Woodworking Magazine Weblog

All week I've been itching to saw these joints that connect the legs to the benchtop. I've never cut a 5"-deep dovetail joint in a 6x6, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

It was easy going until my enormous saw suddenly stopped cutting. Had the flesh-detecting technology in my tenon saw kicked in? (Ye Olde Saw Astyntan?) But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

I follow a lot of woodworking blogs and forums, but I'm more interested in getting the information and getting back to the shop than I am in staring at a computer screen until my eyeballs dry up and fall into my lap.

And that's why I have become a huge fan of the "Spoken Wood Podcast," the mastermind of Matt "The Podfather" Vanderlist.

This October, Woodworking in America will be held in our back yard here in Cincinnati on Oct. 1-3. Registration will open in early May, and we'll start telling you all about the instructors and 80 sessions as soon as we get all the contracts signed.

But there is one aspect of planning this conference that I could use your help with. For this conference, we're planning some extra evening events. And I'd like some advice from you about which ones you think are most interesting.

From outside the confines of our shop, the fact that I'm building another workbench might be interpreted as a cry for psychological help. After all, I already have my fair share of workbenches.

But there are some good reasons that I'd like to share with you. And believe me when I say that the problem here isn't me, it's you.

When I am deep into a sawcut, you could walk into the shop totally naked, on fire and covered with leprous monkeys, and I probably wouldn't notice.

Accurate sawing is tantric. It's a rhythm. It is meditation.

Several weeks ago I was planing a piece of palm when my hand slipped, and a deep sliver of the nasty grass dove into the middle finger of my left hand.

I dug out as much of the splinter as I could. But now almost six weeks later, the foreign object (as my doctor calls it) is deep inside my soft tissue. I can wait things out, or I can see a hand surgeon (I'm a good waiter).

Wood can be nasty stuff. Rosewoods make my tongue swell up like a Ballpark Frank. Some species (redwood, especially) sting like crazy when I get a splinter. And spalted stuff can kill you dead.

But aren't you worried about what wood can do to your tools?

I went looking during lunchtime for stuff to make my epoxy black. I struck out trying to find lamp black and black food coloring in our neighborhood. I guess our neighborhood just isn't chi-chi enough to support people who make their own tires or bake high-end cakes.

However, at our local art supply store, I found Gamblin "Mars Black" powder, a synthetic black iron oxide used to color both paint and construction materials. And I found some India ink.

On one of my early workbenches (the $175 Workbench), a split opened at one end of its benchtop a couple weeks after assembly. It was about 1/8" wide and a few inches long, but it might as well have cleaved the top in twain.

Everyone in the shop gave me a good mock – it was my first benchtop using Southern yellow pine. And I wanted to see if epoxy could – as my grandfather claimed – fix anything except overcooked swordfish.

Last week we offered free plans for the Skansen Bench I built for the April 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. If you didn't hear about this, it's likely because you don't subscribe to our free weekly newsletter. You can correct that oversight here.

In any case, this bench was tremendous fun to build. It was $22 in yellow pine from the home center and a couple evenings in the shop. The sucker is stout, has some nice curves and exposed joinery as well. Read the whole article and download the free pdf here.

So what's stopping you? The legs?

From the chicken vs. egg file: Many beginning woodworkers think you have to have a workbench in order to build a workbench. So they buy a cheap workbench and suffer with it for many years until they get around to building a "real" bench.

Truth is, you don't need a bench to build a bench.

I dislike writing about the magazine business because it's not useful for our readers, who expect us to write about woodworking instead of engaging in navel-gazing.

But because we have received a lot of questions and mail about the merger of Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine, I'm going to make an exception, lift up my shirt and take a quick peek.

I'm to the point with this workbench that I cannot see the concrete floor any more because of the shavings. I hate that floor, but I am starting to feel a bit like a hamster.

Today I took the clamps off the Roubo benchtop we glued up Thursday and I scraped off the excess hide glue squeeze-out. The seam is tight. Nice.

Whenever I visit the East Coast, I am jealous of the region's stock of vintage hand tools. The Midwest just cannot compete -- even though Cincinnati and Indianapolis were important manufacturing centers of edge tools and saws.

So if you are anywhere near Rhode Island this Saturday, I recommend you check out the Bill Spicer Auction, which starts at 10 a.m. at the Masonic Hall, 1515 Ten Rod Road in North Kingstown, RI. Don't come at 10 a.m. Come much earlier. That's when the tailgating happens.

Look for about 12 tool sellers at the tailgate such as Sanford Moss, Gordon Conrad and Patrick Leach (and maybe "the boy!"). Prices for user stuff are generally very reasonable during the tailgate.

Need directions or more information? Contact Bill Spicer Auctions.

— Christopher Schwarz

We glued up the benchtop for this Old-style Roubo bench today. Yeah, it looks ratty in the photo above, but the seam is tight. I even put in a little spring joint in the center of the joint – I was surprised I could close up the gap with just one of the parallel-jaw clamps.

In other words, we really didn't need many clamps.

But we did need extra glue.

Some men seek solace in a bottle. Others in the arms of a woman. For me, when the world starts swirling around the proverbial bidet, I look to construction lumber.

The following is unfiltered, mostly unedited and likely unreadable. But this is what I do.

Today I launched headfirst into building this Roubo workbench. First up: Dress the legs. Well, the four legs look worse now than when I sawed them up. One leg looks OK from the front. On two legs, some checking has progressed to the point that I'm worried about their long-term life. The fourth leg is punky and is likely a loss.

Since we first visited in May 2009, the staff of the magazine has witnessed some amazing progress in the restoration of the Meeting House at the White Water Shaker Village, which is west of our offices in Cincinnati.

As many of you know, we are trying to help a bit here, as well. We've completed reproductions of three furniture projects from the White Water collection, which we have donated to the nonprofit organization that is restoring the village.

A few weeks ago I posted a blog entry about using a flush-cut saw to slice tenon shoulders. I must have written it poorly because several readers requested a video of the process. So here you go.

One of the great mysteries of the hand tool world is how Roy Underhill never seems to get older. (Is there a cursed painting in your attic, Mr. Underhill?) The other great mystery is about the unbeveled faces of vintage irons in handplanes.

If you've even bought an old plane you know of what I speak. You take one look at the face of the iron (what some people call the "back"), and it looks like crap.

For me, ripping boards on low sawhorses is a quick trip to a sore back. It's a balancing act done while bending over and pushing hard. So I'm always on the lookout for ways to do the same work with less effort.

Some might call this "lazy." I prefer the term "American!"

For as long as I can remember I've had a helpful chart hanging above my desk that explains 32 common moulding profiles. Whenever I forgot what a "conge" looked like, I could glance up and instantly get the answer.

I'm think I'm a decent dovetailer. My joints are tight and I get things done. Heck, I can even teach dovetailing to others when pressed.

So why don't I post a video of how quickly I can cut a dovetail joint? Because we'd likely run out of videotape.

Truth is, I think I'm a bit slow. When I was a wee lad my parents took me to a doctor because they thought I was, ahem, mentally challenged. Praise Jebus that I beat that rap. But yet, I admit I am still a bit slow with some things.

Memo to Human Resources
Re: Throwing Axes by the Dumpster

Dear Sir or Madam,

As an employee of F+W Media Inc., I applaud the recent addition of yoga mats and treadmills to our exercise room. The sweet smell of sweat masks the odor of burned microwave popcorn and over-nuked fish from the adjacent cafeteria. And I think we could all use more exercise.

To that end, I propose we set up an axe-throwing range behind the dumpster near the Popular Woodworking Magazine shop. I will be happy to provide, at no charge, double-bitted axes, a stump target and training for the employees.

QUESTION: Although I am not in the woodworking trades, my son is. And last year I offered to pay his tuition at Peter Follansbee's workshop in North Carolina on riven-oak wood boxes. I showed him all the purty pictures on Peter's blog chattering all the while about how cool is this? Boards are split, not sawn, the wood is green, blah blah blah.

He looked at me like I had a third eye in the middle of my head and said, "Are you F!@#$%^ crazy? Why would anyone do all that with hand tools when power tools are available?"

I'm embroiled in building a Roubo-style workbench using massive slabs and hand tools. Actually, I'm embroiled in my head. I'm in Maine this week on business and quite anxious to get back to Cincinnati and my awaiting hunks of punky cherry.

In the meantime, I have an interesting bench design to share with you that was built using only hand tools and some unique ideas that are well worth considering – just in case some of you are thinking about going down the same path as I have.

With a few hours to kill in Maine this afternoon I tool a long-overdue side trip to Liberty Tool Co. in Liberty, Maine. While the state of Maine in general has more than its share of vintage tools, Liberty Tool Co. is supposed to be the mother ship of steel, rosewood and cast iron.

One of my first handplanes, a Stanley No. 5, had a shopmade tote that was all kinds of wrong. Wrong shape, wrong wood, wrongly made.

So as soon as I could, I bought a replacement front knob and tote. These also were all kinds of wrong. Wrong wood, wrong glossy finish, wrong high knob. But the tote was the right shape, so I kept it on the tool for the last decade or so.

Today I put on a vintage rosewood tote and the original low knob on the plane and went to work raising some drawer bottoms. I have no idea if the tote is of the correct vintage (nor do I particularly care), but it sure looks and feels right to me.

So thanks to Carl Bilderback, who sent me the tote after seeing my flashy one (and probably rolling his eyes).

— Christopher Schwarz

There are still some spots open in the woodworking classes I’m teaching this winter. If you’ve recently come into a little money (thank you First National Bank of the Plasma) and have a little time available, here are some details on these classes.

"I know what you're thinking, punk. You're thinking "did he fire six shots or only five?" Now to tell you the truth I forgot myself in all this excitement. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and will blow you head clean off, you've gotta ask yourself a question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?"

— Harry Callahan, "Dirty Harry" (1971)

I'm taking off on Sunday for a week-long trip for work and really wanted to get this Old-school Roubo workbench project underway. While the air-dried cherry stock is surprisingly dry, I still wanted to cut the legs to length so they will (I hope) finish drying while I'm away.

Roy Underhill has asked me to appear on "The Woodwright's Shop" during the show's upcoming 30th season. (Note to self: You can now stop squealing like a little girl.)

Between now and the time we tape the show sometime this summer or fall, there's lots I have to do to prepare. Shave my back, attempt to stop looking like a frightened lab animal while appearing on television and – oh yes – decide on something to talk about.

If you're parsimonious, tardy or just plain wary, then this post is for you.

My book "Handplane Essentials" is now on sale for the first time since its release this summer. Until Feb. 15, you can get "Handplane Essentials" for 20 percent off, plus free shipping in the United States. The book is normally $34.99. With the discount, it's $27.99 plus free domestic shipping.

To get the discount, all you have to do is enter the coupon code: PW10LUV at checkout.

Years ago Don McConnell (now with Clark & Williams plane makers) shamed me into sharpening my own saws.

He was down for a photo shoot and I mentioned that I had sent a saw out to be sharpened with some odd filing. Don stopped whatever it was he was doing and looked up at me.

"I can't believe you don't sharpen your own saws."

I've always wanted to build a Roubo workbench "by the book." Use a massive single plank for the top, tree trunks for legs and all the traditional joinery, such as the through-dovetail-and-tenon joint that marries the legs to the top.

If I'd lived in the the early 18th century, odds are I'd be rotting by now. Life expectancy in England in 1700 was about 37, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. By 1820 it was 41, which is how old I am today.

So it should come as no surprise that though I adore my 18th-century workbench, there are times that it is more suited for a younger man. If I dovetail an entire chest of drawers, I pay for it in the back department – I'm stiff for a week.

What's this? It's a lovely mountain scene that would make Bob Ross proud. Happy little trees. Oh look, the big gymnosperm is reflected in the water. I can almost taste the wood smoke and feel the cold nip of the mountain air blowing off the snow-capped peaks.

But what is this doing in my e-mail's inbox? Why, it's from eBay. But I didn't set up a search for oil paintings.

Holding a "most pathetic workbench" contest is like holding a competition for the "most unusual burro act." Yes, you think in your sick little mind that you are ready for the worst. But really, you're an amateur in the equus depravity department.

When we held our workbench contest in March 2009, I was flabbergasted by the entries. I used to build furniture on top of two pine blocks on our back porch in Lexington, Ky. Little did I know that I had it real good back then. Don't believe me? Click here

Perhaps I'm the oddball here, but I've always found cutting tenons by hand to be more challenging than any sort of dovetailing.

Tenons require a lot of precision sawing if you want to avoid farting around with a shoulder plane, chisel or float. And teaching others to cut perfect shoulders is a challenge. I usually show them Robert Wearing's trick called a "first-class sawcut." Basically, you create a quick V-groove at the shoulder line and drop the saw into that.

"A craftsman is one who understands his tools and uses them with skill and honesty. It does not matter whether his tool is a chisel or a planing machine, it is the work that he does with it that counts and you today can be as good a workman in the carpenter's craft as any who ever lived if you will learn to know your tools and to use them well."

— Thomas E. Hibben

When it comes to learning woodworking, sometimes it's nice to treat yourself like a child.

While researching old tool chests for a future project I kept stumbling over a book in people's bibliographies: "The Carpenter's Tool Chest" (J.B. Lippincott) by Thomas Hibben. On a lark, I picked up a copy last week, even though it kept showing up as a piece of non-fiction for juveniles.

The book is indeed for children. The Junior Literary Guild recommended it for boys and girls age 9 to 11 when the book came out in 1933. But as soon as I opened the book I was sucked into it and spent the weekend devouring its contents.

"The Carpenter's Tool Chest" is designed to introduce children to the world of hand work, and Hibben explains exactly what each tool is used for in simple terms. But what really hooked me was the way that Hibben explained the craft and tool development from pre-history to the early 20th century.

The book opens with a series of delightful plates that trace the history of each form of tool from its earliest known forms to the modern day. The simple hand illustrations by Hibben (his father was an artist) are obviously based on photos and illustrations from earlier works. You'll see Andre Roubo's try square in there as well as some familiar pieces that are obviously from Joseph Moxon, plus some that are taken from works of art.

And though there is no bibliography to the book that will allow you to track down all his sources, the plates are still great fun to look at. His two plates on saws show the parallel development of frame saws and our English/Dutch-style saws, and how both Eastern and Western cultures used both forms of saws. The evolution of the hammer and gouge are also particularly interesting.

After illustrating and explaining the functions of all the tools, he takes a stroll through history that starts in the Stone Age and explains the woodworking tools that were in use then. Then he walks through the Bronze Age, Iron Age, Middle Ages and Renaissance. There are hundreds of illustrations and fun facts (such as why the use of adhesives were banned by governments for a time in the Middle Ages).

Woodworking scholars will discount this book because of some of its notable errors – he calls a marking gauge a "measuring gauge," and his drawing of an eggbeater drill shows a tool that would work only in M.C. Escher's dimension. And new scholarship would poke some holes in his timeline.

But still, what a cool book. The original is beautifully printed on nice heavy stock. It's great fun to read. And it puts our craft in a historical perspective that I think a lot of us don't think much about. The history of humanity and wood are as intertwined as the kudzu that tangles the farms of the South.

Hibben himself is an interesting character (read more about him at the Bear Alley blog). Born in Indianapolis, he studied architecture and engineering and had a fascinating life overseas until he was cut down by a heart attack.

I won't say this book is a must-read tome for woodworkers, but if you stumble across a copy in a used bookstore, it's definitely worth picking up. My copy is going into the hands of my 8-year-old daughter.

— Christopher Schwarz

Wood Whisperer Guild's 'Best of 2009' DVD

Members of Marc Spagnuolo's online woodworking club – The Wood Whisperer Guild – get access to tons of how-to videos when they join the Guild. But because so much information is free on the Internet, I'm sure many woodworkers are wondering if the Guild is worth the $129 yearly fee.

Now Spagnuolo is offering a two-DVD set that features 5-1/2 hours of the best Guild videos from 2009. This DVD is now available for pre-order at a 10 percent discount – $44.99 plus shipping.

In college I had a girlfriend who was half Japanese, half German and entirely unpredictable. And for a kid raised in Arkansas, she was quite the exotic Axis-power antidote to my small-town upbringing.

My grandmother flipped her wig when I brought the girlfriend to the Natural State for a visit (mission accomplished). I was exposed to food and culture that opened my eyes to the larger world. Her dad was a Zen Buddhism professor, their home was filled with Asian ink paintings and they ate all manner of foods that were new to me: sashimi, Ethiopian, Northern Indian, Middle Eastern, and stuffed Chicago pizza.

I like city life. Nothing pleases me more than walking the streets of old cities, ducking down the alleyways of Charleston, S.C., stumbling unexpectedly into the squares of Savannah, Ga., or just absorbing the 19th-century vibe of German Village in Columbus, Ohio.

In fact, I've often thought that my entire life has been an effort to distance myself from our primitive and isolated farm in Hackett, Ark.

Expanded and detailed plans for the Roubo Try Square from the February 2010 issue are now for sale as a download in our store.

The plans include the original two-page article published in the February 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking, plus another six pages of detailed step-by-step instructions on the construction and truing process. There's also a page of the three critical full-size details (the moulding shapes on the ends and the profile of the stock). And a detailed SketchUp file. The price is $4.99.

If you have the February issue and are an intermediate woodworker, you have everything you need to build the try square, which I scaled directly off Andre Roubo's plates with the assistance of a translation of the 18th-century text.

However, every time we publish a project, our customers ask if there are plans with more details available for purchase. We decided to use this project as an experiment. So I took an extra two days to completely flesh out the construction and truing process in minute detail. Art Director Linda Watts took a day to design the package like a story in the magazine.

To read more about the plans, visit our store.

— Christopher Schwarz

Years ago I got a phone call from planemaker Larry Williams that changed the way I look at long planes.

"Do you have the book 'American Furniture of the 18th Century?'" he asked.

I sure did. I had rescued a damaged one that my company was throwing away back in 1996 when the book came out. It's still marked "cut" – the mark for the dumpster.

Larry continued: "Turn to page 118. What do you see?"

This blog post is long overdue.

Late last year I purchased volumes 1-60 of "The Chronicle" on DVD from the Early American Industries Association, of which I am a card-carrying member. "The Chronicle" is the association's quarterly journal, and if you love traditional tools and history, then this DVD is like a giant black hole of your free time.

My next project is a close copy of a walnut side table from the White Water Shaker community. We'll be publishing the plans in an upcoming issue and donating the finished project to the nonprofit group of volunteers who are restoring the amazingly intact Shaker buildings.

I spent a summer afternoon measuring the project and just staring at it. The more I looked at it, the more it puzzled me.

I've taught woodworking in places where the best available bench was the floor. And the best available vise was my wholly inadequate buttocks.

The longer I'm a woodworker, the less I like systems of measurement. Whether you're a machinist who works in metric, an imperious advocate of imperial, or a Bob who measures in "bobs," there is one thing that is true about all these systems: They invite error.

When you add, subtract, multiply or divide these measurements, you are doomed to make a mistake. We transpose numbers. We "burn an inch" when we use a tape measure by reading on the wrong side of the line. And we simply back ourselves into a difficult corner when we need to divide the face of a board into five equal spaces with 1/8" between each space.

Matt Vanderlist, a pioneering blogger, podcaster and advocate for the stretchy pants industry, has launched a new podcast called "The Spoken Wood" that I think deserves some space on your iPod.

Here's the idea: Take one part of the NPR program "This American Life," mix in some of the country's woodworking bloggers and make it free for everyone. Vanderlist has enlisted several woodworking bloggers, including Kari Hultman of The Village Carpenter, Tom Iovino of Tom's Workbench and me to contribute.

Several readers have encouraged me to take a look at the OXO 16" folding ruler, which is an inexpensive aluminum recreation of the classic 19th-century folding ruler.

I picked one up at Staples for $6.99 and have been fiddling with it to determine if it's the second coming or just a second-string tool for the shop.

We're hard at work this month planning the 2010 Woodworking in America conference, which is scheduled for Oct. 1-3 in the Cincinnati, Ohio, area.

Because this conference will be in our backyard, we're excited to show off the Queen City a bit, and we know we can make this the best conference yet. There are lots of events we're toying with now: tours of the unrestored White Water Shaker Village, bourbon tastings, an evening at the magazine's shop and the list goes on and on.

This thing is a work of art, and if you have an extra $375 it can be yours. Sadly, I have already sold my share of plasma this month or I'd buy it myself.

What's really cool about the saw is that you tension the blade by turning the knob at the end of the handle – just like the marquetry saw shown in Andre Roubo's book. Visit Jim Bode's web site at JimBodeTools.com to see more photos and to buy it. Sniff.

— Christopher Schwarz

Ripping boards by hand is a lot like working. And so I'm always looking for different techniques (other than buying a Bowflex machine and steroids) to do it with less effort.

Dovetail maestro Rob Cosman again makes us all feel inadequate with his latest video in which he cuts a half-blind dovetail joint in 6 minutes and 52 seconds.

Cosman uses Northern white pine, which you might think is cheating – he can cut the tail in one stroke. However, his pins are so skinny (just a saw kerf) that the joint is actually more difficult to do in pine because the wood is fragile.

Also worth noting: Cosman uses his new dovetail saw in this video, which I am reviewing in the April 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. It's an interesting saw on many counts. The teeth at the toe are filed fine to make the saw easy to start. The saw has a very heavy brass back. And the handle is made from Swanstone, a synthetic solid-surface material. I can't say much more – I don't want to give it away.

The video above is definitely worth the watch.

