Awesome Carpentry

Despite only firing rubber bands, we would not want to be on the business end of this wooden minigun. Generic Woodworking shows off the incredible amount of blood, sweat, and tears it took to build this impressive toy weapon. It uses parts from a lawn trimmer and a belt sander to drive its mechanism, and makes an unnerving popping sound as it fires off rounds.

This precise stainless steel ruler makes it easy to mark perfectly straight lines at exact distances. It glides smoothly along the edge of a piece of wood and has holes at 1/16″, 1/32″, and 1/64″ increments for marking. It comes in 3″, 6″, and 12″ lengths and works best with a 0.5 mm or thinner mechanical pencil.

We love Hacksmith Industries’ YouTube channel. They also have a store that sells gadgets, toys, brand merch, and books. The Handyman Pocket Reference Book belongs in every home, workshop, and work site. It’s packed with facts and figures used in carpentry, construction, and repairs, info about hardware, wiring, building techniques, and more.

Woodworker Laura Kampf found a tumbleweed while on a cross-country drive. Refreshed by the distraction from her long and lonely trip, she took it with her and thought of highlighting it in a display. While she’s not done with it, we can already see her vision coming together in her prototype: the opposite of a disco ball, encouraging calmness and silence.

Burls Art is back with another creative guitar build. This time, he made a unique electric guitar with a 3D depth illusion with the same technique used to make some wooden cutting boards. Blake and his friend started by cutting maple and walnut boards into strips of varying thicknesses, then stacked, glued, and cut them into wedges to create the pattern.

Jonny Builds shows off another impressive piece of furniture – a record cabinet with a segmented wood door. He started by assembling grain-matched panels for the top, bottom, and dividers. To make the door, he took an 8-foot-long black walnut slab, cut it into boards, sliced it into 109 strips, glued them to canvas, and CNC milled the awesomely wavy shapes.

You can cut pieces of wood to meet perfectly in a corner using a miter saw. But there are other scenarios where you need to work around things that make it more challenging. Entertainer Chaz Bruce re-shared this video of carpenters dealing with tricky corners while he and his son reacted to the cuts. That four-way pipe joint was so satisfying.

Builder John Malecki wanted a new media center for his office. Rather than designing the cabinetry himself, he turned to generative AI to come up with the concept. After playing with a few prompts, Midjourney came up with a design. Its organic shapes caused construction challenges, but John and his team did a great job bringing the real-world version to life.

Jonny Builds set out to make a tabletop using a similar style to Micarta knife handles. After testing with large sheets of paper, he started over with thousands of small sheets of colored paper and laminated them with epoxy in a vacuum bag. After flattening its surface with a CNC machine, he carved a water ripple pattern and coated it with clear epoxy.

Whether you’re a DIYer or a construction pro, understanding math and geometry is critical. DEWALT’s reference guide includes 42 pages of useful equations and rules which will help you measure twice and cut once. Made from durable, toolbox-friendly materials with a spiral-bound edge. Also available for plumbing and wiring.

Vertical blinds are usually made from plastic or fabric, but carpenter John Heisz has an affinity for wood, so he made his own from scratch, using of ash wood he cut down to 3/8″ thick strips. He then built an exposed mechanism for opening and closing the blinds, giving them a more artful look than the ’90s decorating staple.

Builder Hassan Abu-Izmero had a little time on his hands and decided to build himself a piece of furniture that celebrates his craft. He made the rustic wooden table from rough pieces of timber and steel, then used a Shaper Tools Origin handheld CNC to route out precise insets for five wrenches embedded in its tabletop.

Olivier Gomis created this impressive piece of furniture – a table that looks like it has a wormhole that connects two points of space and time. He built the table from rough walnut planks he cut into sticks and glued into grids. He then assembled them into rough shapes, turned the rounded pieces, then assembled and finished them.

For the 2022 Great Guitar Build Off, artist Uri Tuchman set out to create a unique musical instrument that looks like the iconic Les Paul electric guitar, but it’s emerging from a solid rectangle of wood. In keeping with the motif, he made custom square brass knobs for the dials. We love the engraved details on the pick guard too.

Woodworker Ryan Hawkins shows us the time-consuming and laborious process that went into building a truly stunning piece of furniture. He built the 24″ x 48″ coffee table from maple, cherry, and walnut wood, incorporating a herringbone pattern into its top, inspired by a design from cutting board artist MTMWood.

Making things from wood takes time. But if you’re a stop-motion animator like Omozoc, everything goes much, much faster. In the latest video from their Stop Motion Woodworking series, they created a small tray using nothing a thumb and an index finger as tools.