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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...

Some wide chisels and narrow plane irons don’t work well with the cheap-o side-clamp honing guide. They are too narrow to fit between the walls on the top of the...

Senior Editor Glen D. Huey and I cut dovetails in completely different ways. But we entirely agree on one point: People make the joint a lot more difficult than necessary....

This happens every year. Woodworkers are allowed to stop weeding the garden beds and are cut loose in the shop. The result: My e-mail inbox and voice mail inbox are...

While teaching at Roy Underhill’s school in Pittsboro, N.C., I spied this folding bookstand in the front of the school’s storefront. I’d seen the episode of “The [...]

When it comes to powered machinery, I’m a fan of using carbide inserts in the cutterhead instead of traditional straight knives. The cutters last longer, they do a better job...

Wear and tear on an old workbench is always interesting to me. Most of it is predictable and understandable – French marks on the benchtop, the occasional saw kerf in...

Sometimes when I write, I come to a question that paralyzes me – and I cannot continue until I get it answered. As a newspaper journalist, I was trained to...

This morning Chuck Bender from Acanthus Workshop stopped by the office on his way to deliver a piece of furniture to a client outside Cincinnati. After the traditional 15 minutes...

If you ever needed more evidence that woodworkers have always been a parsimonious lot, look no further than the December 1901 issue of the British magazine The Woodworker. In an...

I never cared for carved furniture until I saw some 17th-century American chests in Wallace Nutting’s “Furniture of the Pilgrim Century.” (A low-resolution GoogleBooks version [...]

Reason No. 50 that I dislike chipbreakers: They can prevent your iron from retracting all the way into the mouth of the tool. Sometimes I think chipbreakers are a cruel...