When I teach classes, I tell my students to buy their winding sticks in the “18th-century Tool Section” of their local home center. They look puzzled until I pull out my winding sticks: two lengths of aluminum angle, one of which is painted black. Aluminum angle is cheap and makes a nice set of accurate … Read more
I leave for North Carolina this week to shoot two episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” with Roy Underhill then teach a three-day class on handsawing at Underhill’s little Utopia of a woodworking school in Pittsboro, N.C. One of the shows will be on English handsawing (no on-screen French-sawing DIY vasectomies are planned) and the other … Read more
With Woodworking in America in our backyard this fall, we are going all out to show the attendees a good time in the greater Cincinnati area. So we’ve planned several extracurricular activities for the attendees. All of the events below have a limited number of seats available and will be first-come, first-served (except the pub … Read more
This October, Woodworking in America will be held in our backyard here in Cincinnati from Oct. 1-3. Registration will open in early May, and we’ll start telling you all about the instructors and 80 sessions as soon as we get all the contracts signed. But there is one aspect of planning this conference that I … Read more
I’m just about ready to assemble a drawer, so my daughter Katy lays down her saw and heads to the pickle bucket below the drill press. She dumps the cool water down the drain outside the shop door and refills the bucket with hot. She drops the liquid hide glue bottle into the bucket then … Read more
Traditional cut nails can be made from pretty soft steel, especially the useful cut headless brads. As a result, you have to be careful when installing them. Here are some of the things that can go wrong and how I deal with them. 1. Your pilot hole is too shallow. One early book on woodworking … Read more
Milford Brown writes: Since you are interested in the older hand-powered woodworking, I wonder what, if anything, you know about the history of marking knife use? I recently had occasion to dismantle an old pine blanket chest (because of extensive powderpost beetle damage in the sapwood edges of its top and bottom boards) that had … Read more
