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If you have been following Peter Follansbee’s blog then you know that he has been working on an interesting commission for the Museum of Fine Arts Boston brand new “Art of the [...]

When I teach people to sharpen I notice a bad habit that many of them have: They think that rubbing the tool against a stone is sharpening. The more they rub, the sharper it gets, no? Well, no. I [...]

It looks like the folks in New Britain, Conn., want to get things right. After Stanley’s first generation of the No. 62 low-angle jack plane had some problems, including a fatal bed error [...]

I don’t know why “wagon vises” have their name, but I know that I like them. Wagon vises don’t have the sagging problems that some tail vises have in their middle age, [...]

For many years, one of the best places to get user-grade handtools was from “The Porch,” the oldtools e-mail-based listserv (you can join here). The tools were generally sold by users [...]

Stanley’s Sweetheart socket chisels should be for sale in the United States in about six to eight weeks, according to a company product manager. The chisels are in the final testing stages [...]

Peter Follansbee and Mike Siemsen have cleared up the mystery of the pinwheel-shaped wooden nails. The pinwheel shape of the nails is caused by the shell or gimlet bit used to make the hole. The [...]

The pegs that hold the joinery of old furniture together are always interesting. I’ve seen pegs with their heads shaped square and octagonal, which are obviously the product of either [...]

For the last week or so I’ve been researching the science of smacking the snot out of things. I’ve been reading lecture notes from a Harvard course on “fracture [...]

Thomas Lie-Nielsen called this morning to ask if I was dropping out of the “Handplane Weekend” class at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking on May 14-15 that I help him teach. Oops. [...]

Fetch the yurt, honey. It looks like 2011 is going to be a nomadic year. I’ll be teaching classes all across the country and even in Germany in the coming year on a wide variety of [...]

Whenever I stink at something in woodworking, it becomes my lunch-hour obsession. While chomping an apple, I’ll read everything I can about the topic. Then I’ll steal off to the shop [...]