Woodworking Magazine Blog

One of the world's biggest tool collectors is bringing his brand-new traveling tool museum to Northern Kentucky on Oct. 1-2 to show it off to the public at the Woodworking in America event at the Northern Kentucky Convention Center.

John Sindelar of Edwardsburg, Mich., has spent his entire adult life amassing some of the world's rarest, most expensive and beautiful tools. And this year Sindelar built a traveling tool museum that will travel the country to share some of the highlights of his collection at festivals and fairs.

Even if you got shut out of the classes at Woodworking in America this year, the Marketplace itself is well worth the trip (and it's only $7 for two days).

Our new book, "The Workbench Design Book" is at the printer and will ship at the end of September. It's a 256-page behemoth – and more than half of it is all-new material that I've been writing since February.

Starting today, you can pre-order your copy at 20 percent off – $27.99 plus free domestic shipping – until the book arrives at our warehouse. Then it will go to its full retail price of $34.99 plus free domestic shipping. (By the way, this book won't be available at Amazon for several months. However, Lee Valley Tools will have it this fall.)

Of course, some of you are wondering why I would write a second book on workbenches. So I've included the introduction to the new book below, which explains the book and its content. Also, for those of you who asked, this book is being produced, printed and bound in the United States.

If you are ready to order, you can jump to our store here. Otherwise, read on:

I wrote a short review of Karl Holtey's No. 982 smoothing plane for the October 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine (which is mailing now to subscribers). And you don't write a review of a tool that costs $10,500 without bracing yourself for some comments from readers.

Overall, I quite liked the tool, which was on loan to us for several months from its owner. For me, the experience was like driving the BMW 700-series sedan that belonged to a friend of my mom. At first it was terrifying, and I handled the tool like an injured wombat. After a few weeks of babying it, however, I started to explore its limits.

I have four sets of screwdrivers. Three for loaning and one for using.

The set I never loan is made up of tools that were made (mostly) by the H.D. Smith & Co. company of Plantsville, Conn. Usually these are referred to as "perfect handle" screwdrivers. They are single drop-forged pieces of steel with a wooden handle that has been riveted into place. And they are tougher and more comfortable than any screwdriver I've used.

I've been getting questions almost daily about the 18th-century French-style workbench I built for the cover of the August 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. The questions go something like this:

1. Has the benchtop exploded into pieces yet, you dufus?

2. Has the epoxy shattered?

3. How are your chiropractic bills with that leg vise?

Learning to sharpen has little to do with your sharpening stones. It has a lot more to do with being able to see your progress and knowing when to stop.

Showing a class of woodworkers what a sharp blade looks like in the flesh (a real poor choice of words) has proven to be tricky for me. So I've resorted at times to line drawings, which helps.

Today a reader sent me some great photos he made using a scanning electron microscope, usually called an SEM in the business. Want to read about how the microscopes work? Brace yourself for some scary images of pollen.

We've been testing the Veritas Quick-release Sliding Tail Vise for several months now and have been keeping as mum as possible. Now I can break my mum-ness and discuss this interesting piece of new bench hardware.

The idea is simple: Put a traditional European tail vise and a machinist's quick-release vise into a tropical hotel with an ocean view. Open the mini bar. Order room service.

My first Stanley shoulder plane (a No. 93) was the worst plane I ever bought. The sole was more than 1/8" out of alignment, and it took me a couple hours on a belt sander to even get the tool working.

That dog of a tool was built during the sunset days of Stanley's U.K. plane production, and I've always imagined that my plane had been made by someone who was drunk, hung-over or having a nice stroke.

Today we finalized the design for a nice poster that features the famous plate 11 from Andre Roubo's woodworking masterwork. The poster (redheads not included) will be ready for sale (on very nice paper) at Woodworking in America. It also will be available for sale in our store.

Plate 11, for those of you just joining us, shows one of Roubo's designs for workbenches, plus a scene from a French joinery shop. Some of the tools in the plate are not to scale, but the detail is tremendous and the lessons are there for you to decipher.

We're still working out pricing (should be about $20), and some other details. But here's a shot of the prototype with Linda (hiding behind the poster) and Megan (not hiding).

— Christopher Schwarz

This morning we were messing around with the band saw blades and got into a discussion of how to fold and unfold them properly. I was taught to use my foot to fold it.

Robert Lang uses just his hands.

To release a band saw blade, I was taught to cast it to the ground, roughly, on one of our floor mats. It makes a great noise and people will jump a bit.

Robert Lang uses just his hands.

Megan shot this short video of the two techniques. The little dance at the end is free.

— Christopher Schwarz

Cuss It, I Need to Write More About Band Saws

• The best band saw book I know of is from Mark Duginske: "New Complete Guide to the Band Saw," which we now carry in our store. Hurrah! I bought the first version of this book years ago and still use it today when tweaking my band saw.

• Also good: Lonnie Bird's: "The Band Saw Book."

• Our best-selling book involving band saws is Lois Ventura's crazy (but cool) "Sculpted Band Saw Boxes." So many woodworkers have made these boxes from this book that they have even ended up in the reader's gallery of a competing magazine. That's flattery!

I don't relish handing out bad reviews of tools. But as someone who gets stoned occasionally by an angry mob, I know that a critical review can help improve the quality of my work in the future.

Early Modern Drama majors are enablers. They have fancy library cards and access to stuff that makes you pasty white and boring at parties. I used to have friends. People used to say they liked me.

— Christopher Schwarz

I've been purging my shop and tool chests of excess tools this week. But now I'm afraid some of my tools are "taking the hint" and leaving on their own.

This morning I set out to dovetail a walnut carcase and found that one of my beloved dividers – an old Brown & Sharpe – was AWOL. So I had to use some bigger, clunkier dividers in tandem with my Starrett (shown above) to lay things out.

Last month we showed you a preview of Len Hovarter's interesting twin-screw vise (check out that entry here and see a video). Today Hovarter's web site went live and is offering a $25 discount for pre-orders before Sept. 15.

Watch this beautiful preview of the new DVD from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks on Peter Follansbee's "17th Century New England Carving," which will be available in early fall 2010.

You'll get to see some of Peter's work and Plimoth Plantation, where he works. If you're not in love with 17th-century furniture and methods, this preview (and seeing Peter's work) could change your mind.

And if you can't wait to get a dose of Peter, visit his blog "Joiner's Notes."

— Christopher Schwarz

Soon I will sell my Makita LS1013 miter saw. Not because it's junk – far from it. It's still the best miter saw I've ever used. But I don't need it anymore. During the last five years, I've started using miter boxes a lot more. And my Makita is just taking up space in my shop.

