Techniques

Trestle tables have always looked notoriously spindly and rickety to my eye. Compared to a traditional apron table, there’s just not much material there. Add to the fact that they are [...]

I get called a Luddite all the time for my affection for hand tools (Recent quip from spouse: “You know, we own a blender for a good reason”). I certainly don’t consider myself [...]

Sometimes a craftsman-made tool surfaces that is just plain mysterious and wondrous. Today I spent the morning with Carl Bilderback, a semi-retired Chicago-area carpenter who has an astonishing [...]

Growing old gracefully is one of the signature features of this sometimes-finicky wood.

I’m frequently amazed at what happens when I hand a sharp full-size handsaw to a fellow woodworker for a test drive. Nine times out of 10 they clamp something in the bench vise and then [...]

At least once a week I’m asked if I prefer handplanes that have the iron’s bevel facing up (like in a block plane) or facing down (like in a traditional Stanley/Bailey-style bench [...]

One of my favorite movies as a teen-ager had a scene where a 1940s-era G-man goes to a mystic for help in becoming a superhero. The G-man shows the mystic , named Sombra , a photo of a caped hero [...]

One of the themes coursing through the next issue of Woodworking Magazine is rethinking the role of nails in woodworking. And so I’ve been whacking a lot of cut nails lately and setting [...]

Some days it’s overwhelming to think about all the woodworking and toolmaking knowledge that’s been lost. Last weekend at the Mid-West Tool Collectors Association national meeting it [...]

Thanks to my daughter’s fourth-grade class, I’ve discovered another good source of small-scale drawbore pins for cabinet work. This morning I had to give a small chat about my job at [...]

When you are making big mortises, such as those in the Roubo-style Workbench in Issue 4, it’s a good idea to bore out as much of the waste as possible. This isn’t exclusively a [...]

I sometimes shudder to think about all of the chisels and plane irons I’ve set up in the last 10 years. Every review has involved hours and hours of setup time, most of that flattening the [...]