— Christopher Schwarz

My search for a coping saw that will hold its blade setting is starting to feel a little like an episode of "In Search of..." with Leonard Nimoy. The solution might be as elusive as the Louisiana swamp monster.

This morning I restored a Millers Falls coping saw that uses a locking mechanism that was patented Nov. 10, 1908 (saw nerds can click here). Tool collector and woodworker John Walkowiak turned me onto this form and I picked one up on eBay for almost nothing.

My co-workers branded me with a nickname in the 1990s after I took apart our shop's Bosch plunge router and replaced the brushes on its commutator.

After reassembling the Bosch and putting it back in the tool cabinet, I returned to my desk for an exciting day of editing comma errors. The next day a fellow editor grabbed the Bosch. When he pulled the trigger, a shower of sparks (and he claims, flames) spit from the router's vents.

When I teach anything – writing, woodworking, how to play the armpit flute – I always feel like I'm faking it. I know my source material quite well, but communicating it so it sticks in your head and inspires you to improve your skills is difficult.

I was reminded of this last year when I taught a class on handplanes here in our shop at the magazine. Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick offered to assist me that Saturday, and as we were packing things up at the end of the class, someone asked Megan something about dovetails.

Lots of readers have asked what the new magazine will look like when it hits the newsstands in April 2010. Art director Linda Watts has been working hard on the design, and we have been tweaking our project selection.

We think you'll be pleased.

Earlier I posted some thumbnails of some of the layouts, such as the one above, but now we're ready to take the veil off our cover project for the next issue. Download the pdf below to take a gander.

— Christopher Schwarz

NEW_PWM.pdf (1.08 MB)

Here in America we will put a motor on just about anything. Picnic tables. Ice cream cones. Scissors.

And yet, it was still a surprise when I stumbled on a motorized coping saw for sale on eBay. And no thanks to the two beers inside me at the time, I ended up buying the saw. It arrived yesterday. It is a curious creature.

Of all the power tools I own, I think my scariest, oops-I-crapped-my-pants moments have been with a power miter saw.

When knocking down rough stock, miter saws have a tendency to "armadillo" – or leap straight out of the cut, sometimes kicking your work around. This happens when the stock pinches on the blade, which can occur for a variety of reasons (some of which are impossible to control).

Before you buy one of the FatMax coping saws that I praised this week, take note. Take apart the saw and examine the blade connectors before you plunk down the $10.

We've just received our shipment of our newest DVD: "Handplane Basics: A Better Way to Use Bench Planes." And despite my needing a haircut when we filmed it, I'm pleased with the result.

Check out the trailer above for a quick preview. (Yes, there is banjo music.)

I never knew how lame my cordless Skil drill was until I used a Makita. With a clutch. And the distinct absence of flames. So these last few weeks I've become frustrated and obsessed (frusessed?) with my coping saws – their blades just don't hold their angle.

Luckily, there are already a lot of patented mechanisms out there (patents that have long expired, by the way), plus lots of antique examples of coping saws that have blades that really lock tight.

During my first story on coping saws this week I lamented it was difficult to trace its genealogy. And I cussed the modern form.

Thanks to some readers, I have some more leads on the history of the coping saw (coming soon), and a new coping saw from Stanley that locks down pretty damn good. It's not perfect, but I can help you get it working better than the other junk on the market.

My mailbox is now filled with more than 150 messages about the merger of Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine that we announced on the blog. I am trying to answer every message, but until I can, here are some answers to some of the common questions:

I'm a mediocre guitar player. But because I'm a fair judge of craftsmanship, I have an immense respect for real-deal lutherie.

Have you seen one of Jameel Abraham's ouds in person? They walk that fine line between something that looks and feels both handmade and perfect. On the other side of the equation are musical instruments that are neither, such as my Gibson OP25 acoustic guitar.

Starting with the April 2010 issue, we will merge Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine into one publication that features thicker and larger paper, a new design, and strong writing from a stable of world-class woodworkers – plus the same staff of editors you have come to trust.

The new magazine will be called Popular Woodworking Magazine and it will be published seven times a year. If you are a subscriber to both, or to Woodworking Magazine only, a cover wrap will explain how this change affects your subscription. The April 2010 issue mails to subscribers at the end of February and will be on newsstands everywhere in March.

Why are we doing this? First let me tell you what isn't happening here. To a cynic this might look like a desperate act to stay in business. It's not. Both of these woodworking magazines have posted solid profits year after year and are some of the best-performing publications for our parent company. That is the honest truth. While many of my friends in the media business have been furloughed or laid off in the last year, I'm not particularly worried about my job (knock wood).

So what gives? Well, the staff decided to merge these two magazines because we think we need to change the way we do business so we can grow and serve the woodworking community for many years ahead. In short, we are going to branch out even more into the Internet, DVDs, podcasts, social media and book publishing.

While the magazine is still the heart of this business – I do believe my veins are filled with ink and sawdust – we need to adapt to grow.

What are we changing? Like I said above, we're going to print the new magazine on thicker, brighter and larger paper. Plus we've redesigned the magazine in a way that blends the nice color photography of Popular Woodworking with the understated look of Woodworking Magazine.

The changes, however, aren't only skin-deep. We're taking your favorite authors from Popular Woodworking – Adam Cherubini, George R. Walker, Bob Flexner, Michael Dunbar and David Charlesworth to name a few – and adding them to the no-crap, conventional-wisdom-be-damned  reporting in Woodworking Magazine. You'll also see even more content online – from articles to blogs to video – and how the Internet content enriches and deepens the woodworking knowledge printed in the magazine. In short, every story in the printed magazine will have online content that allows you to dive deep into the aspects of woodworking that interest you.

I'm not going to kid you – some changes might unsettle you at first. Woodworking Magazine readers might be shocked to see some ads and color photos. Popular Woodworking readers might stumble when they encounter our willingness to venture into unexplored areas of the craft.

But rest assured, I think you'll like the result. This magazine is put out by exactly the same staff that produced both Woodworking Magazine and Popular Woodworking. There have been no staff changes or reductions. I'm still the editor. Steve, Glen, Bob, Megan, Linda and Drew are all sitting at the same desks and doing their damndest to inform you about the craft.

So when the April issue arrives, take a close look. We have lots of interesting stories planned this year. (I can't go into too much detail here because this is a competitive business.) And after you've read the issue, let us know what you think about the changes. We're easy to get in touch with – our direct phone numbers and e-mail addresses are in every issue.

When it comes down to it, we're just passionate woodworkers who want to continue writing, building and reading about woodworking for the rest of our lives. And with your support, we'll all get to do that until they scrap the printing presses for good.

— Christopher Schwarz

The coping saw is generally unloved, unheralded and under-appreciated. Yet as far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't enjoy woodworking as much without one.

When I started woodworking about age 11, my father forbade me from using machinery. So the only two saws I had were a panel saw with a blue plastic handle (which would not cut a limp biscuit), and a Craftsman coping saw, which I own and use to this day.

I've used that tool for everything (perhaps things I shouldn't: game, deli meats). And as a result I am attached to the form.

There is great debate among the Saw Nerds (I'm a card-carrying member) about when the backsaw came into this world, kicking and screaming and whipping its lamb's tongue to and fro.

Historic documents have been read. Great thoughts have been thinked. The Internet was clicked many times.

But what gets little attention is actually why the backsaw was ever developed.

In the mind of veteran carpenter and tool collector Carl Bilderback, you don't need a backsaw.

"You can cut any joint you want with a 16" panel saw," he said. "It's more than stiff enough for the job. So why do we have backsaws?"

Bilderback didn't have the answer to that rhetorical questions, but he did offer up some other thoughts. The late Cecil Pierce cut his dovetails (beautifully by the way) with a hacksaw. You can read all about that in his short book "The Precision Handcutting of Dovetails" from Astragal Press. And the book "Modern Practical Joinery" by George Ellis shows experienced joiners cutting tenons with handsaws. "Look ma, no back."

"Why do we even have $200 dovetail saws to do something you can do with a $15 hacksaw from Ace Hardware?" Bilderback asks.

Bilderback has cut lots of joints with a panel saw and recommends that if you want to try it yourself that you use a saw with little or no set.

This afternoon I gave it a try and cut dovetails with a crosscut panel saw. I was laughing the whole time I did it because it was extremely easy to switch from a backsaw to a panel saw. The tool leaves a big kerf in its wake, but that actually made it easy for the coping saw to drop in there to remove the waste.

— Christopher Schwarz

We're having some blog problems right now. Posts and comments are disappearing. This is technical, not a conspiracy (at least not one that I'm in on). I apologize for the problem and hope we'll have it cleared up soon.

— Christopher Schwarz

I have been called a tool dweeb (and that's by people who like me), but I take issue with that assessment. In truth, I have far more books than tools (unless you count every drill bit and cut nail).

At home I have a whole wall of woodworking books in my study. In my office at the magazine, I have three bookcases filled with books, tools, magazines and books. And the basement has several boxes of woodworking books that I don't really use all the time but can't seem to part with.

Recently I was able to dispose of all my old Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine issues by installing them all on my laptop from our annual CDs.

Which made more room for books.

Just about every week, someone asks me for an inventory of my library. Some day I will do that, but it might prove alarming. Until that day, here is a list of the books that I have within 36" of my chair at work. These are the books that I refer to all the time, or I'm reading right now to determine if they belong in my permanent collection.

The file below is a spreadsheet of the title, author, publisher and a line about what I think about the book.

— Christopher Schwarz

BooksAtWork.xls (40.5 KB)

My sister-in-law killed her college landlord with a voodoo doll, so don't try tell me that curses don't exist.

The curse du jour is an innocent flat-panel door I'm building for a wall-hung cabinet. It couldn't be a simpler piece of work. It's a single panel of cherry with two battens on the backside that are nailed and clinched.

Shooting the photo for the cover of a magazine is as unpredictable as my second girlfriend, Kym Harper.

Every time I bend over in the shop, I feel like I'm being just a little disemboweled.

By that, I means that all the important stuff – 6" rule, pencil, tape measure, small square – goes spilling onto the floor. And I get the nastiest knot in my stomach when I see all these expensive and easily damaged items crash to the concrete floor.

After years of development, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks is planning on making a No. 51 chute-board plane that should be released in the first quarter of 2010, Thomas Lie-Nielsen says.

At long last, Roy Underhill has launched his new web site with a complete list of classes and online registration for his school in Pittsboro, N.C.

If you were shut out of his classes next year, stop reading my drivel and get your hinder over there. Last year some classes filled up within minutes. The web site is http://www.woodwrightschool.com.

Don't let anyone tell you that saws are just a hunk of wood plus a sheet of steel. The more that I work with different saws, the less I know about the tools.

Saws are a remarkable combination of materials and geometry. On the materials side of the equation, you can vary the weight, the balance and the amount of effort required to push the tool. On the geometry side of things, you can change the "hang" of the saw (which is basically the thrust pattern), and the aggressiveness of the teeth.

And you can vary all these characteristics almost infinitely.

Some Japanese saws don't play nice with Western hardwoods.

More than a decade ago, my wife bought me a nice Japanese dozuki that cost about $100, a fortune for us at the time. I took it to the shop and started cutting some dovetails for a Stickley mantle clock I was building. The wood was white oak.

From the "I need three hands" file: Sometimes when you scribe a line on a board with the guidance of a try square you need one hand to hold the knife, one hand to press the blade down against the work and a third hand to hold the square's handle up and against the edge of the board.

When I built my French workbench five years ago I had two choices for the vise screws: steel screws from China or steel screws from Eastern Europe.

The choices today are far better, with steel and wood screws available from several continents. The newest entry into the market is from Lake Erie Toolworks in Erie, Penn. Run by Nick Dombrowski, this company makes maple vise screws that have details that I quite like. Dombrowski sent us a kit, and I looked it over this week.

It's real nice. How nice? It makes me want to build another bench. (Sorry Lucy.)

Starting on Friday, we're going to be sending out occasional special coupon codes for books, DVDs and CDs via Twitter, the micro-blogging service that all the kids are using (except, strangely, my kids).

So here's a heads-up: If you start following us on Twitter before Friday, you'll be certain to get the first discount code, which will be for an additional $3 off our new "Handplane Basics" DVD. So your final price will be $16.95 instead of the retail of $24.95.

And here's a Twitter promise: You'll never get a Tweet from us about what we had for lunch, what Glen is wearing (an orange sweatshirt, today) or any other banal personal grooming habits.

Instead, we use our Twitter feed judiciously. We send out Tweets when we've posted new (free) content on our blogs and our web sites. That's good, right? We also Tweet when something cool comes into the shop, such as a cool person (Jim Tolpin just ate a jelly doughnut) or a cool tool (can you say "Holtey?").

And now we'll also be using Twitter to send out coupon codes for our store that will apply to new products, such as this DVD, or to things we are closing out and have a limited supply of.

So follow us. Visit Twitter to set up a free account. And visit our Twitter page here.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of my favorite advertisements shows a guy with a handsaw staring at chair that has legs that are about 4" long. In his efforts to stop the chair from wobbling, he kept cutting down the legs until they would look about right if they were attached to an opossum.

(The ad is a complete failure, however, because I cannot for the life of me remember what they were selling.)

In any case, I was taught years ago a method of leveling legs that hasn't let me down. Today I had to level the legs of the next "I Can Do That" project I built for the April 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking. It's a rustic Swedish bench from the Skansen living history museum in Stockholm.

Legendary English craftsman Alan Peters used a Stanley No. 7 for every bench plane operation.

David Charlesworth uses a No. 5-1/2.

Joseph Moxon says you need a fore, jointer and smoothing planes.

And many woodworkers use just a bevel-up jack plane.

After years of teaching hundreds of people to use bench planes and answering thousands (yes thousands) of e-mails, phone calls and questions from woodworkers, I became convinced that the more you read about bench planes, the more confused you'll get.

So a few years ago I began to rethink the Western bench plane system. Not to develop some idiosyncratic new way of using them – that wouldn't be helpful. Instead I set out to explain the bench plane system in a way that embraces historical approaches, explains all the modern ones and gives you the power to adapt your existing set of planes to your work.

The key to all this was to stop focusing so much on the size of the plane and to focus far more attention to how it is sharpened and set up.

This DVD "Handplane Basics - A Better Way to Use Bench Planes" is the result of all that work. Over the course of a month, Drew DePenning, Megan Fitzpatrick and I boiled down this approach in a 70-minute DVD that:

1. Explains the bench plane system so you can immediately understand the proper use of everything from a "scrub plane" to a "panel plane" to a "fore plane."

2. Shows you how to sharpen, set up and use the three planes you need to process rough lumber into gleaming boards.

3. Explains and demonstrates how to four-square your lumber. I take a rough board and show exactly how to deal with its faces edges and ends so you get a project part that is flat, square and good-looking.

I'm quite proud of this DVD, from the content itself, to Megan's direction to Drew's filming and editing. The DVD is being pressed as we speak and should be shipping withing four weeks. If you pre-order the DVD, you will get it for $19.95 – that's 20-percent off the $24.95 retail price. This sale ends on Dec. 31, 2009.

You can read more about the DVD or order a copy from our store.

— Christopher Schwarz

Today most of the magazine's staff spent the day with Ron Herman, a seventh-generation housewright in Columbus, Ohio, who has spent the last 29 years building, remodeling and restoring homes and historic sites – in many cases using only traditional tools.

His small shop north of the city is one of the wonders of the Western world. Amongst the machinery (much of it converted from a line-shaft system) are more hand tools than your eye can possibly take in. If this were a tool collection, it would be stupendous. The fact that Herman sets up all these tools and uses them is mind-blowing.

Herman spoke on handsaws at out last Woodworking in America Conference. But he knows about a lot more than saws.

I'm still trying to process all my notes and photos for a future article. Herman can talk. And his shop is a feast for the camera. In the meantime, I've pulled out a few good quotes from my notebook and some of the photos I took during our visit.

Hi. I'm a long-time reader and a first-time caller. I really want to start using handplanes in my work. I've been looking at some of the premium handplanes from Veritas and Lie-Nielsen and wow! I can't afford that. Could you tell me where I could get some planes that are just as good as those but cost far less?

— B. Ginner, Poor, Tenn.

Mr. Ginner,

Thanks for your letter. Those planes are available at the same store that sells unicorns that fart cupcakes.

Sincerely, A Grumpy Editor

A Kentucky sideboard by Warren May from the February 2003 issue of Popular Woodworking.

About seven years ago I spent a couple days with Warren May, an accomplished cabinetmaker and dulcimer builder in Berea, Ky., to photograph some of his work for some projects in Popular Woodworking.

The first day I was there we went to Denny's for lunch, and May spent more than an hour talking about Kentucky furniture (and his dislike for Shaker furniture, which should be another blog entry some day).

Recently I stumbled on an 1834 tool catalog from Holtzapffel & Co. in London that describes every tool a 19th-century woodworker could ever want, from planes to wrenches to chisels to tools I've never seen (brass straightedges, Water of Ayr sharpening stones, crow irons).

Naturally, there is a section on workbenches. Of course, I've pored over it. And I am intrigued and a little bewildered a bit by some of its details.

You can download a deluxe SketchUp drawing of the Schoolbox, a project that was featured on the cover of the Autumn 2009 issue.

This file was made by Randall Wilkins, a set designer in the film industry who uses SketchUp in his job and in his woodworking hobby. This file is extremely cool. Here are some details.

Marking gauges have all manner of ways for you to lock the head to the beam, but most involve a screw or wedge mechanism. I think the coolest method I've ever seen is a cam-lock on the vintage Star Tools gauge.

The head locks on the beam by twisting the head (or beam). It locks quite well, and without things shifting around like on some cheap gauges. Both the beam and the head look to my eye to have a fairly complex shape to create this interlock.

Boy was I wrong.

We've added a wish list function to our store, which allows you to select products you would like to have and share the list without having to drop odd hints, such as leaving photos of author Ron Hock in the bathroom.

And if you fill out a wish list by Nov. 30, you will be entered in a drawing in which we'll select two lucky people who will win everything on their wish lists – up to $500. The winners will be announced in our Weekly Wood News newsletter.

If you want to get started, just click here.

It's deer season here in Northern Kentucky. That means I have to wait in line at the butcher's shop next to camouflaged hunters waiting to get their deer "processed" into deer goetta and deer sausage.

It's also "Meagan Bench" season. Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick recently completed her workbench using laminated veneer lumber, which is on the cover of the November 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking. And yesterday, reader Meagan Kilrain sent me photos of her new workbench.

I like corded drills – as long as it's an umbilical cord.

Actually, I do like my Makita corded drill for some things (mixing paint, for example). And I do like to use a corded drill when I have a heap of screws to drill and drive. But for most of my onesie-twosie jobs, I much prefer the meat-powered varieties of drills.

Now some beginning woodworkers get confused about what each boring instrument is used for. And, like people who buy a No. 1 plane all the way up to a No. 8 plane, they think you need all the tools to do good work. Not so.

Mark Harrell of Bad Axe Tool Works just launched his new website this week. And in addition to pretty pictures of his new Bad Axe saws and details of his saw restoration and sharpening services, Harrell does the hand world a solid by offering free tutorials on how he restores vintage saws.

There are stories on removing rust, unlocking a frozen sawnut, restoring a handle (that one is particularly excellent) and even how to pack a saw to ship it.

We're all big fans of Bad Axe here (just read this review), and in case you are just tuning in to this blog, Harrell also offers speed and reasonable resharpening and restoration services. If you have a rusty saw, start the restoration using Harrell's instructions. Then send it to him for sharpening. A sharp saw is a revelation.

Check out the new site at badaxetoolworks.com.

— Christopher Schwarz

Sometimes I feel a tad guilty for owning tools from Veritas, Lie-Nielsen and Blue Spruce. But then I pick up my very first chisel and I get over it.

I've had that chisel since I graduated from college -- it's a 1/2" chisel I bought at WalMart and is branded Popular Mechanics (is that an example of irony? I can't tell. I'm American).

At the risk of enraging the powerful pen-turning cabal, I gotta say that I've never been enthralled by making pens or bottle stoppers on my lathe.

Life would be easier if I did embrace my mini-lathe, especially at Christmas. Instead I end up building furniture for the people I love. One year I made cutting boards with a Spirograph-like router design. Other years I've built Shaker boxes (too many to count).

Reader Aaron Cashion writes:

"Watched your DVD about drawboring today after reading your 'Workbenches' book. Really enjoyed both. I had never heard of drawboring, and this will defintely be going into my arsenal. Where can I get a good eggbeater style hand drill? Are there new quality ones being made or should I go the eBay route and look for a vintage one? I prefer to buy quality and not some Asian import for $4.99."

Ah Aaron, I relish opening this can of oligochaetes.

This year I tried to keep my teaching and traveling schedule fairly light so I could spend more time tinkering with our magazines, assembling books such as "Handplane Essentials" and hanging out with my wife and two girls.

For 2010, my failings as a spouse, parent and diligent editor are your gain.

Ever since I saw George Walker's DVD on furniture design and his lecture at Woodworking in America, I've been trying out some of his ideas on pieces of furniture that I know and love. With a pair of dividers (and sometimes a beer) I've been walking around the drawings and thinking about shapes, proportions and punctuation.

Making a workbench that is both massive and mobile is no small feat. Most of the approaches I have seen have one of the following complications:

1. The mobile base is outboard of the legs. You trip on them. You need new front teeth.
2. The mobile base has "locking" wheels that fail to "lock" completely.
3. The mobile base has spindly wheels that cannot climb a single layer of sawdust.
4. The mobile base is very complicated or expensive.

