Woodworking Trivia
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100 free Woodworking trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 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 100 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
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.
Q 02In the classic joint where a projecting tongue fits into a matching hole, what is the hole called?
The mortise
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.
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 04In woodworking, what does the term 'kerf' refer to?
The slot cut by a saw blade
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.
Q 05Which Caribbean wood, so dense it sinks, is used for 'heavy' cricket bails and bearings?
Lignum vitae
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.
Q 06The Janka test measures a wood's hardness by embedding what into it?
A steel ball
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.
Q 07Plywood gets its strength and stability from stacking veneers how?
With the grain of each layer at right angles to the next
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.
Q 08What does MDF stand for?
Medium-density fibreboard
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.
Q 09What lumber cut has growth rings perpendicular to the board face, prized in oak for its ray fleck?
Quarter-sawn
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.
Q 10Which craft, from the French for "to variegate", applies pieces of veneer to a surface to form pictures?
Marquetry
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.
Q 11Which early civilisation is credited with inventing veneering and using varnish as a finish?
Egypt
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.
Q 12Who, with his wife Lady Yun, is regarded as the founding figure of Chinese woodworking?
Lu Ban
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.
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 21What does a SawStop blade carry so the brake can detect skin contact?
A small electrical signal
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.
Q 22When SawStop's brake fires, what does the spring push into the blade?
An aluminium block
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.
Q 23Whose 1860s cast-iron hand-plane patents did Stanley buy for its numbered bench planes?
Leonard Bailey
Q 14What is the Japanese word for a hand plane, which is pulled rather than pushed?
Kanna
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.
Q 15Which English furniture maker published The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director in 1754?
Thomas Chippendale
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.
Q 16Which American religious sect gave its name to a minimalist furniture style built on simplicity and utility?
The Shakers
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.
Q 17Which California furniture maker, famed for rocking chairs, was the first craftsman to win a MacArthur fellowship?
Sam Maloof
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.
Q 18George Nakashima's signature tables were made from large slabs with which feature left natural?
The edges
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.
Q 19Who hosted PBS's The New Yankee Workshop from 1989?
Norm Abram
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.
Q 20Roy Underhill's The Woodwright's Shop ran on PBS for 37 seasons teaching woodworking with what?
Hand tools and human-powered machines
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.
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.
Q 24Bailey bench planes are numbered according to what?
Their length
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.
Q 25Which small one-handed member of the family is the tool of choice for trimming end grain?
Block plane
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.
Q 26An adze differs from an axe in what way?
Its edge is perpendicular to the handle
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.
Q 27Which two-handled tool, with a short blade set in a sole, shapes curved chair legs?
Spokeshave
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.
Q 28Instead of a mitre, inside-corner mouldings are often cut to each other's profile in what join?
Coped
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.
Q 29A standard mitre joint for a square corner has each piece cut at what angle?
45°
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.
Q 30In frame-and-panel construction, what are the vertical members of the frame called?
Stiles
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.