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If you’re interested in learning to cut dovetails by hand, boy do you have choices. Google hand-cut dovetail videos and the returns total more than 100,000 (no, I didn’t count them). Yesterday I [...]

I just received my advance copy of Jim Tolpin’s new book, The New Traditional Woodworker, and even though I was very involved with putting the book together, it’s always a pleasant [...]

Several readers have asked how to go about squaring up the two legs of the English Layout Square from the December 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. Do you square it up before assembly? [...]

Cutting joinery by hand isn’t a romantic journey to the charms of bygone days. For me, it’s a way to obtain better results in less time. I got tired of fiddling with table saw setups [...]

If there were an award for the most words per board foot in writing about woodworking, I believe that this series of posts about the Gottshall block would win. And if there were an award for the [...]

Time for a show of hands. Have you ever said, “I can’t cut curves because I don’t have a band saw, a jig saw or an oscillating spindle sander?” If so, here’s a [...]

Here’s my theory: if you get good using one tool, learning the next tool you pick up will be easier. Good woodworkers connect a piece of wood on the bench and their brain through their [...]

Working on this little block has been an interesting experience, and I hope you’ll give it a try. Explaining it on the blog has made me think about a lot of basic things that have become [...]

One of the greatest moments in marketing history was the mass adoption of power tools following World War II. Before then, the standard thinking was that just about anyone could pick up a saw and [...]

When you work with power tools, machine set up is everything. The quality of your joinery, and your entire project is based on your level of accuracy at that stage. With hand tools, layout is [...]

One of the things that can overwhelm a beginning woodworker is the sheer number of choices to make about the simplest things. It doesn’t help that there is always someone waiting to tell [...]

If you’ve taken the bait and are willing to make a Gottshall block, I suggest you ask yourself two questions before you start. What kind of woodworker do you want to be, and how will you [...]