I’m in the middle of repairing an antique table. There’s nothing really broken, but most of the joints are loose. So I’m carefully prying apart the old doweled joints and removing the old glue, then reassembling the joint with Titebond wood glue.

Steve Maxwell in the Ottawa Citizen wrote an article a while back (unfortunately the link has expired) about 5 basic principles that apply to anyone in a shop. It’s well worth the read and I have to agree with him. Here’s my summary of what he said:

I remember when I first started woodworking my dad would come up behind me as I was gluing up a project. “Got enough glue on that?,” he’d say. Glue was everywhere. I guess I was afraid of starving the joints of glue. I needn’t have worried with the amount of glue I was using.

This Shaker-style sitting bench is simple enough that it could be mass-produced quickly using conventional shop tools or CNC machines. Of course, you can alter the overall size of the final piece per your customer’s request, but this design makes it easy.

By the time I routed the profile along the edge, I saw a knot would be visible on the finished project. So here's a fix you can try when you encounter a board like that.

Like most woodworkers, I've used the old recipe of mixing sawdust with glue, using the fine dust from my random orbital sander. But one problem with mixing with glue is that it’s hard to sand.