Archives

Whenever I’m in the presence of a piece of furniture that is designed and built to perfection , such as a chair by Brian Boggs , it is a thoroughly humbling experience. Like I should just [...]

Kelly Mehler has opened the registration for his 2008 classes, including three classes that I’ll be teaching on precision handsawing, planecraft and building the Holtzapffel workbench from [...]

Preparing small tabletops or irregular-shaped tops for finishing can be difficult with handplanes. If the top has a lot of mass, you can usually count on friction to help hold the top in place. [...]

Whenever I get into some serious handwork, I always try to boil down the processes so that I can 1) remember it myself and 2) occasionally explain it to others (including a couple children who [...]

Let’s talk about the historical and controversial scrub plane. First a little history, then the controversy. Whenever I talk about the fore plane, the handplane used to get boards to rough [...]

To most handplane users there are three principal ways to adjust the cutter in the tool: You can use a Bailey-style adjuster made popular by the U.S.-made Stanley planes, you can use a [...]

Some manufacturers require a thousand square feet of booth space to show you the new tools they are going to introduce before the end of the year. Others require you to simply push the water [...]

Long-time toolmaker Paul Hamler has developed a new device that can turn many handplanes (both vintage and new) into a scraping plane that is easier to set up, tune and use than any other [...]

While my blog might pinch your checkbook on occasion, Konrad Sauer’s new blog is a mugger in a dark alley with a Bowie knife. Yes, planemaker Konrad Sauer is now a blogger. Oh sure, he [...]

This weekend I got a chance to show off the Holtzapffel workbench at the Sindelar Tool Meet, talk to a bunch of tool collectors and buy some tools I’ve been coveting for too long. But the [...]

Mr. Peel was shaped exactly like one of the Fisher-Price Little People, he jangled his keys in his pockets nonstop and he had a reputation as a tyrannical shop teacher at Chaffin Junior High [...]

I’ve got a weakness for shoulder planes. Though lots of people do great work without them, I find them useful for trimming the shoulders and cheeks of tenons, plus fine-tuning rabbets, [...]