Archives

One of our year end traditions is to pick our favorite tools of the year. Usually this list contains 10 or 12 tools, but this was no ordinary year. Our December issue has our choices on the 16 [...]

Lee Valley Tools‘s latest catalog is filled with lots of interesting stuff that we’re beginning to wade through, including two new plane totes that allow you to convert the Veritas [...]

It’s about 7:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, and I am severely deprived of caffeine as I follow Thomas Lie-Nielsen through the narrow passages of his tool factory in Warren, Maine. He moves so [...]

Our full-fledged, in-print review of the Steel City table saw will appear in our February 2007 issue. In the meantime, we’ve had several questions about what we’ve posted so far here [...]

Arts and Mysteries began when Popular Woodworking’s editor Chris Schwarz, asked me if I was interested in writing an article for an existing column on hand tool usage called “From the [...]

In the Stickley side table from the November 2006 issue, there are enough variations of mortise and tenon joints to give your hands and your head a real workout. One of the things I enjoy most [...]

This posed photo (the opening photo for the first Arts & Mysteries column for 2007) is my best approximation of Johannes Vermeer’s “The Geographer” (1668/69). Vermeer is one [...]

For the last three years, I’ve been writing a column on modern hand tools for the Fine Tool Journal, an excellent quarterly publication out of Pownal, Maine. The Journal is a thick slice of [...]

The opening sequence of David Charlesworth’s latest DVD shows him securing a chisel in a honing guide and putting the tool to the stone for four strokes. He adjusts the tool in the jig, [...]

Readers of our magazine know that we enthusiastically embrace both power- and hand-tool techniques. We’ve found that the best-quality modern-day work tends to involve both hand and machine [...]

I have a couple of heros in the business world, guys who make sense about making money. The first is W. Edwards Deming best known for his book “Out of the Crisis” and the second is [...]

I’m working on a small chest for the February 2007 “I Can Do That” column. Because it’s a primitive design, I wanted the piece to look as if it had been around the block a [...]