Woodworking Trivia
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97 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 97 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 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.
Q 03Wood from flowering, broad-leaved trees is called what?
Hardwood
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.
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; 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.
Q 05Which Caribbean wood, so dense it sinks, is used for 'heavy' cricket bails and bearings?
Lignum vitae
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.
Q 06The Janka test measures a wood's hardness by embedding what into it?
A steel ball
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.
Q 07In standard plywood, how does the grain of each veneer layer run relative to the next?
Crosswise to it
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.
Q 08What does MDF stand for?
Medium-density fibreboard
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.
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 slices through oak's medullary rays, which show on the face as fleck.
Q 10Which craft applies shaped pieces of veneer to a surface to form pictures and patterns?
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?
Egypt
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.
Q 12Who is revered in China as the patron of builders and the founding figure of its woodworking?
Lu Ban
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.
Q 13Traditional Japanese carpentry builds temples with almost no nails, holding the frames together with what instead?
Interlocking joints
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
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.
Q 14How is a kanna, the Japanese hand plane, moved across the wood?
Pulled
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.
Q 15Which English furniture maker published The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director in 1754?
Thomas Chippendale
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.
Q 16Which American religious sect gave its name to a minimalist furniture style built on simplicity and utility?
The Shakers
The Shakers, first nicknamed 'Shaking Quakers' for their ecstatic worship, lived communally and celibately and built furniture to match: plain, unornamented and finely made.
Q 17Which California furniture maker, famed for rocking chairs, was the first craftsman to win a MacArthur fellowship?
Sam Maloof
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.
Q 18George Nakashima's signature tables were made from large slabs with which feature left natural?
The edges
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.
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 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.
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.
Q 24Stanley's classic iron bench planes are numbered from 1 to 8 according to what?
Their length
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.
Q 25Which small one-handed plane is the tool of choice for trimming end grain?
Block plane
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.
Q 26How is the cutting edge of an adze set, unlike that of an axe?
At right angles to the handle
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.
Q 27Which two-handled tool, with a short blade set in a sole, shapes curved chair legs?
Spokeshave
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.
Q 28What kind of joint, often used instead of a mitre, cuts one inside-corner moulding to fit the other's profile?
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 is weak on its own, so woodworkers often strengthen it with a spline, a thin wafer of wood glued into a slot across it.
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.