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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
