50 Fun Facts About Woodworking

Which joint, prized for resisting being pulled apart, classically attaches a drawer front to its sides?

Its interlocking pins and tails are trapezoidal, and once glued it needs no nails or screws; examples survive in First Dynasty Egyptian tombs.

In the classic joint where a projecting tongue fits into a matching hole, what is the hole called?

One of the earliest known examples is 7,000 years old, from the Hemudu culture in China's Zhejiang Province.

Wood from flowering, broad-leaved trees is called what?

The label is botanical, not about hardness: balsa is a hardwood softer than most softwoods, while yew and Douglas fir are softwoods harder than many hardwoods.

Balsa is famous for being the softest commercially used wood in which category?

Its name is the Spanish word for 'raft'; the tree can shoot up 30 metres.

Which Caribbean wood, so dense it sinks, is used for 'heavy' cricket bails and bearings?

It's the national tree of the Bahamas and the national flower of Jamaica, and the whole Guaiacum genus has been CITES-listed since 2003.

The Janka test measures a wood's hardness by embedding what into it?

The ball is 11.28 mm across, chosen so it leaves a dent exactly one square centimetre in area when halfway in.

Plywood gets its strength and stability from stacking veneers how?

The 4 by 8 foot sheet standard dates to the Portland Manufacturing Company's display at the 1905 Portland World Fair.

What does MDF stand for?

Wood fibre is mixed with wax and resin and pressed under heat; large-scale production only started in the 1980s.

What lumber cut has growth rings perpendicular to the board face, prized in oak for its ray fleck?

It cups and shrinks less across its width than flat-sawn boards; in sapele the same cut yields a ribbon figure.

Which craft, from the French for "to variegate", applies pieces of veneer to a surface to form pictures?

Unlike the older art of inlay (intarsia), nothing is cut out of the solid body underneath.

Which early civilisation is credited with inventing veneering and using varnish as a finish?

Their tools were copper until bronze arrived after 2000 BC; whole chairs, beds and chests survive from the tombs.

Who, with his wife Lady Yun, is regarded as the founding figure of Chinese woodworking?

They date from the Spring and Autumn period, 771 to 476 BC.

Traditional Japanese carpentry is famous for building temples and houses using almost none of what?

Its interlocking joints evolved partly to cope with earthquakes and a hot, humid climate.

Kumiko is a Japanese technique for assembling delicate wooden lattice pieces without using what?

The tiny pieces are held purely by precise pressure-fit joints, and the panels are used in screens and shoji.

Which English furniture maker published The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director in 1754?

His name became shorthand for any furniture in the Director's style, from Britain to America.

Which American religious sect gave its name to a minimalist furniture style built on simplicity and utility?

Their formal name is the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing.

Which California furniture maker, famed for rocking chairs, was the first craftsman to win a MacArthur fellowship?

Jimmy Carter visited his home and signed a photo 'to my woodworking hero'; the White House owns several of his rockers.

George Nakashima's signature tables were made from large slabs with which feature left natural?

He joined multiple slabs with butterfly keys and worked from New Hope, Pennsylvania, after being sponsored out of a wartime internment camp.

Who hosted PBS's The New Yankee Workshop from 1989?

He was already the master carpenter on This Old House, and both shows were created by Russell Morash.

Roy Underhill's The Woodwright's Shop ran on PBS for 37 seasons teaching woodworking with what?

It ran from 1980 to 2017 with 468 half-hour episodes, taped in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

How did SawStop inventor Steve Gass first test his skin-sensing blade brake in 2000?

He'd used hot dogs first; the brake fires a spring-loaded aluminium block into the blade.

When SawStop's brake fires, what does the spring push into the blade?

Festool's owner TTS Tooltechnic Systems bought the company in 2017.

Whose 1860s cast-iron hand-plane patents did Stanley buy for its numbered bench planes?

The Bailey and Bedrock designs became the basis for most modern metal planes; a No. 1 is barely five inches long.

Bailey bench planes are numbered according to what?

A No. 1 is just over five inches long, and the numbers rise through smoothing, jack and jointer sizes.

Which small one-handed member of the family is the tool of choice for trimming end grain?