In the interest of full disclosure, the following book – "The Perfect Edge" – is being published by my parent company, F+W Media. Also, I consider the author, Ron Hock, a good friend. Oh, and once I got on stage and shook it with a belly dancer in Greece after too many grape leaves and shots of ouzo.

OK, now that all that's on the table, I think I can also say I'm a big fan of the two other big sharpening books out there: "The Complete Guide to Sharpening" by Leonard Lee (Taunton) and "Taunton's Complete Illustrated Guide to Sharpening" by Thomas Lie-Nielsen. I've also sharpened a few tools in the last 15 years using everything from a brick to a $1,000 electric-powered record player.

During one visit to an art school, I saw a lot of things. But it was the French fry boxes that made my head hurt.

Scattered throughout the school were student works that clearly were furniture (i.e. you could sit upon them). Others clearly were art (they were just for looking at). But there were some pieces of work that defied categorization. In fact, at some point I started asking myself: "Hmmm. Is that thing art or garbage?"

Out by the loading dock was a weathered plank of wood propped up against the wall. It had some pieces of wood rudely attached to its backside. Was this a low bench? An art installation? Or a piece of trash waiting to be taken to the curb?

Despite my Southern friendliness, I have bit of a mean streak.

On Thursday we visited George Walker's home and workshop in Canton, Ohio, to shoot some photos for his upcoming articles on furniture design for Popular Woodworking.

Though I need another sliding bevel like I need a goat in my living room, I recently ordered one of the new sliding bevels from Chris Vesper Tools in Australia and have been putting it through its paces.

I reviewed Vesper's sliding bevels in the April 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking. I also wrote about Vesper for the Fine Tool Journal – you can read the article for free here.

Congratulations to Randy Klein and his family for their portrayal of Norm Abram at all phases of his life, from a small mischievous boy up to a full-grown bearded woman (just kidding about that, Mr. Abram).

I finished up building a set of try squares based on Andre Roubo's 18th-century plans this weekend and need to put the finish on them. What's holding me back? Well, I keep using the squares and getting pencil marks on the blades, which need to be removed before I can finish them.

I quite like round dog holes in workbenches. They are easier to install than square dogs, plus you can use a wide variety of other bench gizmos in them.

But they can have a dark side. I have the Veritas brass dogs in my bench(es), and  used them for many years without incident – until last week.

In honor of "International Dress Like Norm Day" (the official celebration begins tomorrow), a fair number of us dressed like our favorite television woodworker.

Because of the short notice, neither Megan Fitzpatrick nor Bob Lang had time to grow proper beards. But they are bearded on the inside, I promise you.

Don't forget to send in a photo of yourself dressed like Norm Abram and send it to me by midnight Monday, Nov. 2, at chris.schwarz@fwmedia.com. The person who sends in the best photo (as determined by our staff), will win a great prize. What's the prize? We're still working on that.

— Christopher Schwarz

Inspired by Robert W. Lang's article on making wooden try squares in the Autumn 2009 issue, I decided to make a batch of squares this weekend.

Yesterday at lunch I bought some quartersawn European steamed beech that was on sale at the local lumberyard. The clerk at the yard described it as "rustic," which must be a local Ohio term meaning "crap." I found one 12' board in the whole stack that had enough straight material suitable for making layout tools.

I like it when the name of something is eponymous – it fits. Was there ever a woodworker who was more aptly named than the late "Art Carpenter?"

When I was working as a newspaper reporter, I dealt occasionally with a spokesman named "Woody Forrest." I don't even know if that guy was a woodworker. Why isn't my name "Woody Forrest?"

Instead, I've had to endure a name that (according to our dog-eared dictionary of baby names) means: A Christ-like war-monger who is black in color.

Add this to your favorites: George Walker has launched a new blog on furniture design that will supplement his column that will appear in every issue of Popular Woodworking starting with the February 2010 edition. Both the column and the blog are called "Design Matters."

Walker is the host of the excellent DVD "Unlocking the Secrets of Traditional Design," a short and information-packed introduction to the world of using simple proportions to draw pleasing furniture.

We were so impressed with Walker after meeting him that we asked him to write a regular column for Popular Woodworking. He agreed. We also suggested that a blog might be a good way to amplify his points in his columns. And he agreed again.

Walker's first post, "Good Eye," suggests why people tend to like frame-and-panel doors with a bottom rail that is wider than the top rail. It's definitely worth reading.

— Christopher Schwarz

We were all bummed about news last week that "The New Yankee Workshop" was ceasing production. And, in case you've forgotten, this Saturday is Halloween.

I think you see where this is going.

I crossed the border from Missouri to Arkansas this afternoon, and I knew immediately I was home.

For starters, the land is achingly beautiful. I miss the Ozarks I grew up with, which are surprisingly unspoiled by development. Every curve in the rugged terrain brings a new vista. You might be high over a lake one minute, deep into a fog bank the next and then spiraling down switchbacks the next.

The roads are magnificently contorted, narrow and treacherous. In other words, it's a fun drive.

When woodworking magazines publish plans for a reproduction of an antique, we show you the details you need to construct a facsimile. We give you part sizes, joinery details and tips on how to perform the major operations in a modern shop.

But rarely do we give you the social, communal and historical context of a piece. We never try to investigate the original maker's intentions, or discuss his or her relationship to the neighbors, family or village.

After 21 seasons, "The New Yankee Workshop" is closing its doors, and its much-beloved host, Norm Abram, is going to focus on his personal projects and PBS's "This Old House," according to Russ Morash, executive producer and director of "The New Yankee Workshop."

"Norm has done this for 20 years, and he thought it time to step back and do a little less," Morash said in a phone interview. "And because the show was so tied to him, we didn't want to replace him."

There has been lots of speculation among fans of the show and the woodworking press that the show was looking for someone to take the reins when Abram left. But Morash said he didn't think that would be a good idea.

"Comparisons would be inevitable (between Abram and a new host)," Morash said.

The decision to stop production of new episodes of "The New Yankee Workshop" was a mutual decision between Morash Associates Inc. and WGBH Boston, Morash said. But that doesn't mean that "The New Yankee Workshop" is gone forever.

A spokesman from WGBH declined on Tuesday to comment on the matter.

The show's web site, newyankee.com, will continue to operate. And Morash foresees putting shows or segments from the show on the Internet in a "You Tube-like situation" so future generations could enjoy and learn from Abram.

Morash also noted that Abram may some day change his mind and want to crank up "The New Yankee Workshop" again.

"Who can predict the future?" Morash said. "He may want to do this again."

In the meantime, Abram will continue to work on "This Old House," and his own personal projects, both building furniture and improving his house.

When asked why Abram chose to stop working on "The New Yankee Workshop" instead of "This Old House," Morash laughed.

"'This Old House' is a much easier deal," he said. "Norm actually had to work on 'The New Yankee Workshop.' It was a lot of work. And I certainly respect his decision to step back."

With the loss of new woodworking programming from "The New Yankee Workshop," many bloggers and woodworking writers are wondering if the craft itself is on the decline or if TV woodworking shows are no longer viable.

"My own view is that broadcast is dead," Morash said. "That's my personal take on it. Newspapers are dead. And print is dying. The only hope is the Internet. And it's my hope that you'll see lots  of Norm on the Internet in the future."

And what about the craft itself? Is that swirling around the drain?

"No. There is a fundamental human need to build," Morash said. "People will always want to polish their craftsmanship."

The other question is what's going to happen to the shop itself, which is stocked with all manner of machines and hand tools. Morash said he's personally looking forward to some free time so he can build a few things in the shop. As for the long-term plans for the shop, Morash suggested that the shop could be put on display at the Smithsonian.

"It could be like Julia Child's kitchen," Morash said, "which I'm told is one of the most popular exhibits there. Who wouldn't want to visit Norm's shop?"

— Christopher Schwarz

When I bought my first smoothing plane at a flea market in Burlington, Ky., I could fit everything I knew about handplanes into one of the Elvis Presley shot glasses I stumbled upon that weekend.

One vendor had a lot of smoothing planes on his table, so I picked up each one, took it apart like I knew what I was doing and inspected its guts. After that mummer's farce, I ended up buying the plane that felt good in my hands. After all, some of the planes were a bit heavy, and others had totes that were square.

In a move that will please traditionalists and people who pare, Lie-Nielsen Toolworks has started offering some plane irons and chisels made using oil-hardening (O1) steel – in addition to the more modern A2 steel.

There are some words we get in trouble for using in a woodworking magazine. Here are a few: "foolproof" (fools, we have found, are very clever), "holiday" (don't ask), and "sexy."

Sure, it's OK to put a half-naked woman on the cover of a magazine with "that word" in 42-point type in the checkout line at the market where I get my cheese curds and snack crackers. But put "that word" in a woodworking magazine, and people become rather put out – like you threw a dozen cuddly puppies into the river.

I've always been an advocate for low workbenches, especially for planing operations. My workbench is at 34" (and while standing on my horse stall mat it's 33"). And I've become quite fond of Megan's bench, which is at 30" (horse mat included).

But I can tell you that 16" is just too low. Yes, you really can get your weight right over the plane at 16", but then there's the problem of the occasional and inadvertent somersault.

— Christopher Schwarz

Toolmaker Ron Hock has a new book coming out soon and a new blog – both deal with sharpening. I had the privilege of reading the draft of the book, "The Perfect Edge" (Popular Woodworking Books) earlier this year. I think Ron has broken some new ground, especially on the topic of abrasives.

During the Woodworking in America Conference, there were two quotes that really stood out from all the bon mots that were hurled.

This week I'm building the sitting bench for the White Water Shaker community, which will be featured in the Winter 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. The version I'm building is a very close copy, so it will be 13' long. The version for the magazine will be 4' long.

Dealing with long stuff is a challenge, so I thought I'd post a couple movies during the next week that demonstrate some of the tricks to doing it well.

If you liked the video of me walking up a wall, you might enjoy this alternative treatment sent in by a reader who we like to call "Cheeseburger, No Meat."

If you are offended by references to my bum, or to masked avengers, then please do not click on the video.

— Christopher Schwarz

This is my first non-woodworking post on this blog. So if you're a sane and rational person who is here to read about woodworking, skip this post.

Even though I am 100-percent confident in my ability to join two boards together using the tail-of-the-bird joint, I am always riveted when I get to see how other accomplished woodworkers go about the task.

In fact, when I watch others work, I never fail to pick up some important details.

On Saturday at our Woodworking in America conference I got to watch Roy Underhill from "The Woodwright's Shop" television show cut some dovetails and discuss his approach, which is planted in history and practical experience. So here it goes.

You know, at our Woodworking in America event last week I didn't get to talk to a lot of the toolmakers. In fact, I didn't even get to see some of them. That is what a madhouse it was. So that's why I'm particularly pleased to announce a couple additional toolmakers who are coming to the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event Oct. 16-17 in Indianapolis.

If you haven't seen it, Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick is on the cover of the November 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking with her new laminated veneer lumber (LVL) bench. When I proposed this cover, some of the people in our circulation department were sure I had been drinking lacquer thinner.

In my book, there is one rule for buying vintage tools: Buy them from someone who will take them them back if the tool stinks.

That rule keeps me on my toes on eBay, at auctions, flea markets and at garage sales. If I can't completely inspect, disassemble and use a tool before I buy it, I really want a money-back guarantee.

One of the (10 million) highlights of the Woodworking in America conference last weekend was getting to watch woodworkers participate in the Hand Tool Olympics sponsored by the Society of American Period Furniture Makers and run by Mike Siemsen.

Whenever I try to explain the new Veritas Surface Vise with words, I get only blank stares. Perhaps I don't have the language skills to manage it. Perhaps a short movie will help.

I've had my head plunged deep into the cracker barrel of the 19th century this year while working on the forthcoming book "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker."

One of the things I really like about writing books is the research. I have, for example, learned more about the history of pencils this year than during any other period in my life. In fact, I'm considering making some for my own amusement if I can get some graphite from Cumbria.

Woodworker Lévis Thériault of Fredericton, NB, sent these interesting photos of a leg vise he purchased in an antique shop.

The real head-scratcher here is the round post at the bottom of the chop. I haven't seen a parallel guide like this that wasn't threaded.

As you might remember, we have a bit of a competition going among some of the women attending the Woodworking in America conference this week. Megan Fitzpatrick, Heather Griffin (one of the conference organizers) and Kari Hultman from the blog The Village Carpenter are all vying to be the best borer.

As a result, they'll be competing in the Hand Tool Olympics, sinking a 3/4" bit through yellow pine to see who is the fastest (points off for a hole that isn't plumb).

Today we gave Heather a few pointers on boring, then Megan showed us how she was doing. Then Megan tried to kick Heather in the head. Really. It's in the movie.

By the way, apologies to everyone in advance here. I called both of them "girls" during this short video. Yes it took only 1:09 for my Southerness to shine through. In Arkansas we call 70-year-old grandmothers "girls." And until my voice changed, they called me "girl," too.

In any case, the boring climax of this competition will occur at the Saturday-night banquet at Woodworking in America. It's a full card: Roy Underhill and a catfight.

— Christopher Schwarz

In journalism school they teach you this about skepticism: "If your mother says she loves you, then you better find a way to confirm it."

And so I was a little suspicious when Glen Huey told me about the dust collection system rigged up on the SawStop Professional Cabinet Saw (PCS) that we're testing for the December 2009 issue.

We’ve received a number of questions about Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL) and the new “Gluebo” workbench that’s featured in the November 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the article for some of those answers (the issue is mailing to subscribers now, and will be on newsstands the week of Oct. 8), but there are a few items online that may be of interest:

One of the weaknesses of the so-called transitional handplanes is the way the tote attaches to the metal frame of the tool. The tote comes loose when you touch it, look at it or even think about it.

This year I've made friends with my chisel plane. In fact I don't think I could have installed the Benchcrafted wagon vise as a retrofit without it.

Today I got another lesson in chisel plane use from Carl Bilderback that I'd like to share with you. Carl is a woodworker, semi-retired carpenter, tool collector and active member of the Mid-West Tool Collectors Assn. As a finish carpenter, Carl had several specialties, including repairing finished or veneered surfaces on the jobsite and hiding those repairs from customers.

Back in June, some of you might remember that I was building an Ohio copy of a fascinating three-legged Chinese stool. And some of you might also remember how I flamed out at the very end of the project, cutting a single tenon at the wrong angle, ruining the entire thing with no time to recover before the scheduled photo shoot.

Question: I often see dovetail layout lines left showing on the exterior of pieces. As I'm in final cleanup up of a blanket chest (yes, the Union Village chest from your article) the layout lines are still visible after I've got the piece smooth.  However, the lines do not uniformly show on all edges.

What to do? Get rid of them all, re-establish lines consistently around the piece, or just leave it as is with faint lines of inconsistent depth around the piece? It doesn't look all that bad as it is.

Megan Fitzpatrick's new workbench is on the cover of the November 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking, which will be mailing to subscribers soon (I don't want to be more specific than that). Of course, having a woman woodworker on the cover threw some people in our publishing organization for a loop.

"What? Where's the middle-aged balding guy in a flannel shirt? You're putting a woman on the cover in a down economy? Are you a mole for Fine Woodworking?"

Don't worry. There are tons of middle-age guys featured on the inside of the magazine. I know that's the real reason you buy woodworking magazines.

OK, back on track here. We've just posted a video tour of Megan's new workbench, which is made from laminated veneer lumber (LVL). We're teasing her mercilessly about it. Be sure to count the number of times she flips her hair. And be sure to wait for the satanic cackle at the end.

And please buy the issue!

This morning I decided to repair the vintage Chinese stool that we knocked apart earlier this year. Senior Editor Robert W. "Bob" Lang is building a couple reproductions for the winter 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine, and the parts of this vintage stool have been gathering dust on one of my sawbenches.

I need that sawbench. So I broke out the hide glue.

For me, there is something that is far more interesting than the purported uses of "the nib" of a handsaw. And that is: The origin of the term "jack plane."

Take six boards. Nail and glue them together. How hard could it be?

I never got to meet James Krenov, and so last week I hesitated to write anything about his death. But as I drove home on Friday afternoon I forgot to turn on the stereo in my car, and my mind drifted to a long weekend in 2006 when I was sure I knew the man.

This morning we skipped the 20th century entirely.

We invited a few dozen readers to the White Water Shaker Village, a 19th-century colony in rural Hamilton County that is being restored by volunteers. And we invited Freud Tools to the event to show off some of their newest tooling. Freud, never a company for half-measures, sent a huge mobile workshop on the back of a diesel truck.

Dang.

When I teach people how to sharpen and set up a handplane, I can jabber endlessly to little effect. Sure, I'll get in a few jokes about lemurs and frogs (and their forbidden love), but I really don't earn my keep until I start the "show and tell" section of the lecture.

This month I'm finishing up work on a new book called "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker" that is a bit unusual. You can read full details about it on my personal web site, but the quick over-the-back-fence summary is this:

This coming week I'm starting to build a pair of close reproductions of the White Water Shaker Meeting House benches. Earlier this summer I measured the original bench, which is in a building near the Meeting House. When I'm done with these reproductions, we're donating the benches to the Friends of White Water Shaker Village, which is restoring the village, and Hamilton County, Ohio, which owns it.

The joinery in the benches is extraordinarily simple. It's all nails and glue. But these benches have been a massive woodworking challenge, even though I have yet to put a single tool to wood.

The first time I ever met toolmaker Ray Iles, we got into a conversation about the planes made by Karl Holtey. I asked Ray: Have you ever used one of Holtey's planes? How do they work?

For many woodworkers, the biggest stumbling block when building a workbench is finding the right raw materials and the proper workbench design. I can say this with authority because my mailbox is jammed daily with questions about workbenches.

I am quite picky about my workbench designs (if you're reading my blog I don't need to say any more on this), and I'm picky about the quality of my raw material. I think you can use almost any species to build a workbench, but I have three favorites: maple, Southern yellow pine and ash.

Next month at our Woodworking in America Conference (Oct. 2-4 in Valley Forge, Pa.), Horizon Evolutions will be offering special "workbench bundles" of Pennsylvania ash that have the right amount of wood (plus 15 percent waste) for three of my favorite workbench designs.

It's little wonder that Stanley chose to bring its No. 62 low-angle jack plane back to life when the company decided last year to re-enter the premium handplane market. After all, the original No. 62 is highly prized by tool collectors – and Lie-Nielsen Toolworks and Veritas have both improved the plane and made it a workshop favorite among modern craftsmen.

The free Marketplace area of our Woodworking in America shows are – hands down – the best woodworking shows I've attended since I started in the craft. The exhibitors are top-shelf (no ShamWow) and are hand-picked. (We say "no thanks" to several sellers.) See the complete list here.

And, I might add, the Marketplace is totally free. Check it out Oct. 2-4 in Valley Forge, Pa.

When I began teaching at woodworking schools several years ago, it was the most selfish act imaginable.

I didn't do it to share what I know about woodworking. I didn't do it to inspire other woodworkers. I didn't do it for the travel or the all-you-can-eat breakfast bars in mid-range hotels.

I began teaching so I could save enough money to buy a half-set of Clark & Williams hollows and rounds. I have coveted these planes since I first saw them in 2002 when I met Larry Williams at the WoodWorks show in Ft. Washington, Pa.

I mean, who doesn't like a good girl fight?

In high school, fights among the boys were boring. Lots of posturing. Maybe some shoving. At best they might clasp into some Greco-Roman grip that would immobilize both of them for up to five minutes. Yawn.

Give me Heather "Cat Food" Barker vs. Tammy "Runs With Scissors" Gentry any day. There was always some hair pulling. The occasional dirty punch. And, if you got lucky, some good bloody fingernail scratches.

We reviewed six premium carcase saws in the Autumn 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine, and while all of the saws performed quite well, the Gramercy carcase saw took top honors. (That bit of information is free, for the rest, please buy the issue. My children haven't eaten meat for a week.)

Woodworkers are like the undertakers of the tree world. We dissect the living tissue and prepare it (some might say mummify it) for its trip to the afterlife as a highboy or napkin basket.

Personally, I've always been a bit embarrassed that I don't know what the different species look like in the wild. And except for the species that thrive in this growing region, I couldn't tell you where in North America certain species grow. Where does juniper thrive? Heck if I know.

I've resolved to become better acquainted with our woodland friends before I rend them limb from limb.

While I really like it when people send me photos of their workbenches that were inspired by my book "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use," I really dislike it when their finished results kicks the butt of my Roubo.

Today in the "Take that, Schwarz" category is this specimen from Graham Collins. This Roubo-style workbench is made using beech. It is a massive beast: The legs and top are almost 5" thick.

When we select our instructors for our Woodworking in America conferences we look for craftsmen who have devoted their lives to woodworking and who are willing to share that knowledge with the world at large (believe it or not some people still keep secrets).

We also pick the people from whom our magazine's staff would like to learn woodworking.

As a result, the instructors for our Hand Tools & Techniques conference (Oct. 2-4 in Valley Forge, Pa.) are people at the top of their field, or are rising stars who we think you should meet. Many of these instructors are people I've been dying to meet since I started in the craft. Here are a few of my favorites:

Toshio Odate: Personally, I cannot believe we convinced him to travel to this event and speak. I've spoken with him on the phone (we're publishing a couple articles from him in 2010), but I've never met him in person. If it weren't for Odate, I don't think that Japanese tools would be so popular in the United States. His landmark book, "Japanese Woodworking Tools: Their Tradition, Spirit, and Use," is the gold-standard in the field. His teaching and writing have influenced tens of thousands of woodworkers. And we're asking him to speak on a topic that rarely gets touched upon in the Western media: Japanese planes.

