Here is an up-beat and accessible introduction to woodworking. You'll learn basic skills while building attractive and useful furniture. Aim Ontario Fraser, a former Fine Woodworking editor, employs a friendly tone that will inspire you and give you confidence -- especially if you have little or no experience using tools. Each project teaches specific skills, which can be applied later on, and results in a piece of furniture that you will be proud to have made.

Among the projects you will learn to build are a rustic coffee table, two-shelf bookcases, and a funky outdoor easy chair. Throughout the book, Fraser explains in detail the key operations or techniques that are needed to build the project. Helpful photos and drawings guide you along the way.

About the author
Aim Ontario Fraser began her woodworking career during high school while working in a state-of-the-art boatbuilding shop. Since then she has been a professional woodworker and boatbuilder. A former editor of Fine Woodworking, she has written dozens of articles that have appeared in woodworking magazines and WoodenBoat. She live in Norwalk, Connecticut.

Introduction

Tools for Woodworking

Materials

Simple Handmade Box

SKILL BUILDERS:
Sharpening
Clamping
Accurate Crosscuts
Paring with a Chisel
Using a Handsaw
Using a Block Plane
Drilling Holes
Outdoor Easy Chair

SKILL BUILDERS:
Crosscutting Multiples to the Same Length
Countersinking for Screws and Plugs
Installing and Trimming Plugs
Rustic Old-World Coffee Table

SKILL BUILDERS:
Making and Using a Beading Tool
The Pocket-Hole Screwed Joint
Clamping Up a Wide Panel
Making an Accurate Circular Saw Guide
Rounding Edges with a Plane
Classic Bookcase

SKILL BUILDERS:
Router 101--Rabbeting
Template Routing with a Straightedge
Making a Dado Cutting Jig
Top-Drawer Lateral File

SKILL BUILDERS:
Ripping on a Table Saw
Building a Crosscut Sled

Resources

Glossary

Index

Wood is an antidote to the stresses of modern life. From the rough-hewn beams of an old barn to the elegant simplicity of a handmade box, we're drawn to wood. Luxury car makers know this and accent the interiors of their highest-priced models with bird's-eye maple and walnut burl.

Wood is a material with a wholly human scale. Trees are part of our lives, and we watch them through the seasons. We understand how they live and grow. Their wood is not too hard to work but is strong enough to accomplish almost monumental human tasks such as building bridges and shoring up hillsides, yet delicate and soulful enough for making a cradle. Unlike the heroic scale of steelmaking or the hurtling electrons in a microchip, the processes of woodworking are familiar in scale and easy to accomplish using tools that have changed very little over the centuries.

Woodworking is satisfying on many levels. It's a physical activity, with lots of lifting, carrying, planing, and using your arm, leg, and back muscles. It's work that connects you with real life, not with a screen. It's working in a medium where nothing is a given. Each piece of wood is different, and you must see how it acts and work with it. This requires a great deal of creativity and resourcefulness.

Doing woodworking connects you with the real world in a new way. As you learn to use tools and materials, you'll have a new understanding of the way things work. You're able to shine the light of knowledge on some of the mysteries of everyday life, such as why floors squeak (the joints move), the reason drawers stick in the summer (high humidity causes wood to swell), and why the coat rack fell off the wall (the screws were not long enough to anchor the weight in the soft drywall).

Customer Reviews from Amazon

I first got this from the library and then after studying it realized I needed to own a copy of my own.

I am a pretty big fan of this book. The author starts out by telling you the ins and outs of the various tools you need to have around the shop; why one tool might be better than another; what sizes of what kinds of chisels to buy and when to buy things as a set; which tools you should spend the money for and which you shouldn't bother with. (Hint: a router features heavily in the last couple projects, but a table saw doesn't make it into any.) In each class of tool she tells you which size and style she finds herself reaching for most often, which when distilled can make a kind of skeleton shopping list for those newbies (such as myself) with a naked workshop.

Once she's introduced you clearly to the tools and basic methods involved in using them successfully, she plunges into projects. First is the simple handmade box, next an Adirondack chair, then later comes a table, a bookshelf, and a drawered cabinet. Each project introduces a simple set of new skills and builds on the skills learned in the preceding projects; it's very like a textbook in that way. In fact the author did teach woodworking classes for many years and it shows.

I bought it because these projects are actually useful; my daughter needs a toybox, which could be an upscaled version of the handmade box once I've made them. We don't have any pool chairs, so the Adirondack chairs will be perfect. The plans for the coffee table, she claims, are easy to upscale if you'd rather have a dining table. Guess what - we have no dining table at the moment. And the bookcases... well, it's my dream to turn my family room into a Craftsman-style library some day.

The book isn't perfect - I think whoever edited it was not a woodworker. I've already found a few disappointing mistakes. In the first instruction ever given, she instructs you to cut the wrong size board (the 3.5 board, when it should have been the 5.5 board), as previously noted in some reviews. In one of the skill-builders (which are strangely inserted randomly throughout the project, instead of being placed handily right before you're going to need them to complete the next step) she instructs you on how to polish your chisels by asking you to buy 8 ascending grits of wet-dry sandpaper and gluing them, one sheet to a side, onto two sheets of glass (you do the math.) Second, because she's been a woodworker for so long she tends to call for fairly specialized tools.... or maybe my local Lowe's is just particularly crappy. (I couldn't find a Japanese backsaw, or panel clamps, or a honing guide for sharpening my chisels.)

