Popular Woodworking Pocket Shop Reference

by Thomas Begnal

Your personal research assistantAnyone who works wood knows that the craft veers into math, biology and chemistry. You often have to compute some odd joint angle, calculate the amount of wood movement in a panel, choose appropriate metal hardware, or select the proper adhesive or finish for the job at hand, to name just a few examples.Fortunately, you no longer have to spend hours laboring over magazines and books for this kind of information. A quick look at the table of contents in this little compendium shows that it's crammed with exactly the kind of answers a woodworker needs to have on hand. It includes common geometry equations, math conversion tables, standard furniture dimensions, shelf load limit charts, a glossary of joints, properties of various woods, adhesives, finishes, and lots more. The best thing is that all the information is at your fingertips and easy to find, making this one of the hardest working little shop helpers you could hope to have.

• ISBN10: 1558707824
• ISBN13: 9781558707825
• Publish Date: 31 August 2006
• Publish Status: Transferred
• Out of Print: 2 July 2013
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: F&W Publications Inc
• Imprint: Popular Woodworking Books
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 224
• Language: English

Reviews

[annieb123]

Originally published on my blog: Nonstop Reader.

The Handy Shop Reference: Useful Facts and Figures for Every Woodworker is a comprehensive absolutely no-frills shop reference. Written by woodworking guru Tom Begnal, and published by F+W Media, it's 224 pages and available in flexibound/spiral format.

This book is literally packed with info on safety, adhesives, tools, sizes, conversion info, square yardage, wood types, and many other essential info for the woodworker/handyperson.

If I have one small quibble with the book, it's that a fair amount of page content was used doing conversions and simple math calculations that would be so much easier if the user simply understood the mathematics behind the calculations. I know there are sadly a fair number of math-o-phobes out there, but in trying to do absolutely ALL the math for the reader, the author succeeds in making it look very intimidating.

This is a very useful book, and the non-algebra/geometry parts of the book are well worth the price of the book.

This is a no-nonsense book. It's not an instruction book or tutorial guide or anything other than a bench reference, but it's a good one.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.