Make an Auxiliary Vise Jaw to Hold Awkward Pieces
How often have you tried to clamp a tapered, oval, or round workpiece in your vise and wished that one of the vise’s jaws would conform to the shape of the part you are clamping? It happened to [...]
Hand Tools vs Power Tools for Beginners
Do you start a kid (or kid at heart) down the woodworking rabbit hole via hand tools, power tools or both? The more time I spend teaching woodworking, observing students learning and [...]
The Dovetail Doctor: The Sterling Dovetailing Ruler
When cutting precision joinery by hand, sometimes a joint that’s off by a fraction of a degree is the difference between it seating or splitting apart. When diagnosing joinery problems of [...]
Cheap Saws – Part 1
I like to be honest about sharing what works well for me, even if that view might be unpopular: I sometimes recommend saws of the disposable type. And this and my following post, I’ll [...]
’18th-Century Furniture’ Details 5 Classic Projects (& 4 Secret Drawers)
One question to ask of any style is whether it can stand the test of time. Leather motorcycle jacket? Sure. Red satin disco jacket? No. This holds true with furniture. When it comes to [...]
Bill Anderson Knows Moulding Planes
In “Choosing, Refurbishing & Using Moulding Planes”, Bill walks you through the classifications of moulding planes, discusses what to look for when shopping and then takes you step-by-step [...]
An Interview with Tom Fidgen
Woodworking author and instructor Tom Fidgen is the mastermind behind the Unplugged Woodshop web site, the online hand tool woodworking school An Unplugged Life, and author of two bestselling [...]
Q & A: Low-Angle Planes Provide Versatility
A Low-angle bench planes allow you to change the blade’s effective cutting angle to suit specific tasks. Because the bevel points up on a low-angle plane, the effective cutting angle can be [...]
Darrell Peart’s ‘Arched Aurora Nightstand’
In “Gravity by Design” (June 2015, Issue 218), Darrell Peart shares his thought on how the bottom of a piece is the most interesting and telling – how what’s at the ground level [...]
Stop Splits with a Wooden Key
Most repairs to furniture during the construction process are a drag because I am kicking myself for making an error in the first place. Not so when adding wooden keys to a slab tabletop. Big [...]
Upsetting ‘Upsets’
Wood, being a natural product, is not without its defects. Many are obvious and some (such as the upset above) can be harder to detect. I’ve always known them to be called an [...]
Spaghetti, Q-Tip or Toothpick?
Last week I wrote about our baby boy’s first workbench, which is more of an amusement park than a real bench. Today I am going to show you his next bench. Soon after baby Asher got his Fisher [...]
