I recently finished making a traditional(ish) Finnish dough pail. I was rather nervous to use it for the first time. I put some water in it and I guess I got it right as it held the water in perfectly. Not a drop leaked.

The true test will come with time, how it holds up with repeated extreme cycles of wet and dry, but at least it cleared the first hurddle magnificently.

I've been in the market for awhile for a jointer, and looking at used models, mostly on Marketplace. I see quite a few popup and most of them look pretty worn. Take the picture for example, this just popped up in my city, with no price listed. I'm interested but skeptical. I don't mind to put some work into something like this to get it in shape, but man that rust looks pretty bad. And if this unit was left to rust it just feels like the owner didn't take care of it... what else could be wrong?

So my questions are, what should I be looking out for, what questions to ask on something like this? How much work and what process is involved in refinishing that bed? Can it be done by hand or is this a job for a machine shop? What's a fair price? Should I just run and not look back?

First time using Sassafrass, so fun! It smells so nice and works beautifully. Finished with 6 coats of waterlux original.

We’re a small restoration workshop in Odesa. Right now we’re working on the carved ornaments from the doors of the Rauchverger house on Italiiska Street.

Our rule: keep the original. Repair what’s damaged, recreate only what’s lost.

The bracket. 
A section of it broke off and was lost. We glued oversized blocks of new wood into the gap and clamped them up. Once the glue cures, they’ll be carved down to follow the lines of the original scroll.

The rosettes. 
Cracks and chipped petals, filled.

The frieze and acanthus pieces. 
Next in line.

All of this happens in Odesa during the war, between air raid alerts and power cuts. To everyone who follows us here: thank you. Your comments and support keep a small workshop going.

Happy to answer questions about the process.

I have this fresh Osage orange log and I'm trying to figure out the best way to process it for carving and use in tool handles. Do I seal the ends with wax and let it dry for a year or two or do I take it to a Milling plant and have them cut it and then let it dry? I'm just not sure how to go about it.

Need to sand this lid for an urn I'm making. Want to make sure i don't round over the corners and can keep them looking crisp.

I have an ETS 150, a mirka deos 3x5, and, of course, hard sanding blocks.

What would be the best approach in your experience?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers

Hello

I am building a hotrod.

The dashboard is mahogany. It will have brass plates and various other bits on it when finished (one example pic attached - the circular hole was dpne with a hole saw but then had to be clearanced by hand with what I had to hand very clumsily by me, I know I know I am sorry but I was in a big rush with my foundry running, long story! But that will have the speedometer in there, the bezel of which overlaps the brass that is already there so you wont see the hole).

I was wondering before I have at it how best to get this to a beautiful lustre and protect it in a car? Isnthere anything special I need to do with mahogany?

I am not a woodworker (clearly!!!), welding and forging and cars and engines is my bag.

The dash is 15mm thick and is currently just planed flat and smooth.

So, how best to tackle this to get the best from it and keep it nice forever? Any advice from the experts on the room?

Source: https://www.sawstop.com/sawstop_faq/can-i-use-any-10%E2%80%B3-standard-blade-or-8%E2%80%B3-dado-set-with-a-sawstop-saw/

Do not use dado sets with solid-plate interior chippers or blades with molding heads, as neither brake cartridge is designed to stop those blade types.

Does that mean the CMT locked dado set will have an issue with the sawstop? Perhaps with the safety mechanism?

This is the specific one: https://www.cmtorangetools.com/na-en/industrial-saw-blades/locked-dado-pro-set-230

I picked up this cheap center finder on Ali after admittedly not looking at the photos too closely. I assumed at a glance this would be a vernier scale but it's actually 20 units in 2cm. Is this just a fake scale for precision-aesthetic, or is it an actual scale with a use I just can't think of?

Hey everyone, I recently started creating some candle holders from branches - sometimes big ones 5/6 inches in diameter. I really need the bottoms to be square to sit flatly on a table. I work out of my little back yard and have limited room for tools. I assume a miter saw would be the right tool, but it's a little large. I cannot for the life of me get a proper straight cut with a handsaw. It is end grain, could I do this with an electric plane? Belt sander? Router?

Please help! Thank you

Started making some salt cellars for holiday gifts, but also wondered if these are sellable at a local high-end wood craft store. If so, how do you go about pricing them? I've never sold something I've made before. I have a few more styles, but these are the first I've made.

I got a big pile of aspen and alot of work to do cutting it up. Have you ever worked with aspen wood? How was it? How did it turn out? How does it age? How do you like to finish it? Anything about aspen wood is appreciated. Any advice for milling/drying? So far, to me if feels like a combination of poplar and pine.

Anyone have experience with air scrubbers for use in smaller spaces like garages?

