Tools

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 I’ve been teaching a few [...]

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 to: 1. A vintage [...]

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 decent work. However, with saws, it’s [...]

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 to finish with a smoothing plane, [...]

“After many vain attempts at ornamentation …?on my own’ I learned that choice classic designs had been well thought out and established before my birth. It was for me to study them, [...]

Legacy Planeworks officially opened its doors on Tuesday and began selling kits that allow a home woodworker with no metalworking experience to build an English-style shoulder plane with naval [...]

Last year while I was teaching a sawing class in Michigan, one of the students brought along a dovetail saw he had purchased almost 10 years earlier but had never used. When I spied it on his [...]

When I was first learning to use a handplane, I was both intimidated and skeptical of some of the claims made by the “handplane gods.” The gods claimed they could plane any species of [...]

One of the best things about building old-style workbenches (like Andre Roubo’s bench above) is that there are little lessons you learn by using them. At times, you learn the lesson [...]

I have a “saw problem.” There, I said it. And because I have too many saws in my shop at home and at work, I also have too many saws that have loose saw nuts. They loosen up with use [...]

Memory is a funny thing, especially in my family. But I swear that during my last days as a college undergrad there was a car dealership in Chicago that offered a special deal to its customers. [...]

In our June 2007 issue we reviewed two-base router kits. You can read the full review in Adobe PDF format by clicking here. One of the routers in the test, from Craftsman, was nearly identical to [...]