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I’m always looking for little tricks to improve dovetailing, especially the part I dislike: transferring the tails’ locations to the pin board. Sawmaker Mike Wenzloff stumbled across [...]

There is something deep inside our DNA that ties us to the chest as a form of furniture. First off, how many other kinds of furniture do we have that are named after critical parts of our own [...]

I am planning to order a corner chisel, to use when I install hinges, and have seen several styles.  Which do you prefer? That’s a question I received from a reader, and the picture above [...]

Some tools are like high school girlfriends. It’s all hot and heavy and kissy-kissy for the first few weeks, and then things cool off and you wonder what you were thinking. Other tools are [...]

Adrian Mariano writes: I just watched your DVD (“Forgotten Hand Tools” from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks) in which you advocate the use of nails and drawbores to overcome the flaws in the [...]

This weekend I put the finishing touches on two Stickley tabourets; and while the little tables turned out to my satisfaction, the construction process proved quite vexing considering there are [...]

This week I’m getting ready to build a Shaker firewood box for the I Can Do That column in our sister publication, Popular Woodworking. I really like building projects for this column [...]

Sometimes your woodworking improves like a slow and steady climb up a mountain. Sometimes, however, you get to ride the elevator. When I first started woodworking, I used a carpenter’s [...]

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 [...]

“But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools.”– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), “Walden” When I started building furniture on my back porch after college, I [...]

I enjoy a good beating. Chopping dovetails or mortises is almost as pleasurable as sawing or planing. So, as you can imagine, I’m picky about my mallet. For years I tried to make myself [...]

This weekend we gave away our antique Arts & Crafts sideboard to some friends who have just bought a house and I installed the new Gustav Stickley 802 sideboard I’d built with the help [...]