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Lately I’ve been planing stuff that has been a lot nastier than your typical run-of-the-mill cherry, oak and walnut. First Senior Editor Glen D. Huey tried to torture me by bringing in some [...]

Last week I bought a toothing plane from a Midwestern tool collector. I’ve always wanted one of these tools, and this one is particularly nice. Toothing planes are lot like scraping planes: [...]

Thanks to my job and the freelance work I do for The Fine Tool Journal, I get to see a lot of specialty handplanes that most people see only in the catalogs or in one of the lusty tomes …

As woodworkers dive into handwork, they usually start with a block plane, then the bench planes, the saws and the joinery planes. Joinery planes , such as plow planes, router planes, shoulder [...]

When a young Thomas Lie-Nielsen set out to start making premium handplanes in the early 1980s, he launched his business with an adaptation of the Stanley No. 95 edge-trimming plane. But [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

If you are one of the thousands of people who have taken a chair class at Michael Dunbar’s “The Windsor Institute,” then you have certainly used one of the travishers or [...]