50 free Woodworking trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This woodworking trivia quiz covers the whole workshop: joinery (dovetails, mortise and tenon, biscuits, finger joints, miters), hand tools (planes, chisels, spokeshaves, adzes, coping saws) and power tools (table saws, bandsaws, routers, lathes), the timbers themselves (hardwood versus softwood, balsa, lignum vitae, quarter-sawn oak, plywood and MDF), and finishes from shellac to stain. It also takes in the people and history: ancient Egyptian veneering, Lu Ban, Chippendale's Director, the Shakers, Sam Maloof, George Nakashima, Norm Abram, Roy Underhill and the man who tested SawStop on his own finger. About a third of the questions are answerable by anyone who has spent time in a shop, a third are medium, and the rest will test people who know their Bailey plane numbers and their Janka ratings. It works for a woodworking club night, a shop-class quiz or a maker's pub round. Every answer has been checked against an encyclopaedic source and each question links to the page that confirms it.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which joint, prized for resisting being pulled apart, classically attaches a drawer front to its sides?
Dovetail
Its interlocking pins and tails are trapezoidal, and once glued it needs no nails or screws; examples survive in First Dynasty Egyptian tombs.
Q 02In the classic joint where a projecting tongue fits into a matching hole, what is the hole called?
The mortise
One of the earliest known examples is 7,000 years old, from the Hemudu culture in China's Zhejiang Province.
Q 03Wood from flowering, broad-leaved trees is called what?
Hardwood
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.
Q 04Balsa is famous for being the softest commercially used wood in which category?
Hardwood
Its name is the Spanish word for 'raft'; the tree can shoot up 30 metres.
Q 05Which Caribbean wood, so dense it sinks, is used for 'heavy' cricket bails and bearings?
Lignum vitae
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.
Q 06The Janka test measures a wood's hardness by embedding what into it?
A steel ball
The ball is 11.28 mm across, chosen so it leaves a dent exactly one square centimetre in area when halfway in.
Q 07Plywood gets its strength and stability from stacking veneers how?
With the grain of each layer at right angles to the next
The 4 by 8 foot sheet standard dates to the Portland Manufacturing Company's display at the 1905 Portland World Fair.
Q 08What does MDF stand for?
Medium-density fibreboard
Wood fibre is mixed with wax and resin and pressed under heat; large-scale production only started in the 1980s.
Q 09What lumber cut has growth rings perpendicular to the board face, prized in oak for its ray fleck?
Quarter-sawn
It cups and shrinks less across its width than flat-sawn boards; in sapele the same cut yields a ribbon figure.
Q 10Which craft, from the French for "to variegate", applies pieces of veneer to a surface to form pictures?
Marquetry
Unlike the older art of inlay (intarsia), nothing is cut out of the solid body underneath.
Q 11Which early civilisation is credited with inventing veneering and using varnish as a finish?
Egypt
Their tools were copper until bronze arrived after 2000 BC; whole chairs, beds and chests survive from the tombs.
Q 12Who, with his wife Lady Yun, is regarded as the founding figure of Chinese woodworking?
Lu Ban
They date from the Spring and Autumn period, 771 to 476 BC.
Q 13Traditional Japanese carpentry is famous for building temples and houses using almost none of what?
Nails
Its interlocking joints evolved partly to cope with earthquakes and a hot, humid climate.
Q 21How did SawStop inventor Steve Gass first test his skin-sensing blade brake in 2000?
On his own finger, numbed with Novocain
He'd used hot dogs first; the brake fires a spring-loaded aluminium block into the blade.
Q 22When SawStop's brake fires, what does the spring push into the blade?
An aluminium block
Festool's owner TTS Tooltechnic Systems bought the company in 2017.
Q 23Whose 1860s cast-iron hand-plane patents did Stanley buy for its numbered bench planes?
Leonard Bailey
The Bailey and Bedrock designs became the basis for most modern metal planes; a No. 1 is barely five inches long.
Q 14Kumiko is a Japanese technique for assembling delicate wooden lattice pieces without using what?
Nails
The tiny pieces are held purely by precise pressure-fit joints, and the panels are used in screens and shoji.
Q 15Which English furniture maker published The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director in 1754?
Thomas Chippendale
His name became shorthand for any furniture in the Director's style, from Britain to America.
Q 16Which American religious sect gave its name to a minimalist furniture style built on simplicity and utility?
The Shakers
Their formal name is the United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing.
Q 17Which California furniture maker, famed for rocking chairs, was the first craftsman to win a MacArthur fellowship?
Sam Maloof
Jimmy Carter visited his home and signed a photo 'to my woodworking hero'; the White House owns several of his rockers.
Q 18George Nakashima's signature tables were made from large slabs with which feature left natural?
The edges
He joined multiple slabs with butterfly keys and worked from New Hope, Pennsylvania, after being sponsored out of a wartime internment camp.
Q 19Who hosted PBS's The New Yankee Workshop from 1989?
Norm Abram
He was already the master carpenter on This Old House, and both shows were created by Russell Morash.
Q 20Roy Underhill's The Woodwright's Shop ran on PBS for 37 seasons teaching woodworking with what?
Hand tools and human-powered machines
It ran from 1980 to 2017 with 468 half-hour episodes, taped in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
Q 24Bailey bench planes are numbered according to what?
Their length
A No. 1 is just over five inches long, and the numbers rise through smoothing, jack and jointer sizes.
Q 25Which small one-handed member of the family is the tool of choice for trimming end grain?
Block plane
Its low blade angle is what makes it happy working across the grain on the cut end of a board.
Q 26An adze differs from an axe in what way?
Its edge is perpendicular to the handle
A mattock is the two-bladed cousin, with one edge each way; adzes go back to the Stone Age.
Q 27Which two-handled tool is traditionally used to shape chair legs, paddles, bows and cartwheel spokes?
Spokeshave
Wooden-bodied ones gave way to metal with industrialisation; it's too small to be any use on big flat surfaces.
Q 28A coping saw is mostly used to cut mouldings so they meet in what kind of join instead of a mitre?
Coped
It can manage gentle curves and even circles, but a fretsaw beats it for really intricate work in thin stock.
Q 29A standard mitre joint for a square corner has each piece cut at what angle?
45°
It's weak on its own, which is why woodworkers reinforce it with a spline across the joint.
Q 30In frame-and-panel construction, what are the vertical members of the frame called?
Stiles
The horizontals are rails, and the panel 'floats' unglued so seasonal wood movement doesn't crack the frame.