Tools

A sharp, balanced and well-set handsaw is the difference between avoiding handsawing and looking for excuses to pick up the tool. While it is noble to resuscitate vintage saws and put them back [...]

We’ve had two crippling power outages in our office during the last three weeks. First the computer screen flickers. Then your left hand twitches to hit the keys to save your work. Then the [...]

Twenty-three gauge headless pinners have come a long way in recent years, and we were glad to test the new Grex model P645L in the shop. The new edition is an upgrade from the P630 model in a [...]

With so many excellent hand tools on the market, it’s hard to find the space in the magazine to take the mediocre ones to task as much as I’d like. During the last six months [...]

I’ve looked at a lot of old workbenches, and I’ve never seen many that exhibit signs of being flattened. I always look at toolmarks on the benches and what I typically find are [...]

Moulding planes are some of the coolest planes in a toolkit. Each one is like a modern router, but without the dust, the roaring universal motor and a bit spinning at 20,000 rpm. Like all hand [...]

All my relationships usually start out rocky. On my first date with my future wife, I almost blew it by presuming to order for her at the IHOP. (I thought it Southern courtesy; she thought it [...]

Every Tuesday night we ritually torture our children with a meal that we call “New Food Night.” The kids have to eat something they’ve never eaten before , this week was coq au [...]

I’ve always been geeky about sharpening things, not in the sense of polishing chisel backs to #32,000 grit, but having a good edge before going to work. Before using a router bit, I dress [...]

Sometimes the laws of time, space and economics get bent. And, in the case of two little Zona saws I’ve been testing this week in the shop, sometimes these laws get broken. A couple weeks [...]

Question: I’ve noted that you’ve recently mentioned that you’ve been looking into scrapers, so I thought that maybe you could answer a question that I have about scraper-plane [...]

When I learned to sharpen planes, the mantra was: Bench planes need a curved cutting edge, joinery and block planes need a straight cutting edge. And in a lapse of journalistic crotchetiness, I [...]