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File this one under: Tricks that everyone knows but me. Whenever I work against a fence on my drill press, I constantly huff and sweep the table clear of shavings. Why? If even one errant shaving [...]

Anything – a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g – that reduces the time I spend sharpening my tools makes me giddy. Care Bear giddy. Monchichi giddy. Making tools dull is more fun. A few years ago I found a way to [...]

In my blog earlier this week on drilling holes for bench dogs and holdfasts I mentioned a 3/4”-diameter up-cut spiral bit we use in a plunge router to make perfect holes. Several readers have [...]

Note: This is a longer message than we usually post here on the blog and is in two parts. First, a message from Steve Shanesy, the publisher and leader of our woodworking community at F+W Media. [...]

Last week during my bench-building class, student Bill Montgomery was commuting daily from his parent’s house, which was near Kelly Mehler’s woodworking school in Berea, Ky., where the class was [...]

One of the questions that every student asked during my bench-building class last week at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking was: Where should I put my holes? It sounds like a deeply personal [...]

If you remember the Veritas Dodeca-Gauge – the company’s hilarious April Fool’s prank that featured a marking gauge with 12 independent sliding rods – then the company’s newest tool might look a [...]

Woodworkers are always looking for a better way to flatten the top of their workbench after they finish building it, or when the top has gone out of truth for some reason. I like using a [...]

It is unwise to rush when installing vises on a workbench. So I stopped whipping the maggots students during the last two days of the class and encouraged them to work at their own pace. Some [...]

Installing vises in workbenches is always a finicky process – unless you go for a super-simple setup like the one I prefer: A quick-release vise for the end vise and a simple leg vise for the [...]

When I walked into the shop at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking this morning at 8:24 a.m., the place was a wreck. The students were fitting their joints among piles of shavings and sawdust [...]

This is a model of the cover project from the August 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine