In honor of Get Woodworking Week, I decided to take a moment to cover a very basic concept: installing a drawer knob.

I made two Shaker Tables a couple years ago and unfortunately I never got around to making the knob for the cherry version. My mom lost patience with me and purchased a commercial knob. The very least I could do was install it for her.

So here’s a quick review of how I like to install drawer knobs in finished drawers. The key is to use our old shop favorite blue tape, a brad point bit, and a backer block. You’ll end up with nice clean holes and a perfect installation!

Update
Well that’ll teach me! I was in the middle of filming the Roubo workbench build when my mom came in and said, “put this knob on the drawer please!”. So I figured I may as well film it as a Mini. Not having my brain fully in the moment, I forgot about the old trick of simply running a straight edge from corner to corner to find the center point. I was really too focused on the concept of getting a clean hole. I also misspoke when I stated one of the measurements. My apologies for the errors.

Did you know you can join the Guild and get immediate access to over 5 hours of video content and detailed plans for this Shaker Table?
Or you can always buy the DVD in the Wood Whisperer Store.

What you can win this month:

Winner: Craig Clemans
15-Piece Bit Set – Great value starter set! Begin your woodworking career with this nice variety of the most commonly used profiles. Set includes a beautiful solid wood storage case. Two flute carbide cutters & 1/2″ shanks. From PrecisionBits.com

The folks at PrecisionBits.com also wanted to extend an exclusive 10% discount to our readers. Simply use the code thewood10 at checkout.

Winner: John Verreault
3-Month Wood Whisperer Guild Membership – The Wood Whisperer Guild is a unique and interactive online woodworking school.

In the last month, I have injured myself more times than I have in the past few years! Now we’re not talking hospital visits here. Just small cuts and scrapes (mostly from hand tools) and a couple of close calls. Enough for me to take a step back and seriously evaluate how I feel before I step into the shop. If there is one thing I learned about myself, it’s that I have NO business being in the shop when I’m tired.

The problem with fatigue is it’s a little like being drunk. You may be a little more complacent than usual. You might make slightly more risky cuts. You might not set up all the proper safety devices. The phrase, “Its just one cut” will likely come out of your mouth. Even something as simple as having a weaker grip on your chisel or push stick could have dangerous ramifications. Basically, all of our safety training goes out the window if you compromise your ability to make good decisions and execute properly.

With this new appreciation for the effects of fatigue on safety, I am happy to say I have been making the decision to stay home much more often than usual. I guess I’ll just edit more video. Like my good buddy Ice Cube says, “Check yo self before you wreck yo self!”

Mother Nature can be quite harsh on wood even under the best conditions. This is why it is essential to protect your outdoor projects with a good quality finish and if possible, use a cover to protect them from the elements. This video shows you a few boards that were left out in the Arizona weather for over two years with no protection at all. While intended mostly as fun, we might be able to glean some useful information by seeing which species are still usable after this torture test.

Thanks to Dan Johns on Facebook for inspiring the title of this episode.

Related Posts

A Desert Outdoor Finish (Video)
Pondering Outdoor Finishes
Difference Between Spar and Regular Varnish
A Better Way to Apply Spar Urethane

The reason I am bringing this up is because I recently made a purchase at Clyde Hardware and I thought it would be helpful to show you an example of the insane price discrepancies. I made a relatively small purchase of 18 Blum 1/2″ overlay hinges and 100 1/4″ brass shelf pins. At a popular online retailer, the hinges are about $7 each and the shelf pins are about $0.30 each. If my trusty calculator is right, that’s a total bill of $156 before tax. At Clyde, I was able to get the hinges for about $3 each and the pins for about $0.05 each, giving me a total of $59. So that’s a savings of about $97 on small order of 100 shelf pins and 18 hinges!!!

Moral to the story? Pick up the yellow pages and look for a hardware supplier. You might have to find a friend who has a tax ID number (if you don’t have one) because some of these places might not deal with the public directly. The potential savings is significant enough that it’s worth the extra effort to find these places. Spending less money on hardware means spending more money on the stuff that counts……….WOOD!

