Tools

If you ever work with wood from unreliable or unusual sources, such as one-person sawmills, it pays to own a moisture meter. I slip mine into my pocket whenever I head to the lumberyard and it [...]

Sometimes I feel the need to test myself, particularly when it comes to crap I say and crap I do. For many years I’ve contended that using handplanes is faster in almost every workshop [...]

This inexpensive compact saw performs surprisingly well. Click here to read the full review. Web Site: Craftsman.com Online: See the other saws in this line from Craftsman. From the February 2016 [...]

Making “stop shavings” – where the plane cuts only one part of the board – is one of the keys to better edge joints and lots of other handplane techniques. But few people in my hand-tool classes [...]

The trick to becoming fast at handplaning is to never pause during stock preparation. No matter how you prepare your wood for a project (with machines, handplanes or some combination of the two) [...]

American folk art meets the world’s most collectible hand saw. by Ralph Brendler from the June 2004 issue It’s easy to understand why folk artists love to paint on saws – a saw blade is a large [...]

Lightweight but solid, this two-knife model is a decent starter machine. Web site: grizzly.com Blog: See the inside of a straight-knife planer and a helical-head version. Blog: Get the skinny [...]

There are two woodworking tools that we have forgotten the most about in the last 50 years: the steel framing square and the handsaw. The steel framing square is essentially a jobsite calculator, [...]

Compact and quiet with a simple game-like interface. A sure sign that CNC routing is catching on with woodworkers is the increasing number of benchtop CNC machines that are available. With its [...]

My mattress has been sitting on a cheap metal frame for years. A few months ago, I decided the time had come to build a real bed. With limited tools, I had to come up with a design that could …

I’ve been cutting a lot of large-scale sliding dovetails and rabbets lately. And when these housed joints get to a certain size (think of a dovetail socket that is 4” wide and 30” long) it’s much [...]

Sand Curves With Ease Sanding is one of those necessary evils we all face as woodworkers. That’s why we flock to any tool that promises to make the job easier. Craftsman new Oscillating Spindle [...]