Peter Follansbee: This guy is an infectious disease. He made me fall in love with 17th-century furniture and joinery. His research, furniture and writing (check out his blog) have profoundly influenced the way I look at wood, tools and processes. He's working on a book right now about his work that I think will catapult him into the limelight. Honestly, if you don't know squat about early American furniture, you are missing out on one of the most interesting and lively styles around. Look for me in the front row of his lecture. Also, Follansbee is going to be demonstrating joinery in the Hands-on Bench Rooms. Bring your ax.

Ron Herman: Unless you live in Ohio, you probably haven't heard of Ron Herman. He's a general contractor with Antiquity Builders of Ohio and has been working by hand professionally his entire life. He has forgotten more about saws than I know. In fact he lives and breathes saws and is an evangelist for sharpening and using these tools. I don't want to say too much about him here because we're going to do an entry on him later. But let me just say that he is larger than life, unbelievably skilled and is someone you need to get to know.

Roy Underhill: I got to spend several days with Underhill last year and I can tell you this: He is the real deal. He's not some tarted-up semi-skilled hack who looks good on television. He is a man who has devoted his life to hand craft. He reads Andre Roubo in the original French. He is most likely the best woodworking teacher alive today. And he's nice enough that you'd trust him with your kids. There's a reason we call him St. Roy.

Charles Bender: A short look at Bender's portfolio will make you do one of two things: put down your chisels and take up tiddlywinks, or it will inspire you to try to achieve a small percentage of what he's built. I've never seen such a far-ranging portfolio of work. And the number of authentic pieces Bender has built is staggering. He's now starting to share what he knows in the pages of Popular Woodworking and at his school, The Acanthus Workshop. He's a tireless researcher (ask him about his book collection) and has more than book smarts – he's built just about every piece of furniture imaginable.

I'm going to cover some of the other demonstrators in the coming week, but you can get a short look at their bios on our Woodworking in America web site. If you are on the fence about this conference, let me try to give you a push. These instructors are going to both transform and transfix the attendees (us included).

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Now is the time to register. We're offering $40 off the admission price until Sept. 9. After that, the price goes to $375. Click here for details on the different pricing packages available, including single-day passes.

MySpace Countdown Clocks

At the Lie-Nielsen event we had in our offices in May, I gave away hammers. A lot of hammers. (No, this isn't the "making amends" portion of a 12-step program. Aw crap, I just offended all the addicts. Sorry addicts.)

Instead, I wanted to share the joys of cross-peen hammers. Think of it as giving away the first rock of crack for free. (Sorry to my readers who are hubba pigeons!)

To celebrate International Workbench Day, I have a great photo (above) and some links to some interesting workbenches across the Atlantic.

These links and photos were sent to me by Kim-Erik Häggblom in Finland, and I spent about an hour last night at these sites browsing through the photos (no luck with the words, however. My Finnish is about as good as my baguettes these days).

As someone who works in a shop every day with a bunch of bright and talented woodworkers, let me say that the craft is a lot more fun when you can compare notes, tease each other and work together. And you learn new skills a lot faster as well.

While I was poking around the Blue Spruce Toolworks booth at Woodworking in America and trying to figure out how I could escape without spending money (and failing), something curious caught my eye on the workbench. It was a beech-handled dovetail saw that looked familiar.

It was a Wenzloff & Sons saw that was modeled after the early Kenyon dovetail saw that surfaced at the Woodworking in America conference in Berea, Ky., last year. (Read about the saw here.) Wenzloff said he was going to make them for sale and even showed me a prototype, but this was the first time I'd seen the finished product.

For woodworkers who don't have a tail vise, wagon vise or other kind of end vise, the Veritas Wonder Dog has always been a great substitute. It drops into a round dog hole and allows you to pinch your work between the Wonder Dog and a second dog.

Now Veritas has developed a new bench-clamping device that is faster, more versatile and has a much longer throw than the venerable Wonder Dog. It's called the Veritas Surface Vise, and Lee Valley officials were showing it off at the Woodworking in America conference last week. I got to toy around with it a bit and take a few photos.

Veritas is set to release two new backsaws in the next couple weeks that are based on the same architecture of the Canadian company's very successful dovetail saw.

The saws were available in the Lee Valley booth at the Woodworking in America conference last weekend and lots of the attendees gave them a test drive.

I could barely get out of bed this morning. It wasn't because of a hard night of slamming Maudite. Or because I had worked every waking hour for the last seven days. It was because of my shameful, shameful sawing time in the Hand Tool Olympics at Woodworking in America.

Last week Megan Fitzpatrick and I put the finishing touches on her new workbench, which built using an ancient French design, 19th-century fasteners and modern materials (laminated veneer lumber).

We are pleased with the result.

The entire bench is made using LVL and can be knocked down in minutes thanks to its nuts-and-bolts fasteners. The overall workholding and structure of the bench is ideal for anyone who uses hand tools, power tools or both in their work – thanks to Andre Roubo's 18th century drawings of workbenches.

One of best ways to learn how a piece of furniture is put together is to take it apart. Many of best furniture makers I know who work in historical styles have done a fair bit of restoration or conservation work.

Last week at the Woodworking in America: Furniture Construction and Design conference, all the attendees got a chance to dive deep into how American casework is built with the help of Jeff Headley and Steve Hamilton of Mack S. Headley & Sons cabinetmakers.

Jeff and Steve brought an entire van load of reproduction furniture they've built that could be completely disassembled. And during the three-day conference, they took pieces apart, put them back together showed us every single trick we asked about.

Don Williams is like a shark in a clown suit. He'll bite you in half while you are laughing.

During his presentation at Woodworking in America last weekend, I am quite sure that he destroyed the assumptions about pre-industrial woodworking of many of us in the room. And he did it with jokes, amazing slides and a smooth delivery.

Several customers have asked why the pages in their brand new copy of "Handplane Essentials" have a slight wave to them, like David Hasselhoff's hair in a botanical garden.

The good news is that the wave should go away in a couple weeks. If you want to know why this happened, read on.

Because paper is a wood by-product, it is also somewhat hygroscopic, meaning that it can absorb moisture, according to our manufacturing department. We printed this book here in Ohio, where it has been very wet. After all the pages were printed, they sat at the printer for a few days while they awaited time in the bindery. During that time, the pages absorbed some moisture and got a little wavy.

As the books acclimate to your environment (like wood acclimates to your shop) they will flatten out.

We received some of the first copies from the bindery and they had the wave to them. Those first copies are indeed flattening out.

I'm told this is actually a common malady. But when you print books overseas, the books have a good long time in a container ship to acclimate.

— Christopher Schwarz

I got wind last week of a new German-made smoothing plane from Kunz and – surprise – today it landed on a table while I was signing books at our Woodworking in America conference.

It’s called the Kunz Plus, and it’s a 9-3/4”-long smoothing plane that is quite obviously a departure from the company’s planes of the past. I think the kindest thing I can say about the old green Kunz planes is that they, ahem, "required tuning.”

 “The machines need the numbers. We don’t need the numbers.”
 — Jim Tolpin

After attending almost two days of lectures at our Woodworking in America conference, my head is swimming with both big ideas about the craft and the fine details of joinery.

Each of the lectures I’ve attended reminds me of a snake eating a pig. I have taken in a huge amount of information, but it is going to take me weeks or months to digest it. I hope that we’ll be able to do this construction and design conference again in a future year because this is one of the coolest things I’ve ever attended.

I got to spend a little time in the Marketplace area of the Woodworking in America conference this morning and got a first look at some new hand tools that will be available soon.

First stop was with Dave Jeske at Blue Spruce Toolworks. Dave has a new line of try squares coming out this fall (they will be ready in time for our Woodworking in America Hand Tools show in Valley Forge, Pa.).

Today I was standing in line at our hotel waiting to check in, when I did a foolish thing.

“Oh my gosh,” I said (OK, I actually kinda squealed.) “It’s Thomas Moser!”

And sure enough, there was Thomas Moser, checking in at the hotel in style. I felt like a total furniture dork and turned a shade of crimson. Then I felt a lot better when the guy in front of me turned around and said:

“I know! It is him!”

A couple weeks ago a friend in Chicago sent me a new Western backsaw (nice gift!) that he picked up for a couple dollars. It was shiny and factory-fresh with a beech handle and a clean etch.

It also reminded me of why I switched to Japanese saws 16 years ago.

Though this saw had never been used, it is at least 20 years old. And as a result, it is poorly sharpened, ill-set, and a few minutes of holding the tote felt like hanging from the monkey bars for an hour with four country hams draped around my wrists. Really. Just like that.

In the history of measuring equipment, there is one blunder so awful that it makes me twitter (old-school twitter) like a smack-addled squirrel every time I encounter it.

It's a 6" steel rule that I acquired in 1997. The numbers are engraved and filled in. The markings are nice and fine. And there are four scales: eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds and sixty-fourths.

What's not to like?

When the new premium planes from Stanley arrived, it was agony. I was in the middle of another project and had to just stare at them for a week before I could get my mitts on them.

The first tool I set up was the No. 4 smoothing plane, which I reviewed for the October 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking. I think this plane is the best of the new Stanley crop, but when I first set it up, I was grumpy.

My wife, Lucy, is fearful that her four cats are going to get trapped inside the walls of our house. And it's my job, as a woodworker, to prevent this from happening.

Before you think I should have her committed to the Cat Rancher Institute for Disturbed Females, let me explain.

I’ve been talking a lot about laminated veneer lumber (LVL), the raw material we used to build our latest workbench. But what I haven’t talked much about is why we chose this material and the characteristics of the workbench design itself.

The as-yet-unnamed bench is just about finished, and I am organizing my thoughts to write the article about the bench for the November 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking.

I was worried this would happen. Some of the entrants to our contest to build a tool from an Altoids tin built tools that actually worked. Sigh. Woodworkers are so practical.

We're also practical. And so the winner of our contest is Tom Bier, who built a working router plane from an Altoids tin. The tool is impossibly clever – you open the lid to store the iron and thumbscrew. Heck I'd buy one.

Trying to explain a "vise garter" to someone using only words is impossible for me. I've tried. I'm not man enough to conquer the garter.

The job of a vise garter is to lock the vise screw and the vise chop together, allowing them to move in and out in tandem. Usually you need to add a garter if you are using a wooden vise screw – metal vise screws have this function built into their casting.

You can use a vise without a garter, but it's not as convenient because you'll sometimes have to manually pull the vise chop away from the workbench after you release the screw's tension on your work.

When it comes to woodworking vises, I'm quite fond of the leg vise. Once you buy a vise screw (an inexpensive metal screw runs about $30. We're making this leg vise using the wooden screw from Big Wood Vise), you can build the rest of the vise yourself.

For me a design is never done until the finish is on the piece, I've stared at the thing for a long time and I've turned my back on it.

Up until that moment, I'll readily shift gears if need be. I'll order new hardware, rebuild a drawer or change a moulding. So this morning I found myself in SketchUp tinkering with the design of the laminated veneer lumber (LVL) workbench we're building in the shop right now.

It seems, well, insane that I would want to build another workbench. But it’s your fault. Really.

After my book “Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use” came out in 2007, there was one significant criticism from readers that hit home. Why didn’t I discuss knockdown workbenches in any detail?

It was a valid question. So much so that I wrote a free supplementary chapter for the book about knockdown hardware and the strategies for attaching the top to the base that would allow any bench to be broken down.

The Spring 2009 issue is now available for digital download in our store. Our digital issues are in pdf format (not some proprietary web-based, non-portable format). And we've enhanced all our pdf issues with links that will allow you to explore related topics more deeply on our web site. Each digital issue is $6.

The more I work with laminated veneer lumber (LVL), the more I like it. Unlike using standard construction pine, the LVL doesn’t move around on you like solid wood.

As a result, it is easy to machine, doesn’t pinch your sawblade when ripping and keeps its shape after you machine it.

In fact, one of the planks of LVL we brought in had been sitting outside at the lumberyard and looked like it was covered in a brown substance that will go unnamed. Even this weathered plank is stable.

Southern furniture has always fascinated me, most likely because I've spent the vast majority of my life eating grits below the Mason-Dixon line.

For many years, Southern furniture was unknown or ignored until organizations such as the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts opened its doors. Of course, Southerners have always known about their furniture, but we've always been a little ashamed of it, as much of it was produced with abhorrent slave labor.

There is precious little information out there about placing your hardware so it doesn’t look awkward. My theory: Woodworking writers get so worn out by the time that they reach the end of a story that all they do is write: Apply three coats of your favorite finish, attach the hardware and enjoy!

Oh, if only life were that simple. It’s no wonder I see so many projects with terrible finishes and hardware that looks like it was stuck on by drunk chipmunk.

I have never used the right amount of glue – well that’s the way everyone else sees it.

Whenever Publisher Steve Shanesy comes in while I’m gluing, he’s bound to make a comment that I’ve got too much glue on a surface. My reply has always been: Better too much than too little. I’ve never had any finishing problems relating to glue squeeze-out (a great benefit of handplaning your panels) and I haven’t had any joints fail.

This is just a quick reminder that the pre-sale price of $27.99 for our new “Handplane Essentials” book ends Friday night. After Friday the price will be $34.99 and the book will not be discounted again from us until January 2010.

Also good to know: This book is shipped free anywhere in the United States.

One of the coolest woodworking things I’ve seen is where a guy named Mike Burton made some awesome scrapers for cleaning up crown moulding using – ready? – table spoons.

A second cool thing: John Sindelar’s tool collection, which is worth more than the GNP of several Latin American countries. Burton, a professional woodworker, and Sindelar, a farmer and cabinetmaker, have simply let their freak flags fly.

At 1:12 p.m. on Tuesday I had nothing to do, so I hustled Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick into the shop to continue work on the workbench made from laminated veneer lumber (LVL).

Of course, this is the only day in recent memory that Megan has worn a skirt, but she was a good sport about it.

About eight years ago, when I was still a clean-shaven, short-haired senior editor, I took a trip to see the huge woodworking show at Woodstock, Ontario. There I saw some amazing things:

1. Rob Cosman, then a Lie-Nielsen tool dealer, ate an entire chicken and a two quarts of mashed potatoes one evening after the show.

2. The most dangerous woodworking machine ever – a steam-powered shingle-cutting machine that had no guards and could slice a man's arm off – slamming out huge shingles like they were butter instead of cedar.

3. The prototype for the Lie-Nielsen panel saw.

The most significant woodworking tool that has been introduced in my lifetime doesn’t cut wood and costs nothing. It is Google’s SketchUp program, a 3D computer-aided design program that runs on virtually any computer.

Before SketchUp (the BS era), I used a variety of CAD programs to create construction drawings. Because I use only Macintosh computers, the CAD programs available to me were expensive, clunky or just laughable.

Though Charleston is the most ethnically diverse and open Southern city I’ve ever visited, its taste in furniture has long been English.

And because I am working on a book (which should be out this fall) on English furniture construction circa 1839, I took an afternoon during my visit to prowl one of the largest antique stores on King Street.

Drayton Hall in Charleston, S.C., is a time capsule of architecture and joinery. It also is a mighty beautiful place to get killed.

The first time I visited this antebellum plantation on the Ashley River I was a completely stupid tourist. I landed at the Charleston airport in near-hurricane conditions. My dad picked me up in his truck and we ate lunch at a restaurant that no longer exists.

Then, as the wind began to howl, we made the trek up Ashley River Road to this astonishingly untouched plantation. We pulled up to the gate. The wind sounded like Andre the giant was using our truck to play in a jug band.

When I was in Charleston, S.C., last week one of the tour guides said something about cabinetmaker Thomas Elfe that stuck with me.

"Most of his work is buried in the ground."

One of the primary jobs of early joiners and cabinetmakers was building coffins, and these projects have always fascinated me. Frank Klausz built plenty of coffins in his native Hungary. Chinese woodworkers make coffins out of one single log, like a dugout canoe. And they're illegal.

“Charlestonians thought of themselves as Englishmen who happened to be living in America, and naturally did everything possible to emulate the life of London society.”
— E. Milby Burton, "Charleston Furniture 1700-1825"

Thomas Elfe (1719-1775) was likely the most successful cabinetmaker in colonial Charlestown. One estimate put his personal worth at more than 6,200 English pounds, a sizable fortune for a woodworker.

His shop on King Street in Charleston produced thousands of pieces for the well-monied classes of this wealthy city. A contemporary of Thomas Chippendale (1718-1779), Elfe’s work was heavily influenced by Chippendale’s “The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker's Director,” though the pieces I’ve seen of Elfe’s work also show distinct Southern American touches.

I'm a child of the Cold War. I remember the drills in elementary school where we curled up under our desks in the event of a nuclear attack (to kiss our butts goodbye I suppose).

One of my closest friends, Bill Tofflemeier, was obsessed with the Soviet Union and spent a lot of his earnings in junior high purchasing smuggled goods from the U.S.S.R. His room was covered in enormous propaganda posters featuring heroic drawings of Lenin.

My grandfather's workbench had an adhesive rule stuck to its front edge, which was extremely useful when woodworking. You could check part dimensions without pulling out a tape measure or steel rule.

The only problem was that it was fixed to that one spot.

Now a Georgia entrepreneur has made a cool product that allows you to put a rule almost anywhere, then remove it without hurting the surface below. Called "Red Tape," it is exactly as its name implies. It's a 55'-long roll of clear adhesive tape with a continuous ruler printed on it in red.

Last week Andrew Lunn of Eccentric Toolworks announced he was going to remove some of the decorative details on his saws and pass the savings onto his customers.

This week we got our first look at what the new saws will look like.

I need to correct a grave error.

In January I published a list of my favorite woodworking writers, but I neglected to include my all-time dearest – probably because her work should be shipped in a plain brown wrapper.

In my review of drawbore pins in the Summer 2009 issue, one of my gripes with many of the tools were the round handles. A round handle plus a round pin equals a tool on the floor.

My vintage pins had tapered octagonal handles. They stay put on the bench.

I praised the Lee Valley drawbore pins for their octagonal handles, and now I want to do the same for Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. Thomas Lie-Nielsen said  his company will start offering the pins with octagonal handles in a couple weeks.

He sent me a pair to try out, and they are great. The maple handles actually taper at both ends and are easy to grip. If you are thinking of buying a pair of drawbore pins, wait until they offer the octagonal versions.

— Christopher Schwarz

Time to drop my drawers and lose all my Neander-cred.

My favorite planing stop for drawers and casework is the rip fence on my $1,200 Unisaw. The rip fence is completely adjustable, at the right height for me (34") and 100 percent stable. Also, the benchtop (cast iron and melamine) never needs flattening.

Separating Shaker furniture from Shaker ideals has risks. The resulting design can have awkward details. Or the overall look can get wedged somewhere between contemporary studio furniture and country-style stuff you might find at a shopping mall.

Shaker furniture is not just a lack of ornament. It is a diverse collection of works by more than 250 cabinetmakers in 18 communities spread across a wide swath of early America. Yes, there are rules and ideals that course through all pieces made by the brethren, but there is diversity within as well.

Andrew Lunn of Eccentric Toolworks has removed some of the flourishes on his handsaws to speed up production. And he has reduced the prices of each of his saws by about $100 to reflect this.

Lunn says he will no longer hand-engrave the brass backs, nor will he hand-etch the sawplates or use a more time-consuming tinted shellac finish.

Some things about sharpening everyone knows (it’s two metal surfaces, an abrasive and friction). Other things nobody knows (such as the best system ever). And there is a third category of sharpening facts: Things that everyone should know, but some people don’t.

I’ve been doing a lot of sharpening these last few weeks, both for my own work and for tool testing. And three things have struck me as belonging to that third category. All three things are little steps I take that speed up the sharpening process.

We've been testing six carcase saws for the Autumn 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. And while I can't share the results of the test with you just yet, I want to share some of the interesting stuff we dug up that didn't fit in the printed edition.
 
My goal was to answer the simple question: Should carcase saws be filed for ripping or crosscutting? I'm not sure I even accomplished that. So let's take a look.

A shooting board is one of the most essential accessories for a handplane – everyone should have one. But not every woodworker is confident enough to build one or isn't able to build one accurately.

Rob Hanson of Evenfall Studios now offers a custom shooting board of his own design that is well-made, accurate and easily fine-tuned for your work. Sawmaker Mike Wenzloff (of Wenzloff & Sons fame) loaned me his Evenfall shooting board to take it for a test drive. So for the last couple weeks I've been using it in place of my two standard shooting boards. I am quite impressed.

I have three favorite jokes. One of them starts out with, “What’s brown and sticky?” The second one is from journalism school. It goes like so:

“People complain about bias in newspapers. That they never tell the truth. To that I say: What the heck do you want for a (expletive deleted) quarter? The truth costs at least $10.”

In other words you get what you pay for, which is probably not a good aphorism to repeat on a blog.

In the world of backsaws, almost all the modern makers have perfected their version of a dovetail saw. But when it comes to tenon saws, things are all over the map.

Some are difficult to start or hard to push. Some are too small. Some are a bit unbalanced. Some have teeth that are too fine. I formed these opinions after trying several examples of tenon saws by modern makers and many vintage saws (teaching classes about sawing has an occasional advantage).

Growing up in Arkansas, it seemed we had two kinds of wood: yellow pine and pine that was yellow.

I didn't really start to understand the crazy diversity of lumber available until my grandfather let me play with his collection of veneer samples from Constantine & Son. The store, founded in 1812, used to sell samples of 50 different woods. Each was 1/28" thick, 4" wide and 6" long.