I drilled the washers so I could plug weld the faces, and also tack welded three points on the inside of the washers, The mounting screws are drilled on the flats of the nuts to give me max. room for the 6 X 3/4″ screws. After I chopped out the receiving hole for the hex nut and washer, I used the acme threaded rod to pull everything home.

The face board was drilled 1/8″ above center so the face would not sit below the back jaw. And I used a 3/4″ PVC (200 p.s.i.) pipe, so I could get the angle to the jaw, and as a sleeve to protect the screw from damage. I made the washer from a piece of UHMW (I know it’s very pink).

The bottom line:
12′ Acme rod, 10 nuts, 10 washers, (4) 4″ cast iron hand wheels threaded 3/4″-6 was $236.52 (including UPS to Hawaii $90.00). So I figure my unit cost for one Moxon Vise is about $55.00. I hope you enjoy making your own jig’s, and fixtures too.

“It’s your chance to enjoy the company of other passionate craftspeople as you learn from the experts whose work you’ve seen in our pages. Live demonstrations and hands-on workshops are at the heart of this limited-attendance event.”

Sound familiar? Reminds me of another event we have come to know and love from that other magazine we enjoy reading. *Cough* Woodworking in America *Cough* (it is very difficult to work that into a cough. Try it!). While this is a pretty obvious “me too” concept, I say bring it on! In many things, competition means the consumer wins and I feel this is no exception. I lost interest in the travelling woodworking shows years ago and I was surprised and elated to see the recent growth of Woodworking in America. I was even more excited with their recent promise to do two shows in two cities. But now with Fine Woodworking throwing their hat in the ring, there has never been a better time to attend a woodworking conference!

Something worth mentioning is that I don’t see any reference to a vendor area. One of the most popular features of Woodworking in America is the vendor floor. But I am wondering if that has more to do with the Hand Tool Olympics than the presence of the fancy boutique tool dealers. Perhaps leaving the vendor area out means that Fine Woodworking will be focusing more heavily on providing high quality instruction and ACTUAL hands-on opportunities. Oh, and Nick Offerman at the banquet HAS GOT to be better than the comedic stylings of Klausz and Underhill! hehe!

You can read the full announcement for yourself here. Be sure to come back and let me know your opinion. How do you think it will compare to Woodworking in America? If you could only go to one event, which would it be?

“I am building a bar top from 8/4 Walnut for my son’s new home, and he wants to have a very natural finish on it – no film finish allowed. My first thought was to use BLO, but some research has led me to think that Pure Tung Oil might provide better protection. Is Pure Tung Oil a better option than BLO for an open grained wood like Walnut?”

Tung Oil and BLO

When it comes to protection, boiled linseed oil (BLO) and pure tung oil are pretty similar. One important thing they have in common is that neither one offers a great deal of protection. If you have to choose between the two, I would say to go for the BLO since its cheaper. BLO does is said to “yellow” a little more over time when compared to tung oil, but that is a moot point with respect to walnut.

Now obviously your son is the boss here, right? But indulge me while I make a small suggestion. An pure oil finish will certainly be better than nothing at all, but for a bartop, your son might regret this decision after the first few spills. I can totally understand why he doesn’t want a film finish though. Personally, I hate the look of those super thick bartop finishes (epoxy). If someone wants that much protection, they should just put down a piece of glass or simply use something other than wood (can you smell the contempt? hehe). But keep in mind this isn’t an all or none proposition and you can achieve a compromise between the highly protective plastic look and the barely protected natural look.

The Oil/Varnish Compromise

So my suggestion would be to try to achieve the best of both worlds. Give the bar top a very natural-looking finish, while imparting a great deal more protection than what you would receive from an oil alone. There are a few products on the market today that contain oil and varnish together, like Watco Danish Oil. Because there is so much oil in the mix, you would have to put on about 4 or 5 coats before you really start to get an appreciable film. However, if you apply 2-3 coats, the wood will retain the natural look while protecting the surface with at least some varnish. If you go with a matte or satin formulas, I think your son will be even happier with the end result as it won’t have the eye-glaring reflective qualities of a typical gloss concoction.

