100 Fun Facts About Woodworking

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

Dovetail joints use interlocking trapezoidal pins and tails that cannot be pulled apart along the drawer's length, so once glued the drawer front needs no metal fasteners.

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

The mortise is the hole and the tenon the tongue that fits it; one of the earliest known examples, about 7,000 years old, comes 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.

In woodworking, what does the term 'kerf' refer to?

The slot cut by a saw blade is the kerf; its width depends on the set of the teeth, so a careful cut is laid out to the waste side of the line.

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

Lignum vitae, from the Guaiacum genus, is the national tree of the Bahamas and the national flower of Jamaica; its self-lubricating resin made it the classic material for ship propeller-shaft bearings.

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

A steel ball 11.28 mm in diameter is pressed halfway into the wood; that size leaves a dent of exactly one square centimetre, and the force required is the Janka rating.

Plywood gets its strength and stability from stacking veneers how?

With the grain of each layer at right angles to the next, plywood spreads stress in both directions and barely moves with humidity, because each veneer's movement across the grain is restrained by its neighbours.

What does MDF stand for?

Medium-density fibreboard is made by mixing wood fibre with wax and resin and pressing it under heat; large-scale production began in the 1980s in North America and Europe.

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

Quarter-sawn boards cup and shrink less across their width than flat-sawn ones, and the cut exposes oak's medullary rays as fleck; 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?

Marquetry covers a whole surface with shaped pieces of veneer; 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?

Egypt is credited with inventing veneering and with the first varnished finishes; whole chairs, beds and chests survive from its tombs, some more than 4,000 years old.

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

Lu Ban, a carpenter and engineer of the Spring and Autumn period (771 to 476 BC), is honoured as the patron of Chinese builders, and legend credits him with inventing the saw.

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.

What is the Japanese word for a hand plane, which is pulled rather than pushed?

Kanna is the Japanese hand plane, a blade wedged in a wooden block and drawn toward the user; a nomi is a chisel, a ryoba a double-edged saw and a sumitsubo an ink line.

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

Thomas Chippendale published the Director in 1754 as a pattern book of his designs in Gothic, Chinese and rococo taste, and his name became shorthand for furniture in that style from Britain to America.

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

The Shakers, formally the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing, built plain ladder-back chairs and cabinets whose clean lines reflected their belief that work was a form of worship.

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

Sam Maloof received his MacArthur fellowship in 1985; his hand-shaped walnut rocking chairs were owned by Presidents Carter and Reagan and are held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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

The edges were left as the tree grew them, bark removed but the live line kept; Nakashima joined slabs with butterfly keys in New Hope, Pennsylvania, after Antonin Raymond sponsored him out of a wartime internment camp.

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

Norm Abram was already the master carpenter on This Old House when producer Russell Morash created The New Yankee Workshop around him in 1989; the show ran until 2009.

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

Hand tools and human-powered machines were the rule on Underhill's show, produced by UNC-TV in North Carolina; power tools were banished in favour of pre-industrial technique.

What does a SawStop blade carry so the brake can detect skin contact?

A small electrical signal runs through the blade; because the human body conducts electricity, skin contact changes that signal within milliseconds and triggers the brake, whereas dry wood does not.

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

An aluminium block, driven by a spring, jams into the teeth and stops the blade in about five milliseconds as it drops below the table; the cartridge and usually the blade are then replaced.

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

Leonard Bailey's designs, bought by Stanley in 1869, set the blade in a cast-iron body with a lever cap and adjusting screw; the Bailey and Bedrock patterns underlie most later metal planes.

Bailey bench planes are numbered according to what?

Their length sets the number: a No. 1 is just 5½ inches long and a No. 8 jointer 24 inches, rising through smoothing, jack, fore and jointer sizes.

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

Block plane blades sit bevel-up at a low bed angle, 12 degrees in low-angle models, which slices cleanly across the cut end of a board instead of crushing it.

An adze differs from an axe in what way?

Its edge is perpendicular to the handle, so an adze is swung down to shave a surface flat, while an axe's edge lies in the plane of the swing; adzes go back to the Stone Age.

Which two-handled tool, with a short blade set in a sole, shapes curved chair legs?

Spokeshave bodies carry a short blade between two handles, the sole riding the curve as the tool is pushed or pulled; wooden bodies gave way to cast metal with industrialisation.

Instead of a mitre, inside-corner mouldings are often cut to each other's profile in what join?

Coped joints cut the end of one moulding to match the profile of the other, so an inside corner stays tight even when the walls are out of square; a coping saw makes the curved cut.

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

45° on each piece adds up to the 90° corner; the joint glues end grain to end grain and is weak on its own, so woodworkers often reinforce it with a spline or key.