Background,

I'm an Owner/Operator Carpenter/GC and my business is pivoting toward only doing custom high-end finish work. My 5 year goal was to move out of the subs, get a property, build a shop, house and spend 90% of my time in the shop and 10% in the field... but now, only a year since setting that goal, I'm getting loads of requests and have 3 months of custom projects on the books. So, while I'm upping my timeline and my wonderful wife is looking for a property for us. I'm scrambling to update my current garage/shop with more compact dust management. Namely air scrubbers because I need to apply finishes in a dust free environment.

Currently I'm using a Shop Fox dust collector and Festool Dust collector with Cyclone Dust Separator (amazing BTW) but it's just not enough to clear the air to a point where I can apply a finish.

I use the Alorair Scrubbers in the field and have been really happy with the results but they are clunky and free standing. I don't have the floor space needed for those. So, I'm wondering if anyone here has had good results in a smaller work area with the free hanging units. What are you using? Any advice would be appreciated.

I started this last September based on videos from Graham Blackburn and Wood By Wright. It never worked too well, binding badly as it approached full depth, and after using it a couple times I just went to the tablesaw for grooves. Yesterday I was finishing a couple of small coffers from American Peasant and needed to groove the breadboard ends for the lids and decided to finally give this the attention to make it work.

I used a chisel to ease the inside edges, applied a good amount of paste wax to the plane surfaces and to a piece of grooved cherry, and spent a few minutes aggressively riding it back and forth. What a difference! The burnishing action along with the wax worked the wood into compliance and left a glassy surface to slide on. After that I gave it some final shaping and finishing work, then an all over coat of paste wax.

It's made from a piece of steamed euro beech that I keep on hand for plane making, with initial cutting and shaping done on my tablesaw. Cutting the recess for the iron and wedge were done with hand tools, as was the final shaping and smoothing. The iron is a 12 dollar DeWalt 1/4 inch chisel with the handle cut off, an affordable and expedient way to get a good plane iron for grooving or rabbet planes!

This thing really cuts like a dream now! I can pull this out of my tool chest and cut a perfect quarter by quarter by quarter groove in seconds. Far faster than I can set up the tablesaw. This is one instance where the hand tools absolutely outperform the electron-driven madness of power tools. If you don't have one, don't be afraid to try making one, it's a great tool to have and a fun project!

I hope this post inspires you to go make something, or at least to go out and caress your tools in appreciation of their beauty and quiet utility.

Hey friends,

I’ve recently acquired this really neat behemoth of a butcher block. She feels pretty darned sturdy but there are some splits along the top that make me a bit nervous with some of the separation running nearly the full height of the block.

I have wooden counter tops that I have maintained pretty well so far by just oiling the heck out of them. Will that work for this too?

Previous owner only cleaned it with hot water and bleach and I’m afraid the water on the open ends of the grain caused the splits by swelling/contracting. Would oiling do the same thing?

Any advice is appreciated!

My sister uses her hot tub a lot so I made her a tea light candle holder she can use while soaking. I included a cast iron candle snuffer that is stored in a channel inside the candle holder, held in place by a black screw-on magnet. On the back where you can't see it while using the candle holder I glued on a wafer-thin strip of magnetic stainless steel to hold a lighter in a magnetic sleeve.

I had planned to add onboard candle storage underneath somehow but I decided that would be too busy.

Body is Spanish cedar with 2 coats of Defy redwood deck stain, legs are walnut, inlay strip covering the snuffer storage channel is torrefied poplar. Both legs and inlay finished with 2 coats of Defy butternut deck stain.

The legs were supposed to be torrefied poplar as well, but every time I tried to rout them using a pattern template I made, the flush trim router bit would destroy the poplar, sometimes destroying the template in the process. Even when I ensured that my bandsaw rough cut was close enough that I was only flush trimming 1/16" off using my router table. It acted like I was climb cutting only much worse.

Torrefied poplar is really brittle and apparently router bits love to grab it, although it cuts on a table saw just fine. Except for the tearout. Lots of tearout. I'm not a fan. I switched to walnut and was able to flush trim the legs with no problems at all.

NOTE: I originally labeled this as a project submission but I'm new to this and didn't realize in-progress photos were required for that, and I didn't take any. I was too busy fixing/covering up my many mistakes.

Spread over the course of a month, 212 hours were spent in creating this beautiful aircraft. The Hawaii (II As the first was destroyed) Mars was and still is the most awe worthy piece of engineering. I wanted to convey this in my own ways as well as giving my original Martin mars being the Philippine Mars a sister.

The Martin JRM Mars was a massive, four-engined cargo transport and firefighting flying boat built by the Glenn L. Martin Company during World War II. Only seven units were ever completed, making it one of the largest and rarest Allied flying boats ever operated.

In 1959, the surviving aircraft were slated for demolition, but a consortium of British Columbia timber companies called Forest Industries Flying Tankers (FIFT) bought them.