All custom planemakers are judged against the work of Karl Holtey. His work has the precision of a Swiss watchmaker, and the tools are finished to such a degree that they some might classify them as jewelry – if they weren't such hardworking tools.

As a beginning dovetailer, I had a crappy set of plastic-handled chisels, a newspaperman’s salary and a copy of the Japan Woodworker catalog.

All three things conspired to make me miserable.

I wanted to cut dovetails with bold angles, but my crappy chisels had side bevels that were as big as Cheddar Mountain at Bonanza. So every time I went to clean out the waste between my tails, the side bevels would tear a bite out of my tails.

Look around your neighborhood. The next time you see a truck belonging to a contractor or cabinetmaker, there’s a good chance that the company uses a handplane in its logo.

Though the image of a plane is the mark of the craftsman, there are few craftsmen who really know how to use the tool. Has this knowledge been lost? Are the tools simply obsolete?

The truth is that neither statement is true. The handplane is the most advanced and cunning wood-cutting tool ever invented, and it has yet to be surpassed by anything with a power cord. After World War II, handplanes began to disappear from shops because we traded speed for skill and expediency for quality.

Instead of calling myself a woodworker, I am now considering the title "outsider artist."

Now before you stop reading this entry and resume watching videos of funny monkeys, hear me out for a bit. Whenever I'm at a dinner party with strangers and they find out I'm a woodworker, there is usually one of two reactions.

1. They ask if I could please come over to their house this weekend to build them a new closet, kitchen island, deck or addition to their home.

2. They ask if I enjoy my job at the mall scrollsawing letters all day to make plaques for kids' rooms.

I have tried to explain how I design and build furniture, but I might as well be telling them that I make scented candles from reclaimed earwax. They don't understand why anyone would make something (furniture) that is so cheaply available from Ikea.

If you want to sell something to a woodworker, the easy way is to start by selling him on the idea that he can’t possibly do it himself. If you can accomplish that, then you have someone ready and willing to buy yet another jig to make joinery simple or publication that reveals the secrets to cutting dovetails. In truth, there isn’t much to woodworking beyond cutting stuff to a line and cleaning up surfaces you’ve cut. When I tell myself “I can’t possibly do that” a warning signal goes off, and I look for the reason why.

Drawing on his almost four decades of experiential knowledge as well as historic evidence dating back thousands of years, in “Hide Glue: Historical & Practical Applications” author Stephen A. Shepherd provides an in-depth look at the history, chemistry and techniques for making and using hide glues – as well as compelling reasons to do so.

The historical information is of particular interest to me. I was fascinated to learn, for example, that the Neanderthal artists of Lascaux used hide glue to help secure their paintings to the cave walls, and that a circa 1500 B.C. Egyptian mural depicts a glue pot on a fire. Shepherd also recounts a fairly detailed history of the hide glue industry in America.

When The Schwarz first handed me the M.Power PSS1, I was intrigued because sharpening has always been my woodworking Achilles’ heel – if you’re looking to round the end of a chisel, just hand it to me. I can do it. Having a device that locked everything in place to sharpen and touch-up my chisels and plane blades could be a godsend. If you’re a hand-sharpening guru, I doubt this is the setup you’ll be interested in using. But if you struggle with sharp, read on.

"And tho' the Mechanicks be, by some, accounted Ignoble and Scandalous yet it is very well known, that many Gentlemen in this Nation, of Good Rank and high Quality, are conversant in Handy-Works…"

If you are interested in the early development of Western woodworking – including joinery, turning and carpentry – here is some important news. Joesph Moxon's complete 1703 "Mechanick Exercises: Or the Doctrine of Handy-Works" is now available again for the first time in about a decade.

Gary Roberts of Toolemera Press has spent the last few years restoring and digitizing an original 1703 edition of this landmark work and now offers the book for sale on CD.

The book is a fully featured pdf, which means you can search it by keyword and skip easily to certain sections with bookmarks.

I'm just about ready to assemble a drawer, so my daughter Katy lays down her saw and heads to the pickle bucket below the drill press. She dumps the cool water down the drain outside the shop door and refills the bucket with hot.

Before Mike Wenzloff became a professional sawmaker, he was a furniture maker. Before that he was in graphic design. Before that? An almost-minister. And before that? Fetus? Nope. Logger.

Don’t buy the knife shown above. You’ll likely find it useless for dovetailing. It will languish at the bottom of your tool box, mocking you every time you push it and the Black & Decker battery-powered tape measure aside.

When I attended the 20th anniversary of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, John Economaki of Bridge City Tools was at the next table. When Thomas Lie-Nielsen called out Bridge City as one of the other pioneering modern toolmakers, Economaki interrupted the speech.

"Bridge City!" Economaki cried out. "Going out of business for 25 years now!"

The crowd roared. What made it particularly funny for me was how true that comment is for so many small toolmaking companies. There is a perception among a lot of woodworkers that Economaki, Lie-Nielsen, Mike Wenzloff, Wayne Anderson, Konrad Sauer and even Karl Holtey must be very rich men.

Today I got the magazine's staff involved in evaluating carcase saws for the Autumn 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. But before I could cut the staff loose on the saws, I had to make sure the tools were all dull.

The words "always" and "never" will get you in trouble – so you should always endeavor to never use them.

During the early stages of learning to cut dovetails, I foolishly tried to read everything I could on the topic. It was foolish because it would probably take two lifetimes (in dog years even) to get through all that material. And it was foolish because that time would have been better spent practicing the joint.

The 1830s marked one of the pivotal moments in the history of American furniture. As the country took its first steps toward industrializing, tastes in everything – from architecture to clothing to design – took a turn for the radical.

In fact, some historians say that this moment is when our world transformed from a culture based on wood to one based on metal (and later synthetics).

When I first learned about the so-called Golden Mean or Golden Section I was enthralled by the concept. I actually remember the moment. I was in the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., in 1996 and just discovering that some of the geometry I learned in junior high actually had a use.

The newest DVD from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, "Unlocking the Secrets of Traditional Design," is the most information-packed, lucid and mind-expanding 68 minutes of woodworking footage I've ever watched.

Using simple images, dividers and basic ideas, George Walker delivers a compelling crash course in how to develop furniture designs using basic shapes (squares, circles and rectangles), simple ratios and concepts such as symmetry, contrast and punctuation.

Do you like stories about gladiators? How about stories about idiot woodworking editors?

"The two great truths in the world are the Bible and Grecian architecture."
— Nicholas Biddle (1786 – 1844), president of the Second Bank of the United States

Among some historians of furniture and architecture there is a line in the sand where everything built before 1830 was great and everything built after that was on the downhill slide to McMansions filled with Value City pressboard termite-barf.

With every project there is always some tool that deserves an Academy Award-style acceptance speech.

“In building this chest of drawers I’d like to thank my mom for birthing me, Hanes for making the underwear that needed storing and my shoulder plane for fitting all the tenons in the web frames.”

When you pick up an old plane in an antique store or swap meet it is sending off clues. This is (I'm told) a bit like speed dating – your job is to weed out the twitchy, drooling, camo-wearing sociopaths to find a suitable mate for life.

Traditional cut nails can be made from pretty soft steel, especially the useful cut headless brads. As a result, you have to be careful when installing them. Here are some of the things that can go wrong and how I deal with them.

After being in and out of print during the last several years, David Finck's "Making & Mastering Wood Planes" is finally available for sale again directly from the author.

This 192-page, full-color book isn't just for the person who wants to build handplanes based on the designs of James Krenov. I read this book when it first came out and was impressed by how much Finck focused on the mechanics of the tools – things that apply to planes no matter what materials they are made of.

When making through-mortises by hand, one of the occasional problems is that you get a little mallet happy, you drive the mortise chisel a little too deep and you blow out a piece of grain on the exit side.

Or you drive a too-tight tenon into the through-mortise, the tenon hits the rim of the exit hole and the grain blows out. Or – when making angled through-mortises – your chisel lifts up the face grain when you are bashing out the acute side of the mortise. The results are any thing but cute. Here's how I repair the damage.

One of my hobbies is chairmaking. That statement might sound kinda dumb. After all, I’m a long-time woodworker and making wooden chairs is woodworking. No?

You can now read our account of our visit to White Water Shaker Village on our web site in full. I'll warn you, however, that words and photos do not describe what this place is like. (It's like the old expression, "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.")

In the tool world there is an ugly (and erroneous) slur. When one company copies the tool of another company, they call it a “cheap Chinese copy.” Never mind that the copy was almost certainly commissioned by aggressive Westerners.

Anyway, I have no dog in this fight

We're received the much-anticipated new planes from Stanley Works and are beginning to set them up for a review in a future issue of the magazine. In the meantime, here are some of the details on the tools that will help clear up some of the misinformation and confusion on the Internet.

Last week a reader posted a nice SketchUp drawing of a Roubo workbench that you can download (for free) from Google's 3D Warehouse.

The drawing features the Benchcrafted Wagon Vise and a dovetailed end cap that holds the vise in place. I've had several readers ask me what this construction should look like. Now you can download the plan, take this bench apart and see one good solution.

On Wednesday morning the entire staff of the magazine crowded around a handmade door in an early 19th-century structure as our guide fiddled with a padlock on the door. A couple clicks later the door swung open and it sounded like everyone breathed in simultaneously.

A curved cutting edge is critical to most operations with your bench planes. The curve prevents the corners of the iron from digging into your work, and it allows you to correct the flatness of the face or edge of a board.

But how do you create this curve, sometimes called a “camber?” And how do you create it with a honing guide, which seems to encourage a cutter that is sharpened straight across?

There are lots of valid ways to create the curve. Here’s how I do it.

I like a good carcase saw in the same way I like to eat most parts of the pig. I like the way that its well-tuned crosscut teeth slice into the grain and leave behind a glassy smooth cut. I like how easy the saws are to start. I like the fact that they don’t tear the face grain up.

But like fried pork skins loaded with triglycerides, I’ve been trying to give up carcase saws lately. Why? Well it’s for a future book that I’ll be able to tell you about in a few weeks. What counts here is that I’ve been building furniture lately with just two backsaws – a dovetail saw and a sash saw that are both filed with rip teeth.

The little side-clamp honing guide is my favorite bit of sharpening equipment. But it frequently is criticized for two shortcomings:

• It is poorly made and sloppily painted. So you have to tune the little sucker up before it will perform reliably, especially with chisels. This is a 100-percent valid critique of this honing guide.

• You cannot rely on the honing guide's directions for setting the correct angle on a plane iron – i.e. make the iron project 1-1/2" to sharpen a 30° angle. This inaccuracy is because these instructions are based on using thin irons only, back when most plane irons were consistently about .08" thick. Today many manufacturers use thicker irons.

When I build a frame-and-panel assembly such as a door, face frame or back, I almost always add “horns” to the stiles. As a result I almost always get the stink eye from the others in the shop.

What are horns? This is when you make your stiles longer than they need to be – usually 1/2" to 1" longer at each end. So when you glue up your frame, the stiles stick up proud of their mating rails. They look like miniature devil horns to my eye. Then you saw and plane the horns flush to the rail as you fit the frame to the carcase.

During the next few weeks, there will be a much-deserved outpouring of praise for Sam Maloof, his work and the indelible mark he left on the craft. As a writer, I’ve never been good at writing these kinds of stories. Maybe that’s because I’ve always thought the bigger picture was made up of thousands of small pictures.

So instead of simply telling you that Sam Maloof was one of the greatest woodworkers of this generation (and he was), I’m going to tell you about chicken tacos instead.

Growing up, there was little doubt I would turn out, um, peculiar. One week my dad threw out his back while working on the farm, and his doctor confined him to his bed to recover.

So my dad set up a little workshop in the bed and -- while on his back -- built a small end table and hand painted the end panels. My friends don’t believe this story, but I have the table to prove it.

While I own an electric plunge router and all manner of bits and guides, I tend to cut my stopped dados using hand tools for a couple reasons. One: I’ve found that it doesn’t take much more time when I have less than a dozen dados to do. And two: The hand-tool method involves less risk to the project.

The real trick with the hand-tool method is to know the right steps to get accurate results. You’ll need a few basic tools: a marking knife, dividers, a chisel, a combination square and a crosscut backsaw (such as a carcase or sash saw). And if you have a hand router, you’ll have an even easier time.

As a hand-tool woodworker, I try to avoid bookmatching my panels. Bookmatching creates a panel where the grain in one board runs one way and the grain in the other board runs the opposite.

When you handplane that panel, tear-out is almost inevitable. Bookmatching is, in my opinion, better left to those with sanders and dust masks. Sometimes, however, it is unavoidable when dealing with boards that have been cut sequentially from a tree.

I’m building an early 19th-century five-drawer chest this week and needed to glue up some panels yesterday for the 20"-wide sides, bottom and top. And when I got down to it, I needed to bookmatch three panels so that the chest  looked its best.

Instead of writing about the flatness of plane soles, perhaps I should talk about something less controversial, such as religion or politics.

When purchasing a vintage plane, the flatness of the sole can be critical when making a purchasing decision. So I’m going to man-up here and talk about how I approach this potential problem.

The soles of vintage handplanes can be warped for a variety of reasons. Perhaps they were poorly manufactured. Perhaps they weren’t properly stress relieved and the casting moved over time. Perhaps they were dropped or abused in service.

Cincinnati is not a tourist destination like nearby Big Bone Lick, Ky., So when people come to visit our shop I try to accommodate all their requests so they consider their journey to “Porkopolis” to be worth the gasoline.

This weekend, one of the visitors to our shop pointed to the anvil by my workbench and asked:

“Is that the anvil you used to beat those planes with a hammer?” they asked.

“Yes, it is,” I answered.

Whenever I teach a class on handplanes, I'm amazed at what the students bring to set up and use. I've seen Holtey planes and Harbor Freight planes in the same class.

And there's always at least one student who brings an entire box of vintage planes that he or she bought at a garage sale (price $5). And this is where I usually find the biggest pieces of garbage and the brightest jewels.

Because many beginning woodworkers have trouble telling the difference between a good vintage user and slag, I've decided to devote some time to explain some of the hallmarks of good planes and bad ones. In this post, I'd like to talk about frogs, the movable chunk of metal between the blade assembly and the body of the plane.

Sometimes it seems like there are 100 things that can go wrong with a handplane before it will do one thing right: Eject a perfect and fluffy shaving.

Lately I’ve been using a lot of bevel-up planes on softwoods and have become attuned to some of their peculiarities. Maybe I’m the new dumb kid on these issues; if so, then this blog entry will just be a note to myself.

Anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me knows that I am obsessed with food – almost as much as I’m obsessed with woodworking. Both of my parents cook (my mom has run a number of restaurants), and I spend every evening in the kitchen or exploring restaurants in Cincinnati.

So if you are going to be in town this weekend for the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event and travel on your stomach, here’s a short list, based mostly on proximity to our offices or stuff that interests me.

The vintage Stanley No. 48 plane was one of the most gizmo-tastic planes in the company's arsenal. It's a single tool that can cut both the tongue and the mating groove. All you have to do to switch the plane from one function to the other is pivot the fence 180°.

I've had a No. 48 for years and I've inspected a bunch of vintage ones, and they seem to have a common flaw: a wobbly fence. I don't know whether the wobbly fence is caused by years of use or from less-than-perfect manufacturing, but it does hurt your results.

When the fence wobbles, your tongue tends to look like a real human tongue: It's rounded at the top and let's say it's "organic" looking. And the groove tends to look more like a strip mine than a picture-perfect European canal.

If you have been putting off buying an insert from toolmaker Paul Hamler that converts a bench plane to a scraper plane, you might want to start checking your couch cushions for change.

As a 4-year-old, the woods behind my grandparents' house in Bronxville, N.Y., was both foreboding and magical to me. My grandfather would take me for walks there almost every day during the year my father served in Vietnam. We'd look under rocks, find bird's nests and poke around the underbrush.

I clearly remember one day my grandfather bringing along a saw from his woodshop. And when we reached a certain tree, we stopped and he began sawing a limb off the trunk. He gave no explanation.

After slicing through the limb, he looked at the freshly cut end grain. Then he put this limb on top of a fallen trunk or rock and sawed off a disk about 1" thick. He picked the disk off the forest floor and handed it to me.

I looked at the wood. And the wood looked back at me.
 
Somehow rot or mineral streaks had created a smiley face in the end grain of the disk – two eyes and a perfect grinning mouth. I kept that chunk of wood for years, but I lost it sometime after we moved to Arkansas.

Since then, I've encountered many faces in the boards that have passed under my hands – there's a reason they call it "face grain." For me, wood grain is like puffy clouds; I'm always looking for patterns or meaning.

Turns out, I'm not alone. Reader Chris Burn of Ottawa, Ontario, sent me the photo above of a sheet of veneer that came out of a plant in North Bay, Ontario.

It's pretty cool. But I'm glad that this is a rare occurrence. If every log I cut open was looking at me, I might think twice about firing up the table saw.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. To download the full-resolution photo, click on the link below.

face_veneer_full.jpg (1.74 MB)

If only we had 1,000 more teachers like Trevor Smith, I think the future of woodworking would be safe and sound.

Smith, a physics teacher at Troy High School in Michigan and an avid woodworker, manages to weave the craft into his curriculum in surprising ways. And after spending a day with Smith and his students, I think that what the world needs is more boomerangs.

All of the students in Smith's Physics II classes make functional boomerangs to learn the principles of airfoils and flight. They make them using high-density plywood, a band saw, a spindle sander and a few files and rasps.

Most of these high school kids have never had any woodshop experience. Smith surveys his students about their woodshop experience, and when he asks if they know what files are for, the most common answer is: fingernails.

But after a few weeks in the shop, the students are like pros. We spent a morning session with a class in the school's woodshop where Smith's students refined their boomerangs with files and sanding. They ran the band saw and spindle sanders like shop rats. I was even amused to see how several of them had mastered clamping with handscrews (something that even old pros struggle with).

Then the students took their boomerangs out onto the field after lunch and threw them for about an hour. Most of them worked remarkably well.

But the best part of the whole project was how enthusiastic the students were about the project. Many of them decorated their boomerangs, and Smith says they carry them around in their backpacks and even trade and sell the things.

Near the end of the school day, one student brought three boomerangs into the classroom; two of them were completed and one still needed work.

That was the one her father was making. Her dad had gotten so excited about the project that he wanted to make one.

"That happens all the time," Smith says. "The kids are so enthusiastic about their boomerangs that the parents or the grandparents start making them, too."

I must have seen about 50 boomerangs on Thursday, but I definitely had a favorite. It was made by Will Schwarz, who plays on the football team at Troy High School. He said his nickname on the field is "The Schwarz," and so he gave his boomerang the same name.

We'll be publishing a complete story on Smith, plus plans for boomerangs, in the October 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking, which goes on sale Sept. 1.

— Christopher Schwarz

Today we glued up two chunks of what will become Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick’s workbench.

For those of you just tuning in, I haven’t broken my vow of workbench chastity. The bench design isn’t new (it’s actually quite old), but the material we’re using is. The whole thing is going to be made out of LVL – laminated veneer lumber. So this is a story about a new material. Really. And it’s Megan’s bench, not mine.

After slicing into the LVL on the table saw I learned some of the finer points of this engineered material. Because of the laminations, there really aren’t any stresses in the planks. It cuts easily, like nice plywood.

I ripped each LVL 2 x 12 into four 2-3/4"-wide strips. Then I jointed the solid-wood faces of each strip. The nice thing about LVL is that the faces are thick enough to withstand a couple passes on the jointer before you cut through the lams – it’s like thick, old-school veneer.

The bad thing about LVL is the seams. Every six feet or so there is a scarf joint where the lams overlap one another. These seams determine the direction you should run the material over the jointer. I jointed one of them in the wrong direction and was rewarded with a big splintery bite at the seam. I’ll never do that again.

The material is fairly consistent. The first plank I sliced up was dimensionally perfect in thickness and width. The second one was not. One end was a little thicker than the other (about 1/16") and the plank had a pronounced crook – but only on one edge. Crazy.

The only other bad thing I have to say about LVL is that because it’s (usually) made from Southern yellow pine, it’s pretty dang splintery. I’m in Detroit tonight for a photo shoot tomorrow and let’s just say I brought some LVL with me for the ride.

We glued up the two slabs with regular Titebond and left them in the clamps overnight. Yellow pine can have a lot of resin, which resists waterborne glues. So Titebond’s resident pointy head (Dale Zimmerman) recommends we leave it clamped for at least five hours. We’ll glue up the remainder of the top on Friday.

How will we flatten it? I’m still working on that. Megan keeps bringing up the fact that Senior Editor Glen D. Huey has a wide-belt sander that can handle a 24" top.

— Christopher Schwarz

The most miserable aspect of hand work is setting up the tools for the first time. Removing the coarse manufacturing scratches from the unbeveled faces of your edge tools can be grueling, boring and filthy work.

(One side note before someone spanks me about David Charlesworth's "ruler trick." I really think you need to remove those deep scratches before you polish the tip with the assistance of a ruler. If you don't, the deep scratches will remain or you'll be ruler tricking that tool for a very long time.)

After setting up hundreds of tools for testing during the last 13 years, I've found that a few inexpensive magnets make the job easier and more accurate.

Get a Grip
I don't know about you, but my left hand gets pretty cramped when flattening the unbeveled faces of my tools. Once I get a cramp (even though I've waited 30 minutes after eating) I find it difficult to apply enough pressure. So the flattening process takes even longer. And so my hand cramps some more. And when I walk out of the shop, my left hand looks like the shriveled prop from "The Monkey's Paw."

