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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 [...]

These days investing in premium tools might have less financial risk than the stock market. Just about every week I get an e-mail or phone call from a reader asking me if they think that premium [...]

Need to clean up the corners of really wide rabbets? Then I have the plane for you. This Stanley plane is so rare it doesn’t even show up in John Walter’s “Stanley Tools Guide [...]

For the Lie-Nielsen fan who has everything, you might consider getting a Lie-Nielsen tattoo for the arm that pushes your bronze and ductile iron beauties. Casual Lie-Nielsen fans can purchase the [...]

Sometimes brand-new chisels and planes (even from the best manufacturers) don’t hold an edge well. I’ve seen some edges crumple like tin foil after two whacks with a mallet or two [...]

There are still some spots available in the class on handplanes that Thomas Lie-Nielsen and I are teaching in April at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. This is the only class I am teaching [...]

Last week I compared the Lie-Nielsen and Veritas small router planes and concluded that I really would like a Lie-Nielsen with a closed throat. So, of course, a reader showed me how it can be [...]

The first time I saw a chisel plane was at an antique market in Kentucky. It was sitting out on a table with a bunch of common planes. Every person who walked up to the table picked it up to …

Pint-sized router planes see a lot of use in my shop. Instead of using a trim router, I always prefer to cut mortises for hinges with a chisel and a router plane. So as soon as Veritas and [...]

The stuff I write about Stanley’s metallic scrub planes always gets me in trouble with the people who use the tool to dress the faces of rough lumber. You can find my stories here and here. [...]

Though the new Stanley premium handplanes won’t hit stores for a month or more, the company has released these photos of the planes that are going to be used on some packaging. These photos [...]