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

Stiles are the uprights and rails the horizontals; the panel sits in a groove and '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?

Swell is what the compressed beech biscuits do as they absorb water from the glue, locking into their slots; they are cut with the grain running diagonally for strength.

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

Switzerland is where carpenter Hermann Steiner devised the system in 1956 as a way to join chipboard; his firm Lamello, based in Bubendorf, went on to make the machines.

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

Comb joint is the other name, because the interlocking fingers in cross-section look like the teeth of a comb; it is often confused with the box joint used for box corners.

What is the craft of shaping wood on a lathe traditionally called?

Turnery is the craft of the lathe; unlike a metal lathe, wood lathe tools are held freehand against a rest with no fixed point of contact.

What was a 'bodger' in traditional English woodworking?

A turner making chair legs from green wood, the bodger worked in the beech woods of the Chilterns, turning legs and stretchers on the spot and selling them to the chair factories of High Wycombe.

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

A pole lathe uses a springy pole and a cord wrapped round the work: a treadle pulls it down to spin the piece toward the tool, and the pole springs it back for the next stroke.

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

Soften them so they bend — heat and moisture make the lignin between the wood cells plastic; the piece is then clamped to a form with a steel strap outside to keep the outer face from tearing.

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

An insect, the female lac bug Kerria lacca of India and Thailand, secretes the resin on tree branches; 78 rpm records were pressed from shellac until vinyl took over.

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

Animal collagen from hides and bones, boiled into gelatin, sets as it cools and can be reversed with heat and water; casein from milk was another early option.

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

Kiln-dried lumber reaches the 6 to 8 percent moisture wanted for indoor furniture in days or weeks, where air drying takes roughly a year per inch of thickness.

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

Jointers carry a cutter head between two tables set a hair apart, so the board is flattened on one face and an edge squared against the fence; a thickness planer then makes the opposite face parallel.

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

Two or more wheels, one driven and the other tensioned, carry the band; the width of the band sets how tight a curve you can cut and the teeth per inch how fine.

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

Router bits spin at up to about 25,000 rpm below a flat base, following a fence or bearing to cut grooves and profiles; the hand-tool ancestor is the router plane with a narrow blade under a broad sole.

Fine Woodworking magazine was launched in 1975 by which publisher?

Taunton Press, founded by Paul and Jan Roman in Newtown, Connecticut, launched Fine Woodworking in 1975 as its first title; early issues were printed in black and white with stapled covers.

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

Finland is where Uno Cygnaeus founded the system, and its 1866 school decree made handicraft a compulsory subject; Otto Salomon's teacher-training school at Nääs later spread a Swedish version worldwide.

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

Fibres running straight, spiral or interlocked give each board its grain pattern; planing against their direction tears the surface, which is why woodworkers read the grain first.

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?

Copper, cast and hammered, made the saws, adzes and chisels of the Old Kingdom; the metal is soft, so blades needed constant resharpening, and iron came into use only much later.

Softwoods come from which botanical group of trees?

Gymnosperms bear naked seeds, usually in cones; nearly all softwood comes from the conifers among them, such as pine, spruce, fir and larch, though larch drops its needles each autumn.

Which American Graffiti actor worked for years as a self-taught professional carpenter to support his young family?

Harrison Ford turned to carpentry when the acting roles on offer disappointed him, and later said he had moved between acting and carpentry jobs for 15 years.

In Carlo Collodi's novel, which poor woodcarver carves the puppet Pinocchio from a talking block of pine?

Geppetto is handed the wood by a carpenter, Mister Antonio, who had been about to carve the talking block into a leg for his table.

Which carpenter of the Gospels has a 1 May feast day honouring him as the patron of workers?

Joseph gained the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker in 1955, when Pope Pius XII set it on the same day as International Workers' Day as the church's counterpart.

Which fast-growing material for floors, furniture and scaffolding is botanically a giant grass rather than a tree?

Bamboo belongs to the grass family Poaceae, and its giant species are the largest grasses of all, with single stalks reaching 46 metres.

Thor Heyerdahl's raft Kon-Tiki, which crossed the Pacific in 1947, was built from nine trunks of which wood?

Balsa trunks up to 14 metres long were lashed together with hemp rope, with no metal in the build, and carried six men 4,300 miles to Polynesia.

By United States law, bourbon whiskey must be aged in new, charred containers made of which wood?

Oak is required by the federal standard for bourbon, and the charred inner layer gives the spirit its brown colour and distinctive taste.

Carpenters check a corner is square by measuring sides of 3, 4 and 5 units, a trick resting on whose theorem?

Pythagoras lends his name to the rule behind it: because 3² + 4² = 5², a triangle with those sides must hold a true right angle.