In an upcoming issue we're featuring an article by Ron Herman on how to select a miter box, so I don't want to steal his thunder here on the blog. But there is an important bit of miter box news that I wanted to share with you.

This year we are going to sell T-shirts at Woodworking in America. I swear this on a stack of Joseph Moxons. But we need your help.

You see, we'd like to have a humorous slogan on the shirt, but we're not funny enough to come up with anything suitably clever. All our slogans sound something like:

"Show me your feathered crotch!" (That was mine.)

"Wanna feel my fleam?" (Megan.)

"Gee, I've got cramps." (Megan, Glen and me.)

"I got hammered at WIA."

And so on.

So we'd like you to help us craft a slogan for our T-shirts. We're shooting for seven words or less. And it would be great if the slogan was funny, unlike ours. And it would be great if you could wear it to a church picnic, unlike ours.

So post your entries in the comments below before noon EST on Friday, Aug. 20. The winner will receive a T-shirt (surprise!), untold fame and Bob Vila's flowery underpants (shown above, not actual size, offer not valid in Guam).

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Woodworking in America is sold out, but you can still get on the waiting list or come for the un-freaking-believable Marketplace (just $7 for two days). Check it out here.

If you've ever wanted to go to Germany and take a hand woodworking course from a guy who is mostly German (me), but doesn't speak a word of German (me again) but likes German beer, pork products and pork by-products (guilty), here's your chance.

Several people have asked questions about the Marketplace at Woodworking in America. Here are some answers.

• If you are registered for classes at Woodworking in America, you can go to the Marketplace all you like. It's included in your registration fee.

• If you want to attend the Marketplace alone, then $7 gets you in for both days (Friday and Saturday). You'll either get an armband or two tickets.

• If you pay to go into the Marketplace (or are a full-conference attendee), you can visit John Sindelar's traveling tool museum (drool rags and Depends not included). It will be on the Marketplace floor.

• The Marketplace will also feature demonstrations by bodger Don Weber. Buy him a bagel or a beer and he'll teach you anything you want to know about coppicing, chairmaking or foot-powered turning.

• If you attend the Marketplace you can participate in the Hand Tool Olympics (game on, people).

• And yes, admittance to the restrooms is covered by the admission fee. You will be issued four tickets. One ticket per flush.

— Christopher Schwarz

I like reading about workbench patents as much as I like movies about gladiators (which is a lot).

So here's how to prove your bench geekiness, and it won't cost a penny (except for the bandwidth). Jeff Burks has compiled almost 2,000 pages of United States patent papers and drawings related to workbenches and workholding between 1845 and 1960. The patents are arranged chonologically in a .pdf file, which has some basic bookmarks and is somewhat searchable using Acrobat's "find" feature.

David Brookshaw has been making amazing tools since 1988 -- many of them miniatures that have appeared in some of the gorgeous tool books from Sandor Nagyszalanczy, including the cover of "Tools: Rare and Ingenious."

This November, Brookshaw is coming to Philadelphia for the Philadelphia Miniaturia show Nov. 6-7, where he'll be showing his miniature tool chest and workshop that we featured on the blog earlier (read about it here and here).

Lately Brookshaw has been making some pieces from the incredible Nessi collection of tools, including the ones below. These were featured in this book, which I bought in 2004 for $80. Ouch. But the essays and photos are well worth it for the ardent tool nutjob.

Brookshaw makes his pieces for sale. The dividers above, which are from the French book "Le Livre de l'outil." They were a commission that cost $3,000. So now I am reconsidering my decision to skip law school.

Check out the dividers below from the Nessi collection, and stop by the show in Philadelphia if you want to see more. You can contact Brookshaw through his web site.

— Christopher Schwarz

Other Tool Makers and Books You Should Investigate

• "Classic Hand Tools" by Garrett Hack

• "The Art of Fine Tools" by Sandor Nagyszalanczy

• Heinz Tools: heinztools.com, where I got my squirrel hammer!

• Gerd Fritsche's Traditional Handplanes: traditional-handplanes.com

As of 10 minutes ago, Woodworking in America is officially sold out. You can still sign up for a waiting list here or come and attend the amazing Marketplace that we have put together (admission to the Marketplace will be $7).

This will be the biggest Woodworking in America event yet. To ensure it's also the best one yet, we have secured additional space for instruction, we have brought on more than 60 vendors for the Marketplace (all woodworking-related), and we are even bringing in a traveling tool collection from John Sindelar that will make you (add hyperbolic verb here).

Thanks to all our customers who have supported us during these last three years to build Woodworking in America into one amazing orgy of tools, instruction and – dare I say it – community. We couldn't do it without you.

— Christopher Schwarz

If we ever change the name of our magazine to Erudite Blowhard Wood Finery, I know exactly where to get the headlines for all the projects we'll publish: The comments on this blog entry.

We had more than 90 readers enter our contest to come up with the most pompous name for a piece of furniture. Picking the winner was difficult. Here's the scientific way I did it: I picked my 10 favorite and then read them out loud at the staff meeting this morning. The one that got the biggest laugh won the contest.

This has been one of our busiest years ever at Popular Woodworking Magazine. Plus, I have been in many foreign lands with exotic cultures and their own languages: France, England, North Carolina.

As a result of my travels, I haven't had a chance to introduce you to some of the interesting stuff we have been working on in the wee hours, including a jumbo-sized project called "Exercises in Wood-Working."

Router planes are the Starsky. Handsaws are the Hutch.

These two tools work together all the time in my shop. In fact, all the sawing classes I teach are actually classes on the router plane in disguise. So I have seen a lot of woodworkers struggle with sharpening the router plane's L-shaped iron.

Following his trip to North Carolina to shoot two shows with Roy Underhill for "The Woodwright's Shop" and a three-day teaching stint at Roy's school, Chris took a few days to head south and visit with family in South Carolina.

But usually when Chris is out of the office, he continues to post blog entries. But yesterday? Nothing. And frankly, I'm a bit concerned.

Yesterday was International Beer Day. And Chris did not write about it. We should all be worried.

— Megan Fitzpatrick

photo by VoxEfx

I've always been hesitant to get to know my personal heroes because it's usually a disappointment. They almost always turn out to be just like the rest of us. A bit vain. Self-conscious. Insecure. Troubled.

So when Roy Underhill of "The Woodwright's Shop" invited me to stay with him at his converted mill in North Carolina while I taught at his school, I was delighted and dejected.

When I teach classes, I tell my students to buy their winding sticks in the “18th-century Tool Section” of their local home center.

