Fine Woodworking Magazine October/November 2025

Tired of driving Origin around? BenchPilot enables automated, hands-free cutting for Origin (Gen1 and Gen2) so you can focus on other tasks at hand. Clip Origin into BenchPilot and let it drive Origin from point A to point B while Origin continues to handle the small precision movements. Think of it as autopilot for Origin. Dimensioned and sized to fit perfectly with Shaper Workstation, BenchPilot creates a gantry-like system with horizontal and vertical milling capabilities—flexible for cutting joinery, inlays, intricate engravings, or profiles. It can also be mounted without Workstation and fit directly to your bench. It’s great for batch work or simply tedious and time-consuming jobs. Best of all, it doesn’t require complicated software, g-code, or other types of CNC programming to operate. If you know how to operate…

Our Unlimited membership provides exclusive access to a dynamic menu of woodworking talent, techniques, and projects—combining our print subscription with our online membership—all for $99 a year. For details on all the benefits, go to FineWoodworking.com/members. Online extras Visit FineWoodworking.com/319 Many ways to play chess In this issue, Erik Curtis makes a chessboard out of solid wood squares. Craig Thibodeau, however, prefers to make his with commercial veneer and an MDF substrate. VIDEO An L-shaped jig for your L-fence Amanda Russell shows how she puts together a jig to make any size crosscut with an L-fence and a table saw. VIDEO Micro-adjust your rip fence Mike Pekovich shows off his new favorite gadget for the table saw: a simple system that allows you to micro-adjust your table-saw fence. VIDEO Wrap…

Chance Coalter (“Tapered Table Legs on the Lathe”) lives in San Diego, near where he grew up, and he has been woodworking for as long as he can remember. He whittled with his grandfather and fixed all of the broken items his mother could come up with. After high school he took woodworking classes at Palomar College in nearby San Marcos and then transferred to San Diego State University to study furniture design with Wendy Maruyama. He worked for several local shops in college and began teaching woodworking at Palomar when he graduated. He was promoted to a full-time position in 2023. Craig Vandall Stevens (“Coopered Wall Cabinet Built the Krenov Way”) built log houses in his hometown of Columbus, Ohio, for 10 years before finding his way into furniture making. Visits…

ISSUE NO. 318 August/September 2025 p. 20 Why no Wendell Castle? I am a 50-year Fine Woodworking subscriber (yep, got them all) and a retired 40-year professional woodworker. I am astounded that you neglected to mention Wendell Castle in “Remarkable Mentors.” Besides Wharton Esherick, who influenced Castle, who influenced Silas Kopf . . ., with apologies to Nakashima and Maloof and Krenov, I still consider Wendell Castle to be the father of the American studio furniture movement. Castle had, and continues to have, a great deal of influence on a generation of woodwork/furniture design builders. As evidenced by the fact that Wendell Castle’s work is featured in the permanent collections of many prominent art museums in our country and abroad, how FWW did not give credit to the entirety of Castle’s…

Big, accurate crosscuts on the table saw An adjustable L-fence, as described by Bob Van Dyke in FWW #290 (access the article for free at FineWoodworking.com), is an invaluable table-saw jig with a growing number of fans. Van Dyke described a variety of uses and accessories for the versatile jig, but those are just a start. Once when I was assisting a woodworking class, we needed to crosscut a wide panel but lacked a table-saw sled big enough for the task. There was a Van Dyke–style L-fence on hand, so I came up with this simple crosscut jig that works in tandem with it. It’s another L-shape, but flat this time. Built from two pieces of plywood, it can be made in multiple sizes, to suit any project. I used…

MACHINES Step up to a drill press with no compromises IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A BENCHTOP DRILL PRESS, this new model from Grizzly is a great one to consider. I can’t think of anything I would change on this machine. While there are similar floor models from Grizzly, they are pricier, and I find that it’s easier to fit a benchtop model into most shops. There are zero compromises on this one. It’s tall enough to drill down into large workpieces, with a whopping 6 ¼ in. of vertical spindle travel. It’s beefy and powerful enough to drive the largest Forstner bits without breaking a sweat, and the ⅝-in. chuck is smooth, accurate, and industrial-size. Last, it offers variable speed (550 rpm to 3500 rpm) on the fly, with a…