Archives

With the release of the new Veritas Small Scraping Plane last week, lots of people are saying: Cool! I want one! Do I need one? Good question. Scraping planes are curious birds. The large [...]

The hardest thing about dovetailing isn’t the sawing or the chiseling or the layout. It’s the seeing. I don’t think I can teach anyone to see, but I can show you where to look. [...]

While my dad was sleeping off the flu in February, I was plundering his drawers. The man has an English chest problem like I have a hammer problem. I pulled out all the drawers of his six or [...]

Everybody has a list of woodworking books they enjoy and a stack of woodworking books that they never should have bought (anything with “Krenovian birdhouses” in the title). And most [...]

The last few weeks I’ve been doing lots of hand joinery, and in that short period of time I have completely fallen for my Blue Spruce Toolworks mallet. It’s the perfect weight (1 lb.) [...]

In the shop, my mechanical pencil is as important as my eyeglasses. I use a mechanical pencil with a 0.5mm lead to darken in my knife lines when cutting dovetails, tenons or other joinery. I like [...]

When most people think about cutting dovetails, they think: handsaws. However, there’s more to dovetailing than sawing. You also need to be mindful of your handplanes when you’re [...]

I feel like a dirty English tool dealer this morning. But I’m OK with that. Recently I purchased a bunch of brass-bound folding rules to give to co-workers and friends. Most of these were [...]

A couple years ago I finally got to go to Winterthur, the DuPont’s estate in Delaware that is a shrine to early American furniture. Right as our tour of the collection was about to begin, [...]

If we haven’t yet convinced you to abandon your family/job/comfortable retirement and head to Cincinnati on May 16-17, I hope this blog post will help you come to your senses. That weekend [...]

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 [...]

While teaching a class on handsawing a couple years ago, one student lost his cool. He was cutting a tenon for his sawbench, and he strayed over the line and the result looked rough to him. He [...]