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I have owned several plant sprayers since Harrelson Stanley of Shapton USA introduced them to me in 2003 as a great way to keep your waterstones wet. Of all the sprayers I’ve used, this sub-$10 [...]

When tool chests suffer damage, it’s usually in three places: the top rim of the lid, the lower skirt around the carcase and the bottom boards, which are rotted. The rim of the lid gets dented by [...]

It is not always the screw’s fault. Yes, home-center wood screws are too soft. Some off-shore screw manufacturers use substandard materials and manufacturing processes. But sometimes it’s your [...]

Woe is the poor glue scraper. There are no toolmakers crafting these tools with rosewood handles and German silver accents. No annoying forum threads that debate the merits of the different [...]

If you read this blog regularly, you should be sick of this suggestion: Buy Pégas coping saw blades. Hoard them. I do – and I’m not generally a hoarder. I have about 150 stashed away in case [...]

It’s easy to be skeptical about the polissoir. Could a bundle of broom corn radically change the way you finish some pieces of work? All of us who worked on the translation of A.-J. Roubo’s [...]

Full disclosure: The following gift ideas are 100-percent unsponsored. I bought all these tools myself and would buy them all again – that’s why they are on this list. First on my list for 2014 [...]

Roorkee chairs are great fun to show customers – until they ask me to take it apart and put it back together for them. For the first year or so, I was pretty slow at putting them together because [...]

My dovetails are always at their best if I warm up before sawing. But I’ll be honest – when I am pressed for time I have no patience to cut an entire joint, much less prep the wood for a …

The following blog entry might seem snarky. I assure you it is not. I’m interested in what impresses people when they view a piece of furniture. In fact, when a fellow woodworker shows off a [...]

If you haven’t figured it out, I’m wary of tool reviews in magazines or online. With rare exception they are uninformed or (worse) misguided. And believe me: I am the first to admit that I was [...]

There are lots of ways to get around not having a sliding deadman – sometimes called a “board jack” – on your workbench. For the last 15 months I have been working on a bench without a deadman or [...]