They look puzzled until I pull out my winding sticks: two lengths of aluminum angle, one of which is painted black. Aluminum angle is cheap and makes a nice set of accurate winding sticks.

I would probably be a better person if I didn't interact with other people.

That is the thought that flashes through my head when Roy Underhill says to me: "I could go down the street and buy a plastic doll that you could saw in half."

So we shot two 25-minute episodes of "The Woodwright's Shop" today. So you are probably wondering what the heck I did with the other 23 hours of my day.

Manicure? Pedicure? Facial? Crystal Meth bender?

Nyet.

I woke up this morning at 6 a.m. at Roy's place -- he lives in an old mill, and the guest bedroom sits right on the water. We slugged down some coffee. Roy sat in a rocking chair and quietly looked out over the dam next to his mill. I was poring over one of his books on Virginia shore furniture (I could spend a month here just browsing this man's library).

Let's say your table saw's guard is painted black. And you've figured out that if you put a piece of wood under it in a certain way, that usually it comes out cut like you intended. But sometimes not. After all, you can't see what's going on under that guard.

This sounds ridiculous, I know. But that's basically what many woodworkers do when they apply finish to their projects. They don't know how a finish works or why it works (or doesn't). In fact, finishing is still considered by many of us to be a "black art," with secret formulas and the like.

I'm packing up all the tools I'll need in North Carolina for the coming week, and I was a bit shocked this morning as I went through my checklist.

One of the "Woodwright's Shop" television programs Roy Underhill and I are shooting this weekend will deal with the typical toolkit of a joiner circa 1839. I compiled my list based on an old book, "The Joiner & Cabinet Maker," which detailed the fictional life of a young apprentice.

I know I am going to get flack for this, but I cannot help myself.

Last week we received two copies of a cool new book in the mail – "500 Cabinets: A Showcase of Design & Craftsmanship" (Lark). The book is (though I didn't count the cabinets) a collection of 500 designs from woodworkers all over the world.

Most of the cabinets are contemporary, and almost all of them are fun to look at. All the staff members here have been paging through these books since they arrived. I really like these books because you get to see a wide range of work, and it's usually beautifully presented.

But there is something about these books (and some contemporary furniture in general) that makes me giggle:

Isshi Yamada never said much to me when I was dating his daughter in college. To us Western students who studied Eastern religions, he was an enigmatic Zen Buddhism professor who was famous for giving exams that bordered on the surreal.

Most of my memories of Dr. Yamada put him sitting at his dining room table in a worn Irish fisherman's sweater – drinking a little sake and watching the affairs of the household.

One day, however, Dr. Yamada became quite animated on the topic of human perception. And his short lecture sticks with me to this day.

"What is the one thing the eye cannot see?" Dr. Yamada asked.

I leave for North Carolina this week to shoot two episodes of "The Woodwright's Shop" with Roy Underhill then teach a three-day class on handsawing at Underhill's little Utopia of a woodworking school in Pittsboro, N.C.

One of the shows will be on English handsawing (no on-screen French-sawing DIY vasectomies are planned) and the other show will be about the simple toolkit of a joiner, circa 1839.

To prepare for the class and show, I built a new sawbench this weekend.

Bob Baker, a furniture and tool restorer and excellent planemaker, died unexpectedly last week.

I had the pleasure of meeting Bob in February of 2006 when we hosted a gathering in Cincinnati for many of the best planemakers and gave each of them the opportunity to present their work to one another, and to talk about planes, planemaking and toolmaking in general. Bob was high on that list of "best planemakers." In the picture at left, he's presenting two of his planes to the rest of the group.

I met him only that one day, but as I look back through the pictures of the event, I remember a kind and genuine man who had a grin on his face almost the entire time. Kari Hultman, who knew him better than did I, has written more about Bob on her blog, The Village Carpenter, and there are some touching comments below her post that I hope you'll take the time to read.

Chris wrote a story about about our "planemakers'" event for the August 2006 issue, which features some of Bob's work. You can link to it here. 

— Megan Fitzpatrick

Just about every week, someone asks Chris, “How can I get started in working with hand tools?” Sure, there’s a lot of information on the Internet…not to mention in our magazine, in other magazines and books, and on this blog and others. But it can be difficult to sort through the scads of information (some of it contradictory) and pick out what you need. That’s why we’re particularly pleased that we are reprinting a classic but little-known book: “Exercises in Wood-Working,” by Ivin Sickels.

Mark Harrell at Bad Axe Tool Works has always taken a different path than other modern sawmakers. Instead of imitating the look of classic British saws, Harrell has always favored American styles, with their steel backs and distinct tote profile. And he launched his sawmaking business by making the biggest backsaws first – most sawmakers have started by introducing a dovetail saw.

This summer Harrell has introduced two new backsaws that are going to make your buying decisions far more difficult.

There are few things I dislike more than seeing myself in video. I'm one of those guys who has a face for radio. And when I talk, I move my hands in a way that looks like I am giving myself an erotic chest massage.

But readers have asked – insisted even – that we provide video instruction for things that are difficult to show with words and still photos. So I've swallowed my discomfort – hard.

For more than three months, Glen D. Huey and Drew DePenning filmed me as I was building the workbench shown on the cover of the August 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. Nothing was faked or set up for the cameras. It was just me working, Glen filming, me sweating and Glen chuckling.

In all, we recorded more than 40 hours of video, which Drew has been distilling into a compact narrative that explains in the most succinct terms possible how to build this bench using hand tools. We were able to greatly condense the story of building the bench by almost eliminating the "talking head" part of woodworking videos (a crime of which I am guilty on occasion).

Instead, most of the video is of me working with narration layered over the video. In film, narration is a "cheap plot device," according to one of my favorite film professors. But I think it works here.

In addition to the video, the DVD has some extras that you will find useful.

• There is the complete story from the August 2010 issue with the cutting list and construction drawings, plus two additional views of the leg joinery.

• An extensive slideshow that contains more than 80 images – many of them unpublished. This shows you nitty-gritty details in high resolution so you can study them.

• SketchUp files of the bench, plus two variants I worked on and a SketchUp file that shows you how I took Roubo's image of the leg and transformed it into a real working joint.

I am very not displeased with this DVD – my highest praise for my own video work.

As of today, the DVD is now in stock in our warehouse and is shipping. The DVD is $24.99.

If you are considering buying it, would you do me a favor and use this link? They track this stuff, and thanks to you guys, I won $100 in beer money, which I plan to share with the entire staff.

And speaking of beer, I think my chest massage thing could perhaps become a drinking game for you and your woodworking buddies. You have to drink anytime I'm treating my chest like an old-fashioned radio. Or anytime I say the word "unit."