Its low blade angle is what makes it happy working across the grain on the cut end of a board.

An adze differs from an axe in what way?

A mattock is the two-bladed cousin, with one edge each way; adzes go back to the Stone Age.

Which two-handled tool is traditionally used to shape chair legs, paddles, bows and cartwheel spokes?

Wooden-bodied ones gave way to metal with industrialisation; it's too small to be any use on big flat surfaces.

A coping saw is mostly used to cut mouldings so they meet in what kind of join instead of a mitre?

It can manage gentle curves and even circles, but a fretsaw beats it for really intricate work in thin stock.

A standard mitre joint for a square corner has each piece cut at what angle?

It's weak on its own, which is why woodworkers reinforce it with a spline across the joint.

In frame-and-panel construction, what are the vertical members of the frame called?

The horizontals are rails, and the panel 'floats' unglued so seasonal wood movement doesn't crack the frame.

Biscuit joinery uses small oval biscuits of compressed wood that do what when the glue hits them?

Swiss carpenter Hermann Steiner invented the system in 1956, looking for a way to join newly popular chipboard.

In which country was the biscuit joining system invented, in 1956?

Steiner's company Lamello brought out the first portable biscuit joiner in 1968.

A finger joint is also known by what other name, after what its cross-section resembles?

It's regularly confused with the box joint, which is the version used for the corners of boxes.

What is a woodturner working at a lathe traditionally said to be practising?

Unlike a metal lathe, wood lathe tools are held freehand with no fixed point of contact.

What was a 'bodger' in traditional English woodworking?

They worked in the woods where the trees were felled, and the term for the craft dates from around 1799 to 1827.

What kind of foot-powered machine were the legs and spindles of a traditional Windsor chair turned on?

Windsors are defined by construction, not origin: legs and back are tenoned into a solid carved seat, and they were painted to hide the mix of woods.

Steam bending works because heat and moisture do what to wood?

The strips are clamped to a form, often with a metal band on the outside to stop the fibres blowing out.

Shellac, once the dominant wood finish, is a resin secreted by what?

The female lac bug of India and Thailand produces it; 78 rpm records were pressed from it until vinyl took over.

Traditional 'hide glue' for woodworking was boiled down from what?

Casein from milk was another early option; modern shop glues are mostly PVA.

Wood seasoned in a heated chamber rather than in the open air is called what?

Air drying is the traditional method; the point of either is to lower the moisture content before the wood is used.

Woodworking machines that flatten one face of a board and then square an edge to it are called what?

The thickness planer then mills the opposite face parallel to the jointed one.

A bandsaw's blade is a long toothed band welded into a loop and stretched between what?

The width of the band sets how tight a curve you can cut, and TPI (teeth per inch) sets how fine.

Which power tool with a flat base and spinning bit cuts grooves, edges and moulding?

There is a hand-tool ancestor too, the router plane, with a narrow blade projecting below a broad sole.

Fine Woodworking magazine was launched in 1975 by which publisher?

Early issues were printed in monochrome with stapled covers; back issues are still sold and indexed.

Sloyd, the Nordic handicraft-based school system, began in 1865 in which country?

Uno Cygnaeus founded it, and it was taught in American schools into the early 20th century.

Wood grain refers to the arrangement of the wood's what?

Terms like straight, spiral, interlocked and figured all describe how those fibres run.

Notched wooden sticks dating to about 476,000 years ago, among the earliest woodworking finds, came from which site?

The Kalambo Falls finds in southern Africa predate the Clacton spearhead from England, which is about 400,000 years old.

Which Roman author devoted six books of his Natural History to trees and woody plants?

Though not a botanist, Pliny preserved much of Rome's knowledge of trees and their uses after most physical Roman woodwork was lost.

Before bronze arrived after 2000 BC, Egyptian woodworking tools were made from which metal?

Iron working was unknown in Egypt until much later; deforestation of the Nile valley also forced imports of cedar from the Second Dynasty.

Softwoods come from which botanical group of trees?

Gymnosperms are coniferous, cone-bearing and evergreen; their wood is typically paler, lighter and less dense than hardwood.