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Milford Brown writes: Since you are interested in the older hand-powered woodworking, I wonder what, if anything, you know about the history of marking knife use? I recently had occasion...

While teaching a class on handsawing a couple years ago, one student lost his cool. He was cutting a tenon for his sawbench, and he strayed over the line and...

When I glue up panels from several narrow boards, I use my jointer plane to dress all the mating edges. While our power jointer is fairly well tuned, it’s rarely...

I noticed the head on my trusty Hamilton hammer was loose last weekend as I was driving a bunch of nails (good thing I have an extra hammer or two)....

In my kindergarten class, someone was snitching cookies from the lunchboxes of the rest of the class. (Spoiler alert: It was the fat kid.) While the teacher’s investigation was ongoing,...

Despite the fact that monkeys were as rare as hen’s teeth in the mountains of Arkansas, the highest praise for intelligence there was to be called a “clever monkey.” To...

Blacksmith David Maydole was the SawStop of the 19th century. Sometimes hammerheads would fly loose from their handles on the job site. This could be troublesome or deadly because occasionally...

Some of the best workholding ideas rely on simple wedging action. This weekend I stumbled onto one more great wedging trick using cut nails. This might be old hat for...

The most stressful glue-up of my life was assembling my tool chest in 1998. The main carcase had 120 mating surfaces that had to be glued. Foolishly, I chose yellow...

Some day I expect one of my little girls to tell a school counselor (between sobs): “Daddy has a hammer problem.” My, ahem, problem started innocently enough years ago. I...

This week I’m at my father’s house in Charleston, S.C., to get my USRDA of grits, tasso and shrimp. Whenever I visit the Holy City, I always make sure to...

There are so many ways to construct a drawer that someone could write an entire book on the variations across time and cultures. I’d buy it. One curious drawer detail...