Shop Blog

A year ago I built a glorified stump to hew spoon blanks. I spent weeks thinking about my needs, how to make the work safer and the construction robust. It needed to be high enough to so I wasn’t [...]

In previous posts, I drew the basic 2D curved shape for the BARN Workbench vise chop using CAD software. Because I was still at the beginning stage of the project, I also designed and built a jig [...]

Strategies to have more control while removing rust with abrasives One of the best ways to give you more control when sanding rust and to make sure you only engage the corroded areas is to back [...]

I often feel like sourcing wood takes on two dissonant aspects. It can be an annoyance when I can’t find the board I’m looking for, and everything is checked, warped or has too much [...]

When Josselyn and I moved out here to Covington, I refused to do two things. For one, I wasn’t going to bring some of the beater furniture that had been following us around since college. [...]

If you are not a subscriber to our print magazine, you might not know that we produce seven issues a year. This week, we received the first box of our September/October issue at our office in [...]

A lot of hand skills develop hand-in-hand with other hand skills. Learning to sharpen a handplane gives you the skills to sharpen a carving gouge or turning tool. These are pretty obvious. But [...]

Thanks for all the great comments! Congratulations to “rjhanby” the winner of this book giveaway. Stay tuned for more exciting book giveaways and if you’re interested in a copy [...]

A well-tuned bandsaw is a perfect tool for resawing. Adding a few jigs to the process makes resawing better, safer and easier. The thin blade on a bandsaw doesn’t waste much wood, [...]

The September/October 2017 issue mailed today (digital subscribers, please check your email; the print version should be arriving in mailboxes shortly); you’ll find all the online extras at [...]

In my previous post about making the BARN workbench vise chop, I shared the basic CAD design work for the project. In Rhino3D, I created the curved 2D design – the chop and a simple box [...]

We released a video on YouTube yesterday all about nails. Christopher Schwarz presented a short lesson on the various types of nails available and why we might use them in different applications. [...]