Bill Kovalick


Before and after: redwood blank and finished DIY dowel
If you’re ever in need of a dowel but don’t have one handy, there’s an easy fix: roll your own! The DIY approach not only provides immediate gratification but also allows you to create dowels of custom size or species that may be difficult to find in stores or online. And you’ll likely save money. There […]

Roll Your Own Dowels


A grove of black and white oaks approaching harvest-able size
My brother John and I took advantage of an unseasonably warm mid-March day to go for a nice long hike in the woods near where we grew up in the mountains of eastern PA. As I am wont to do, I found myself examining various trees along the way, identifying them by species, considering why certain trees are growing […]

A Walk in the Woods



Cutaway view of carpenter bee tunnels in redwood lumber
When I reclaimed the lumber from an old redwood bench, I knew there were carpenter bees taking up residence in the wood but I had no idea how many – and how much damage they had caused. Boy, was I in for a surprise! The only external evidence of the bees was neat 1/2″ diameter […]

Carpenter Bee Damage


Bluebird house with 1-1/2" diameter double thickness hole 2
What to make when you have left over wood from an Adirondack side table project that was made from left overs from an Adirondack chair project? How about bird houses? In fact, I had enough left over cedar and cypress to make three bird houses. So that’s what I did. The houses were sized to […]

Bluebird Houses



Adirondack chair and matching table ready for finishing
After building some Adirondack chairs, I decided that an accompanying side table would be an ideal mini-project for using up the left over cedar lumber. So, I looked around a bit to get some ideas and settled on a fairly simple design that is similar to one that Norm Abram used but with longer legs. […]

Adirondack Side Table


Traced curves cut with bandsaw and sanded smooth
In an earlier post, I described a simple method for laying out a curved piece for an Adirondack chair back support. I tried this same approach on another chair but this time the piece did not fit quite so well. After mulling it over a bit, I realized that the poor fit was probably because […]

Chair Curve Layout Redux



With the new year upon us, it has me thinking about what I want to accomplish woodworking-wise for the next 12 months. New tools to try, new projects to tackle, new techniques to learn, etc. Here’s what I have so far: Learn to scroll saw. I’ve always been intrigued watching someone cut out intricate shapes with […]

Woodworking Goals For The Year


All season Adirondack chair made from cypress 1
What could be better on a hot summer day than a cold drink, a good book, and a quiet, shady spot to read? How about a comfortable Adirondack chair? Exactly. After mulling it over for a number of years, I finally got around to building some Adirondack chairs this past Fall. Yes, a bit late […]

Adirondack Chairs



Dryer booster fan with lint trap
This isn’t exactly a woodworking project although it did require a bit of cabinet re-purposing. If you’re looking to glean some woodworking wisdom, you may want to move on. But if you’re dealing with a clothes dryer that doesn’t dry very well, you may find this information helpful. We noticed that over time, it was […]

Dryer Booster Fan


Entertainment center housing a 1980's era TV and stereo system
Most of the furniture from my early woodworking ventures had a red oak theme to it and this entertainment center was no exception. It was made in the late 1980’s and is fairly representative of entertainment centers of that time: an opening to house a nice sized TV (32″ was large back then), a series […]

Oak Entertainment Center



Oversized oak bookshelf
When I made this bookcase some years back, I built it to fit a specific area of an office wall. However, if I were to do it again, I would have made two narrower bookcases rather than one wide unit.  At the time, my thinking was that a single wide unit would be the most […]

Over-sized Oak Bookcase


While building an Adirondack chair, I needed to create a curved support piece that would attach to the rear side of the back slats. I made the chair from a set of plans that provided templates for all of the other pieces but this particular curved piece was a refinement that I decided to add […]

Chair Curve Layout Tip



Chip the beagle lazing the day away in his well-worn doghouse
From the back of the rack… I made this dog house for our family beagle Chip (aka, Chipper) way back in the 70’s. It was one of my earliest woodworking projects. At the time this photo was taken, the dog house had seen several years of service – it was starting to fray a bit at the […]

Chip’s Dog House


Oak-walnut floor lamp 1
Here is a floor lamp that I built in the early 1990’s. I was in a lamp building frenzy back in those days and this one was perhaps my crowning achievement. It features a tapered pole made from laminated solid red oak and walnut and tapered red oak legs that attach to the base of the […]

Oak Walnut Floor Lamp



Solid oak coat rack 2
Some years back, the family was growing and we were running low on coat/jacket hanging options. I decided it was high time to make a coat rack. Or two. I realized we needed something that was functional, able to hold roughly 10 items at a time, but not too utilitarian. Something that could be proudly displayed […]

Coat Rack


Jig consists of a curved template and adjustable end clamps
After embarking on a mission to create a box load of mini-mallets, I realized a handle forming jig was called for to make each handle the same shape and to keep me from going crazy (no way was I cutting every single handle on the band saw). I came up with the simple router jig […]

Mini Mallet Handle Jig



A mini-mallet makes a great tree ornament!
Having made several full-size mallets for general purpose shop use, I decided to make some mini-mallets. My initial thinking was that they could be used as tree ornaments, and that’s exactly what I did with a couple mallets in our home. I also discovered they work well as crab mallets, office desk knick-knacks, gavels for calling […]

Mini Mallets


Burl on cherry tree with 1-gallon can for perspective 1
While out looking for wild blueberries, I came across a wooded grove containing a number of trees with unusual growths on them. I’ve seen such growths before but never this many in such a tight cluster. I felt like I was walking into an alien forest… As best I can tell, these growths are burls rather than […]

The Gall of Those Burls