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Of all the furniture of the 18th and 19th centuries, the work of Boston chair maker Samuel Gragg (1772-1855) is some of the most shocking to modern eyes. His elastic, steam-bent chairs are based [...]

In the great battle to make the best router plane (what, you weren’t aware of the war?), Lie-Nielsen has raised the stakes by introducing two new closed-throat routers. For those of you who don’t [...]

I was in a rock ‘n’ roll band in college, and we dreamed about getting a record deal, selling dozens of copies of our album and ending up in the cut-out bin. For those of you who aren’t music [...]

I’m gearing up to build a run of Roorkhee Chairs for some customers and (fingers crossed) this magazine. But before I can even order the wood I had to do something I thought I’d never do again: [...]

As a lifelong Southerner, I can attest that things are done a little differently below the Mason-Dixon line. Things might seem a little backward or slow to newcomers. The manners, the way you do [...]

It sounds like a difficult question, but it’s really not. “I really want a Wenzloff & Sons handsaw, but I am a (graduate student, hobo, philosophy major) and cannot afford it. Can you [...]

Attention woodworkers in and around the Great Falls, Montana, area: Have you noticed a curious lack of vintage handsaws in your flea markets and antique malls? Well there’s a reason that greater [...]

Around the Popular Woodworking Magazine office we used to joke about how red oak (Quercus rubra) wasn’t really a wood. It was more like a weed. It’s stringy, kinda homely, cheap and – most of all [...]

My favorite honing guide is the one you can find at almost any woodworking store. The guides are inexpensive and poorly made, but you can easily tune them up to make them work. One of the major [...]

For some of us, working wood is a form of time travel. We like the smells, the physical exertion and the pleasure of a job well done. What makes it even more fun is when a tool manufacturer plays [...]

  It seems I have more holdfasts than internal organs. And yet, when I was dropping something off at Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick’s house this week, I was struck by two holdfasts in her [...]

While deep into dovetailing a small chest at the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking this summer, my concentration was suddenly burst by someone at my workbench. “There’s a guy outside,” the [...]