Woodworking Magazine Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

 “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’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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, I have no dog in this fight

Whenever I demonstrate handsawing, someone usually asks this question: "Should you saw right on the knife line or next to your line?"

I answer: "It depends. Usually I split the knife line."

They usually respond with something like: "Yeah, and I'm a Chinese jet pilot."

So I show them. And now that we have a cool new macro lens at the magazine, I can show you, too. Above is the shoulder of a dovetail joint I cut this morning. The knife line at the edges was made with a cutting gauge.

I am not showing off. This is easy to do with a sharp saw and a little practice. Not years. Not months. It takes just a couple days, really.

Here's my advice: Practice. Don't practice on a real project. (There's a reason that surgeons practice on cadavers.) Practice on scrap. After a few hours of work you'll find it easy to follow a line. After a few more you'll cleave a knife line in twain.

Other sawing advice can be found in my treatise on sawing in the Spring 2008 issue.

— Christopher Schwarz


Looking for More Woodworking Information?
• Sign up for our newsletters to get free plans, techniques and reviews HERE.
• Looking for free articles from Woodworking Magazine? Click HERE.
• Like hand tools? Read all our online articles on hand work HERE.
• Want to subscribe to Woodworking Magazine? It's $19.96/year. Click HERE.

For the Lie-Nielsen fan who has everything, you might consider getting a Lie-Nielsen tattoo for the arm that pushes your bronze and ductile iron beauties.

Casual Lie-Nielsen fans can purchase the temporary tattoos Lie-Nielsen Toolworks sells at its web site ($5 for 10 of them). Or you can go all the way and get a permanent tattoo, like Rob Giovannetti of Illinois.

Giovannetti’s wife is an accomplished tattoo artist. He loves handplanes. And so the natural result was this tattoo on his right arm.

Giovannetti showed off his tattoo on his new blog, Cherry Creek Woodworks. Knowing him, this won’t be the last outrageous thing he does there.

And this isn’t the first tool tattoo I’ve seen. About five years ago, one of the demonstrators in the Festool booth at a trade show had Festool tattooed on his right forearm in the company’s bright green. The guy installed custom floors for a living. And if memory serves me right, he also had Festool emblazoned on his truck. And he even kept his firstborn in a Systainer for its first couple weeks of life. (OK, I made that last detail up.)

— Christopher Schwarz

This weekend we gave away our antique Arts & Crafts sideboard to some friends who have just bought a house and I installed the new Gustav Stickley 802 sideboard I’d built with the help of Harvey Ellis’s pen and German technology.

Like every other woodworking magazine, we’ve been heavily testing the Festool Domino since it arrived in early December. Senior Editor Glen Huey has built a number of traditional American projects using it. Senior Editor Robert Lang has been building a massive credenza that will go behind his workbench (it’s a long story, ask him). And Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick has even had her turn with the machine and is in the middle of building a medicine cabinet and mirror with the Domino.

And for my part, I’ve fiddled around with the thing quite a bit. I built a few picture frames for some artwork that has been languishing around the house. And I’ve built a couple cabinet doors. But my first real test of the machine was this summer as I built a Stickley 802 sideboard between bouts of traveling and teaching.

This was my first complex piece of casework with the Domino, and I was eager to get familiar with the machine but also cautious that I’d muck up a lot of good cherry in the name of trying out the new thing.

I’ll spare you any suspense: The Domino works as advertised. And considering its immense promise, that is an impressive feat. In competent hands, the Domino is capable of cutting joints with jaw-dropping speed and impressive strength. But note the qualifier: “In competent hands….” The Domino is only as smart as its user.

As I put the sideboard together, I was curious how much faster it would be to use this machine compared to cutting traditional mortise-and-tenon joints. Glen Huey estimates that the Domino is capable of trimming about 25 percent off the shop time of a typical casework project. As I put the base of the sideboard together, I thought Glen was dead-on right. The Domino moved effortlessly through the project. It cut offset joints with immense precision and little math. It made joints that were tighter than any biscuit joints. And because of the inherent holding ability of the ribbed beech Dominos, I had to use few clamps to get everything together.

With the case assembled, I braced the sideboard against my bench and used a jointer plane to remove a few shavings from the rear apron to get it flush to the legs.

Then the project went limp, like my youngest sister’s arm when she broke it while playing in our driveway. The Domino joints in the front apron had failed. But why?

I’d forgotten a cardinal rule of tenon design: A tenon should be two-thirds the width of the stock it emerges from. Because the Dominos were so tight and so dead-on, I’d used two of them in each joint in the front rail. I should have used three.

