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Years ago, when I was woodworking as a full-time occupation, I remember a couple jobs in particular that required me to set up a drill press to drill a sequence of holes where accuracy was a [...]

Making woodworking tools doesn’t interest me as much as making furniture, but my recent encounter with Henry O. Studley’s tool chest has me eyeing the metals section of the  McMaster-Carr web [...]

Exotic woods don’t blow my skirt/kilt/skort up much. In small doses they can look beautiful, but for the most part I find them oily, difficult to work and far too wild looking for full-size [...]

Sharpening a spear-point marking knife isn’t difficult, but it sure seems to flummox some woodworkers. The bevels on the knife are small, and if you aren’t used to freehand [...]

Today I’m in Portland, Maine, eating myself sick at Duckfat and studying the architectural details on the old houses in this coastal city. As I started picking apart some Victorian houses on the [...]

Tool seller Patrick Leach has a new sliding bevel in the works that does something that no other modern bevel does: It locks at a perfect 90°. Yup. Sliding bevels are great at describing almost [...]

If you remember the Veritas Dodeca-Gauge – the company’s hilarious April Fool’s prank that featured a marking gauge with 12 independent sliding rods – then the company’s newest tool might look a [...]

This weekend I built a contemporary lamp for the August 2011 issue of the magazine that was all-electrons, all the time. It has been a while since I have worked this way – usually my mode is to [...]

Jim Tolpin’s article “Secrets of the Sector” in the June 2011 issue has stirred up a lot of interest and discussion among our readers. A sector is a way to eliminate arithmetic, especially [...]

As Jim Tolpin’s article on sectors from the June 2011 issue is getting into the hands of readers, we have had a few questions about the tool. One question is, of course: “Where can I buy one?” I [...]

In the June 2011 issue we have Jim Tolpin building the “Ultimate Router Table.” Nah, just yanking your chain. He’s actually building a wombat house. Ha. Got you. In truth, Tolpin wrote a great [...]

When building the Monticello Bookcases for the June 2011 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, I used through-dovetails with a mitered shoulder to join the cases. This joint gives a nice [...]