As always, thanks for your support. It's why I still get to work here and am not the "detail sander" editor.

— Christopher Schwarz

At high school reunions there's always the guy you don't recognize because he's gained 200 pounds and is nursing a spectacular goiter. This workbench is like that.

Eagle-eyed reader Andrew Midkiff sent in these photos of a workbench he spotted in a water-powered grist mill at the West Point of the Eno City Park in Durham, N.C.

The top is a huge slab. But what confused me at first was that the legs are attached to the top using giant, round through-tenons.

After five years of whining, someone listened to (or became merely weary of) my complaints about the search function on this blog.

When I worked at a liquor bottling plant one summer, the bosses found out I was in college and decided to put me in charge of the robots.

I had to summon the robots from the warehouse, pick up an entire pallet of coffee liquor with a giant robot arm and load it on the little scurrying buggers.

Oh, I also forgot to mention something: I know nothing about robots.

I can make my own beef jerky, but that doesn't mean I want to apply veneer-making techniques to a hapless bovine.

So when I found out that long-time woodworker Bill Rittner was making knobs and totes for vintage Stanley planes, I jumped at buying a set for my vintage No. 6 fore plane.

The cutting list for the 'The Return of Roubo' workbench in the August 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine has a small error in the cutting list. And I'd like to quickly clarify a couple things about the construction drawing.

Sorry for all the bench posts. (Hey, that should be the name of this blog.) I have a lot of extra jetsam (or is it flotsam?) sitting around as I crank out my next book. Here's an awesome piece of detritus.

A couple years ago a reader sent me a cardboard box containing two unused pieces of bench hardware – and the instructions! – from the Mechanical Manufacturing Co. One piece of hardware, a bench clamp, is stamped as patent pending (but I can't find a patent for it). The other gizmo, one of 10 billion bench hooks patented between 1854 and 1920, received a patent in 1910.

Michigan engineer Len Hovarter has developed a new vise mechanism that looks more like a magic trick than bench hardware.

The vise hardware is patent pending and should be available in September, Hovarter says. This hardware is just so cool, that I wanted to share it with you now – in case you are planning on building a bench this fall. I've ordered a set of the hardware from Hovarter, so I'll be testing the stuff myself. Until the hardware becomes commercially available, we'll just have to enjoy these photos and a short movie.

We need more workbenches for Woodworking in America. The event, Oct. 1-3 here in the Cincinnati area, is by far bigger than the last three events we've held.

And me, I'm going a little stir crazy. I've spent the last three weeks writing the remaining chapters to a follow-up book to "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use." (While my first workbench book is like the Old Testament, this new book – tentatively titled "The Workbench Design Book" – will be the New Testament. But more on that topic later.)

In any case, I am not getting enough time in the shop. So yesterday evening I was excited when a neighbor summoned me to his shop and pulled open a cardboard box.

No matter how many times I've complained in the last five years, I have been unable to get our technical people to change the search function on this blog, which stinks.

So I'm taking matters into my own hands. It might be a little rough, but I've created a custom search through Google, which I will start embedding in my blog. This search will automatically use Google to search this blog, plus my personal blog at home, which is also dedicated to woodworking.

Let's hope this works.

— Christopher Schwarz

I've always resisted adding wheels or a mobile base to my workbenches. They can be complex, in the way of your feet and take some fiddling to engage and disengage.

So we've always put our benches up on furniture dollys when we needed to move them.

However, readers have pestered me for years now for ideas on how to make their benches mobile.

For many years I was happy with my Olson coping saw, which I bought from the now-vanished Aufdenkamp Hardware in 1996. The saw locked tight. It held the blade without rotating. And when armed with Olson-brand blades, the thing cut smoothly and quickly.

A few years ago, the saw began to tick me off.

This morning, Glen Huey, Megan Fitzpatrick and I went into rural Ohio to fetch some wood for a new workbench for Megan's study (it's long story; ask her).

Megan had scored some sweet Eastern white pine logs that were left over from building a log cabin; they were kiln dried, fairly clear and about 10 years old. All for $100. The only problem was that some were 17' long -- too long even for Glen's capacious lorry (as Megan would put it).

My latest DVD, "Build an 18th-century Workbench" is now available for pre-order in our store at a 15-percent discount until June 30 – $21.24 plus shipping.

As I was building the workbench that will be featured on the cover of the August 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine, Glen Huey and Drew DePenning spent hours in the shop filming the construction process during the three months I was working on the bench. (Note: I'm not slow. I just have a day job.)

Since I finished the bench, Drew has been condensing the footage into a short but information-packed video that shows the entire construction process from working the raw slabs of wood to mixing and applying the finish that I like to use on workbenches.

Until we get some sets of these chisels in-house, there's no way to answer all of our (or your) questions about these tools. However, thanks to Publisher Steve Shanesy, we now have more details from the Stanley press conference and – if you can stand it – a little speculation on my part at the end of the blog entry.

The Stanley Sweetheart chisels are, according to the company, aimed at the woodworking market.

"We are going back after the professional woodworking market," according to a Stanley official. "We want to compete with Lie-Nielsen and Veritas."

This is by request. And for me this is like showing you my basement. Did you see the pawn shop's basement in "Pulp Fiction?" It's like that – but without the Spandex, leather and shotguns.

A reader asked to see the angle-setting guide I use for setting my tools in my side-clamp honing guide when sharpening. It was featured (briefly) in the DVD "Handplane Basics" that we released late last year.

Before we get into details and philosophy, let me state that I know this jig isn't a new idea. And my version is junky blue-stained Eastern white pine. It is nothing like the sexy guide made by Deneb Puchalski at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. Heck, that thing has a leather thong. No lie.

Stanley Toolworks unveiled three new hand tools today at a press conference in New York City – two different kinds of chisels and a shoulder plane.

I couldn't attend the press conference, but Publisher Steve Shanesy is there (as I type this) taking photos with his phone. I don't have a lot of details yet, but here is the first look at the new Sweetheart socket chisels, which look like Stanley's venerable 750 tools (and Lie-Nielsen's).

People often divide our country into North and South using a variety of metrics. There's the Mason-Dixon line, of course. The Barbecue Line (the word means "grilled meat" in the North and "porky heaven" in the South). And so on.

I use the "Yellow Pine Line." This fantastic material is difficult to find in many Northern climes, except as pressure-treated nastiness. And in the South, the stuff is so common that it grows on trees.

