Get a great start in woodturning with expert, shop-tested insights and advice from the American Association of Woodturners. With this collection of articles from American Woodturner magazine, the official journal of the AAW, you’ll quickly get out of the blocks with the best practices on safety, tools, and fundamental techniques. Along with the 18 skill-building projects for everything from bowls and pens to holiday ornaments and doorknobs, Getting Started in Woodturning delivers all the detailed, practical advice a beginner needs.
Woodturning is a great hobby: it has a short learning curve, the skills last a lifetime, and you get to make wood chips fly. Few things are more satisfying than creating something out of wood with your own two hands—that beautiful bowl, useful pen, or one-of-a-kind ornament turned on the lathe instantly becomes a source of pride, a family heirloom, or a favorite gift.
Woodturners enjoy nothing more than sharing their passion for turning and the knowledge they’ve gained at the lathe. Getting Started in Woodturning represents this community spirit: This collection of practical and skill-building information from American Woodturner magazine, the journal of the American Association of Woodturners, is written by woodturners for woodturners. Inside these pages, experts and pros share their best safety practices, tool knowledge, fundamental techniques, and favorite projects. This helpful reference is chock full of detailed, useful advice that covers the problems, challenges, and questions that all beginners encounter. With the guidance of Getting Started in Woodturning, you’ll be turning in no time and sharing your own enthusiasm for the craft.
Inside Getting Started in Woodturning, you’ll discover:
![]() |
$24.95 $14.97 |
If you are a builder, developer, or homeowner intent on getting the most from your new home construction or remodel budget, you need Building An Affordable House. This book gives you the insider techniques used every day by the best homebuilders in the country to save thousands of dollars on the cost of every home they build. Building An Affordable House will help you: * Add curb appeal on a budget * Cut costs and keep quality * Build savings into blueprints * Learn secrets of reducing material costs * Get subs on board from the get-go
![]() |
$19.95 $11.97 |
With proper planning and design, a deck can add a new dimension of living space to a home. Not only is it an enjoyable outdoor retreat and expanded entertainment area for family and friends, but its also a great return on a home investment. For homeowners building new decks or upgrading existing ones, or for builders and remodeling contractors looking for new ideas for their clients, this most complete and up-to-date book is packed with over 300 inspiring photographs along with hundreds of design solutions and top-notch advice to help inform smart decisions. Chapters focus on a wide range of deck sizes, styles, and materials, as well as furniture, accessories, and landscaping ideas. In addition, practical sidebars and case studies will help anyone plan just the right deck to suit their home, yard, and lifestyle.
![]() |
$27.95 $16.77 |
Bird covers all the methods used to shape wood. Making squares, circles, coves, reeds, flutes, bent and laminated curves, edge treatments, and moldings as well as turned and carved shapes. This is a very graphic, step-by-step presentation with numerous visual maps, cross-references and indexes to make the information accessible to the reader. A good reference work for the woodworker.
![]() |
$26.95 |
It is estimated that nearly 3 billion board feet of urban lumber are buried, chipped, burned or otherwise destroyed. Dr. Sherrill discusses how to alleviate at least some of this waste by harvesting this timber and using it for a variety of different purposes. There are clear, concise, step-by-step instructions on felling, bucking, sawing, and drying timber. There are case studies of how some communities have used this timber for public works projects and how independent tree services can convert this timber and sell it to both professional and hobbiest woodworkers. This is a much needed book that addresses an increasingly difficult problem faced by many communities.
![]() |
$19.95 $11.97 |
Building Outdoor Structures offers practical, easy-to-follow instructions on enhancing any homes front and backyard with the natural beauty of wood. Starting with the simple uses of wood in landscaping, such as raised beds, author Scott McBride shows the average DIYer how to build retaining walls, arbors, pergolas and 7 other projects, including a gazebo. The book covers everything from choosing materials to building techniques.
![]() |
$40.00 $24.00 |
Bird decoys, which were first fashioned by Native American hunter-artists at least 1,500 years ago, are the only major folk art form to originate in North America. Today, decoys made during the heyday of decoy carving--roughly from 1840 to 1950--rank among the most avidly sought of all folk art collectibles, with some rare and outstanding examples fetching upwards of $8000,000 apiece at auction. These humble hunting tools, intended to deceive wildfowl by luring them into shooters' range, are now appreciated on many levels: as compelling works of sculpture, as exacting portraits of living and extinct species, and as irreplaceable historical objects. Successful decoy carvers of the past knew their prey intimately--spending countless hours observing game birds in the wild and then bringing their accumulated knowledge of different species' appearance and behavior to the carving bench. Because the works these artisans created were meant to attract avian eyes--conveying the essence of a bird's plumage, form, and attitude at a glance--older handmade decoys are deeply observed symbols of living birds that no merely decorative object, no matter how photographically accurate, can match. In this definitive, lavishly illustrated work, folk-art expert Robert Shaw chronicles the now-vanished era in which the great decoy makers pursued their craft. Shaw traces the natural history of North American bird species--more than sixty of which are represented in antique decoys. He relates the history of wildfowl hunting on this continent, detailing the excesses of nineteenth-century commercial hunting and the rise of a conservation movement aimed at ensuring bird species' long-term survival. He examines the distinctive forms produced in each major hunting area, from the Maritime Provinces of Canada to the Chesapeake Bay to the bayous of Louisiana and beyond. And, with a storyteller's gift for the entertaining anecdote, Shaw puts us in touch with the lives and circumstances of the decoy makers themselves.