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The most miserable aspect of hand work is setting up the tools for the first time. Removing the coarse manufacturing scratches from the unbeveled faces of your edge tools can be grueling, boring [...]

I spent most of this weekend on my knees, and it had nothing to do with a lengthy visit to Chicago’s Hopleaf gastropub or the large cooler of Julius Echter wheat beer that a reader brought [...]

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 [...]