I think it's an ideal workbench material. It's cheap. It's stable. It's stiff. It's easy to flatten. It's available in wide widths. So it should come as no surprise that I get e-mails like this one from Paul:

I live in Aurora, Ill., a western Chicago suburb. It does not appear to be a location friendly to the Southern Yellow Pine that you've prized in earlier articles.  Home Depot/Lowe's/Menards all stock, at best, SPF...so I don't really know what I'm getting.

So now, the question – how might I best obtain woods with the density/strength that you recommend – in a land like mine that seems very un-woodworking friendly?

One note – one of your articles on Southern Yellow Pine suggested that, if it can't be found, that we take the pickup truck down to Cincinnati. Unfortunately, that won't be a good option for my Ford Taurus these days (though it would be fun to do).

I've thought of just dealing with the SPF that Home Depot offers, but I am afraid that I'd be disappointed with it in a year. I'd like my bench to last five, 10, or more years.

Well the easy answer would be to use "SPF" which is a grab-bag category for "spruce, pine or fir." It's certainly strong enough, though usually it's a little soft. And some places don't dry it as well as necessary. But the good news here is that you are actually close to the "Yellow Line." You don't have to come to Cincinnati to get Southern Yellow Pine. In fact, I know of some people in Chicago who have found it in the city at lumberyards (if you are out there, please chime in with the name of the yard!).

Even if you cannot find it in the city, you should be able to sneak over the border to Indiana and find some. It's amazing how the wood choices can change radically by changing your geography slightly

And finally, let me repeat something that I've said about 100 times about workbench materials: Almost any wood will do. Pick something that is readily available, inexpensive, dry and stiff. You'll be fine.

— Christopher Schwarz

Other Workbench Resources I Recommend

• Tim Celeski's excellent workbench site: workbenchdesign.net.

• I actually still like my book "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use."

• We have a nice and inexpensive CD of many of the workbench and shop plans we've published "The Best of Shops & Workbenches."

• Watch Roy Underhill's episodes (free!) where he builds a French bench.

In the world of infill planes, there are several tools that stand out as iconic designs, including Karl Holtey's "bad arse" A13 and his groundbreaking No. 98, which laid the groundwork for all the modern bevel-up planes.

On this side of the Atlantic, few planes are as distinct as Stephen M. Thomas's "Loopy" infill. It started as a joke, way back in the early years of the Badger Pond discussion group (we didn't have WiFi, we didn't have Skype, we didn't have "air" – and we liked  it!).

Some days I forget that not all woodworking tools are designed by woodworkers (see: many of the honing guides on the market).

And I forget that some tools are just designed to trick your family members into buying them for you at Christmas (see also: the battery-operated tape measure and C-clamp).

This weekend as I was cleaning up the shop a bit, I started thinking about many of the odd, unnecessary or downright counterproductive features on tools and machinery. Here's my short list.

This week we received a visit from James Travis, who built what could be the most ornate sawbench.

Travis, who is in his early 20s, was traveling through Cincinnati on his way from Boston to San Antonio, Texas, and dropped by the shop. Travis recently completed the "Three-month Furniture Making Intensive" program at the North Bennet Street School in Boston and was headed back to Texas to set up shop as a furniture designer and craftsman.

This is the last post on Joseph Moxon's double-screw vise. Promise.

Wednesday morning while I was in the shower, my brain clicked. (Hey! twice in one month!) On Tuesday, Glen Huey and I were discussing how to make a double-screw vise without a wood-threading kit. He suggested bolts. I suggested pipe clamps. We left it at that.

Then, at 5:15 a.m., the lukewarm water of our shower brought on this idea: F-style clamps. Everyone has them. So I scurried off to work and immediately began fussing with some poplar at my bench. I had a rear jaw and chop already prepared for threading. The holes were drilled, and the blank for the handles was waiting on the lathe.

Instead I took the poplar parts to the table saw and milled a 1/4"-wide groove in the ends of the rear jaw and the chop. Each groove intersected a hole and was just wide enough to accept the bar of an F-style clamp.

I slid two short F-style-clamps into the grooves and filled in the grooves with some poplar scraps (purple poplar – my personal favorite).

Does this vise work? Heck yes. And later that day Glen and Robert Lang and I came up with some other ways we could do this without permanently installing the F-style clamps. (However, I prefer it this way.)

The best thing was that making this twin-screw vise took – at most – 30 minutes.

Perhaps I should shower more often.

— Christopher Schwarz

Other Workbench Resources You Might Enjoy

• "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use." Now in its third printing.

•  "The Best of Shops & Workbenches" CD from Popular Woodworking.

• "The Workbench: How to Design or Modify a Bench for Efficient Use DVD" from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks

The Skansen bench that I built for the April 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine has proved to be a popular project with readers. But if you like, you can do a better job of emulating the original than I did.

I built the project for our "I Can Do That" column, which features furniture you can build using basic tools and home-center materials. As a result, we sometimes have to make design changes to our projects because of the rules set down by the column.

In my DVD "Building Furniture With Hand Planes," we offer plans for a Shaker Hanging Cabinet, which is what I'm working on throughout the DVD.

However, as some viewers have pointed out, the plans on the DVD are for a cabinet with a solid-panel door. In the DVD, I'm building a divided-light door.

If you need plans and details for the divided-light door, I've posted a link below to download a dimensioned SketchUp drawing of the door that you can take apart and study. Now, some of you might be confused by how the mullions are put in. I use a technique taught to me by Glen D. Huey that is a huge time-saver.

Shaker_Cabinet_Door.zip (126.82 KB)

Earlier this year I met a fellow woodworker named Chuck Isaacson of Sun Prairie, Wisc., who broadcasts his wood shop on http://www.ustream.tv/channel/sac-s-woodshop. I was inspired and intrigued by how effortlessly Chuck got around his shop. He was able to move about in a way that most woodworkers would envy. The reason this stood out more than other woodworkers I have watched work in their shops is because Chuck is in a wheelchair.

Chuck was deployed in Afghanistan. On Feb. 18, 2007, in southern Afghanistan Chuck's life was forever changed. Chuck was then a sergeant in the U.S. Army and a flight engineer on a Chinook helicopter. With only days left on his tour, the helicopter he was riding in crashed due to winter weather. He wasn't scheduled to be on the flight but took it over for a friend who had injured his back and couldn't make the flight. After the crash, Chuck awoke to find himself sitting in the snow and not able to move his lower body.

If a sliding deadman and a crochet got married and had a baby (well, actually if they had a litter), it might look like the workbench of Jan C. Goris of St. Louis, Mo.

Goris's pine workbench is based on the French Roubo-style platform, but it has some modern workholding touches that are worth examining.

Joseph Moxon I could kiss your dessicated worm-eaten corpse.

