The New Kid in the Popular Woodworking Shop
Every morning for the past year, I would clock in at the cabinet shop where I was working and take a moment to contemplate the worn-out scribbling on the band saw. The band saw was older than I [...]
Building Sawhorses, Part 2
Picking up after my last post on sawhorses (or sawbenches, as you might call them), the housings were all formed and ready to go. Then it’s down to cutting the legs to length: 26 1/2″ [...]
‘Bench Bull’ – The Jack of All Bench Jigs, Part 3
After showing you in my last post a few ways for clamping workpieces to the Bench Bull (F-style clamps, Veritas Fast-Action Hold-Downs and 3/4” pony #56 pipe clamps), I want to introduce one last [...]
The Better Way to Get a Plane to Stop Cutting
Making “stop shavings” – where the plane cuts only one part of the board – is one of the keys to better edge joints and lots of other handplane techniques. But few people in my hand-tool classes [...]
Building Sawhorses, Part 1
If you’re considering making a sawhorse, sawing stool, saw bench or however you like to describe it, this pattern is worthy of consideration. Thanks to its very stable platform, [...]
The Best $139 I’ve Spent on my Bench
After 19 years of building workbenches and testing workholding devices, I am darn picky about what equipment I have on my benches. In truth, I don’t have a lot of vises on my benches because I [...]
‘Bench Bull’ – The Jack of All Bench Jigs, Part 2
For Part 1, click here. I crosscut our first batch of Bench Bulls from a 7-1/4″ x 2-1/2″ rough pine beam that we found on the street in front of our school. The beams were discarded [...]
How to Avoid Hours of Handplaning
The trick to becoming fast at handplaning is to never pause during stock preparation. No matter how you prepare your wood for a project (with machines, handplanes or some combination of the two) [...]
Special Roy Underhill Collections (in Limited Quantities)
No, the photo at left is not from “The Woodwright’s Shop”…but it’s one of my favorite photos of me with Roy Underhill (he won). Why am I sharing it? Well, right now, you can [...]
Making Sawhorses
When I made my current workbench, I built it from a pair of robust, traditional-pattern sawhorses (a form you might know as sawbenches). On the bench build I’m about to start, I’ll be [...]
Anarchist’s 2015 Gift Guide, Day 10: Abranet
I do almost no power sanding. But I do use abrasives in my work. And the only abrasive I use is Abranet. I hesitate to call it “sandpaper” because it is absolutely nothing like sandpaper. There’s [...]
Fast & Fun Gift Projects
It’s that time of year when some of you might be scrambling to get a gift or two built on or before December 24. Might I recommend you take a look at the many simple (but good-looking) free [...]
