Fine Woodworking Magazine May/June 2025

I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Rick Mastelli, an editor from the early days of the magazine and one of the driving forces behind bringing video to Fine Woodworking. It’s safe to say that thousands of woodworkers have enriched their skills because of that move. As far as I can tell, project-based videos didn’t hit the website until 2005, with a full push seeming to start in 2012—which was about the time I discovered Fine Woodworking and became one of its devotees. Since that time there have been many videos that changed my personal woodworking journey, and to celebrate Fine Woodworking’s 50 years, we thought it would be fun to highlight some of the videos that were released on the website. I have watched these series multiple times,…

Peter Marcucci (“Charles Rohlfs Umbrella Stand” and Designer’s Notebook) has always worked with tools. His father was a tile setter and tile contractor, and all of his uncles had businesses in the building trades. As a kid, he spent many hours on construction sites and helping with home-building or renovation projects. While dating Jody, who is now his wife, he was inspired by some of the furniture pieces that her father had built and wanted to eventually build furniture for their home. “When we purchased our first home in 1980, I established my first home workshop and built my share of coffee tables, bookcases, desks, and dining tables. Every Saturday afternoon, I would watch Norm Abram’s New Yankee Workshop on PBS. Looking back, I am surprised at how many of…

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Anything that has endured for 50 years, as Fine Woodworking has, definitely has survived a lot of change. And that is worth a celebration. However, I don’t think the simple fact of being around for 50 years is what we should be celebrating. More exciting to me is the nature of the craft and the magazine’s mission to create a place for discourse, a place to be inspired and get the information necessary to make the things you want to make. A key reason Fine Woodworking has remained relevant is that the magazine provides a clearinghouse for ideas, from the wisdom of masters who have dedicated their lives to the craft, to the insights of thoughtful, curious, impassioned amateurs toiling…

Wire system gives pipe clamps unlimited reach Once while I was gluing multiple pieces of edging onto an octagonal table, the crisscrossing pipe clamps kept interfering with each other. A few years later I figured out a way to adapt the clamps that not only solves my original problem but, more importantly, lets me extend the clamps to almost any length. This method allows just a few clamps to replace a whole stack of pipes of different lengths. And the whole system fits into a shoebox. I mounted the jaw assemblies from the original clamps on shorter pipe sections and connected those with ⅛-in.-thick steel cable. Then I attached cable stops at intervals along the wire, locking them in place by swaging them (flattening them slightly) with hammer blows. To…

ACCESSORIES Head-to-head: High-tech sanding disks Everyone wishes sanding were faster and easier, so I jumped at the chance to try out two fairly new disks: Mirka’s brand-new Ultimax Ligno and the somewhat similar 3M Xtract Cubitron II Net Disk 710W, which has been out for a couple of years. Both include high-tech ceramic abrasives and arrange their abrasive grains in clusters, with gaps between them. The clustered abrasives are intended to cut more aggressively, and the gaps to funnel air between them, which keeps the sanding process cooler and allows more-efficient dust collection. The 3M disks use a porous net material as the substrate, while Mirka’s disks are solid, with a universal hole pattern called “Multifit.” Dust collection was very good with both. I compared the disks to each other…

As our staff looked ahead to assembling this anniversary issue, I spent a lot of time looking back—paging slowly through Fine Woodworking’s early issues to take the pulse of the magazine when it was young; skipping around from decade to decade to find furniture that particularly impressed me in the articles where I had discovered it; reading stray bits at random that drew me in a second time. All that looking back eventually impelled me to turn forward again and assemble an article filled with work by a range of woodworkers whose careers have launched in the last decade or two. I ended up identifying so much superb work that we’ve had to split the article in two; a second batch of makers will be featured in an issue later…