My newest version of the double-screw vise illustrated in Moxon's "Mechanick Exercises" (1678) is a complete success. The vise is simple – five pieces of wood. And the only special equipment you need to build it is a wooden threadbox and tap (a $45 investment). And it takes only about an hour to construct.

Steam-bending wood is awesome, but I've never been a big fan of having a potential bomb in my house (or in the office). So I've worked at mastering cold-lamination bending, but I've found there's a lot of prep work (resawing, drum sanding, etc.), and the plastic resin glue is nasty stuff. It's the only glue that has ever gashed my arm.

So yesterday I pleased to see a big box propped up against my front door.

John Sindelar, who owns the most jaw-dropping, drool-inducing tool collection I've ever seen, is bringing a big chunk of it to our Woodworking in America show Oct. 1-3 in Cincinnati.

And here's the best part: The collection will be displayed (in a traveling trailer) that will be on the floor of the Marketplace. If you are registered for our event, then you will get to tour the collection. No extra charge. Nothing else to register for.

Adam Cherubini at a Lie-Nielsen Handtool Event in Philadelphia.

This Friday afternoon we throw open our doors to the public for the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event. This free event is free, and it also is free. If you've ever wanted to learn about hand tools, sharpening them and then putting them to use, this is a great opportunity.

However, this isn't just some free show with free admission.

Threading and tapping wood is fairly easy work, once you get your thread box set up.

When I started here at the magazine in 1996, we had a bunch of threading kits sitting on a shelf. Like the handplanes next to them, they looked great in the background for photographs, but they didn't see much work.

When I was assisting a woodworking class this April, a student asked why anyone would buy an infill plane. They are more expensive than a premium plane from Veritas or Lie-Nielsen, and perform at the same very high level.

"Well," I answered. "I build stuff by hand. When people occasionally buy my stuff it's expensive. So I believe in supporting people who build tools in the same way I build furniture."

Another student at the back of room put it better than I did:

This summer Lie-Nielsen Toolworks will release a DVD on the basic principles of using handsaws and backsaws. During the video, I quote the Bible, cut all sorts of joints and am constantly menaced by flies.

The dust collection on our shop's cabinet saw sucks. Let me re-phrase that. It doesn't suck. Zero suckage. Two holes. Tons of waiting.

We have a big cyclone dust -collection system. We have our cabinet saw hooked up at its base and in the basket guard. Still the dust tends to build up in the cabinet. (Note: It hasn't ever gotten as bad as when Glen D. Huey turned on his Unisaw and the blade wouldn't move because the dust had collected up to the arbor, stopping the motor.)

For me, this is like the day I first saw my name in the phone book. I am somebody.

This summer I'm teaching a three-day class at Roy Underhill's school, The Woodwright's School, in Pittsboro, N.C., conveniently located next to the City Tap room. The class will run Aug. 2-4 and will be on sawing.

This morning I added a coat of pitch black milk paint to my sack-back chair.

After you strain milk paint, it's a lot more like adding a colored wash than it is like painting. (It's funny how my wife doesn't even bother asking me what I want her old pantyhose for anymore.)

Early chairs – especially American ones – look best when they are painted.

Like any good woodworker who is in love with his or her raw material, I've tried to make stick chairs without painting them. Some chairs, such as two Welsh stick chairs I built six years ago, look pretty good to my eye without paint. But they don't look traditional. Their albino skin tone makes them look quite contemporary.

As the finish was drying yesterday on my double-screw vise, I took a few minutes to turn a new handle for my bench screw, which pierces my crochet (which sounds dirty, but isn't really).

When I was a young nerdling, I loved the video game "Ultima" – not because of the raping and the pillaging, but because you spent most of your time exploring a huge map of the world. Everyplace on the map that you had never been was pitch black, lightening up only when you stepped foot into the unknown.

I think that's one of the reasons I like woodworking. My best days in the shop are when I'm trying to master something for the first time, or I'm exploring something I saw in an old woodworking book that didn't make sense and left me in the dark.

Fair warning: I have little doubt that we will sell out our Woodworking in America conference Oct. 1-3 in Cincinnati. We already have more people registered than we did for our first conference in Berea, Ky., and we've only had registration open for two weeks.

It took a fetus to convince me to come to Cincinnati in 1996. But I don't think you need to resort to such drastic measures (and perhaps painful surgery) to get your family in the car and on the road to Cincinnati next weekend for the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event on June 4-5.

When most people think of Cincinnati, they think of the television show "WKRP," perhaps they think of the Reds and maybe even the odd stuff we call chili here. (Side note: This is the only town in America where you can tell a waitress you want a "three-way" and not get slapped.)

"When newspaper reporters write about this school, some of them write, 'And he builds chairs without using nails!' That's like saying: 'And he builds automobiles without using hamburger.'"

— Michael Dunbar, May 20, 2010

During my week at The Windsor Institute in Hampton, N.H., I've gotten a lot of questions from readers of the blog about the school, their equipment, their teaching methods and if my father is willing to switch teams (he's not).

Chair classes are like soap operas. There are long periods where everything is reasonable and rational. And those are punctuated by brief forays into the bizarre, unreal or macabre.

As we close in on assembling our sack back chairs this week, several things are becoming obvious. First: With every minute that passes you are out further on a tightrope over the falls. One small slip, and you could bring the whole thing crashing down.

Do you like the look of the strapping doctor in the plaid shirt above? That's my dad. Today he learned about the power of a blog, and he just asked me if I could use it to find him an attractive female companion.

Chair making is an equal-opportunity agonizer. After the first day of dealing with spindles and steam-bending, we came back to our beach-town bungalow (price $300 for the week!) and collapsed on the couches.

We each had a beer in hand and sat immobile for a good 30 minutes before we could get up the energy to scratch our noses. We were whupped like rented mules.

Green wood is a wacky thing. Yes, it can be easy to work. But don't fall for its easy-going nature. It's like a Type-A hippie chick.

Quick – it is time to make up a quick excuse to your boss to arrange a sham business trip to Cincinnati on June 4-5. On those two days we are going to open wide the doors of our office and shop and host a Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event.

(If you need ideas for how to trick your boss into traveling here, let me know. We have a wide variety of businesses here. Just say "Procter & Gamble," "Kroger" and "Macy's.")

Most American woodworkers struggle with bowsaws. Now before you think that bowsaws are tools for beret-wearing, Gitano-smoking woodworkers who eat espresso and croissants when on a break, think again.

This week I'll be taking a sack back Windsor chair class with maestro Michael Dunbar at The Windsor Institute, his school in Hampton, New Hampshire (a state my daughter has re-named "New Hampster").

