Many beginners make gluing up panels a lot harder than it should be. They add biscuits or splines for alignment, which can also cause some mis-alignment if you aren’t careful with your machines [...]
When I reorganized my shop last Spring, I sold a lot of stuff. I sold so much stuff that I was afraid that I was cutting into the bone. I sold my routers. My router table. My sliding compound [...]
Making woodworking tools doesn’t interest me as much as making furniture, but my recent encounter with Henry O. Studley’s tool chest has me eyeing the metals section of the McMaster-Carr web [...]
Exotic woods don’t blow my skirt/kilt/skort up much. In small doses they can look beautiful, but for the most part I find them oily, difficult to work and far too wild looking for full-size [...]
I know the exact moment that Roy Underhill cracked my workbench open during Woodworking in America last weekend. There was a disturbance in the Force. In other words, my phone went nuts with [...]
When I inspect an antique tool – especially one that hasn’t been messed with much – I always take a look at the cutting edge. How was it sharpened? What is the shape of the edge? Did they do any [...]
The adjustable-height outfeed table – done. An adjustable-height bench – check, done. The adjustable-height miter-saw stand – done and done. And now, the adjustable-height tool chest. Tool [...]
This is a stupid trick. In fact, I’m sure you have a better way to do this. But I don’t. This week I glued up a couple Welsh stick chairs – each had 12 spindles and 28 through-mortises that must [...]
Whether you love them or hate them, the English form of the infill plane has remained almost unchanged since it was invented in the 19th century. An infill plane is a metal shell that is stuffed [...]
For most Americans, Lee Valley Tools is a catalog filled with objects of lust for the workshop. For Canadians, this lust also comes in the format of a retail store. And yes, this is worse. Lee [...]
Food is one of my constant obsessions – right behind woodworking. So whenever people visit our fair city, I am prone to force some restaurant recommendations upon them. Hence, this blog entry for [...]
First a warning: Don’t read this blog entry if you already obsess too much over the details of your furniture. This entry could only make things worse. Years ago, a high-end finish carpenter [...]