One of the great advantages to using an oil/varnish blend is you can monitor the surface after each coat and simply stop when you have the look you want. Dilute the mix with mineral spirits if you want even more fine control. Also keep in mind that you can actually make your own oil/varnish blend by mixing 1/3 mineral spirits, 1/3 BLO (or tung oil), and 1/3 polyurethane.

Either way, make sure you sand lightly between coats to keep the finish nice and smooth. After the final coat, either sand with 1200 grit paper or buff with 0000 steel wool. The wood will not only look natural, but will easily repel the occasional spill.

Related Resources:

Oil Finish Basics (Video)
Make Your Own Oil/Varnish Blend

The idea started as many great ones do… late at night in a bar. At a recent gathering of woodworkers, we were sitting around a table asking ourselves, “How can woodworking be saved?” After all, with most schools no longer offering a shop class, millions of school age kids might not ever get the opportunity to work with wood. Add to that the trend toward ‘disposable’ furniture, built out of particleboard or MDF and designed to last until the next big design trend change, we were wondering if the appreciation of finely-crafted furniture would continue to be lost.

That’s when the idea hit me – we needed a special event to get folks off the sideline and into woodworking as a hobby. That’s where the idea of Get Woodworking Week comes in. This February 5 – 12, woodworking bloggers across the Internet are banding together to gear their sites toward the novice or soon-to-be-novice woodworker. They’ll cover topics as diverse as how they got started in the craft, which tools a beginning woodworker needs (without breaking the bank) and what techniques are essential to start with. There will be discussion about how to find wood on the cheap for projects, what sources of information are reliable and how making mistakes can – and do – make you a better woodworker.

I will be collecting links to each of these blog posts and listing them over at my blog, and I’ll mine the web to find some sites that would be interesting for the beginning woodworker – and for more advanced woodworkers who want to go back and take a look at where they started.

The most important part of Get Woodworking Week is that each of you reading this takes the time to get out of your comfort zone and invite someone new into the craft. It could be a child, niece or nephew, a neighbor who has always admired your work – and talk to them about what you do. If we can expose woodworking as a hobby that is interesting, fun and educational – that challenges both the left and right sides of your brain – AND can leave you with an attractive, useful project at the end, well, we’re on our way to ensuring that woodworking will be alive and well for years to come.

So, get out there and let’s Get Woodworking!

Location: Oak Harbor, WA

Hobbyist or Pro: Hobbyist

Shop Type: Garage

Square Footage: 0-249

Shop Description:
I decided to start woodworking about two years ago after my wife, Michelle and I went shopping for a new bedroom set. We visited the local furniture mart and Michelle found a set that she liked. It looked nice and each piece was priced around $500. When I asked the salesman what it was made out of, he talked in circles for a minute or two, fed me a line of BS, then walked away to ask his manager. It certainly was not hardwood and didn’t seem any better than the IKEA stuff we had. Frustrated, I left the furniture store and made a decision to start building my own furniture.

I went to my local big box store and loaded up with tools that I thought I needed. I somewhat successfully built my first project–a bookcase for Michelle. I had some real problems with the finishing process. Frustrated with how the bookcase looked, I took a hammer and just start beating the crap out of it. It was literally one of those “tiger got out of the cage” moments. Michelle heard all the pounding and expletives coming from outside and quickly ran to see what was wrong, fearing that I might have already injured myself during my inaugural build. Seeing the look on her face as I was turning her bookcase into kindling, I realized that injuring myself would have been far better than the wrath I was about to endure for ruining her bookcase. Needless to say, I made “nice” and managed to salvage the project and turned it into a bench. From that moment it became clear that it was going to take a lot more time, practice, tools and most of all patience to build furniture!

Over the past couple of years, my shop has gone through a couple progressions. I bought a cheap Delta table saw and Dewalt router from CL and built a couple more projects with some major issues as I continued to struggle. Not happy with the performance of my cheap table saw, I decided to try the all hand tool route. I sold my table saw, router and some of the other unnecessary power tools. Talk about biting off more than I could chew. I loved the idea of working with hand tools, but not the results I was getting. It is a slow, tedious and somewhat difficult process to learn for a new woodworker. It was driving me crazy and I was ready to quit. I took some time off and tried to figure out what it was that I was trying to accomplish. I figured out that I did not have to live in a world with only hand tools or only power tools. I now think of my shop and woodworking as a constant progression and try to enjoy the process as much as the end result. For me there is no finish line, timeline or deadline only enjoying time spent in the shop when I can.