So I stick a magnetic base from our dial indicator on the blade and grip that. No, it doesn't magnetize the tool. And no, in my experience, it doesn't bend the tool. What it does do is speed the process. It requires much less effort to keep the blade against the stone. My guess is that it cuts my flattening time in half.

The magnet, which is from Grizzly's G9623 Magnetic Base With Indicator ($16.95 total), doesn't slip or let go – until you want it to. I've also used the square magnetic bases that have a switch. These work fairly well, though I like the lower profile and shape of my base.

Another option might be the Mag-Jig gizmos, though I haven't tried them.

No More Slippery Rules
I do use the ruler trick quite a bit, especially when I teach sharpening and time is of the essence. Students love the trick, but they struggle to keep the ruler stuck to their stone. It tends to slide around, no matter what they try.

My solution? Magnets again. The ruler I use for sharpening is a 12"-long job that I received as a gift for subscribing to the British magazine Good Woodworking. One side is metric, so it's fairly worthless to an Imperialist like myself.

Like all rulers, it would slip on my stone. So I stuck a couple rare-earth magnets on the back; this prevents the ruler from sliding on the stone. I've been doing this for years; it works brilliantly.

Now the only thing that makes me nuts about sharpening is the grime (surgical gloves don't work – my hands get as hot as a monkey's bum). Perhaps I need to get my boss to start paying for manicures – that would definitely get Art Director Linda Watts and Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick interested in sharpening.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Many woodworkers think that the ability to design a beautiful piece of furniture from scratch is a God-given talent. Either you have the knack or you should just make knock-offs.

I'm here to tell you that idea is crazy talk.

While there are some people for whom design comes naturally, I insist that anyone can learn to design well-proportioned, inspiring pieces that are built to last generations. Building things that endure is not just about using the right joinery – it's also creating a form that transcends the shackles of contemporary taste so that it will never be kicked to the curb.

Like any woodworking skill, your eye for design needs to be developed so it can flow through your hands, onto the page and into the wood. And that's why we created the Woodworking in America: Furniture Construction & Design conference.

This three-day event in St. Charles, Ill., will bring together the very best minds on furniture design and construction. And through a carefully orchestrated series of lectures, question-and-answer sessions and hands-on training, you will make serious advances in your ability to create furniture that looks good now, will look good in 100 years and is stout enough to endure everyday use.

The program, which runs from Aug. 14 to 16, is divided into three parts:

• Mastering the mechanics of the design process
• Gaining a deep understanding of the predominant American furniture styles
• Learning to create the right joinery, mouldings and details to execute your designs.

Mechanics
During the last few years, Google SketchUp has changed the world of designing furniture. This free 3D drafting program works on virtually any computer and can be mastered by anyone willing to learn the ropes.

During the three days in St. Charles, we'll show you how Google SketchUp can be used for designing all kinds of furniture, and how you can harness its astonishing power to create designs that can be quickly modified. In addition to interactive lectures, we'll have an open SketchUp laboratory where you can bring your laptop and get hands-on instruction and advice from SketchUp wizards who are also dyed-in-the-wool woodworkers.

And with the help of Jim Tolpin – author of the seminal "Measure Twice, Cut Once" – you'll learn how to take those designs and execute them in a power-tool or hand-tool shop.

Furniture Styles & Details
Though there are many furniture styles, woodworkers tend to build in early American, Shaker, Arts & Crafts and Contemporary styles. So we gathered the foremost experts on the last four centuries of furniture styles to deepen your understanding of them.

Jeffrey Greene – author of "American Furniture of the 18th Century" – will show you how you need to understand regional details to create period furniture that looks right. Robert Lang – author of several books on the Arts & Crafts style – will help you explore this misunderstood era and realize it's not all about dark oak and straight lines. Jerry Grant, curator of the Old Chatham Shaker Museum, will dispel the many myths about Shaker furniture and show you what it really looks like so you can build more authentic, better-looking pieces. And Oscar Fitzgerald, author of "Studio Furniture of the Renwick Gallery," will take you on an inspiring tour of contemporary furniture styles that will open your eyes to the work of the last 100 years.

Construction
Good design is worthless without sound construction. So we brought together some incredible woodworkers who can tell you exactly what joints are appropriate and how to scale them.

For 18th-century furniture, Jeff Headley and Steve Hamilton from Mack S. Headley & Sons will explore authentic casework joints and mouldings, which they reproduce daily in their shop (they've even done work for the White House). Conservator Don Williams will explore the joinery of the 19th century and how it went from being cut entirely by hand to almost entirely by machine – and what that means for your work.

For the Arts & Crafts era, we've brought on Jim Ipekjian, a professional woodworker from Pasadena, Calif., who has built hundreds of pieces in the Greene & Greene style. Jim has an unrivaled mastery of the incredible joinery of this era. And for the contemporary woodworker, we have enlisted Brian Boggs to help you unlock the secrets to composing your projects using wood grain – one of the defining aspects of modern design.

To top it all off, the keynote speaker will be Thomas Moser of Thos. Moser Cabinetmakers. Moser, one of the most successful designers and builders of contemporary furniture, will explain how he started as a home woodworker and became one of the premiere designers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

And if this is not enough, we also will have a Marketplace area filled with vendors selling the finest tools available now. This really is a weekend not to be missed.

The cost of the three-day conference is $375. You can read more details of the conference and register at woodworkinginamerica.com. I'll be there this summer, most likely sitting next to you and taking it all in.

— Christopher Schwarz

When people visit our shop at Woodworking Magazine, they are surprised to see the guards in place on our Powermatic 66.

"Those are on just for visitors, right?" is the typical reaction.

Actually no. Years ago I got religion on table saw guards. It wasn't because of an accident – I am accident-free on the machine. Instead, I decided to use a guard at every opportunity after shaking the hands of woodworkers at shows who had missing fingers. I concluded that it wasn't a question of "if" I would get injured. It was just a matter of "when."

So we installed two bits of aftermarket safety gear on the table saw. All told, the upgrade cost us less than $200, but there have been some bumps in the road with both the basket guard and the splitter. In the spirit of Safety Week 2009, I'd like to give you an honest long-term assessment of this equipment.

The MJ Splitter from MicroJig
I installed this little splitter on our 66 in 2004. I also installed it on my Unisaw at home. Because the jig is $20, this should be a no-brainer for all but the professional skinflints among us.

In essence, the MJ Splitter is a semi-circle bit of polycarbonate that presses into three holes in your saw's throat plate. You get two splitters with the kit. And each face presses your wood against your fence to a different degree.

Installation was a snap. The instructions were great and everything went together as promised. And I was quite happy for the first year.

The problem with both the jig at work and the jig at home is that the three little legs below the splitter become weak or bent after use. The first time I had trouble was when I was ripping some stock that had a little bit of tension in it. The kerf closed on the MJ Splitter and pulled it out of the throat plate on my saw.

This happened more and more as the little legs got weaker and bent. Now it's time to replace the whole thing. The splitter is difficult to push into the throat plate and comes out far too easily. I wish the legs were made from a more robust material. But what do you want for $20?

All in all, it's silly not to get the MJ Splitter, but it is silly to expect it will last forever.

Penn State Industries Dust Collection Guard
Among aftermarket basket-style guards, the one from Penn State Industries has all the features you need at a remarkable price – just $170 direct from the company.

It has a shatterproof clear plastic blade cover that has a counterbalance on it. Moving the basket up and down is a breeze. There's even a port for dust collection to help reduce the spray of sawdust from certain cuts. And you can use the system with just about any blade, including dado stacks.

So what's the downside? The guard tended to sag, which is no surprise because of all the weight cantilevered out over the blade. No matter how firmly we fastened the whole assembly to our saw and a storage cabinet, it still tended to droop.

So we fixed it MacGyver-style with a paperclip, some nylon twine and Nair (just joking about the Nair). We looped some string around a fitting in the ceiling and tied it to the paperclip. Then we bent the paperclip into a hook shape and hooked it to the guard. The string prevents the guard from sagging and the paperclip allows us to unhook the guard when we need to slide it aside.

Bottom line: I'd purchase this guard again.

— Christopher Schwarz 

P.S. Read the other Safety Week stories here.

I spent most of this weekend on my knees, and it had nothing to do with a lengthy visit to Chicago’s Hopleaf gastropub or the large cooler of Julius Echter wheat beer that a reader brought to us.

Instead, I spent most of the weekend on my knobby knees at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Chicago for three reasons. One: To demonstrate how to use winding sticks about a dozen times during two days. (I think some of the attendees were just trying to get a look down my shirt.) Second: To try out a new Lie-Nielsen rip panel saw on a makeshift sawbench cobbled out of a shipping crate. And third: To examine every single speck of the new Benchcrafted leg vise on Jameel Abraham’s traveling workbench.

Let’s start with the vise because lots of people bent over this weekend to see how it works. The beauty of the vise is that it is so smooth and quick. Thanks to two rubber wheels on the vise's parallel guide and a Delrin bushing, the vise glides – nay floats – in and out. It’s about as fast as a quick-release vise. And when you spin the 8" round handwheel the jaw closes tight enough on your work to immobilize it. You don’t have to crank the wheel at all.

Other details: The rubber wheels on the parallel guide run on ball bearings, and the jaw opens to 10" – more than enough.

Jameel of Benchcrafted is planning on putting it into production soon; he already has some orders from this show. He said it should cost a bit less than his wagon vise hardware, which costs $350 and is dang well worth it. Yes I ordered one. No, I haven’t yet told my wife, Lucy (Hi sweetie! Sorry!).

The vise will include everything but the wood and the pin for the parallel guide. Jameel was showing the vise on a new traveling bench, which he was sharing at the show with plane maker Ron Brese of Brese Planes.

Ron’s extremely nice and fairly priced infills (which I’ve written about for the Fine Tool Journal) were sitting out all weekend so you could give them a test drive. They were all set up and ready to go. In addition to his smoothing planes, Ron also was showing a new miter plane he’d built using ebonized walnut as the infill. The plane was doing its thing on a nice miter shooting board. I gave it a test drive and became very worried about my wallet.

Not to be outdone, the Lie-Nielsen folks were showing a bunch of new products, including their drawbore pins (which I review in the next issue of Woodworking Magazine), a new DVD on design from George Walker (more on that later this week) and the production version of the company’s tongue-and-groove plane and panel saws (both of which are now shipping).

The tongue-and-groove plane is sweet. Lie-Nielsen has really nailed the form and fixed the problems with the original Stanley. I ordered one a few weeks ago (my personal attempt to stimulate the economy) and will have a full report this week or next.

The panel saw is also nice. After getting a gander at it last weekend, I was itching to give it a test drive. The Lie-Nielsen folks had the rip-tooth version with them and it worked well. Deneb Puchalski (said Poo-hall-ski) with Lie-Nielsen said the saw I tested had not been taper-ground and it didn’t have its etch, so I’m going to hold off on the details until I get my hands on a production version.

The event was held at the shop of furniture maker and woodworking instructor Jeff Miller. While the shop is fantastic, it is exceeded by its occupant. Jeff’s work is extraordinary. He makes wood do things that wood doesn’t like to do. And his mastery of curved and compound joinery is humbling. Add to all that the fact that Jeff is low-key and as friendly as they come. I spent some time prodding him to write for us. We’ll see what happens.

After spending the weekend on my feet and knees, however, I’m ready to spend an evening on my back. Starting now.

— Christopher Schwarz

I'm fairly well convinced that my ears are different than yours. The music I like isn't going to sound the same to you. It's almost impossible for me to share with another person what the Heartless Bastards sounds like to me. Language is too imprecise.

Same goes with the eyes (and tastebuds). How you experience a Paul Klee or a Hebrew National is impossible to share with me.

The problem is that our senses are tied to our big, dumb brains, which process and filter the waves of information our organs receive.

And so it makes me crazy to explain how to sharpen to people because it involves so many senses (except taste I think) that are processed. And there is so much information that comes in through our eyes, fingers and ears that beginners cannot focus on what is important.

So here is what I see when I sharpen a plane iron. I'm going to show what it looks like on the unbeveled side, which I call the "face" and others call the "back."

Above is what the face of a smoothing plane iron looks like when it is fresh from the wrapper. The vertical scratches are deep and are left behind by the manufacturing process. These have to be removed. So I begin by abrading the tool on my #1,000-grit waterstone.

After a short time on the #1,000-grit stone the metal gets a scratch pattern that looks like this. I move the iron back and forth diagonally on the stone and examine it every couple minutes. I'm looking for where the deep vertical scratches go all the way to the end of the iron. That's where the metal is weakest and the edge will begin to break down. The arrows point to where I see problem scratches. When these scratches disappear at the end of the iron, I can move on to the next grit – #4,000 grit.

Usually #4,000-grit stones start to give me a good polish. And so the #1,000-mesh pattern is generally replaced by more of a polish. Some #4,000-grit stones don't do much polishing, but most do. Try working the iron in one direction – this brings up the polish faster.

If I can see the deep vertical scratches, I might need to drop back to the #1,000 grit. In the drawing above you can see some #1,000-grit scratches and one deep manufacturing scratch at the right that are problems. Usually I'll drop back to the #1,000-grit stone here for a few minutes to get that deep scratch out.

I'll also start to see faint horizontal scratches left behind by the #4,000-grit stone. When the #1,000-grit scratches and manufacturing scratches are gone, move to your next stone. For me, that's the #8,000-grit waterstone.

This stone should bring up a nice mirror-like polish. You might have some horizontal scratches from this stone, but those generally aren't a problem. Look for any #1,000-grit diagonal scratches (as shown with an arrow above). Keep working until all the vertical and diagonal scratch marks are polished away right at the cutting edge. Don't worry about the scratches that don't make it to the edge.

I'm sure all this looks different to other experienced sharpeners, but these crude pencil drawings are about as well as I can explain it without coming to your house.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I sat down in a restaurant's booth in early April and waited for my pan-fried noodles, I knew that I had found a new workbench material.

For the last couple years I've been researching alternative materials for building workbenches – materials that are strong, inexpensive and widely available. And for the last six months I've been pestering Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick to build a workbench using LVL – laminated veneer lumber.

You're unlikely to find LVL in a home center, but it is widely available in commercial lumberyards. Contractors use the stuff to cross long spans because it's incredibly stiff, straight and reasonably priced. And it comes in 60' lengths (if you need it that long).  

In the wild, LVL looks like a piece of dimensional stock – the stuff Megan bought today looks like yellow pine 2 x 12s. But as you get closer you can see the edges and ends are laminated. Our 1-3/4"-thick pieces had 16 plies of yellow pine, each with a dark glue layer.

The stuff is pretty cheap, too. A 1-3/4" x 11-7/8" x 24'-long piece of LVL was just $110. (You can also find the stuff in different thicknesses and widths, though it's harder to find.) But how will the stuff fare in a workshop? And will it look decent?

That last concern was Megan's objection to LVL.

Back at the noodle bar, Megan and the other magazine's staff members approached the booth. I pointed to the table.

"This is LVL," I said.

The woodworker who made the restaurant's table ripped the LVL, turned it 90° and laminated it up. They put a nice finish on it and it looked great. Megan's objection to LVL disappeared as soon as she saw the table.

Today we brought the stuff in to build an 8'-long bench for Megan. The bench's design is going to be a blend of the Roubo and the Holtzapffel benches (the Holtz-bo). It will have a leg vise in the face vise position (with a wooden bench screw from BigWoodVise.com). And it's going to have a quick-release vise in the end vise position.

I'm certain the design will work. And after today I think the material will work as well. It came into the shop fairly dry – a couple of the sections were a few points above the norm. It jointed nicely on our powered jointer with a carbide cutterhead. And it ripped beautifully and easily on the table saw.

Next up: The big question. What will the glue do to the high-speed steel knives in our planer? And how will the scarf joints in the lamination fare when they are machined?

By the way, our full investigation into this material will appear in a future article this year in Popular Woodworking.

— Christopher Schwarz

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While teaching a class on handplanes this weekend, one student in particular was having a heck of a time with his Veritas No. 4-1/2 smoothing plane. Let's call him Mr. Papanicolaou. (I just hate it when writers use simple names for pseudonyms.)

Papanicolaou was trying to dress a board with the plane, but the plane refused to take a consistent cut. The plane would take a shaving at the beginning of the board, but then it would kinda crap out somewhere in the middle.

And so began our diagnosis.

First we checked to make sure the frog was secured tightly to the plane's body. Check.

Then I looked at the board to make sure it wasn't springing between the bench dogs. Check.

Then I checked his mechanical adjuster to see if there was any backlash in the mechanism that was fouling him up. Nope.

Then we reassembled the entire plane. I checked the sharpness and shape of the iron (check and check). We reattached the chipbreaker and made sure it wasn't bending the iron off the frog.

We checked the tension on his lever cap to make sure it was holding the cutter assembly against the frog.

Then I took some shavings with the plane myself on my workbench and on a board I knew to be flat. Perhaps Papanicolaou was applying pressure at the wrong places. Perhaps the bench had a bad hollow. Perhaps the board was just wacky on the junk.

I had the same problems as Papanicolaou.

And that's when I turned my attention to the sole of the plane. I didn't have any feeler gauges, so I checked the sole using a straightedge and held the plane up to the light. Sometimes this method exaggerates the problem because you see the light reflected off the sole – effectively doubling the error.

But the problem leaped out and poked me in the eye. The sole was the shape of a malformed banana. There was a large bump right behind the mouth. And another smaller bump at the heel. (The photos are of the plane taken in front of a tracing box.)

In this photo the plane is rocked forward on the bump behind the mouth so the toe is touching. This plane rocks!

Papanicolaou sheepishly volunteered that he'd flattened the plane's sole to try to increase the performance of the tool. Now we had our answer.

This isn't the first time this has happened during a class. And so here's my advice: If you spent serious money on a tool, don't flatten the sole yourself. If you suspect you have a problem, call the manufacturer for advice. If there's a problem, they can fix it for you.

If you are buying old tools, take a straightedge and feeler gauges with you. Check the sole of the planes you are interested in buying. You need the areas in front of the mouth and along the sidewalls to be coplanar (a hollow area in the middle of the sole behind the mouth is usually OK). If you find problems that are more than .004" in critical areas, be wary.

If you do decide to flatten the sole of a plane, practice on a junker first and read up on the various techniques on the Internet. Here's what I do: I glue a long strip of blue belt-sander paper to granite. I can flatten block planes, smoothers and jack planes with this setup. Jointer planes are a bear.

Not all your planes need to be dead flat (anything used for roughing can be wonky). But if you want to take really fine shavings, it's important.

— Christopher Schwarz


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This weekend I assisted Thomas Lie-Nielsen during a class on handplanes at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. Thomas brought along some of the new tools they are working on and talked to the class about new tools in the pipeline in Warren, Maine.

Here are some details:

Panel saws: Lie-Nielsen is starting to ship its first panel saws. Yes, it's true. I first saw the prototype for this saw about eight years ago when Rob Cosman was using it at the Woodstock woodworking show. Since that prototype, the saw has evolved considerably.

It has a taper-ground sawplate, a nib at the toe and a gorgeous curly maple handle with a lamb's tongue detail. Thomas brought the saw in a nice leather holster. I didn't get a chance to try out the tool, so now you know everything I do about the saw. More details to follow.

Tongue and groove plane: Lie-Nielsen is also starting to ship these planes. I got to use a prototype of this tool a couple years ago when we were shooting the "Workbenches" DVD. The production version of this tool is far and away better than my original Stanley No. 48.

Instead of two irons that you have to fiddle with to get exactly even, the Lie-Nielsen version has a single iron that is forked. Also, the fence on the Lie-Nielsen is more robust than on the Stanley and moves very little.

I made some joints with this plane during the weekend in hardwood and was impressed. While my No. 48 struggles in hardwoods, this tool had no problem in oak or maple.

O1 Steel: Thomas mentioned a couple times during the weekend that he was hoping to offer some more tools with high-carbon oil-hardened steel. For the most part, Lie-Nielsen uses A2 steel in its blades, but some customers prefer O1, especially for tools that require a low sharpening angle, such as paring chisels and blades for some low-angle planes.

Speaking of paring chisels, those are also on the drawing board.

Workbench hardware: Lie-Nielsen has begun making its own workbench hardware. Thomas brought along a new tail vise assembly to show, and it was sweet looking. Thomas says it's much faster to install and won't droop over time. It also has another surprise, but I'll have to save that for another post.

One final tease: Thomas says he has a load of beech that he's letting dry.

I'm sure I'll hear more details at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Chicago this weekend (Friday and Saturday). If you're in the area, stop by at this free show, say hello and you can see some of this stuff for yourself.

One final thing. To the student this weekend who brought me a six pack of Bell's Two-hearted Ale: Thanks! My wife thinks I'm getting a reputation as a lush because whenever I go out of town to teach I come back with a trunk full of alcohol.

Is this bootlegging? And is it a bad thing?

— Christopher Schwarz


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Really, I have enough clamps – a couple dozen – to do just about anything.

If I can't clamp it, I can always use pinch dogs, drawboring or some other dodge to get the job done.

But I don't think I have enough marking gauges. I always have at least three or four set up for a project at any given time. This week I have four unfinished projects on my bench, and I'm running out of gauges.

If you're a regular here, you know that I like the Tite-Mark cutting gauge. It is a marvel of micro-adjustable engineering. Today, let me introduce you to my other favorite gauge: The Les Outils Cullen slitting gauge (it's also a cutting gauge).

This gauge is made from Dymondwood, brass and steel. Dymondwood is a high-end plywood-like product that looks like an exotic wood and is durable and stable. The fit and finish of the Les Outils Cullen is superb. It's one of those tools where they make all the screw heads line up (somewhere, there's an engineer who is tingly all over right now).

