Archives

Next to my workbench at home, I keep an antique tool chest that has a tricky, sticky and unpredictable lock. Most days, I can open the chest with ease. I rotate the key. The cylinders turn. The [...]

“I can teach a man to sail but I can never teach him why.” – Timothy E. Thatcher, published in “The American Scholar” The March 2007 issue of Woodworking [...]

Tonight I attempted to make my first serious loaf of bread, and I learned something about woodworking benches. Now, I don’t like to talk much about my life outside the magazine. It’s [...]

Every piece of lumber has three kinds of surfaces: edges, faces and ends. A good workbench should be able to hold your lumber so you can easily work on these three kinds of surfaces. Any bench [...]

Question: Looking over the current and past issues of Woodworking Magazine, I see how drawboring or wedging a mortise and tenon joint will improve the strength and fit of the joint.  But is [...]

Question: A couple of questions regards to my Roubo bench project: 1. Regarding laminating the top: I’m not the best laminator in the world. Ihave about a dozen small cracks on both [...]

Sometimes the laws of time, space and economics get bent. And, in the case of two little Zona saws I’ve been testing this week in the shop, sometimes these laws get broken. A couple weeks [...]

Question: I’ve noted that you’ve recently mentioned that you’ve been looking into scrapers, so I thought that maybe you could answer a question that I have about scraper-plane [...]

Before I knew Bob, one of our senior editors here at Popular Woodworking, I knew him as Robert W. Lang, the author of two landmark books I owned that were chock full of shop drawings of Craftsman [...]

When I learned to sharpen planes, the mantra was: Bench planes need a curved cutting edge, joinery and block planes need a straight cutting edge. And in a lapse of journalistic crotchetiness, I [...]

One of my favorite things to do is teach basic hand skills. Unlike some other aspects of the craft, face-to-face instruction is the fastest way to teach sharpening, planing, sawing and chiseling. [...]

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 [...]