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Isshi Yamada never said much to me when I was dating his daughter in college. To us Western students who studied Eastern religions, he was an enigmatic Zen Buddhism professor who was famous for [...]

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 [...]

Bob Baker, a furniture and tool restorer and excellent planemaker, died unexpectedly last week. I had the pleasure of meeting Bob in February of 2006 when we hosted a gathering in Cincinnati for [...]

Just about every week, someone asks Chris, “How can I get started in working with hand tools?” Sure, there’s a lot of information on the Internet…¦not to mention in our [...]

Note to self: Do not drink coffee whilst reading e-mail. A note this morning from Emily (you may remember her from the Norm Abram lookalike contest) made me spit coffee onto my keyboard. [...]

Thanks to the steady stream of tools that flow in and out of our shop, I do a lot of sharpening. I set up more tools from scratch than I care to admit. And I wear out sharpening stones. Last …

Mark Harrell at Bad Axe Tool Works has always taken a different path than other modern sawmakers. Instead of imitating the look of classic British saws, Harrell has always favored American [...]

There are few things I dislike more than seeing myself in video. I’m one of those guys who has a face for radio. And when I talk, I move my hands in a way that looks like I am giving …

At high school reunions there’s always the guy you don’t recognize because he’s gained 200 pounds and is nursing a spectacular goiter. This workbench is like that. Eagle-eyed [...]

After five years of whining, someone listened to (or became merely weary of) my complaints about the search function on this blog. We now have a custom Google search bar at the bottom of every [...]

We spend three days with the world's most expensive planes. Are they just jewelry? Or do they work better than your plane?

When I worked at a liquor bottling plant one summer, the bosses found out I was in college and decided to put me in charge of the robots. I had to summon the robots from the warehouse, pick up an [...]