Techniques

As I was unpacking my tools for the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Chicago this weekend, John Economaki from Bridge City Tools stepped up to my workbench with an astonishing...

The best hand drills ever made came out of the Millers Falls factory in the first half of the 20th century. While many people used these drills for boring holes...

If you haven’t surmised it yet, one of the themes running through the Spring 2008 issue is the fact that accurate sawing has a lot more to do with accurate...

I’ve never fully understood how the U.S. Postal Service works , beyond the fact that you put an envelope in a slot here and it arrives somewhere else. This week,...

I’m always looking for little tricks to improve dovetailing, especially the part I dislike: transferring the tails’ locations to the pin board. Sawmaker Mike Wenzloff stumbled across [...]

When it comes to saws, aspiring sawyers have two basic questions: What saws should I own to build furniture? And where can I get them? During the last couple years...

Tenon saws are one of the three essential backsaws for building furniture (the other two are the carcase saw and the dovetail saw), but until recently your choices were limited...

When you buy a handplane (even a Veritas or a Lie-Nielsen), it’s not going to work well out of the box. You really need to hone the iron to do...

Circle Center By George Vondriska Quickly find and approximate the center of a narrow board by using your fingers like a marking gauge. Set a pencil in your fingers, allowing...

The fore plane is a traditional English tool used to get rough boards fairly flat so that you can then make them really flat with a jointer plane and ready...

Bandsawing Inside Curves This is a useful trick when bandsawing inside curves. It requires no marking and no special jig. First I cut a shallow slot in a piece of...

Large Sheet Crosscutting Crosscutting large sheets of plywood on the tablesaw can be difficult, and I usually end up binding the blade, burning the wood, or worse. To get around...