Forest industries was later bought by Coulson aviation and the Hawaii was refitted with cutting edge avionics flying until 2016 and once more in 2024.

This plane is personally my greatest ever creation and hits home as well having seen it once in action on the field.

So enough of that here’s some stats if anyone is crazy enough to make a 3.5 foot wide plane.

Wood used for the main aircraft: pine so shaping would be easy.

Wing: oak

Tail was cedar and MDF

Floats are oak

Stand is black walnut.

The cost was about 250$ total (not bad!)

And the time spent was summed up by around 100 hours of shaping and sanding and 60 putting it together. The rest was on finishing which took several all nighters.

I hope looking at her brings the same weird feeling of looking at a hunk of wood in the shape of one of the most gorgeous flying boats ever built.

Cheers guys.

It’s time to wrap up before my retirement from making planes.

Your favourite plane maker,
-nasty

I came across some discussion on this on Reddit when researching this problem, but nobody had answered definitively if these parts were interchangeable. So now that I've tried, I wanted to share this for the record in case other people happen to be looking for answers in the future.

I initially bought this RIDGID R4331 planer from Facebook Marketplace. I stupidly only tested it by making sure it ran rather than feeding a board through it. When I got it home and tried to use it, the board would only move small bits at a time and eventually get stuck. I took it apart to try to clean it up and figure out what was wrong. It turned out at least one of the gears in the gearbox assembly was slipping and that lead to the feed rollers not turning consistently.

I reached out to the person who sold it to me, and he refunded my money. I don't believe he knew it had this problem as he had admittedly not used it for a couple years. Unfortunately RIDGID no longer seems to make this assembly (part # 089170109706) anymore which I find odd considering they still sell the planer new. I did find some people suggesting they thought that the gearbox assembly for the WEN 6552 (part # 6552-0174) might also work, but nobody had actually tried it. It seems like these two planers have a lot in common and probably source a lot of the same parts if they aren't also made in the same factory.

I just decided to give it a try since the parts looked similarly shaped and sized and WEN's parts supplier would let me return it if it didn't fit. I'd only be out return shipping in that case. I installed the new assembly today, it fit perfectly, and everything is running great now. Hopefully if anyone else needs a new gearbox assembly for the RIDGID R4331 they come across this post and learn that they can buy the WEN part to fix it.

I've been slowly getting to grips with Vectric Aspire and I'm really pleased how this came out! I usually use the CNC for basic flattening, pockets etc.. so never attempted anything this complicated before!

EARLY EDIT: Surprise, it's oak! Not sure how I missed that.

I'm a woodstover, so I get log drops whenever small-time tree guys have takedowns near me, in SW Connecticut. I'll take anything, pine, maple, oak. Always for free so that's amazing. Usually just cut, split, season, but I finally got around to buying an Alaskan mill for any "nice" logs and milled some 5' long maple, about 14" diameter.

No idea what I'm going to do with them. Maybe stair treads on a staircase I need to refinish. Please tell me if I'm an idiot for doing that.

Anyway I've been milling them 2" thick. I have one last log, it's shorter at 4', should I be making some thicker slabs? Will anyone want to buy any of this? It sat outside (raised off ground) for 18-24 months. All seems pretty mint. I'd just dry this...in my basement?

Any thoughts, advice, comments are welcome. Thanks!

Gear geeks:

Mill is a Vevor 14"-36". Way cheaper than Granberg ($60 vs $330). Don't love going the China route but just can't justify the extra spend for practically the same thing.

Chainsaw is an MS362 with a 24" Oregon Powercut bar and Stihl 33 RMX ripping chain. I bought the saw used years ago, recently rebuilt with a used Stihl crankshaft and a new Meteor piston and cylinder.

Working on removing varnish on an old wood dresser (15+years old). Sanding took hours and I switched to citristrip for the finer pieces which worked well at first. But I left the citristrip on the two drawers and corners for too long and now I’m stuck.

I read using denatured alcohol will help and then I can restart. When I do restart should I use a heat gun and scraper or use citristrip again and Saran Wrap the wood?

Also I heard dumond smart strip is tougher and better than citristrip

Hello all!

I just finished up this shaker hanging cabinet, made from riftsawn cherry harvested from trees in my yard.

I also used quartersawn eastern white pine for the drawer box, from Alexander Brothers in PA.

This is my first complex, heirloom-quality build. First time doing dovetails, as well.

I really took my time. This took me about three weeks. I borrowed heavily from designs by Christian Becksvoort, and borrowed Rob Cosman’s drawer bottom slip idea.

I’ll make a quick peg rail to go with it. Both will be a wedding gift for my mother.

Excited for this!

I made this dresser. Solid walnut with a homemade finish

Do yall bring bags or boxes big enough for your cutting boards? I don't want people to be deterred from buying because they don't wont to carry them around.

Thanks,