This is my third chair class. I took my first one in Canada with David Fleming. My second class was with bodger Don Weber. And at long last, I have made it here for a class.

I'm starting to think that a bench crochet pierced by a screw is likely the great-grandpappy of the venerable shoulder vise – the favorite face vise of dovetailing demon Frank Klausz.

Sometimes I am so dense that it's a wonder that my parents ever allowed me to stop attending a Saturday school program for slow kids (true story).

Here's the nearly completed shot of the handmade Roubo workbench that will be on the cover of the August 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. The only thing missing is me showing off a bit more sun-deprived flesh and a non-Botox pout -- look for that post tomorrow.

I finished up work on the base configuration of this old-style Roubo workbench last night for a photo shoot today. But before I tore apart the shop and moved all of our workbenches around for the photographer, there was one last task to perform.

My psychological oddities include: A fear of being tackled by females in elf suits and enmity toward all birdhouses.

Perhaps my hostility to birdhouses springs from my days as a Cub Scout where I built too many of them. Heck I'm also still haunted by visions of milking a plywood cow with an udder made from a rubber glove and learning to wring a chicken's neck. (That is a great-looking merit badge, I tell you what.)

The woodworkers who are restoring the White Water Shaker Village are making significant progress – just in time for the Woodworking in America tour of the village on Oct. 3.

I thought I had a hammer-collecting problem until I met Scotty Fulton.

Fulton set me straight: 50 hammers is not much of a collection. Try 12,000 hammers – virtually all of them different, all of them carefully cataloged by his wife, Karen, and all of them displayed beautifully in his barn outside Maysville, Ky.

Now that is a hammer problem.

The subject of skew block planes gets people's bodily juices going.

When I announced at our weekly staff meeting that we had received a new skew block plane from Veritas, two of the editors who use primarily power tools sat up straight and said "Really!?" and "Cool!"

After many years of working here, I can reliably translate "power tool guy" language. (I also speak "drunk guy," "baby talk" and "agitated feline.") So here's a quick translation of "Veritas Skew Block Plane."

In the debate of round bench dogs vs. square bench dogs, I have tried to remain neutral.

But after years of working on both, I have decided to cast my lot in with the round dog camp. Here are a few reasons why:

If you ever decide to delve into traditional woodworking, you quickly learn that wedges are your friend.

Build chairs? You need to wedge all the joints. Traditional doors? Wedge your through-tenons. Workbenches? Wedge everything you can. But where do wedges come from?

For this Roubo workbench to work, I've got 16 joints that have to come together all at once. There is not an option to glue things up in stages and still guarantee success.

As a result, I tried to give myself some wiggle room.

If you've been trying to reach me during the last few weeks, I apologize. The answers to your questions are:

I love me some blue masking tape. I have at least four rolls of the stuff at my bench and use it for all sorts of tasks, from shimming a shooting board to stopping the flow of blood.

Yet, there is one common use of the tape that I dislike:

You know that you've been building a Roubo workbench when you chop a 1-1/4" wide, 4"-long and 3"-deep blind mortise and it's comically easy.

Today I'm getting back into the swing of things on this Roubo workbench. My goal is to have the stretchers dry-fit into the legs by the end of the week. There are several things that could get in my way.

I don't like adverbs – you know, words like "extremely," "fallaciously" or "throbbingly." But I am at a complete loss to otherwise describe the wack-nutty bendable wood that Jeff Miller showed me this weekend during the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Chicago.

The hardest part of ripping (besides the exertion) is making a square cut through the thickness of the work. It's fairly easy to follow your line when ripping, but it's also easy to make that cut at an angle, especially in thick stock.

After a couple of weeks of working with the legs for this new workbench, I am certain the material is not pine.

Yes, I know. Shocker. The good people at Home Depot were mistaken.

What is it? Heck if I know.

One of the goals of this latest bench is to build a piece with enough visual interest that you could put it in a dining room (think sideboard) or a living room (think table behind a couch).

I've added lots of details that I think will make this work in a living space (as well as a workshop), but there is one flourish I'm not so sure about. That's where you come in.

With Woodworking in America in our backyard this fall, we are going all out to show the attendees a good time in the greater Cincinnati area.

So we've planned several extracurricular activities for the attendees. All of these events below have a limited number of seats available and will be first-come, first-served (except the pub crawl). There will be a small added expense (except for the pub crawl) to cover transportation or food. We're not doing these to make money -- we're doing them because, uh, we really want to do these things during Woodworking in America and thought you might, too.

The Marketplace for this year's Woodworking in America conference is the deadliest ever. By deadly, I mean you better start saving your pennies and moving some money out of that Cayman Islands account. We already have more than 40 exhibitors confirmed for the show – with some more in the wings.

These are top-shelf manufacturers that make or sell woodworking equipment or provide instruction. There will be no purveyors of magic towels or wacky ladders. Just woodworking.

This year's Woodworking in America conference features 44 different classes taught by world-class instructors with lots of opportunity for you to get dusty, sweaty and skilled.

The April Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Chicago is starting to become a bit of a tradition. It's a great little show with some good exhibitors: Jameel Abraham from Benchcrafted, Ron Brese of Brese Planes, and John Economaki from Bridge City Tools.

Plus, I'll be there, as will Thomas Lie-Nielsen himself.

I'm thankful when I can see disaster coming. Being able to spot a potential problem is the gift of experience, but it is also like a tranquilizer dart used to take down a rabid African elephant.

Today I was cleaning up the sliding dovetail socket for the fourth and final leg of this French-style workbench. And the deeper I plunged with my router plane and chisel, the more concerned I became. What looked like a little punkiness on the underside of the benchtop was turning into a tumor worthy of "One Life to Live."

Some of the superstars of the period furniture world will gather June 25-27 at Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, located in Lancaster, Penn., for a long weekend of demonstrations and discussion.

So I'm mortising this benchtop this morning when I hit a patch of epoxy and bam! My chisel's helve split like a Twix bar. Dang, this epoxy is tough stuff.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. The above is a work of satire. Epoxy has neither the ability nor the ill will to damage your chisels. The Epoxy Institute claims – and I believe them because they advertise – that epoxy can be chiseled, sanded and makes a great addition to a RoTel dip. Go epoxy!

To modern eyes, old-school workbenches look like they are going to self-destruct.

The legs are tenoned into the benchtop (which moves with the seasons). And stretchers (that don't move) are tenoned into the legs. Something has to give, right? Otherwise your benchtop will be cleaved asunder, creating a "split-top Roubo" a la naturel.

After a little tweaking of the mortise, the first leg went in. You can see a gap at the shoulder (it's about 1/16" now). That's actually what's left of the rough underside of the top. I'll take down the middle hump on the underside and it should close right back up.

