Awesome Carpentry

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.

Sometimes, the best kind of lock is the kind that doesn’t look like a lock at all. B-Star Crafts shows off a simple, but effective method that keeps doors or drawers locked using hidden neodymium magnets. It’s a trick that’s frequently found in puzzle boxes but can be easily applied to furniture and cabinets as well.

Builder Tim Sway dusted off an old drum kit he found in the trash and gave it a whole new life. What makes these drums really special is that he crafted their bodies by recycling hollow core closet doors. He then reused the old hardware and added new Remo drumheads. Tim has previously made guitars from a similar material.

Woodworker and artist Blake Weber shows us the incredible and laborious process behind making this beautiful cabinet. The most remarkable feature is the set of curved doors he built by bending different colors of wood. He actually made two of these – one for himself and he sold the other one on his website.

Paul Jackman often makes things from reclaimed pallet wood. This time, he used the wood to craft 100 screwdrivers for his sponsor ISOTunes. He first milled the pieces down into sticks, cut and milled them into hexagons, then shaped them into their final form on a lathe. He also put a hidden compartment into each handle.

For this Scrapwood Challenge, carpenter Neil Pask created a beautiful modern pendant lamp. He created its cylindrical shape by gluing small wood segments into circles that he routed smoothly. To create the organic perforations in the shade, he drilled randomly-placed holes and then painstakingly routed each one by hand.

Woodworker Peter Waldraff built this unique piece of custom furniture that conceals a working model railroad beneath its surface. The circular side table has a pop-up center section that houses an N-scale train that chugs along the rails through a scale scenic backdrop inspired by Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Most benches look pretty ordinary. Woodworker Chris Salomone wanted to build something a little different, so he came up with an abstract modern design for a wooden bench made up of a series of layered triangles. The finished piece looks like something straight out of a high-end furniture showroom.

Creating bent wood objects typically involves cutting a repeated series of slots known as kerf cuts to help the wood to flex. But one side effect of this process is that it leaves unsightly gaps which must be covered up. JAR Made shows off a neat technique using a tapered router bit that makes those gaps nearly invisible.

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.

Woodworker Kurahito is an expert at sculpting unusual forms from lumber. In this clip, he shows how he used a table saw to gradually carve a springy, helical shape out of a dowel rod. With two of them intertwined, it looks like a strand of wooden DNA. Turn on closed captions for an explanation of the process.

Sinks are usually made from porcelain or metal, but builder Laura Kampf wanted something a little different to replace the beat-up old slop sink in her shop, so she created one by laminating scraps of plywood, then coating them with an ample dose of epoxy to make it watertight. Now she needs a proper backsplash.

After crafting a handmade guitar out of a shelf, luthier Tchiks Guitars came up with a new guitar challenge – to see if they could build a guitar body and headstock out of a single slab of cherry wood. Sit back and enjoy the quietly satisfying process of cutting, carving, and sanding to create a beautiful and functional instrument.

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.

Thanks to its layered structure, plywood is a strong and versatile material that costs less than hardwood boards. Carpenters often work to hide exposed plywood edges, but Michael Alm came up with a better solution – he created his own custom plywood with beautiful and intricate edge patterns which you’d never want to hide.

Back in 2008, Bridge City Tool Works posted this video showing off a fun use for their precision Jointmaker Pro table saw. By cutting numerous alternating notches into a stick of lumber, it turns into the wooden equivalent of a wet noodle. Woodworker Stumpy Nubs posted a more recent video showing how the tool works.

Have some old closet doors lying around? Guitar builder Tim Sway shows us how he took the thin wood used to make hollow-core doors and used it to build a totally serviceable acoustic guitar. He laminated together strips from the edges of the door with epoxy to create the guitar’s neck and used the main panels for its body.

Woodworker Jonathan Katz-Moses shows off a really cool piece of furniture he built that seems to defy logic and gravity. Its structure was tricky to engineer and build, but the result is something we’d be thrilled to have in our living room.

After showing us how to make some geometric patterns with plywood, builder Michael Alm is back with another neat woodworking tutorial. In this clip, he walks through several other patterns, each of which is contained in a hexagonal shape. Surprisingly, it’s not nearly as difficult as it looks.

After building a larger-than-life utility knife and a huge screwdriver, Jackman Works is adding another tool to his giant-sized collection. This time he made an Estwing hammer fit for Paul Bunyan, carving the 8-foot-long, 90 pound monster out of reclaimed southern yellow pine. We’re gonna need a bigger workbench.