Regardless, it is way better than the book that I bought along with it, Woodworking for Dummies, which already assumes that you own all the high-end power tools (such as a planer, etc). I think the errors are easy to work around if you don't trust her blindly, and the step-by-step instruction throughout various skill levels is invaluable. This book is well worth the money spent and I'm glad I stumbled across it.

I really like this book. The projects build skills used in later projects. The reason I did not give it 5 stars was the descriptions for some of the steps in project making. I found them hard to follow, requiring several readings. I also think that there is a typo on step one on page 65.

The skill building sections, however, were first rate. I liked the section on hand tool sharpening.

All in all a good book

Mark

I was very excited to get my hands on this book after reading some of the material covered. I have a woodworking background from a long, long time ago, but wanted a good refresher since so much has changed since the last time I held a block plane in my hand. I am currently finishing up the first project and am extremely disappointed in this book. The errors contained in the first few steps didn't become apparent until several steps later, causing me to basically toss aside my first few pieces of work. This is never a good way to start for a "beginner" like myself. I am going to have to draw up my own plans and do all of the calculating and measuring myself, since the author and editor can't provide it.

First example: Step 1 of the box project tells you to cut your 1/2" x 3 1/2" piece of wood into two 16" long pieces. Easy enough, as this was later chopped down to two 4 1/2" and two 10 1/2" pieces to make the sides of the box. WRONG!!!! The actual wood that should be used to make the sides of the box is the 1/2" x 2 1/2". First step already a mis-step, as the finger joints to be cut was specified to be 1 1/4" (which is correct for 2 1/2" tall side pieces). Fortunately, I recognized this mistype early and cut my finger joints at 1 3/4". I did have enough material to build 3 boxes when I first started - now I am going to be lucky to be able to build one, as a majority of my 1" x 4" (nominal) wood was mis-used. Frustrating. . . .

Second example: When you later cut the bottom and top of the box to begin working on the finger joints, you realize that the 4 1/2" pieces that you cut for the sides (and the 10 1/2" pieces as well) are too short, as the author tells you to buy 1" x 4" and 1" x 3" wood, but her actual measurements assume your wood is 1/2" thick, not the 3/4" thick that 1" nominal actually yields. Now the pieces that were cut from the wrong wood to begin with are useless as they are too short to form the joints. I suppose that you could cut the top and bottom pieces down further to fit, but then your box is too small to do much with other than admire. I began at this point to question my sanity as to getting back into woodworking, but as I have already squandered nearly $1000 in equipment, I decided to forge ahead.

Third example: The pictures are best ignored, save for the final project. They aren't presented with the text that they represent, so they can be more confusing than helpful. The author likes to use terms that I have either forgotten or never knew when referring to parts of tools, so I find myself re-reading and studying pictures until the concept of the written text dawns on me. I have small children, so my workshop time is limited to late at night - not the best time to decipher this text.

If you buy this book, be sure to buy some Post-It notes or book marks or tape flags, as you will be flipping back and forth continuously. The skill builder sections are nicely done, but appear in very strange places in the book. I would have put them all either before the projects or in an appendix. As it is, the first project refers you to several skill builders that are scattered throughout the pages of the first project (never on the facing page or the same page). This breaks the project text and pictures up too much.

The best thing that can be said for the first 1/2 of this book is that the projects look really neat, if you can survive the errors. I am now taking the approach to study the end product, draw my own plans, and learn the hard way (always a dangerous prospect when using sharp tools). If I could get a refund, I would - then spend the money on a different book.

I bought this book since I am relatively new to woodworking and was looking for a book with some different woodworking furniture construction projects that would be fun to build and develop my skills. This book has about 5 different interesting projects ranging from simple box construction, adirondack style chair, bookcase, coffee table, and low file cabinet. All the projects will result in fairly simple yet attractive projects which are well worth the time spent working through. In the process of each project Fraser walks the reader through increasingly difficult woodworking skill building exercises.

Now for the bad news, as touched on buy several of the other reviewers there are numerous typos and innacuracies which I think are inexcusable being that this book is written by a former editor of a very fine woodworking magazine, and it is directed towards beginners which don't need the additional challenge of catching and working around type errors.

Because I liked the project, I skipped directly to the last project, the low file cabinet. The project starts out with an explanation of dimensions for the project, but for some reason leaves out a few of the key dimensions on the drawings. Then the text references photographs, but for some reason the photos don't match the text, or are not sequenced in the right order. Also, a few of the dimensions in the text are simply not correct, and unless you carefully study the provided dimensions in the drawings and make some visual scale estimates on the photos, you will end up with an incorrectly designed project. In spite of the inaccuracies I was able to successfully build the project, but it is imperative you check the drawings, photos, and text carefully and pick the source which provides the most accurate information to complete the project correctly. Not really something a novice woodworker should have to deal with. So I give this book 3 stars, a 4 for concept and a 2 for execution.

The book contains good explanations of terms and techniques but there are a lot of errors in it. Errors in a book for beginners is unacceptable. It's hard enough to figure out the difference between a dado and a rabbet without being given wrong directions. Take the first project for instance. The first step in the project tell you to cut the wrong piece of wood. The author tells you to buy 1x3, 1x4, etc. wood. The dimensions given for the cuts, however, are for wood that is 1/2" thick. 1x wood is actually 3/4" thick. Additionally, some of the pictures in the introduction to tools section are mislabeled. I haven't tried any projects after the first one. I'm gunshy now.

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