The Roubo Meets the EyeClops

It’s perhaps the ugliest photo of my Roubo-style workbench ever taken, but the image above is a picture of its Southern yellow pine benchtop that’s magnified 200x. It looks a bit like [...]

My Scrub Saw

The stuff I write about Stanley’s metallic scrub planes always gets me in trouble with the people who use the tool to dress the faces of rough lumber. You can find my stories here and here. [...]

A New Lesson From an Old Workbench

Sometimes the best innovations are so simple it’s a wonder that they aren’t everywhere. This week, Mike Siemsen of Chisago City, Minn., sent me an e-mail about his new workbench that [...]

Shhh! Don’t Tell My Scraper That

It’s funny what you can accomplish when you’re ignorant. No one told me I couldn’t cut joinery with a hacksaw, which has fine teeth and little set. But that’s exactly what [...]

I See the Light Now

It’s easy to get grumpy about the way you work in the shop and resist the newfangled features that appear on tools. To be sure, some of these “innovations” are boneheaded (the [...]

Why We Hate Paint

Yesterday I finished up work on the dry sink that is the cover project for the Spring 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine (Issue 13). As always, the finishing part of the project was as much an [...]