Techniques

Woodworkers can spend a lot of time perfecting a finish for their projects, when often a simple finish will serve just as well.  Shellac with a  wax topcoat is one such finish.

From Drafting and Design for Woodworkers,  author Bob Lang describes what information is necessary to develop a design for tables.

After watching Frank Klausz cut a set of dovetails in three minutes using a special bowsaw blade (see the video here in our video section), Rob Cosman decided to show...

Handplanes with corrugated soles vex many woodworkers. If you find them on a vintage plane, should you grab it or should you shun it? If you order a bench plane...

A lot of people ask to see my tool collection. I tell them I don’t have one , I’m a user, not a collector. If I say that again, however,...

Be it spilled coffee or sloppy joinery, mistakes cost time but increase knowledge.

Several years back I was fitting some 1/4″-thick mullions and muntins into a door and needed to plane the little suckers to remove their sawmarks. Planing thin stock can be...

One of the most powerful things about hand tools is that they allow you to work on small areas of a board with ease. Instead of running the whole board...

Pickling oak or pine is easy using some white paint and solvent.

Reader Tim Williams writes: I have a number of old Stanley planes that I’ve spent a lot of hours cleaning and refurbishing. I’ve read multiple places about how when tuning...

Almost every day I get an e-mail or a phone call that goes something like this: “I’m a beginner. I want to buy some handplanes. But I have no idea...

If you ask me, the first backsaw you should buy should be a carcase saw. It’s handy for all manner of crosscuts when building furniture. But you never see reviews...