Tools

This morning we were messing around with the band saw blades and got into a discussion of how to fold and unfold them properly. I was taught to use my...

I don’t relish handing out bad reviews of tools. But as someone who gets stoned occasionally by an angry mob, I know that a critical review can help improve the...

Soon I will sell my Makita LS1013 miter saw. Not because it’s junk , far from it. It’s still the best miter saw I’ve ever used. But I don’t need...

Router planes are the Starsky. Handsaws are the Hutch. These two tools work together all the time in my shop. In fact, all the sawing classes I teach are actually...

So we shot two 25-minute episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” today. So you are probably wondering what the heck I did with the other 23 hours of my day. Manicure?...

I’m packing up all the tools I’ll need in North Carolina for the coming week, and I was a bit shocked this morning as I went through my checklist. One...

Isshi Yamada never said much to me when I was dating his daughter in college. To us Western students who studied Eastern religions, he was an enigmatic Zen Buddhism professor...

I leave for North Carolina this week to shoot two episodes of “The Woodwright’s Shop” with Roy Underhill then teach a three-day class on handsawing at Underhill’s little [...]

      Every so often I need to plane down a piece of wood that is too small for my jointer. To handle these small jobs, I devised a stand for my...

Bob Baker, a furniture and tool restorer and excellent planemaker, died unexpectedly last week. I had the pleasure of meeting Bob in February of 2006 when we hosted a gathering...

Note to self: Do not drink coffee whilst reading e-mail. A note this morning from Emily (you may remember her from the Norm Abram lookalike contest) made me spit coffee...

Thanks to the steady stream of tools that flow in and out of our shop, I do a lot of sharpening. I set up more tools from scratch than I...