Two features of this gauge make it stand out: The knife itself and the mechanism that locks the head to the beam. What I like about the knife is that you can easily reverse it in the beam. That means you can go to marking the baselines for your dovetails to slitting thin pieces of stock with just a simple turn of a thumbscrew. The knife comes quite sharp, is the proper shape and can score deeply if you ask it to, such as when defining the field of a raised panel.

The locking mechanism is the other standout. The bottom part of the beam is radiused and it drops into a matching cove in the head. A large thumbscrew locks everything in place. It is very solid all-in-all – I cannot detect any of the wiggling shimmy that plagues cheap gauges.

Les Outils Cullen Tools in Quebec makes a number of gauges that range in price from $39.95 to $79.95. The slitting gauge is $54.95 from TheBestThings.com. Highly recommended.

— Christopher Schwarz

Robert Giovannetti – aka The Tattooed Woodworker – has just posted a lengthy and insightful interview with Thomas Lie-Nielsen, the founder of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. I've known Thomas for a long time and I learned quite a few things from the article.

You'll get answers to these interesting questions:

1. Why the company stopped making the No. 9 miter plane in bronze.
2. What are the new tools on the immediate horizon for the company.
3. Which tool in his line-up is "the most underrated."

Check it out here. It's a good read.

— Christopher Schwarz


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For those of you who chisel out all your waste when dovetailing, this post is not for you. Please move along. There's nothing to see here.

OK, now that we're alone: Have you ever been confused about which frame saw you should use to remove the waste between your pins and tails? I have. For years I used a coping saw and was blissfully happy.

Then I took an advanced dovetail class with maestro Rob Cosman and he made a strong case that a fret saw was superior because you could remove the waste in one fell swoop. So, like any good monkey, I bought a fret saw and did it that way for many years.

A fret saw's thin blade drops into the kerf left by a dovetail saw. Then you just turn and saw.

Here are the results left by the fret saw.

But fret saws aren't perfect. Almost all of them require some tuning. You need to file some serrations in the pads that clamp the blade, otherwise it's all stroke, stroke, sproing! Oh and the blades tend to break a lot. Or bend.

And fret saws are slower. I use 11.5 tpi scrollsaw blades and it takes about 30 strokes to get through the waste between my typical tails in hardwood.

If you want to see a good video on how to tune up a fretsaw, check out Rob Cosman's site. He shows you how to hot rod the handle and bend the blade for the best performance.

About Coping Saws
What I like about coping saws is that they cut faster. I use an 18 tpi blade from Tools for Working Wood. (I think they're made by Olson.) The blades cut wicked fast thanks to their deeper gullets. It takes me 12 to 14 strokes to remove the waste between tails.

Coping saws require two swooping passes to remove the waste. Drop the teeth in your kerf and make swoop one.

Come back and make swoop two. Sometimes you have to rotate the blade to do this.

The other thing I like about the coping saw is that its throat is deeper (5" vs. 2-3/4" on the fret saw), which allows me to handle some drawers without turning the blade. Also, the blades are far more robust and almost never come loose. I'm quite partial to the German-made Olson coping saw. It's about $12 and beats the pants off the stuff at the home centers.

The major downside to the coping saw is that you have to remove the waste in two passes instead of one. Because the coping saw's blade is thick, it usually won't drop down into the kerf left by your dovetail saw (unless you saw dovetails with a chainsaw). So you make two swooping passes to clear the waste.

After the last couple weeks of constant dovetailing (hence all the dovetail posts – sorry about that), I think I'm going to put my fret saw away for a while. In other words, I'm going to stop fretting and just cope (sorry about that as well).

— Christopher Schwarz


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There are lots of people who will show you how to handplane the edge of a board. A few less who will show you how to really flatten the wide face of a board. A smaller number will show you how to flatten a glued-up panel (stay tuned – that tutorial is already written) and even fewer who will demonstrate how to plane an assembled carcase.

After lunch I dressed a small dovetailed box I'm building and took some photos along the way. Have a minute? Get the alcohol!

Really, get the alcohol. A dovetailed carcase has a lot of end grain, so moistening the end grain with denatured alcohol will make the work easier.

Set up a planing platform for your carcase. Big carcasses can be sleeved over the end of your bench. Small carcasses and drawers can be worked on a platform that's clamped to your bench.

As with all aspects of hand work, everything begins with stock selection. I try to pick boards with the straightest grain so I can plane them in both directions – from the ends and into the middle of the carcase. This avoids blowing out the end grain of the pins and tails.

If the board has a pronounced grain direction (which stops me from planing both directions)  I'll use a plane with a high pitch to do all the smoothing work – this also allows me to work from the ends and into the middle. High-angle planes can ignore grain direction. And, despite what you've read, you can plane end grain with them. Sharpness fixes almost anything.

Trim the Pins
I trim the pins with a sharp block plane. The reason I prefer a block plane is that it's quite narrow, so I can work in small areas without planing away stuff I want to keep. You can skew the blade to make the cut easier. And don't forget the alcohol. Work from the end toward the middle – but just trim the end grain, not the face grain.

With the pins trimmed on both ends of one face of my carcase, I need to make a decision. If I'm going to attach moulding to the carcase, I want to ensure those areas are dead flat. (Bending moulding = no fun.) I'm attaching base moulding around this box so I trued its lower section with a jointer plane. Note that I start the plane at the end, work into the middle and lift off in the middle.

Check your work with a straightedge to make sure you're not creating a hill in the middle of your panel. If you are, work the center only until you get it flat.

Smooth the Face
Then use a smoothing plane to dress the face. Start from the ends and work to the middle, lifting at the end of the stroke. At the moment your joints' baselines disappear, you're done.

One difficulty people have here is with boards that have a pronounced grain direction. Here's how I deal with it: Plane "with the grain" on the carcase face for the majority of the panel. Lift off only at the very end.

Then come back and dress the other direction with a high-angle plane, working only a short distance. That way if you have to scrape, it will only be a small area. Now plane the other side of the carcase using these same techniques.

Trim the Tails
Now trim the end grain of the tail boards. Moisten the end grain with alcohol and work from top to bottom (or bottom to top). This prevents you from having any blowout on your tailboards. When the tails have been trimmed, grab the jointer plane and smoothing plane and work from the ends and into the middle again, just like you did on the other two faces.

Note: There are other ways to tackle this job. You can plane a small chamfer on all four corners and plane straight through on all four faces of your carcase. This is faster but risky. If your chamfer isn't big enough, you're toast. You also can fetch the belt sander or random-orbit sander. But you wouldn't be reading this blog entry if you sleep with your sander.

— Christopher Schwarz

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With the release of the new Veritas Small Scraping Plane last week, lots of people are saying: Cool! I want one! Do I need one?

Good question. Scraping planes are curious birds. The large scraping planes are typically used to dress tabletops and large panels that have unruly grain. Scraping planes can ignore grain direction, work large surfaces and leave a relatively flat surface – especially compared to a card scraper.

The small scraper planes work the same way, but I wouldn't want to use one for a banquet hall table. So they get used in other ways. You can use them like a block plane for dressing edges – this is how bodger Don Weber uses his Lie-Nielsen No. 212. If you have trouble bending a card scraper, the small planes are a good substitute as they are easy on your hands. And they can be used for evicting localized tear-out on a larger surface.

Veritas officials loaned us one of their new Small Scraping Planes last week. I was involved in testing a pre-production model of the tool, so I'm already quite familiar with the way it works. It is very clever and easier to set up than the No. 212 model made by Stanley and Lie-Nielsen (I've owned the Lie-Nielsen No. 212 for many years). The Veritas also costs less money (It's $119 and on sale now for $99. The Lie-Nielsen costs $160 to $175.)

Both tools, I found, have plusses and minuses. Let's take a look.

Veritas: Easy to Set But Can Clog
What makes the Veritas different is its blade system. Unlike the Lie-Nielsen, the Veritas uses a thin blade (.039" thick vs. .120"). The thin blade allows you to camber it gently by turning a small straight screw at the rear of the tool. This is much like the system on the venerable Stanley No. 80 cabinet scraper and the excellent Veritas Large Scraping Plane.

The net result of this system is that the Veritas scraping plane is easier to set up than the Lie-Nielsen. You insert the blade, tighten the clamp and give the cambering screw a turn. Then you scrape to your heart's content.

The other new twist with the Veritas is the adjustable palm rest that gives the plane its Beetle-esque shape. It's impossibly clever – you simply move the rest until the plane fits your hand, then lock it in place with a hex-head wrench (included). Once locked, it's quite stable. You can force it out of position, but you have to work at it.

In addition to that ergonomic touch, the toe of the tool has a nice lip for your thumb.

My only complaint with the tool is the same one I had with the pre-production version. I think the tool clogs with shavings more easily than the Lie-Nielsen. I suspect – but could be wrong – that the cause of the clogging is that the blade-clamping mechanism is bigger and lower on the blade. And the tool's mouth is fairly wide open. What tends to happen is that you take a stroke with the tool, and on the return the last shaving drops below the sole. As you push forward for your next stroke, the stray shaving fouls the mouth.

If you pull the shavings out regularly, you won't have this problem.

Lie-Nielsen: Won't Clog, But Trickier to Set Up
The Lie-Nielsen uses a variable-pitch frog that allows you to set it for a wide range of pitches. This is handy for experienced users but sometimes frustrating for beginners. If you want a camber on your blade, you are going to have to add it while sharpening – there's no cambering screw on the tool.

This makes setting the tool a little trickier. You have to tap the iron left and right to get the camber in the center. Then you sometimes have to fine-tune the frog to get the shaving you want. After a while you get the hang of it, but I wouldn't want to learn to use the tool on live stock.

On the plus side, I can't recall this tool ever clogging. The mouth is tighter and the blade-clamping mechanism is fairly high. Shavings fall out and don't get pulled back into the mouth.

As to ergonomics, I think it's a draw. The Lie-Nielsen, while odd looking, is remarkably comfortable to my hand. And the Veritas is exactly whatever I want it to be.

— Christopher Schwarz

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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. Developing your eye – plus your ability to sense the perpendicular – will do more for your dovetailing skills than any jig, square, knife or saw.

Like everything with dovetailing, it all begins at the baseline – the thin scratch across the grain that determines the limits of the joint. When you remove the waste between the tails and the pins, a frequent error is to leave too much material behind, which prevents the joint from closing.

You need to be able to glance at the joint and sense immediately if the baselines on the front and back of your workpiece line up without any waste between them. Ian Kirby and other woodworking instructors recommend using a small square to probe the joint and look for humps and bumps.

I have never had much luck with the small square approach. If I have to probe a joint, I'll do it with the long side of a chisel and see if the tool rocks back and forth on anything. Then I use the same chisel to tease out the garbage.

But it's rare that I ever do that. Instead, I hold the board up to eye level and take a quick look. After enough dovetails, you'll see it and know exactly what to do.

And the truth is, I rarely have to do much to my baselines except chase some little bits of junk in the corners. And that's because I have a good sense of the perpendicular. We're all born with it, but it's like a muscle. You need to work at it.

When I'm chiseling out the waste between my tails and pins I hold the chisel at 90° to the work and stand to the side of the tool to ensure it's at 90°. Again, other woodworking authors recommend you use a square or even a block of wood clamped to your baseline as a reminder. But this is really a "Use the Force Luke" moment. You know 90°. Just position yourself so you can see it.

(Quick side note: The more hand work you do, the more you'll find this comes in handy for boring and mortising especially.)

The other time this sense of 90° comes in handy is when you are sawing your pins out and the waste blocks on the ends of your tail boards. A pencil line or knife line is handy, but the real guide is your gut. You'll know when things are going wrong, even if the line is covered in dust.

Once you start developing these two skills you'll find that you can put your winding sticks away when processing boards with your handplanes. Your sense of square will show you the high spots in a board at a glance.

This blog post is not brought to you by the High Times beauty pageant. Promise.

— Christopher Schwarz

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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 seven 19th-century chests of drawers and gave a close look at their construction details.

One of the features I quite liked was the way that some of them dealt with the groove plowed in the sides and drawer front that capture's the drawer bottom. There are lots of ways to deal with the groove so it's not visible on the outside of the drawer.

• You can use drawer slips instead of a groove.
• You can bury the groove in a half-tail in the drawer's side.
• You can, with care, bury the groove in a full tail in the drawer side.
• You can skip the groove and use a plywood bottom and cleats.
• And on and on.

Many of the drawers in my dad's house use what we moderns would call a finger joint at the bottom of the drawer side. It's essentially a half-tail with a 0° slope. It's easy to cut using hand tools, looks pretty good and avoids having a big half-tail at the bottom of the drawer side. Click here to see a photo I took at my dad's.

I used this layout in a couple drawers that I built yesterday and I like it. The only trick comes when you are transferring the tail layout to your pin board. The groove plowed in the finger joint prevents you from getting your knife against the pin board.

So instead, I just used the wall of the groove and a square to strike the knife line on the pin board. It worked fine. There are some other details to my dad's drawers that I'll discuss in future posts. Right now I have to go help shoot a magazine cover.

— Christopher Schwarz


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Everybody has a list of woodworking books they enjoy and a stack of woodworking books that they never should have bought (anything with "Krenovian birdhouses" in the title). And most woodworkers have a list of woodworking books that they wish would get published someday.

That is not what we are writing about today. Below are the books that should never see the light of day. Or are simply ridiculous. Joel Moskowitz, the founder of Tools for Working Wood, came up with 11 sample titles below. Have a look:

"The Complete Guide To Honing Guides"
"Woodworking and Intellectual Property Law for Forum Posters"
"Lost in a Tool Tray - The Search for the Hidden Marking Knife"
"Seven Excuses for not Finishing Your Kitchen Cabinets"
"Tool Purchase Budgeting"
"Interesting Uses for Rarely Used Tools"
"101 Party Suggestions for those 'I've Finished a Project' Parties"
"Popular Woodworking's Guide to the Writings of Chris Schwarz"
"How to Increase Productivity When You Have Internet Access At Work"
"How to Make Your Own Folding Chairs"
"A Price Guide to Lie-Nielsen Boxes and Packing Materials"

Of course, Joel's list prodded me to make up my own. I don't know if I can top that "price guide" book. That one almost made me soil myself. Here goes:

"$10 Bed Rocks and Unicorns that Poop Rainbows"
"Make Your Own BBQ Grill -- From Wood!"
"Craft Fair Crap"
"Still More Craft Fair Crap"
"'Nice Crotch!' and 600 Other Naughty-sounding Woodworking Terms"
"How to Murder Trees and Make Stuff With Their Flesh"
"Plywood Silhouettes of Famous French Monarchs"
"I Hate Tools That Cost More than $1 (And the People Who Buy Them)"
"How to Make $40,000 a Year at Woodworking" (Oops, this actually is a real book!)

OK humorous woodworkers. Here's your chance. Leave the title of your most ridiculous imaginary book in the comments below. By the way, this is all a joke. So if you're going to leave an angry comment, I'm going to roll my eyes.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.) and size (8-1/2" long). It's beautifully finished. It's perfectly balanced. But what is really astonishing about the mallet is how it can take a beating without getting beat up.

Most wooden mallets (round or square) become dogmeat in short order – no matter what sort of wood you use. The Blue Spruce sidesteps that problem by using an acrylic-infused head. Every pore is filled with plastic, yet the mallet feels like wood to your hands and responds like wood when you hit something. That is, it doesn't bounce like a rubber mallet, which should be reserved only for circus clowns.

I've had this Blue Spruce mallet since February, have been using it just about every day and have yet to make a dent in it. It still looks as good as when I got it out of the box. Yes, it is more expensive than the mallets in the $2 bin at Home Depot that smell like a possum's underarm. Yes, you can turn your own for less. Or you can send Dave Jeske at Blue Spruce 80 of your hard earned American dollars and get the most well-designed and durable wooden mallet I've ever used.

Don't just take my word. After messing with my mallet, both Senior Editor Glen D. Huey and Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick bought them. Megan bought a blue one. (The vacuum process that adds the acrylic can also be used to infuse the wood with dye.) Glen got a red one (Psst. Don't tell Glen but some people think it looks a little... uh.. pink.)

I think this plastic technology could be used in other woodworking tools. Blue Spruce already uses it in handles for bench chisels. It would be great for the handles of mortise chisels – those receive a whooping. It also could be used in the totes for saws and planes – these are notoriously fragile. How about a wooden try square made from it? (I assume the acrylic reduces or eliminates the expansion and contraction process.) Hammer handles?

— Christopher Schwarz

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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 the really thin lead because I can usually drop it into a knife line and – with just light pressure – the lead will mark only the right and left sides of the knife line. That makes it easier to split my pencil line when sawing.

I know you are beginning to think I have an engineering background. Really, I’m not all that fussy.

While I like my mechanical pencils, I’ve always hated three things about them: the pencil mechanism itself, the lead and the eraser. Oh, and the pocket clip is flimsy, too.

I generally buy the Pentel pencils, which are the top of the line here in Kentucky. Their mechanisms tend to jam; I get about six months out of a pencil. The eraser is as effective as a gummy bear. The lead breaks too easily.

But heck, that’s what you get, right?

Today I was at Staples looking to replace my latest ex-Pentels when I noticed something I’d never seen before: “Super Hi-Polymer Lead,” which is supposed to be 25 percent stronger. (Stronger than what? Stinky cheese?)

I picked up a pack of the stuff with my new soon-to-be-dead pencils and used it to mark half-blind dovetails all afternoon. You know what? It really is stronger than the regular lead. I didn’t snap a single lead through six sets of dovetails. That is a record.

So if you’re a mechanical pencil dweeb like me, check out the Hi-Polymer stuff next time you need a refill. Hey, now I only hate two things about my mechanical pencils.

— Christopher Schwarz

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 dovetailing. They can create gaps or help prevent them.

This week I’m dovetailing a bunch of drawers and smallish boxes, so my planes are heavy on my mind.

If I remove any material from the inside of this pin board, the joint will become gap-tacular.

First, let’s talk about how handplanes can cause gaps. If you cut your pins and tails for your box and then plane all the inside surfaces, then you are asking for trouble. Planing the inside surfaces of your pin boards will make you look like a crap-tacular sawyer.

Don’t get it? Think about it for a minute: The interior surface of your pin board contains the wide triangles that fit into your tail board. Every stroke of your handplane on the interior of your pin board makes the joint looser and looser by removing the widest part of the joint (the same advice holds true for the belt-sander crowd).

You can, however, plane the interior surfaces of your tail boards with little consequence. The more planing you do, the more trimming you will have to do after assembly, but this is really no big deal.

So how do you avoid this problem? Plane the interiors of all your surfaces before you cut your joinery. This is a good idea for many reasons. First, planing helps remove any twist or bow in your stock, which makes joinery easier. And second, it prevents your joints from getting looser as you refine their surfaces.

For casework, here’s how I do it: First, I dress all the long-grain surfaces with a jointer plane. Then I cut the joinery. Assemble the carcase. Trim the proud nubs. Smooth plane the exterior. Be done with it.

When cutting a cross-grain rabbet, first draw the tool backwards so the nicker can define the shoulder. This results in cleaner cuts (and is historically accurate, thank you Peter Nicholson).

Here's the completed rabbet. It's less than 1/32" and a bit more than 1/64". It's all you need.

Now that we know that handplanes have an evil side, how can we use them to tighten our dovetails? Use a moving fillister plane to cut a shallow rabbet on the inside of each tail board.

This shallow rabbet is the width of your stock’s thickness (use a 3/4”-wide rabbet for 3/4”-thick stock). And the rabbet is less than 1/32” deep. What does this rabbet do? It makes transferring your marks from your tail board to your pin board (or vice-versa) much easier. The mating board nests right into the rabbet so you don’t have to fuss around with lining things up on the baseline.

Senior Editor Glen D. Huey showed me this trick in 2002. He was using it to line up pieces of differing thicknesses, but the rabbet also made transferring the marks from one board to another almost foolproof.

I use a moving fillister plane to cut the shallow rabbets. A true moving fillister has a depth stop and fence to regulate the depth and width of the cut – plus it has a nicker that scores the cross grain ahead of the cut. This reduces tearing.

This shallow rabbet, which is used by other dovetailers such as Rob Cosman, is completely worth the effort to make it. It takes just a few strokes with your plane and prevents an endless cycle of fussing and adjusting.

The Veritas Skew Rabbet Plane meets all the criteria to make this cut, as does the Philly Planes moving fillister plane and vintage moving fillisters. The Lie-Nielsen Skew Block Plane (with nicker) is lacking only a depth stop (you have to count the shavings and be careful if you use it for this purpose).

Next week: How a hammer can tighten up your dovetails.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here I'm pushing the rabbet against my pin board. This makes transferring the shape of the tails a can't miss affair.

I feel like a dirty English tool dealer this morning. But I’m OK with that.

Recently I purchased a bunch of brass-bound folding rules to give to co-workers and friends. Most of these were Stanley No. 62s, a common rule that I really like. If you want to know my favorite one, however, you’ll have to come to Cincinnati in May and fish it out of my tool cabinet.

In any case, the last folding rule I had left to give away was definitely an Alberto Fujimori (a former ruler). The scales on the outside were too dark to read. The scales on the inside of the rule were OK. The rule had cost only $1.76, so I wasn’t feeling overly shafted.

This folding rule was special because it had been used hard. The brass corners were worn from frequent use. One of the scales was charred a bit (that must have an interesting tale behind it). But despite the bad scales, its joints worked well and the rule had two of its three alignment pins intact – so it hadn’t been mistreated. Most folding rules are missing these pins, which keep all the components locked together when the rule is folded.

