Techniques

A couple years ago I finally got to go to Winterthur, the DuPont’s estate in Delaware that is a shrine to early American furniture. Right as our tour of the collection was about to begin, [...]

Milford Brown writes: Since you are interested in the older hand-powered woodworking, I wonder what, if anything, you know about the history of marking knife use? I recently had occasion to [...]

While teaching a class on handsawing a couple years ago, one student lost his cool. He was cutting a tenon for his sawbench, and he strayed over the line and the result looked rough to him. He [...]

When I glue up panels from several narrow boards, I use my jointer plane to dress all the mating edges. While our power jointer is fairly well tuned, it’s rarely perfect , we have a busy [...]

I noticed the head on my trusty Hamilton hammer was loose last weekend as I was driving a bunch of nails (good thing I have an extra hammer or two). This morning I decided to do something about [...]

In my kindergarten class, someone was snitching cookies from the lunchboxes of the rest of the class. (Spoiler alert: It was the fat kid.) While the teacher’s investigation was ongoing, she [...]

Despite the fact that monkeys were as rare as hen’s teeth in the mountains of Arkansas, the highest praise for intelligence there was to be called a “clever monkey.” To wit: [...]

There is no single best way to set a bench plane to take a proper shaving. I’ve seen people do it by eye, with their fingertips, using scraps of wood and even working on live stock and [...]

Last month I got to visit Roy Underhill’s new school in Pittsboro, N.C. (read about my visit here). One of the coolest parts of the visit was getting to try out his foot-powered table saw [...]

My grandfather’s folding rule reads from right to left, while my tape measure reads from left to right. I never thought much about it, though I always did like using my folding rule when [...]

Blacksmith David Maydole was the SawStop of the 19th century. Sometimes hammerheads would fly loose from their handles on the job site. This could be troublesome or deadly because occasionally [...]

Anyone who has worked with me for about five minutes knows that I really like chamfers on my work. Stop chamfers, such as those found on early English and American work, are particularly [...]