Three drawers down, three to go.

My new pride and joy! Lie-Nielsen 8pt panel saw. Getting broken in this weekend building the dresser.

Dresser halves are together along with a top!

The greatest tool chest ever made.

Thoughts on woodworking →

This guy wrote a postcard to Lindsay Lohan every day she was in prison. Here was an interesting one with his thoughts on woodworking…

Rails for the dresser mortised into the legs.

After a marathon of jointing and planing, parts for 8 dust panels are ready to go.

12” board sawn by hand and eye - not bad!

Bandsaw has arrived!

Mariner’s star

The bitterness of poor quality lingers long after the sweetness of a cheap price is forgotten.

— Anonymous

Woodworking is like making a 3D puzzle

Woodworking is taking over more and more of my free time. I was working on my latest project at school this evening and thought about how woodworking is really just a giant puzzle, but in three dimensions.

The difference is you make the pieces yourself and there’s no picture on the box to help—you create that too. It’s very challenging and very rewarding. Sketchup is a great way to visualize this complex combination of puzzle pieces. Flipping into x-ray mode shows you the insides of your pieces, specifically the joinery (assuming you took the time to model it):

It’s hard to believe that it’s possible to keep track of all that and actually make it out of wood. But, slowly but surely it comes together. You end up with a lot of saw dust, wood chips and a few boards that are within thousands of an inch of where you wanted them. In most do-it-yourself projects around the house, 1/16th of an inch is about as accurate as you need to be. But in fine furniture you really do deal with thousands of an inch. And it’s actually easy to do with good tools. Taking off half a thousandth of an inch is common.

Back to our puzzle. What if after about 10% of your puzzle is assembled you can’t really count on the picture any more? As the pieces of your project start coming together there are always slight differences in widths or heights from your plan. These add up as you assemble your project. So you need to compensate for it. You start taking measurements off the pieces themselves and count less and less on your plans. By the time you’re done you aren’t even using your original project diagrams any more—the project itself becomes your reference.

Woodworking has been around almost as long as we have and it’s amazing how much there is to learn. But apply those time-tested techniques and, after tens or hundreds of hours, you don’t have a puzzle any more but a box or a table or a chair that you made yourself using only your hands and mind, and with little care will outlive you and even your children.

Launch! Sketchup for Woodworkers.com

For the past year and a half now I’ve taken up woodworking as a pretty serious hobby. I’m currently enrolled in my second woodworking class at Palomar College and a major part of the class will be designing our own project from scratch. Using Google Sketchup is an option but not many of the students know it (and I don’t envy someone using a 3D software package for the first time). I’ve been using Sketchup for a while now and wanted to share what I’ve learned with the class.

So this past weekend I hunkered down with Sketchup and Photoshop and put a site together. Sketchupforwoodworkers.com will be a resource of tutorials and more that are specifically designed for woodworkers just starting out, or ready to move to the next level, with Sketchup. Even if you’re not interested in building your own bedroom set but have always wanted to dip your toes into 3D, check it out!

Technical Details The site is powered by Radiant and hosted by the fine folks at Linode.