So I decided to try to restore this rule and see if I could turn it back into a nice piece of workshop equipment. British tool dealers have a bad reputation of taking beautifully patinated tools and wire brushing them into pupil-piercing brilliantness. I didn’t want to do that. So I started with a mild cleaning with mineral spirits and a toothbrush.

That did absolutely nothing.

So I consulted Philip E. Stanley’s book on folding rules ("A Source Book for Rule Collectors" – love the book, by the by). He recommends using Boraxo, a hand cleaner with lanolin. You can get it at home centers. It’s a bit gritty, smells like oranges and removes grease from your hands.

Here's the ruler after I treated one scale with Boraxo (at top). The other scale is untreated.

I cleaned one arm of the folding rule with the stuff last night and things began looking up. The paper towel got a brown skid-mark and the ruler got easier to read. However, Easter morning I woke up and (after making French toast and helping the kids find their eggs) I decided to do a little ruler resurrection. I was going to potentially throw my $1.76 down the metaphorical toilet.

I mixed up some wood bleach (oxalic acid). I like a solution of three tablespoons of powdered bleach with 16 ounces of hot water in a glass salsa jar. I use this bleach solution for removing iron stains when I steam-bend wood and then nail it (like when I make Shaker oval boxes).

Here's the ruler after I treated one scale with oxalic acid (at left). The right scale is untreated.

With rubber gloves on, I applied the bleach with a woven gray pad. Within a minute, the boxwood lightened considerably. But the ink on the rule stayed intact. Whew. I rinsed the rule in running water, allowed it to dry and applied two coats of wax.

Sorry tool collectors. You’re going to have to wait for another 50 years of patina before you can have this one. It’s going back to work.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Plow planes are some of the easiest joinery planes to use – once you know a few tricks to getting good results. I struggled with the tools until Don McConnell (now a planemaker at Clark & Williams) set me straight years ago with one simple piece of advice:

"Each hand should have a separate job," he said. "One hand holds the fence. The other pushes the tool forward."

Before that point, both of my hands were engaged in job sharing. My hand on the fence was also pushing forward. My hand on the tote was twisting the tool to keep the fence tight on the work.

Here are the other things I've learned about gripping a plow plane over the years:

1. It's a bit like sawing. The hand that holds the tote (or the stock) should be directly lined up with the cut and should swing free. Sometimes this means getting your body over the work (a low bench is helpful here). If your forearm is not in line with the skate of the tool, it's gonna be a roughie.

2. It's a bit like jointing an edge. For my fence hand, I wrap the web between my thumb and index finger around the stems (sometimes called posts) of the tool. I reach my fingers around the fence and touch the work and the front edge of the bench if possible. My thumb is pressing down. If you joint edges of boards by hand, you'll recognize this hand position immediately.

Workholding: Keep it Simple
There are lots of ways to hold your work for plowing. If your end vise and dogs are positioned near the front edge of the bench, you can usually pinch things directly between dogs. You also can use a sticking board, which is a little shelf that holds your work.

Or you can do what I do: Clamp a batten to the benchtop to brace the edge of your workpiece. And plow into the tip of a holdfast. This is very quick for plowing drawer parts – there's no clamping and unclamping and you can work with a bunch of different lengths easily.

Set the Fence
Set your plow's fence so it is parallel to the skate and the desired distance from your cutter. The most common cut I make is a 1/4"-wide groove that's 1/4" from the fence. Conveniently, the brass section on my folding rule is exactly 1/4" long, so it’s easy to set things at a glance.

Begin at the End
You can use a plow plane like a bench plane and make full strokes that run from the near end to the far end. But I have found this to be sometimes troublesome. Sometimes the cutter will follow the grain in the board and the tool's fence will drift away from the work. The results are ugly.

Instead, I start at the far end of the board and make short cuts. Each succeeding cut gets a little longer until I am making full-length cuts. The advantage to this is that if your plane wanders, it will only be for a short distance and the next cut will correct the error.

After you are making full-length cuts there's little danger of the tool wandering.

The shavings should be fairly thick – you don't want to do this all day. These shavings are .015" thick. I could probably go a little thicker in pine.

Results and Then…
When the tool stops cutting, you stop stroking. The edges of the groove might be a little furry – that's typical even for the best work. That's why I wait to smooth plane my pieces after I have grooved them. That removes the fur. Here's what the groove looks like when I'm done.

— Christopher Schwarz

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A couple years ago I finally got to go to Winterthur, the DuPont's estate in Delaware that is a shrine to early American furniture. Right as our tour of the collection was about to begin, the docents segregated me from the gaggle of chattering blue-haired old ladies.

In retrospect, the docents were probably afraid I was going to mug them in the Marlboro Room.

In any case, it was a lucky turn of events. I and the two guys with me with were paired with our own personal docent for a tour. When she found out that two of us were furniture makers, she gave us little flashlights.

"I know your type," she said. "You're gonna crawl under the highboys."

And crawl like slugs we did. I learned a lot about casework that day, but the most lasting memory was getting to examine the sides of some of the grandest bonnet-top highboys I've ever seen. These were masterpieces of design. And yet, on almost all of them the side panels were split. Plus the panels would never pass muster in Ethan Allen. You could feel and see the regular scallops of the smoothing planes. Heck – the undulations were so regular and obvious that you could tell what width the craftsman's smoothing plane was.

And that was the most beautiful thing I saw all day.

Handplaned surfaces are not perfect. And thank goodness. They have a slight irregularity to them that I embrace. While it is entirely possible to tune a smoothing plane to produce a surface that looks like a machine dressed it (I'll do it at shows to impress the power-tool guys), that's not my goal. I aim to remove tear-out but to leave my mark.

So what does this look like?

Close up, it looks like crap. The photos above show every little detail of my work on a tabletop of the server I'm trying to complete this week. You can see how I angled my plane to begin my stroke, which reduces chatter at the beginning of a pass. You can see evidence of toolmarks everywhere when you get close enough.

When this top gets a finish on it (oil followed by lacquer), these hallmarks will become less obvious, but they will still be there for someone who knows how to look. For me, they are as telling about my work as my name that I'm going to stamp on the leg.

— Christopher Schwarz

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If we haven't yet convinced you to abandon your family/job/comfortable retirement and head to Cincinnati on May 16-17, I hope this blog post will help you come to your senses. That weekend is the free Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event here at our magazine's editorial office.

But it's not just going to be me and Thomas Lie-Nielsen cooking weenies and shooting the shinola about bedding angles. The local chapter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers (SAPFM) has volunteered to give free demonstrations during the two days on a variety of topics. Here is the schedule:
 
Saturday, May 16            
Time    Demonstrator        Topic           
noon      Robert Crouse        Hollows & Rounds    
1 p.m.    Dave Heyer           Carving Acanthus leaves on a period chair
2 p.m.    Charles Murray     Bench Planes    
3 p.m.    Dan Reahard       Carving Fluted Quarter Columns
4 p.m.    Donna Hill            Inlay: Preparing Inlays and Sandshading
5 p.m.    Bob Compton
             & Jim Crammond    Chairmaking: Windsors
            
Sunday, May 17
Time    Demonstrator        Topic           
10 a.m. Mark Arnold           Inlay & banding    
noon     George Walker        Scratch beader    
2 p.m.   Donna Hill              Inlay: Preparing Inlays and Sandshading
4 p.m.   George Walker       Design: Incorporating Ornament in a Design

And lest you forget, we'll also have other toolmakers in addition to Lie-Nielsen at the event, both showing off their wares and showing you how to use them (the real heart of these events, I might add).

John Economaki of Bridge City Tools. See the Jointmaker Pro (which we awarded a Best New Tool of 2008 award) in action.

Ron Hock of Hock Tools. Ron is a long-time bladesmith who is extremely knowledgeable about steels and sharpening. Ask him about his forthcoming book on sharpening tools.

Kevin Drake of Glen-Drake Tool Works. Kevin builds my favorite marking gauge of all time (the Tite-Mark), plus other thoughtful tools, including chisel hammers, plane hammers and the thought-provoking double-handled dovetail saw.

Ron Brese of Brese Planes. Ron makes incredible infill handplanes at down-to-earth prices. If you're in the market for an infill, he's should definitely be on your short list.

Bob Zajicek of Czeck Edge Hand Tool will be showing off his wares. He makes fantastic marking knives, awls and other tools.

Jameel Abraham of Benchcrafted will be showing his awesome wagon vise, plus I hear he has a new product in the works that is very interesting.

Need ideas for things for your family to do while you are enjoying yourself? Click here.

Again, you don't have to register. The event is free. Give up your will.

— Christopher Schwarz

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 dismantle an old pine blanket chest (because of extensive powderpost beetle damage in the sapwood edges of its top and bottom boards) that had been assembled with the later-style cut nails, and had hinges attached with screws that had no point, but with the top of the head showing circular machining marks, which from what I could find, dates it to somewhere after 1837.  

I found also that in places such as rabbets for corner joints and cuts to inset the hinges and the small inner compartment, the necessary lines had been cut rather deeply with a knife.  

The joiners that Joseph Moxon ("Mechanick Exercises") wrote about had pin-style marking gauges that followed an edge, but in either the original or your easy-to-read version, I didn't see anything about how other cuts were marked. According to the Wikipedia article on pencils, various writing sticks with graphite cores were available long before this chest, but its maker, as many now, preferred a knife. Web-searching for marking knives located a variety of modern products, such as the ones you wrote about, but I didn't find anything in the way of history. Did you?

Milford,

You're right that Moxon, a 17th-century source, doesn't mention a marking knife. He discusses the pricker, which seems to be an awl-like tool used for marking joints.

The earliest image of a marking knife that I'm aware of is from Joseph Smith's "Explanation or Key to the Various Manufactories of Sheffield" (shown above). It's a circa 1801 source. The striking knife shown there was the dominant form for many years – you can still find examples being made today that look like this (though I don't recommend the modern version).

I browsed through Andre Roubo's books this morning and couldn't find a marking knife (if someone else has found one, let me know). I did find a "la point a tracer," which translates as "scriber." Roubo's description says it is a round steel tool with a handle that comes to a peak. Sounds awl-ish to me.

I'll check my other books at home. If you know something, fess up in the comments.

— Christopher Schwarz

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 grunted, threw his saw down with a clatter and stomped away from the bench.

The classroom got real quiet. This student was a big fella – he probably had 100 pounds of muscle on me, a ZZ Top beard and a short fuse. As he angled toward the classroom door to leave, I wasn’t sure what to do.

So I picked up one of his uncut legs, marked out the joint he needed and sawed it out without saying a word. I didn’t do it like when I teach (history, blah, blah, joke, blah, technical detail, blah, sidebar, blah, blah) where it takes 20 minutes to make a tenon. Instead, I cut it like I do it at home with the radio on. One tenon. One minute.

I left the tenon on the bench and walked away. I was a bit freaked about what would happen next. I was out of ideas. The other students walked up to see my work.

“I get it now,” one student said. “That’s what it looks like – from start to finish. That’s what the joint looks like at the end. That’s what I needed.”

The big guy came over for a look, too. I got him a new workpiece to replace his ruined one. The rest of the day went smoothly.

It’s easy to get intimidated by hand joinery. We expect it to look like router-cut joinery, or some trumped-up bit of fakery by photographers. The truth is that in some cases hand joinery looks better when compared to joints made by power tools and worse in others.

In my work, for example, I don’t go for slick end-grain surfaces. What’s the use? They offer little gluing strength. I focus on the getting the gluing surfaces flat and smooth. And I try to get the fit as close as I can.

But don’t we all? What does this really look like?

Now that we have a macro lens at the magazine, I’ve started taking photos of things that our lenses couldn’t show before, such as close-ups of joinery surfaces.

Here’s what a casework dovetail looks like that I cut two weeks ago. It’s for a sideboard for the Summer 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine.

In the first shot above you can see how things are pretty clean, but nothing like a router-cut surface. I cut that rabbet on one of the faces of the piece to make it easier to lay out the mating socket.

In the second shot, this is how things looked right before I knocked the dovetail home. Yes, the end grain looks rough. Yes, that’s some junk in the corners. I could pare it with a chisel, but why bother?

And third, you can see the end result. The fit is OK around the dovetail – nothing like you see on a magazine cover. There's a gap at the back shoulder I could slip a playing card into. But the joint is tight at the front shoulder, which is all that will ever show. I am done and ready to move to the other side of this joint.

I hope this helps you – like my frustrated mountain man student – to relax a bit when it comes to sawing joints.

— Christopher Schwarz


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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 shop. So I find it easier to dress my edges by hand than to fuss with the powered jointer.

My jointer plane has a cambered iron, which allows me to correct an out-of-square edge. (I'll cover this in a future blog post after I pick up some Kevlar undergarments to protect me from the flak.)

Until I mastered using a cambered iron in my jointer plane, I used to use a straight iron and a jointer plane fence to dress my edges. I still use a jointer plane fence on occasion when I only have one or two chances at getting an edge dead-nuts square.

There are two kinds of commercial jointer plane fences. The more common one now is the Veritas Jointer Fence, which attaches to the plane with two rare earth magnets and a post that wedges the whole thing on your plane's sidewall. This fence works with almost any bench plane, though I usually use it with a plane the size of a jack or a jointer (14" to 22" long).

The other kind of fence is like the discontinued Stanley No. 386. This fence attaches to the plane using thumbscrews. The nice thing about the No. 386 is that you can set it for a wide range of angles and it has a knob that I find useful for the edge-jointing process. The other nice thing about the No. 386 is that I can use it with a cambered iron because the fence is under the sole of the tool. The fence centers the plane over a typical edge, where the cambered iron is basically straight. (You can do this with the Veritas fence by adding a wooden block to the fence.)

The No. 386 can be tough to find in the wild. St. James Bay Tool Co. makes one that is similar, but I haven't tried it.

How to Joint Edges With a Fence
Just like with using a power jointer, there is some technique involved in using a jointer plane fence.

Things to watch: The cutter has to be sticking out of the tool dead square. This is why I learned to use a curved iron in my jointer plane – it's actually a more forgiving setup than using a straight iron.

Second: Use your dominant hand to push the plane forward and your off-hand to control the fence. With your off-hand, use your thumb to push the toe down against the edge and use your fingers to push the fence against the face of your board.

Third: What you have to understand about handplanes is that the tool's cutter sticks out below the sole of the tool. As a result, the tool takes a slightly heavier cut at the beginning of the pass when only part of the plane is on the edge.

Last week I tried to measure this by edge jointing a 30"-long board and then measuring the shaving's thickness at five points along its length. At the beginning of the cut (toe engaged only) my cuts were consistently .0055" thick. In the middle and end of the cut the shaving was .005" thick.

That is not much difference. But it can add up. After several strokes the edge develops a gentle curve to it. And that's no good for gluing.

So here's what I do: First remove some of the middle section of the edge. I start the cut a few inches in from the end of the board, and I end the cut a few inches from the end. I'll usually take two passes like this. (This is similar to what David Charlesworth does, though I believe he continues to make passes until the plane stops cutting.)

Then I take a pass all the way through the edge. If I get one perfect unbroken shaving, I'll test the edge with a straightedge or the board's mating edge. If the edge is perfect or is a little hollow in the middle, I'll get the glue and the clamps. If the edge still bulges, I'll remove another shaving in the middle.

One more thing: Some woodworkers poo-poo the jointer plane fence. As Senior Editor Bob Lang might say: "You might as well show up on the job site wearing a dress."

Well since today is "National Tartan Day," I think you can get away with it.

— Christopher Schwarz


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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 it.

Conventional wisdom is that the head works loose because of the shock that the tool is subjected to daily. Sounds conventional. Sounds wise. But R. Bruce Hoadley, author of "Understanding Wood," claims otherwise. He says it is the continuous cycle of seasonal expansion and contraction that results in the handle shrinking out.

In either case, the fix is the same in my shop. First I probe around in the head to find an area of the handle that I'm certain is wood. I'm going to be driving a chisel down there, so I don't want any metallic surprises.

The adze eye here is 1/2" wide, so I need a wedge that is that same width.

Make a Wedge
I tighten up my heads with wooden wedges. You can buy metal ones at the store, but I have lots of wood. I scrounged up a piece of 1/2"-thick maple (ash, oak or hickory are all good choices as well). Then I crosscut off a piece about 3/4" long.

I created the wedge on the band saw. I have a little sled that presents the wood to the blade at 7° (you can set your saw's miter gauge and attach an auxiliary fence if you like). You cut one end of your stock, flip it and cut the other. The result is a wedge with a 14° taper. Make a bunch of wedges and find the one that comes to the finest point.

Chisel Down
Fetch a 1/2"-wide chisel. Not the nice one; the other one that belongs to your neighbor. Secure your hammer with clamps or in a vise and drive the chisel as deeply as you can into the adze eye. Don't be shy here.

Remove the chisel, turn it around and drive it in again. When you are done, this is about what it should look like.

Glue and Wedge
Apply glue to the chiseled slot in your handle and on both faces of the wedge. (I use yellow glue.) Drive the wedge in as deeply as you can.

This is why you need two hammers in your shop. This is exactly what got me in trouble in the first place. (See "Daddy has a hammer problem" for details.)  

Wait for the glue to cure and trim the excess with a chisel or saw. Now you're ready for another beating.

— Christopher Schwarz

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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 gave us a speech that I still remember.

"I once had a student who stole cookies," she said. "Then he stole lunch money. Then he stole money from his parent's wallets…."

Long pause. "Then he robbed a gas station."

If you are still in the "smoothing plane" (stealing cookies) stage of your slide into handtools, let me give you a peek at some of bad deeds you'll be committing against your family's checkbook in the years ahead. First stop: plow planes.

Plow planes make grooves in the edges and faces of stock, which is great for frame-and-panel work. They also can be adjusted to make the tongue on a tongue-and-groove joint. And they are great for wasting away stock when you are making decorative moulding with moulding planes.

There are many different kids of plow planes, but I think there really are two families: the wooden plows and the metal plows. And their differences are in more than the raw materials used to make them.

Because that's the most obvious difference, however, let's start there.

Metal vs. Wooden Bodies
If you're buying a used plow, the metal ones are usually in better shape than the wooden ones. And the metal ones can usually be resurrected a little more easily. That's because the wooden body of a plow can warp (very difficult to fix), and the wooden wedge that secures the iron can be frozen in its mortise or can be so modified that it is useless.

That said, I always prefer a wooden grip on a plane, so the metal grips aren't my favorite. Heck I've thought about wrapping some friction tape around the handles to improve the feedback.

Where the Shavings Go
In use, the biggest difference for me is where each tool's shavings go. On the metal plows, the shavings eject into the fence and the user's hand. This is annoying because many times the shavings bunch up like a wad of toilet paper in the fence and you have to stop your work and clear things out.

On the wooden plows, the shavings are ejected away from the user and onto the benchtop. I have yet to find a disadvantage to this way of work – except that you have to sweep off your bench once in a while.

About that Fence
The fence on a metal plow is usually secured with two thumbscrews. Because of the tight tolerances when the tool is made, it's usually simple for the user to get the fence parallel to the tool's skate – a critical detail.

With wooden plows, it's all over the map. Fences can be fantastic or one step above semi-adjustable firewood. The bridle mechanism on my D.L. Barrett & Sons plow is perfection. It's better than a metal plow. One thumbscrew locks everything, and it's always parallel to the skate.

However, most of the wooden plows you'll find have two wooden screws that adjust the fence (or sometimes wedges do the job). With the two wooden screws, it's a bit more of a hassle to get things parallel. Plus, sometimes these screws are damaged beyond saving.

Different Depth Stops
On a metal plow, the depth stop is on the side of the skate that is opposite the fence. On the wooden plow, the depth stop is between the fence and skate. I haven't found either to be troublesome, but you do have to pay attention to your work. You don’t want to waste away part of the wood that you are going to need your depth stop to contact on a later cut.

I work with both tools and find that they both do everything a woodworker needs. The choice of tool comes down to:

• How much you can spend
• What is available in your area
• How much work you want to put into the tool
• And which form makes you drive by Texaco stations that aren't on your way home.

— Christopher Schwarz  

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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: "When Clem saw the Law, he slammed on brakes. That clever monkey got out of a speeding ticket by saying he was trying to stomp a sweat bee."

But I digress. This month I'm reviewing new drawbore pins from four manufacturers for the Summer 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. One of the new entrants to the field is Lee Valley – its drawbore pins will be available in the next couple weeks at a special introductory price ($49 a pair).

When company officials sent me a couple for evaluation, they also sent a disassembled one so I could see how it was made (and presumably to keep me from sawing apart their pre-production models). It is cool. Monkey cool.

The stainless steel shaft passes entirely through the octagonal bubinga handle. And the tool is capped at the top with a strike button. Though you normally don't need to strike drawbore pins, some people do.

The metal shaft is barbed to grab onto the inside of the handle. And it has a rubberish O-ring. Company officials were quick to point out the function of the O-ring. It is not a shock absorber (like leather between the bolster and handle of a chisel). Instead, it is an assembly aid at the factory.

The handles are epoxied on. When the cap is screwed in place, there is enough vacuum pressure to cause the epoxy to squirt out the bottom of the handle. Hence, the O-ring to seal things up.

The engineering is extremely clever, all-in-all. And though I won't say which of the new tools I prefer (you'll have to read the Summer 2009 issue for that), I will say that I favor the Lee Valley's handle.

It should come as no surprise that around the office, one of the highest praises for intelligence is: "Clever Canadians."

— Christopher Schwarz

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