This is my shop in its current state, part of a large one car garage. My workbench is a very basic and inexpensive design. Two IKEA tops laminated together with ¾” dog holes drilled into it. The top sits on a base built out of 2 X 4’s joined together with pocket holes. Not super sexy, but after I added bench dogs, wonder pups and a couple of Gramercy Holdfasts, it became very functional. I also added a T8 light above the bench that I got from Home Depot for about $40. On the bench are a few of my hand tools. I have two LN independence saws, one filed crosscut and the other rip. I have a Veritas Plow Plane, Router Plane, Spokeshave, LN block plane, Stanley Jack Plane Type (Type 14), Tite Mark and Veritas marking gauges and a Blue Spruce marking knife (worth splurging for). On the back of the bench I have a set of LN chisels, two Buck Brothers pairing chisels (wood handles made in Maine) and a Starrett combination square. Underneath my bench is where I store a very generic version of a tool chest, its actually a footlocker from a deployment I went on a few years ago and has come in very handy for storing my hand tools until I can build a legit tool chest. Inside of it I have a Stanley hand brace, Jennings pattern bits, sliding bevel, winding sticks and a couple other miscellaneous tools.

To the right of my bench is my sharpening station. I use Shapton 1000, 4000, and 8000 grit stones, a DMT duo sharp (coarse/fine) to flatten my stones, a Veritas MKII honing guide and a Rockler LED light courtesy of a monthly drawing on The Wood Whisperer site. The surface is just a piece of ¾” MDF bolted on top of what used to be the base for my table saw. The Ridgid jointer is a recent addition found on CL. I was not in the market for a jointer but it was only $100. It was in pretty poor shape–there was a lot of surface rust and it needed some serious TLC. After a couple days of hard work, all the rust was off and it looked pretty good. As far as functionality its okay, but I am not in love with it. The bed is short, its finicky to adjust, its only 6” wide and it I don’t like the amount of tearout I am getting, but it was only $100. Right behind the jointer is where I store my parallel clamps, nothing fancy but it works.

The planer was my first power tool addition. Its a Delta 12 ½”, 2 knife “lunchbox” style planer that I got off CL. This was a great find, I bought it from an older guy and it looked like he had only used it once or twice. The manuals where still in plastic unopened and it came with the mobile base. Its only a two-knife plane so I take very little off each pass; it takes little longer but sure is easier to thickness a board with the planer then by hand.

My newest power tool addition is a Grizzly G1022 ProZ, contractor style table saw with a Shop Fox Classic Fence. Another CL find and the one I am most proud of. It was almost a two hour drive to pick it up, but well worth it. The saw is in great shape, with limited use and very well taken care of. It came with a mobile base that the previous owner built, but I added the drawers, which are from Lee Valley and excellent for extra storage in my small shop. I added a couple of accessories–an Infinity Super General Combo blade, Onsrud Rip and Dado blades (eBay finds recommended by Knotscott). I have not used either of the Onsrud blades so I can’t offer any personal experience but from what Knottscott told me about them, some various opinions around the Interwebs and their very reasonable pricing, I am confident they were a good buy. Can’t forget about the safety equipment–3M respirator and a Grr-Ripper, which is a must have, love that thing! Oh and of course a WW push stick!

There is a very basic outfeed table behind my table saw. Under the outfeed table is my temporary dust collection system. Its a Dust Right Vortex Dust Separator hooked to a shopvac. The shopvac is loud and not the greatest when it comes to DC but it gets the job done.

Finally, we have what serves as my assembly table. Just a piece of plywood mounted between two beams in my garage. On the table is a Ryobi grinder, storage cabinet for screws and favorite new toy…I mean tool, a Festool CXS drill! Oh yea and a pair of Festool safety glasses.

I have an idea of where I want my shop to go over the course of the next couple of years but nothing is set in stone. I will just let my projects dictate my next couple of shop upgrades and continue to enjoy the process of working wood. I will post all of the shop updates on my blog www.jamscroll.com