Assuming, that is, I can get the leg out of the mortise.

— Christopher Schwarz

I started cutting the mortises and the dovetail sockets in the benchtop today and I can tell you a few things:

Things I hate: Gouging my own eyes out with a spoon, and being pulled away from a project for more than a couple days.

The world needs more makers of new wooden handplanes, especially moulding planes. Vintage moulding planes can be testy in my experience. The narrow stocks can be twisted or bowed, the irons can be rusted to oblivion and many wedges need to be replaced.

If you read my article on Clark & Williams planemakers in the April 2010 issue, you probably concluded the same thing that I did: There are enough woodworkers out there to support another maker.

Inlay scares the pants off of some woodworkers, especially when it comes to producing original designs with curves.

So I was quite intrigued when Geoffrey Noden showed off a prototype tool at the Woodworking in America conference at Valley Forge. Noden is a highly accomplished woodworker and the inventor of the Noden Adjust-A-Bench.

Noden's new tool, called the Noden Inlay Razor, is impossibly clever and shows off his deep understanding of raw materials, his desire for unlimited creativity and a passion for making things simple.

I have some bad news. Yesterday at the Showcase put on by the Northeastern Woodworkers Association, I fell in with the wrong sort of people – again.

This week I'm working with Marc Adams on a series of articles for Popular Woodworking Magazine on veneer. Marc did all the work – I'm just editing and helping with the photos.

I hope these articles will convince many woodworkers to start working with veneer. Marc's series will explain all the simple tools and processes necessary to get started (you probably own all the tools). And the series will provide inspiration. Some of the most beautiful furniture in the world is made

Andrew Lunn at Eccentric Toolworks has resumed taking orders for his custom saws.

Let the whuppings and hand-wringing commence!

Last year Lunn stopped taking new orders so he could concentrate on eliminating his backlog of orders and figure out a pricing structure that would allow the former paramedic to make a living. This week, Lunn resumed taking orders and raised his base prices. A dovetail saw starts at $500.

I'm sad to announce that the world has lost another good saw sharpener.

Steve Cooke, 61, of York, Pa., died on March 17. Cooke was the founder of Cooke's Sharpening Service, which specialized in sharpening all forms of edge tools. But Cooke had a special place in his heart for saws, and he had an impressive collection.

In the pre-industrial age, it was fairly common to have your workshop inside your home. In fact, in many early American houses, rooms served several purposes and could be converted to another function by rearranging the furniture.

These days, most of us have dedicated shops. We surveyed our readers in 2005 on this question and found that 96 percent had a dedicated workshop space. Of those of us with shops:

• 42 percent have a garage shop
• 32 percent have a separate outbuilding (that's not a garage)
• 28 percent have a basement shop
• 5 percent have one in an "other location"
• 2 percent use a spare room in the house.

Note that the numbers add up to more than 100 percent because there is some overlap here (a basement garage shop, for example).

Recently, however, I've been getting a fair number of e-mail from readers who are woodworking without a dedicated shop space. Their solutions to the problem are novel and would seem familiar to an 18th-century woodworker. Let's take a look.

The Kitchen Shop
Jameel Alsalam lives in a one-room basement apartment with his girlfriend in Washington, D.C., and figured out how to make a functional workbench that also doubled as a dining table.

The dining bench is made from three 4" x 10" x 8' slabs of poplar he got free from his uncle. And while the top was fairly straightforward, the base was tricky. It had to support his workpieces and still be able to allow chairs to scoot in all around.

His solution was to use two stretchers down the middle of the top instead of stretchers along the long edges of the benchtop. The stretchers are joined with mortise-and-tenon joints and bench bolts.

"The end result is a dining table burly enough for Vikings to eat at, and it's rock solid for planing," Alsalam writes. "I think keeping the top flush with the side is gonna be tricky, but the main goal is accomplished: I can do woodworking, and my girlfriend hasn't left me."

The other key to Alsalam's success with this set-up is that he uses only hand tools at home. When he needs power equipment, he heads to the local adult education center.

"One time I made the mistake of trying a power sander, and suddenly I was wiping the sawdust off everything in my house," he writes. With hand tools, all I have to sweep up the shavings (I'm lucky to have a tile floor)."

A Blog for the Shopless
Kenneth Woodruff lives in a condo in the San Francisco area that has no space for storage or a shop. So for a year, Woodruff researched the craft to figure out a way to make things work in his condo.

And as he's gotten cranked up, he's found there are a lot of people out there just like him. So he started a blog that documents his efforts called Rough Wood. Visit the blog at http://roughwood.kennethwoodruff.com.

"Many people around the web are clamoring for ways around some basic issues: a reasonable bench, boring accurate holes without a drill press, hand planing on a tiny surface, not using a router in a tiny apartment," he writes. "Being shopless instills a need to innovate and overcome challenges that are often not present when you have a garage full of tools – and a father who introduced you to woodworking at a young age."

Some of the projects are definitely worth investigating, including a knockdown workbench that lives underneath his bed. Now he's working on a tool cabinet that will look as good as a piece of furniture.

We're planning another survey of our readers real soon, but until that comes around, take this quick poll about your shop.

— Christopher Schwarz

The BigWoodVise.com web site says that ordering is temporarily closed. I chatted via e-mail with Joe Comunale at Big Wood Vise to get the story.

Here's the good news: It's only a temporary thing.

Comunale, who works in the automotive industry, said his day job kicked into high gear after some layoffs. As a result, he's been traveling a lot on short notice and hasn't been home to make the ash vise screws, which won a Best New Tool award from us in 2009 and was featured on the LVL Workbench shown above.

He said things should return to normal in a few months. In the meantime, he decided to close ordering so he could fill his existing orders before taking on new business. If you have a vise screw on order, he's working on it.

— Christopher Schwarz

Several readers have asked about the sawhorses that my new benchtop is temporarily sitting on. We've had two pairs of these in the shop for about 14 years and featured them in a one-page article in the March 1997 issue of Popular Woodworking.

I scanned the page and you can download a pdf of the article here.

sawhorses.pdf (1.14 MB)

The sawhorses are quite handy. In their short form, they are 21" high, and are excellent for laying out cuts on rough lumber. We also assemble cabinets on them. They are a little high (for me) for handsawing. I want to lop 2" off the legs. That would be about right.

When you put the risers on them, they are 30"-high – just right for gluing up panels. We'll also put a door on top of them and use that as an assembly table or – in a pinch – as a dining table for a staff event.

There are a million plans out there for sawhorses. Here is #1,000,001.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.