Archives

When I call my students “maggots,” I do it in only the kindest, most loving way possible. After all, most of them are at the very beginning of their journey on handwork. If I wanted to be cruel I [...]

When I teach a class on sawing by hand, some students seem bewildered by how much work we do with planes and chisels. When I teach a class on planes, there’s a lot of work with saws and chisels [...]

I have always been fastidious about keeping rust off my tools. I have to be. My shop is partially underground and we live in a humid river city. Blink, and your tools will turn to iron oxide. The [...]

I looked at my 10-year-old daughter Katy over a plate of chili dogs today and realized that this was the chance I had been waiting for all my adult life. When I teach people woodworking, I spend [...]

While packing my tools to teach a toolbox class in Germany, I knew two things: 1. The students had to cut a lot of dovetails in 7/8”-thick material. 2. Coping saws are uncommon on the Continent. [...]

Tool seller Patrick Leach has a new sliding bevel in the works that does something that no other modern bevel does: It locks at a perfect 90°. Yup. Sliding bevels are great at describing almost [...]

  If you know me through my writing, then you likely think that I prefer traditional furniture to the more contemporary forms. That’s not exactly true. What I really prefer is [...]

The last day of the tool chest class at Dictum workshops was supposed to be all about the lid. One lid in one day. Easy. Well as it turned out, the last day of the tool chest class was about …

One of my students in my tool chest class has no business being there. He’s been a woodworking instructor in Denmark for 40 years and can teach me a few things. But his son Jonas asked him to [...]

It’s time to reveal a dirty little secret of teaching woodworking classes. Are you ready? I don’t care. Here we go. You have to whip the students mercilessly in the beginning days or the class [...]

I don’t know if there were ever guinea pigs in Europe, but now there are 11 of them. This week I am teaching a class in building the traditional tool chest from my book “The [...]

I am married to a very smart woman. This has its advantages – life is never boring. It also has its disadvantages – she does not suffer fools (such as myself) lightly. What the heck does this [...]