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“After many vain attempts at ornamentation …?on my own’ I learned that choice classic designs had been well thought out and established before my birth. It was for me to study them, [...]

Legacy Planeworks officially opened its doors on Tuesday and began selling kits that allow a home woodworker with no metalworking experience to build an English-style shoulder plane with naval [...]

When I was first learning to use a handplane, I was both intimidated and skeptical of some of the claims made by the “handplane gods.” The gods claimed they could plane any species of [...]

One of the best things about building old-style workbenches (like Andre Roubo’s bench above) is that there are little lessons you learn by using them. At times, you learn the lesson [...]

Memory is a funny thing, especially in my family. But I swear that during my last days as a college undergrad there was a car dealership in Chicago that offered a special deal to its customers. [...]

If you are one of the thousands of people who have taken a chair class at Michael Dunbar’s “The Windsor Institute,” then you have certainly used one of the travishers or [...]

Whenever I’m in the presence of a piece of furniture that is designed and built to perfection , such as a chair by Brian Boggs , it is a thoroughly humbling experience. Like I should just [...]

Kelly Mehler has opened the registration for his 2008 classes, including three classes that I’ll be teaching on precision handsawing, planecraft and building the Holtzapffel workbench from [...]

Preparing small tabletops or irregular-shaped tops for finishing can be difficult with handplanes. If the top has a lot of mass, you can usually count on friction to help hold the top in place. [...]

Whenever I get into some serious handwork, I always try to boil down the processes so that I can 1) remember it myself and 2) occasionally explain it to others (including a couple children who [...]

Let’s talk about the historical and controversial scrub plane. First a little history, then the controversy. Whenever I talk about the fore plane, the handplane used to get boards to rough [...]

To most handplane users there are three principal ways to adjust the cutter in the tool: You can use a Bailey-style adjuster made popular by the U.S.-made Stanley planes, you can use a [...]