Tools

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 classes on the router plane in [...]

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? Pedicure? [...]

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 of the “Woodwright’s [...]

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 who was famous for [...]

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 No. 5 [...]

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 in Cincinnati for [...]

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 onto my keyboard. [...]

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 care to admit. And I wear out sharpening stones. Last …

Mark Harrell at Bad Axe Tool Works has always taken a different path than other modern sawmakers. Instead of imitating the look of classic British saws, Harrell has always favored American [...]

We spend three days with the world's most expensive planes. Are they just jewelry? Or do they work better than your plane?

When I worked at a liquor bottling plant one summer, the bosses found out I was in college and decided to put me in charge of the robots. I had to summon the robots from the warehouse, pick up an [...]