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The hardest thing about dovetailing isn’t the sawing or the chiseling or the layout. It’s the seeing. I don’t think I can teach anyone to see, but I can show you where to look. [...]

While my dad was sleeping off the flu in February, I was plundering his drawers. The man has an English chest problem like I have a hammer problem. I pulled out all the drawers of his six or [...]

The last few weeks I’ve been doing lots of hand joinery, and in that short period of time I have completely fallen for my Blue Spruce Toolworks mallet. It’s the perfect weight (1 lb.) [...]

In the shop, my mechanical pencil is as important as my eyeglasses. I use a mechanical pencil with a 0.5mm lead to darken in my knife lines when cutting dovetails, tenons or other joinery. I like [...]

When most people think about cutting dovetails, they think: handsaws. However, there’s more to dovetailing than sawing. You also need to be mindful of your handplanes when you’re [...]

How to tune up your band saw and  get it sweetly singing .

Milford Brown writes: Since you are interested in the older hand-powered woodworking, I wonder what, if anything, you know about the history of marking knife use? I recently had occasion to [...]

While teaching a class on handsawing a couple years ago, one student lost his cool. He was cutting a tenon for his sawbench, and he strayed over the line and the result looked rough to him. He [...]

When I glue up panels from several narrow boards, I use my jointer plane to dress all the mating edges. While our power jointer is fairly well tuned, it’s rarely perfect , we have a busy [...]

I noticed the head on my trusty Hamilton hammer was loose last weekend as I was driving a bunch of nails (good thing I have an extra hammer or two). This morning I decided to do something about [...]

In my kindergarten class, someone was snitching cookies from the lunchboxes of the rest of the class. (Spoiler alert: It was the fat kid.) While the teacher’s investigation was ongoing, she [...]

Despite the fact that monkeys were as rare as hen’s teeth in the mountains of Arkansas, the highest praise for intelligence there was to be called a “clever monkey.” To wit: [...]