplugged attempt to turn a simple Shaker side table into a low country Southern Queen Anne version. In this episode I tackle the drawer and fit it. I did not go into detail on the ogee molding so stay tuned for a dedicated episode in the future on [...]

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