The vial of a carpenter's bubble level is traditionally filled with which liquid, chosen because it will not freeze?

Alcohol, or 'spirit', is what gives the spirit level its name, and it lets the bubble glide with less friction than water would.

Which everyday lumber size is famously smaller than its name, measuring just 1½ by 3½ inches once dried and planed?

Two-by-four is only the nominal size, the dimensions of the rough board before drying and planing shave it down to what the yard actually sells.

Which Parks and Recreation actor runs his own Los Angeles woodshop and wrote the woodworking book Good Clean Fun?

Nick Offerman has run Offerman Woodshop with a small crew since 2001 and has said that acting in TV and films cramps his style at the shop.

Which repeating vertical timbers, usually spaced 16 or 24 inches apart, form the skeleton of a framed house wall?

Studs run between the top and bottom plates of a wall and carry the weight of whatever sits above; North American builders usually set them 16 inches centre to centre.

Each step of a staircase pairs a horizontal tread with which near-vertical board that closes the gap below it?

Riser boards are optional: a staircase built without them is described as open-riser, leaving a clear gap between one tread and the next.

Which craft rank between apprentice and master takes its name from the French word for a day?

Journeyman comes from journée, a day, because craftsmen of that rank were paid daily; some German carpenters still take to the road as wandering journeymen.

Which pastime of carving shapes from raw wood uses nothing but a knife, typically a small pocket knife?

Whittling is set apart by its single blade: other kinds of wood carving call on chisels, gouges and a mallet as well.

Which geometric wooden flooring, often laid in herringbone, replaced the marble floors at Versailles in 1684?

Parquet arrived because the palace's marble needed constant washing, and all that water was rotting the joists beneath the floors.

What do woodworkers call the dark, roughly circular patch in a board where a branch once joined the trunk?

A knot forms when the trunk grows around the base of a dead lower branch, and the grain inside it can run at up to 90 degrees to the wood around it.

Which dense black wood traditionally topped a piano's sharps and flats, opposite the ivory of the white keys?

Ebony is so dense that some species sink in water, and it still makes the fingerboards of violins, cellos and guitars.

Which tropical timber, protected by its natural oils, became the classic choice for boat building and outdoor furniture?

Teak resists termites and other pests thanks to those oils, and it stays durable outdoors even when left without any oil or varnish.

Carved wooden cuckoo clocks became world-famous exports of which wooded region of southwestern Germany?

Black Forest clockmakers did not invent the cuckoo clock: an Augsburg merchant described one in 1629, decades before clockmaking was established in the region.

Medieval England imported so much of which wood for its longbows that stocks were depleted over a huge area?

Yew bowstaves ran so short that a statute of 1472 made every ship entering an English port bring four of them for each tun it carried.

Which traditional craftsman, whose trade became a common English surname, shapes timber staves into barrels and casks?

Cooper comes from a Low German word for a cask, akin to the Latin cupa, and the same trade also turned out vats, buckets, tubs and troughs.

Which specialist woodworker builds and repairs stringed instruments such as violins, cellos and guitars?

Luthier comes from luth, the French for lute, and at first meant only a maker of lutes before it widened to take in the violin family and guitars.

Which horizontal beam spans the top of a door, window or fireplace opening and carries the wall above it?

Lintel and sill are opposites: the sill is the span along the bottom of a window, and unlike the beam at the top it bears no load at all.

In old timber-framed houses, which mix of woven wooden strips and sticky clay filled the panels between the timbers?

Wattle and daub has been in use for at least 6,000 years, with the sticky daub often bulked out with sand and straw.

Most of the world's surviving medieval stave churches, named for their timber uprights, stand in which country?

Norway keeps nearly all of them: the only medieval stave churches left elsewhere are one in Sweden and one that was moved from Norway to Poland in 1842.

The Adirondack chair, invented by Thomas Lee in the early 1900s, is named after mountains in which US state?

New York is where Lee built it, in the Adirondack village of Westport, but the patent went to his friend Harry Bunnell, who adapted the chair for convalescents.

Which home-improvement presenter became the first host of PBS's series This Old House when it began in 1979?

Bob Vila was hired after his restoration of a Victorian house in Newton, Massachusetts, won a Better Homes and Gardens award for 1978.

Which American company patented the first hand-held electric drill with a pistol grip and trigger switch in 1917?

Black & Decker was founded in Baltimore in 1910 by Duncan Black and Alonzo Decker, and it opened its first factory in the same year the drill was patented.

According to Genesis, Noah's Ark was built of which mysterious timber, a word found nowhere else in the Bible?

Gopher wood has puzzled translators for centuries: the King James Version left the word untranslated, and scholars' guesses have included cedar beams and even reeds.

