Archives

We’ve had two crippling power outages in our office during the last three weeks. First the computer screen flickers. Then your left hand twitches to hit the keys to save your work. Then the [...]

I’ve looked at a lot of old workbenches, and I’ve never seen many that exhibit signs of being flattened. I always look at toolmarks on the benches and what I typically find are [...]

Moulding planes are some of the coolest planes in a toolkit. Each one is like a modern router, but without the dust, the roaring universal motor and a bit spinning at 20,000 rpm. Like all hand [...]

All my relationships usually start out rocky. On my first date with my future wife, I almost blew it by presuming to order for her at the IHOP. (I thought it Southern courtesy; she thought it [...]

Every Tuesday night we ritually torture our children with a meal that we call “New Food Night.” The kids have to eat something they’ve never eaten before , this week was coq au [...]

Question: I’ve noted that you’ve recently mentioned that you’ve been looking into scrapers, so I thought that maybe you could answer a question that I have about scraper-plane [...]

When I learned to sharpen planes, the mantra was: Bench planes need a curved cutting edge, joinery and block planes need a straight cutting edge. And in a lapse of journalistic crotchetiness, I [...]

My head is deep into preparing card scrapers these days. I’ve vowed to try to make sense out of all the conflicting information we read about sharpening them. And so I’ve been turning [...]

OK I’m sorry to be a bit of a tease about all this stuff with sharpening scrapers. It’s not that I’m trying to string you along, it’s just that I still have more questions [...]

Scrapers are one of the most misunderstood but useful tools in a woodshop. A scraper in its simplest form is simply a piece of hardened steel that has a small hook on its edge that was created by [...]

There’s one question that I’m asked almost every week that I cannot answer. And here it is: What brand handplane should I buy if I don’t want to fix up a vintage plane, I [...]

I finished building a Roman-style handplane from a kit made by Ron Hock of Hock Tools. The kit is designed to be used to make a plane in the style popularized by James Krenov,�  but I converted [...]