The Weekend Woodworker: Quick and Easy Country Projects : Tables, Garden Projects, Cabinets and Chests, Children's Furniture and Toys

This book is a storehouse of woodworking projects to keep your shop humming. They're easy to make but elegant in appearance. Like most good designs, their beauty is in their simplicity. You can build every one of these projects with an amateurs tools and techniques. Your results will be impressive and attractive. You'll be proud to tell your friends and guests that you built them yourself. Every project in the book is solidly in the American tradition. In fact, most of them are classic designs from rural America, carefully measured and drawn, with step-by-step instructions prepared by woodworkers with years of experience. They contain everything you need to know, including sources for uncommon hardware, tips and suggestions for more efficient work, and separate instructions for more widely useful techniques.

Rodale has produced another collection of project plans in the popular "Weekend Woodworker" series. Included are instructions for making a variety of tables, cabinets, shelves, and even a child's sled. Some of the projects are reproductions of antiques, and others are new designs. The instructions are straightforward enough, but the description "quick and easy" is a bit misleading. The illustrations, like those in most of Rodale's woodworking books, are among the best. While most of the designs are aesthetically pleasing, none is particularly remarkable or innovative; this reviewer has seen similar projects on numerous occasions. Only the largest, all-inclusive public library collections will want to consider this title; smaller libraries can safely pass.
- Jonathan Hershey, Akron-Summit Cty. P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Here's a collection of woodworking plans that will please beginning as well as more experienced woodworkers. Beginners will like it because the plans in it aren't all that difficult. The more experienced will find it a worthy reference and, if they're sharp-eyed, be able to improve on its simple plans. As with any book of this ilk, it pays to read all the well-written instructions before beginning a project, for it frequently turns out that a project's author overestimates or underestimates the reader's skills. The instructions seem to make no drastic shortcuts, but until you place wood to blade, you never know for certain. If the finished book features four-color pictures that will show completed projects more clearly than do the photocopies submitted for review, this will indeed be a handsome book. Jon Kartman