Techniques

There are lots of people who will show you how to handplane the edge of a board. A few less who will show you how to really flatten the wide face of a board. A smaller number will show you …

Tombstone Doors By Lonnie Bird Through many years studying and building 18th-century furniture, I’ve learned that this era produced countless fine examples of good design. One example is the [...]

Shop-Made Router Lift Features you can’t buy at a price you won’t believe. By Bruce Kieffer and Richard Tendick Router lifts are hot items these days and for good reason. Veteran [...]

With the release of the new Veritas Small Scraping Plane last week, lots of people are saying: Cool! I want one! Do I need one? Good question. Scraping planes are curious birds. The large [...]

The hardest thing about dovetailing isn’t the sawing or the chiseling or the layout. It’s the seeing. I don’t think I can teach anyone to see, but I can show you where to look. [...]

While my dad was sleeping off the flu in February, I was plundering his drawers. The man has an English chest problem like I have a hammer problem. I pulled out all the drawers of his six or [...]

The last few weeks I’ve been doing lots of hand joinery, and in that short period of time I have completely fallen for my Blue Spruce Toolworks mallet. It’s the perfect weight (1 lb.) [...]

This week I was finally able to purchase a new table saw.  I had been "getting by" with a lowly Ryobi 10" contractor saw with a tiny table.  I tried the 'build a saw [...]

In the shop, my mechanical pencil is as important as my eyeglasses. I use a mechanical pencil with a 0.5mm lead to darken in my knife lines when cutting dovetails, tenons or other joinery. I like [...]

When most people think about cutting dovetails, they think: handsaws. However, there’s more to dovetailing than sawing. You also need to be mindful of your handplanes when you’re [...]

How to tune up your band saw and  get it sweetly singing .

I feel like a dirty English tool dealer this morning. But I’m OK with that. Recently I purchased a bunch of brass-bound folding rules to give to co-workers and friends. Most of these were [...]