Archives

If you have attended any of the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Events in the last year and you have a sharp eye, then you probably noticed an odd-looking low-angle jack plane on one of the benches. It’s [...]

Compared to many of my woodworking friends, I buy wood and treat it a little differently than most. Many of my friends have a significant stock of lumber on hand, from a garage-full to a few [...]

There are still millions of excellent vintage saws in the world, and the only thing standing between them rusting or chewing through wood is a good sharpening. Many beginning woodworkers are [...]

On the first day of my woodworking classes at Dictum GmbH in Bavaria in June, I began with a confession. “I’m afraid that after three years, my German language skills are still crap,” I told the [...]

Unlike many hand-tool woodworkers (and turners), I’m not much of a steel nerd. I’m not on a quest for the steel that promises the ultimate in edge life. The reason I’ve not experimented with lots [...]

On the final day of a workbench class, the students either assemble all their benches or pack up the parts in their cars to assemble things at home. Assembly is easy. I usually do it by myself, [...]

When I build a workbench in the old style, the rules for joinery change a bit for me. The strength of the bench comes from the top – not the base. And the amount of contact surface between all [...]

When you build a workbench with an impressively thick top, one of the challenges is cutting it to its finished length. Unless you have an insane circular saw from Mafell. Yup. The chain mortiser [...]

My least-favorite joint to cut by hand is – hands down – a deep mortise. But when you build a French-style workbench, you need to make about a dozen of them. And if you do it by hand, you are …

No matter how many times I do it, every class on building a workbench is remarkably different. Different wood. Different tools. Different students. Different country. I don’t know how I got [...]

I have always disliked chipbreakers, which clog a handplane all too easily. But tonight I dislike them a little less. After the recent spate of discussions about a series of Japanese films on [...]

John Sindelar’s Michigan tool museum will close its doors in a couple weeks when Sindelar moves his woodworking business about five miles down the road. Sindelar is one of the most public tool [...]