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Very fine work, Robert! Is that a reproduction or your own design?

Yes, dampening with a spray bottle can sometimes help.

Yesterday I stopped by a job my son is working on in a neighboring town, repairing damaged trusses on an 1870 era brick meeting house. Missing slates allowed the heels of two trusses and the plate...

Try wire wheels of various types before sandblasting.

Not necessarily. Pneumatic pressure is an option (Fine Woodworking #63 p. 83, Pneumatic Lamination). If one runs short of clamps threaded rod is an alternative as shown here....

If you feel you need to bricklay and pattern-rout stacked layers in order to get an accurate curve I suggest keeping the thickness down and use 3 or 4 layers as trimming with a long router bit...

Forget pattern routing. Do the joinery and assembly, then saw the parts out as accurately as possible and clean up the faces. In my shop I would use an edge sander.

The bevel angle on a spindle gouge is not critical, somewhere between 30* and 45* will work; the more acute the angle the better it will work on softwoods and the faster it will dull. The shape,...

Thanks for the response and all the pictures, Tom.

Tom, those are nice looking windows and a credit to your use of old hand tools. How do you go about coping the joints? Do you cut jack miters and undercut with a coping saw or do you have a coping...

There isn't any maximum thickness with that set as it cuts only the profiled part of the sash bars. The glass rabbet must be cut with another tool with a straight profile like a rabbeting bit or dado...

If you already sold the client on a profile a custom cutter set may be required. I recently had a pair of corrugated back shaper knives and a coping router bit for a door made by Ct Saw & Tool for...

Penetrating oil plus time, heat (heat gun or torch) and vibration (careful tapping with a hammer). If that doesn't suffice try to find a bearing puller, use wedges as Ken suggests , or try to suspend...

I don't question your experience with poplar heartwood, Mel, but it just isn't available here as such. I have read elsewhere of old growth poplar being quite durable, and we have a meeting house in...

Mel, can you get poplar that is primarily heartwood? I have never seen it come that way in these parts. I worked on a large house trimmed outside in poplar with a lot of attention to flashing,...

Depends on the width of your stiles. If you want narrow stiles use a stretcher.

I avoid poplar for exterior work as it has little rot resistance. Look around for torrefied wood. Western red cedar,...

Have you considered using air pressure? A section or two of firehose and a caul trapped between a two piece form will supply higher and evenly distributed pressure. Short of that, use cauls and more...

Absolutely. If you make closely fitted drawers of lumber acclimated to 50-60% rh and put them in a consistent 40% rh atmosphere you're likely to have problems. You need to get the mc lower before...

Yes, that's right. I suspect part of the reason (maybe the whole reason) commercial units don't have that problem is because the membranes are typically formed in a box shape and the vertical pleats...

Bill said in his initial post, "My shop is in the garage where the humidity averages 50 to 60 percent." If that is accurate one would expect mc ranging 9-11%. I have similar conditions in my...

I wouldn't do it that way. A true torsion box will have a top and bottom skin to develop full strength and as John said at that scale the skins can be on the order of 1/4" thick. Nominal 1/4" lauan...

I don't quite agree with that if by "moisture check" you mean using an electronic meter or an oven test. Bill knows that his storage conditions are such as to predict that the wood's mc is somewhere...

I would make it a bit deeper or make it up as a torsion box. One thing I ran into with my 4' x 8' frame press was the 2" x 2" birch top frame bowing inward when under vacuum. I solved that by sizing...

Are the drawer sides and/or cabinet dividers flatsawn? The issue may be those parts cupping rather than (unlikely imo) the overall opening size shrinking. In any case the primary cause is the...

I use a sled for tenoning/coping on my shaper with a stop screwed to the fence. Once the work clears the short stop it has no contact with the fence and the alignment is not an issue. Trying to keep...