Which simplest way of joining two boards, also the weakest if unreinforced, just sets one end against the other?

Butt joints are weak because they offer little surface for glue and no interlocking shape, which is why builders so often reinforce them with ties and plates.

Which carpenter's word for perfectly vertical comes from the Latin for lead, the metal of the old weighted line?

Plumb shares its Latin root with aplomb, which first meant standing upright, and the weighted line it names is the ancestor of the bubble level.

Which science dates the wood in old buildings and panel paintings by matching the pattern of its growth rings?

Dendrochronology can fix the exact year in which each ring formed, something radiocarbon dating cannot do: that method always gives a range rather than a single date.

What is the older central wood of a tree trunk called, usually darker and more decay-resistant than the outer layers?

Heartwood forms by a genetically programmed chemical change, and some trees start making it so early in life that only a thin band of living sapwood remains.

The white glue and yellow carpenter's glue found in most workshops are both based on which synthetic polymer?

Polyvinyl acetate is the same adhesive as school glue: woodworkers simply call the white version white glue and the yellow one carpenter's glue.

Which square-socket screw was devised by a Canadian salesman after his slotted screwdriver slipped and cut his hand?

Robertson screws stayed a largely Canadian habit because their inventor refused to license the design to a big American carmaker, which then used them only in its Canadian division.

Hans Wegner, the 'King of Chairs' who designed more than 500 of them, was a furniture designer from which country?

Denmark's mid-century design won international popularity partly through Wegner's work, and more than 100 of his chairs went into mass production.

Which fast British warplane of the Second World War was nicknamed the Wooden Wonder for its mostly timber airframe?

Mosquito wings and fuselages were built by a group of 20 furniture companies, putting to use skilled carpenters whose trade the war had sidelined.

Howard Hughes's giant flying boat was nicknamed the Spruce Goose, although it was built almost entirely of which wood?

Birch was used because of wartime restrictions on aircraft metal; Hughes disliked the Spruce Goose nickname, and critics also called the plane the Flying Lumberyard.

Why is the end hook of a carpenter's tape measure deliberately fixed with loose rivets through oval holes?

To offset its own thickness: the hook slides in when pushed against a surface and out when hooked over one, so inside and outside measurements both read true.

Which light framing method, with slim uprights running two storeys, displaced heavy timber frames in 1830s America?

Balloon framing was itself superseded by platform framing, today's standard, in which each floor level is framed as a separate unit.

Which German-Austrian cabinetmaker's bentwood café chair No. 14 went on to sell some 50 million copies?

Michael Thonet designed it to come apart into a few components, so 36 dismantled chairs could be shipped in a box of one cubic metre.

Which American furniture maker led the Arts and Crafts movement at home and launched The Craftsman magazine in 1901?

Gustav Stickley used the magazine to promote both the movement's philosophy and his own factory's furniture, and his ideas went on to shape American Craftsman architecture.

Which Anglo-Dutch woodcarver, famed for Baroque limewood garlands, worked on St Paul's Cathedral and Hampton Court?

Grinling Gibbons was discovered by chance in 1671 by the diarist John Evelyn, his landlord in Deptford, who introduced him to Sir Christopher Wren.

Which London landmark is crowned by a hammerbeam roof commissioned in 1393 and built by royal carpenter Hugh Herland?

Westminster Hall got the roof on the orders of Richard II, and its timber was hauled from royal woodlands by teams of horses, finishing the journey by water.

In a traditional timber roof truss, which central vertical member runs from the tie beam up to the apex?

King post timbers work in tension, hanging from the apex to hold the tie beam up, the reverse of the look-alike crown post, which is pressed down from above.

Which Russian-born cabinetmaker wrote A Cabinetmaker's Notebook and later taught at the College of the Redwoods?

James Krenov learned the craft in Stockholm at the school of Carl Malmsten, called the father of Scandinavian furniture design, and the surprise success of that first book led to four more.

North American sawmills price lumber by which unit, equal to a piece twelve inches square and one inch thick?

Board foot totals are worked out from nominal sizes, so the figure on an invoice can overstate the wood actually delivered once it has been planed.

North American woodworkers use which word for a channel cut across the grain, known in Britain as a housing?

Dado cuts run across the grain, and that is the whole distinction: the same channel cut along the grain is simply called a groove.

On a woodworker's workbench, which pegs fit a line of holes in the top to pinch a board against the vise?

Bench dogs work in pairs with a matching dog on the vise, and the holes for them are typically spaced four to six inches apart.

Linseed oil, a traditional wood finish and the base of oil paints, is pressed from the ripe seeds of which plant?

Flax oil is the same thing in its edible form, and as linseed oil it also hardens putty and went into the making of linoleum.