You’ve got one level of Harry Potter fandom where enthusiasts re-read the books and re-watch the movies again and again. And then you’ve got David Lundell’s level of fandom, which inspired him to build a gorgeous, wooden Potter-themed coffee table complete with secret compartments you need a magic wand to open.

Animating anything by hand using stop-motion techniques, one frame at a time, is a time-consuming and mind-numbing process. But in order to create the surreal organic images for his WoodSwimmer video, Brett Foxwell had to slowly slice away at a log, sliver by sliver, while photographing the entire process.

You probably want a carpenter using nails to build your house, so, you know, it doesn’t fall down. But for more decorative wooden creations, fasteners can result in an unsightly finish. An alternative is to rely solely on precisely engineered wooden joints that fit together so perfectly you’d swear they were optical…

Welcome back to the Toy Aisle, io9's new weekly collection of the best toys around. This week, we’ve got dancing Gremlins, blocky Marvel superheroes, teddy bears with adorable attitude, and merchandise based on the Darth Vader comic’s best and most murderous stars.

It’s impossible to turn on a TV, browse social media, or do anything other than hide inside a dark cave without getting stressed out these days. When it comes to relaxation, you need all the help you can get, and surprisingly, watching this magnificently bearded woodworker turn a log into a perfect wooden bowl might…

Jerry McNamara’s Day By Day is a short documentary that focuses its lens on artist George Rocha of Iris Skateboards in San Francisco. Rocha takes stacks of old, unrideable skateboard decks, glues them together, grinds ‘em up, and then transforms them into functional objects like furniture, tables, tap handles, and,…

Here’s some free advice if you ever find yourself in a post-apocalyptic world and need glasses: squint. Because after watching How to Make Everything attempt to make a pair of prescription eyeglasses, let me tell you, it’s going to really, really hard for you to actually make a pair yourself. There are just so many…

You won’t want to actually kick it around without wearing steel-toed shoes, but Russian carpenter Vladimir Zhilenko makes turning a bunch of wooden pentagons into a perfectly-round soccer ball look incredibly easy. The final sanding looks especially satisfying, assuming you don’t accidentally sand away your fingertips…

Japanese hand planes or kannas are remarkable tools that can shave off layers of wood so ridiculously thin that they look like tissue paper. The wood shaving in the GIF above is only 8 microns thick which almost sounds like an impossible measurement because even human hair has a diameter of about 50 microns.

Even if your carpentry skills aren’t much more than having watched a few episodes of This Old House, it’s still pretty common knowledge that a drill only works in a straight line. Or does it? Woodshop hacker Izzy Swan created a custom rig that can actually drill a curved hole instead.

It’s never too early to start fostering a deep, almost obsessive love of Star Trek in your children. So while your toddler is innocently rocking back and forth in this lovely wooden USS Enterprise rocking horse, they’ll have no idea they’re secretly being groomed as a future Trekkie.

It’s like a Bizzaro World version of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” where the paper manages to beat everything and scissors are pissed.

There are over 150 steps in making a bamboo fishing rod which involve nearly 60 hours of work to actually complete. That’s a lot of work. You can sneak a peak at how it gets done—the carving, the burning, the shaving, the glueing—in the video below by Michael Herman. In it, you get to follow fly fisherman Nick Taransky

Chop a tree. Wait three years. And then you can make yourself a longbow.

This is a really captivating look at how wooden objects are made in small villages across China. This video shows how residents of Shawo Village—a community with only 270 households—use foot-powered lathes to make their wooden bowls, utensils, tools, toys, and more.

Any type of tree house rules. Throw a shanty on a tree trunk and the world immediately becomes a beautiful place. This tree house, though? This tree house is legitimately awesome. In the woods and next to the water, it has a bridge, windows, a deck, and basically everything you ever wanted in a tree house.

There’s no reason I need to make charcoal—I don’t normally use it for anything, and if I did, bags of it are so easy to buy. But I find the whole process of exhausting wood sticks into little brittle black pieces so much fun that I’m going to start inventing reasons to use charcoal in my life.

Okay, so he had a lot of help from his dad, but this third grader’s school project—a wooden model of the Steel Bridge in Portland—is totally awesome. It has all the moving parts of the real bridge; both the lower and upper decks can be lifted to make way for boats on the river.