Techniques

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...

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...

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 mechanics,”...

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...

SketchUp is a great tool for creating models of your next project, but where it really shines is when you want to quickly change a project. Whether it’s something you...

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....

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...

People gripe that the vintage tools and books I write about often go up in price after I post an entry. I actually think the effect is mild and temporary,...