97 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 cavity, usually rectangular, and the tenon the tongue cut to fit it exactly; once the tenon's shoulders seat, the joint is glued, pinned or wedged to lock it.

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

Hardwood is a botanical label, not a measure of hardness: balsa is a hardwood softer than most softwoods, while yew is a softwood harder than several hardwoods.

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

The slot cut by a saw blade is the kerf; the teeth are set slightly to each side, so the slot is wider than the blade, and that lost wood has to be allowed for when measuring.

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

Lignum vitae is one of the heaviest woods in the world, and its natural oils make it self-lubricating, which is why ships' propeller-shaft bearings were cut from it; it is also the national tree of the Bahamas.

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

A steel ball 11.28 mm across is pressed into the wood to half its diameter, and the force that takes is the Janka rating, the figure used to judge whether a species is hard enough for flooring.

In standard plywood, how does the grain of each veneer layer run relative to the next?

Crosswise to it: cross-graining makes the sheet about equally strong in both directions, helps it resist splitting and keeps the panel stable as humidity changes.

What does MDF stand for?

Medium-density fibreboard is wood broken down into fibres, mixed with wax and resin and pressed into panels under heat; 'medium' places it between low-density particle board and the densest fibreboards.

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 slices through oak's medullary rays, which show on the face as fleck.

Which craft applies shaped pieces of veneer to a surface to form pictures and patterns?

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?

Egypt's woodworkers glued thin sheets of rare, expensive wood over cheaper timber on furniture and coffins, stretching fine woods that had to be imported.

Who is revered in China as the patron of builders and the founding figure of its woodworking?

Lu Ban, a carpenter of the fifth century BC, is honoured as the patron of Chinese builders; legend credits him with inventing the saw, though toothed blades are older still.

Traditional Japanese carpentry builds temples with almost no nails, holding the frames together with what instead?

Interlocking joints, cut precisely in the timbers, lock the frames together; the temple carpenters who make them, the miyadaiku, built some of the world's longest-surviving wooden structures.

How is a kanna, the Japanese hand plane, moved across the wood?

Pulled toward the body, a kanna can be worked sitting down or with the whole body behind the stroke; Japanese saws cut on the pull stroke too, which lets their blades be thinner.

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

Thomas Chippendale's pattern book showed designs 'in the Gothic, Chinese and modern taste' and was copied so widely in Britain, Europe and America that his name became shorthand for the style.

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

The Shakers, first nicknamed 'Shaking Quakers' for their ecstatic worship, lived communally and celibately and built furniture to match: plain, unornamented and finely made.

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

Sam Maloof turned down offers to mass-produce his designs and went on shaping each piece in his home workshop; he called himself simply a woodworker, the word on his business card and in his autobiography's title.

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

The edges kept the tree's own outline while the tops were planed smooth; Nakashima set up in New Hope, Pennsylvania, after architect Antonin Raymond sponsored his release from 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 are all Underhill uses, with nothing electric; North Carolina's public station turned his pitch down at first and took the show only in 1979.

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 cast-iron planes, whose patents Stanley bought in 1869, became the world's standard pattern and still underlie most metal bench planes made today.

Stanley's classic iron bench planes are numbered from 1 to 8 according to what?

Their length sets the number: a No. 1 is just 5½ inches long and a No. 8 is 24 inches, and the scheme became the standard, so a No. 5 means a 14-inch jack plane whatever the brand.

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

Block plane blades sit bevel-up at a lower angle than a bench plane's, which helps them shear cleanly across the cut ends of boards.

How is the cutting edge of an adze set, unlike that of an axe?

At right angles to the handle, where an axe's edge runs in line with it, so an adze shaves a surface smooth instead of chopping into it; the tool dates back to the Stone Age.

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

Spokeshave means what it says: wheelwrights first used the tool to shave cart-wheel spokes round, and it now dresses curved work of every kind.

What kind of joint, often used instead of a mitre, cuts one inside-corner moulding to fit the other's profile?

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 is weak on its own, so woodworkers often strengthen it with a spline, a thin wafer of wood glued into a slot across it.

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 dried, compressed beech biscuits do as they soak up moisture from the glue, wedging themselves tight in their slots.

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.

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

Turnery is the craft of the lathe worker; unlike a machinist's lathe, a wood lathe has its cutting tools guided by hand, with no fixed point of contact with the wood.

What did the itinerant 'bodgers' of England's Chiltern beech woods make for High Wycombe's workshops?

Chair legs and stretchers were shaped on the spot from freshly felled green wood by these skilled craftsmen, then sold to the furniture makers of High Wycombe to become Windsor chairs.

On what kind of lathe were a traditional Windsor chair's legs and spindles usually made?

A pole lathe uses a springy pole and a cord wrapped round the work: a treadle pulls the cord down to spin the piece, the pole springs it back, and cutting happens only on the down stroke.

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

Soften it for a while: steamed wood can be bent round a form and keeps the curve once it cools and dries, the method behind Michael Thonet's bentwood café chairs of the 1850s.

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

An insect, the female lac bug of India and Thailand, secretes the resin as a tunnel-like tube along tree branches; it is scraped off the bark, and for decades it was also pressed into 78 rpm records.

Before modern adhesives, woodworkers' traditional hot glue was boiled down from what?

Animal collagen, boiled out of hides and bones, makes hide glue; violin makers favour it because its joints can be taken apart again when an instrument needs repair.

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

Kiln-dried timber is seasoned in a chamber where heat, humidity and airflow are controlled, so it dries faster and more evenly than boards stacked in the open air.

In North American workshops, what are the machines that flatten one face of a board and square an edge called?

Jointers flatten a face and square an edge against a fence, and a thickness planer then makes the opposite face parallel; in Britain and Australia the jointer itself is called a planer.

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

Two or more wheels carry the band, one of them powered; the narrower the band, the tighter the curve it can cut, which is why bandsaws suit irregular shapes.

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

Router comes from 'rout', to hollow or gouge out; before electric motors, woodworkers cut the same recesses by hand with a router plane, a narrow blade under a broad base.

What defect does planing a board against the grain usually cause?

Tearout is the jagged surface left when the blade lifts the wood fibres instead of slicing them, which is why woodworkers read the grain direction along a board's edge before planing.

A 2023 study dated the oldest known wooden structure, two notched logs, to at least 476,000 years ago on which continent?

Africa: at Kalambo Falls in Zambia, permanently high water preserved two logs joined by a cut notch, shaped before our own species, Homo sapiens, had evolved.

Which Roman author, killed in the eruption of Vesuvius, wrote extensively about trees and timber in his Natural History?

Pliny the Elder was no botanist, yet his encyclopedia preserves much of what Romans knew about trees and their uses; he died in AD 79 after sailing toward the eruption on a rescue mission.

Before bronze took over, which softer metal were the earliest metal saws, adzes and chisels made from?

Copper came first; alloying it with tin gave bronze, which is harder, so bronze tools took over, and iron working arrived only much later.

Softwood comes from trees that mostly bear their seeds in what?

Cones carry the seeds of conifers such as pine, spruce and fir, the trees that give nearly all softwood; the larch is the odd one among them, a conifer that sheds its needles every 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.