I’m fairly well convinced that my ears are different than yours. The music I like isn’t going to sound the same to you. It’s almost impossible for me to share with another [...]
While teaching a class on handplanes this weekend, one student in particular was having a heck of a time with his Veritas No. 4-1/2 smoothing plane. Let’s call him Mr. Papanicolaou. (I just [...]
This weekend I assisted Thomas Lie-Nielsen during a class on handplanes at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. Thomas brought along some of the new tools they are working on and talked to the [...]
There are lots of people who will show you how to handplane the edge of a board. A few less who will show you how to really flatten the wide face of a board. A smaller number will show you …
With the release of the new Veritas Small Scraping Plane last week, lots of people are saying: Cool! I want one! Do I need one? Good question. Scraping planes are curious birds. The large [...]
When most people think about cutting dovetails, they think: handsaws. However, there’s more to dovetailing than sawing. You also need to be mindful of your handplanes when you’re [...]
A couple years ago I finally got to go to Winterthur, the DuPont’s estate in Delaware that is a shrine to early American furniture. Right as our tour of the collection was about to begin, [...]
When I glue up panels from several narrow boards, I use my jointer plane to dress all the mating edges. While our power jointer is fairly well tuned, it’s rarely perfect , we have a busy [...]
In my kindergarten class, someone was snitching cookies from the lunchboxes of the rest of the class. (Spoiler alert: It was the fat kid.) While the teacher’s investigation was ongoing, she [...]
There is no single best way to set a bench plane to take a proper shaving. I’ve seen people do it by eye, with their fingertips, using scraps of wood and even working on live stock and [...]
Anyone who has worked with me for about five minutes knows that I really like chamfers on my work. Stop chamfers, such as those found on early English and American work, are particularly [...]
When you’re a professional writer, people tend to give you cranky manual typewriters as gifts. They don’t expect you to use them, per se. But they do expect you to display them in [...]