So I pulled apart the front of the carcase and cut additional joints. (Note: Try cutting mortises on a half-assembled carcase with a hollow-chisel mortiser. The portability of the Domino is one of its oft-overlooked wonders.) Then it was glue, clamps and an impatient and fitful evening. The next day I picked up at the same place I’d gone wrong. This time the Dominos held, which was absolutely no surprise at all.

This week I’m gearing up for some more furniture projects. My youngest daughter needs some bookshelves, and the friends with the new (read: empty) house need some shelves as well. And our living room has never had a decent coffee table. Ah, and the campaign chest I’ve been doodling is starting to tug at me.

And the Domino figures prominently in many of those plans.

— Christopher Schwarz

In general, I write about the best way to cut dovetails as much as I write about choosing the best religion. That is, not much. One of the reasons I avoid the topic of dovetails is that it gets far too much ink already.

One retired carpenter told me that cutting dovetails probably gets more ink than anything else in woodworking, followed by resawing on the band saw, tuning up your table saw and building the ultimate router table. Ugh, just typing that list of story topics makes me queasy.

The other reason I avoid the topic of dovetails is that I think the real “secret” to a good joint is so boring that readers would fall asleep if they had to read about it. Get your Red Bull energy drinks at the ready because here it is: Pick a method (they all work). Choose a set of tools (they are all valid). Cut the joint using those techniques and those tools and refuse to vary. Refuse to try much of anything new. Refuse to take shortcuts.

And then, according to a brilliant Chinese saying: “Practice 30 more years.”

I’m not a flashy dovetailer. I don’t use radical angles. I don’t cut really tiny pins. I don’t do fancy spacing to add “visual excitement.” I lay out the joint to make it easy to cut for my set of tools.

And after 14 years of practice (I’m almost halfway there!) here’s what I get: I almost never, ever have to pare the walls of the joint. My joints assemble with a little pounding of my fist on the first try. They are always tight enough that I don’t cringe when other woodworkers pull out my drawers. I never have to fill gaps with shims.

As I’ve worked, I’ve found a few tiny revelations that help me get better results with less fuss. I’m going to show you one of them tonight.

One of my biggest frustrations when dovetailing used to be crossing the baseline when chopping out the waste between my pins and tails with a chisel. You can’t just put the chisel in your baseline and pound down. The chisel will angle back and cross the baseline.

I don’t have this problem anymore, courtesy of my cutting gauge (I now use the Tite-Mark gauge from Glen-Drake Toolworks, before that I had a Japanese cutting gauge. They are the same tool, in essence.) After I lay out my tails or pins, I score the baseline in the waste areas deeply with the cutting gauge. Then I cut the joint.

After I chop close to my baseline with a chisel, I place the chisel tip in the baseline and flick the waste off. The deep score left by my cutting gauge leaves a small 1/32" rabbet of waste below the baseline (see the photo at top for what this looks like -- it's subtle). Then I can drop my chisel tip right against the baseline and pound down. About 99 percent of the time, I make a perfect and flat cut across the waste. About 1 percent of the time I undercut the joint. But that undercut is no big deal because the undercut occurs inside the joint where no one will see. The baseline is preserved in all cases.

Should you try this? I’ll leave that to you. If you use a cutting gauge and have trouble with crossing your baselines, I think it's worth a try. But don’t rush out and buy a Tite-Mark if  you are using a different kind of gauge and are pleased with it (this message is brought to you by WivesAgainstSchwarz.com).

There actually is one how-to story on the dovetail that I’m eager to write, but it’s the dovetail story that hasn’t ever been written (to my knowledge). It’s on the list of stories for upcoming issues of Woodworking Magazine, right after sawing, clamping and chiseling.

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor's note: Every few days I’m asked for a bibliography of the essential books for a woodworker who is interested in working with hand tools. I often dash off a list of books that are at the top of mind. Usually it’s five or six core titles with a few oddball ones thrown in that are probably the result of my diet.

So I’ve decided to codify this list and explain a bit of reasoning behind my choices. The first few books are home runs, things that shouldn’t be out of print ever (but sometimes are). One more thing: These aren’t books for a hand-tool purist. I blend machinery for the coarse operations with hand tools for the truing and finishing tasks. My reading list reflects this sensibility.

“The Essential Woodworker” by Robert Wearing

As Robert Wearing eases you into his book during the introduction, you will be both encouraged and alarmed. “The Essential Woodworker” is indeed a book on hand-tool basics and covers all the basic furniture-making tasks necessary to build tables, cabinets, doors and drawers. That’s the encouraging part.

What is alarming is that the stuff in “The Essential Woodworker” is material that is rarely covered in magazines, books or classes. In other words: This book is a good part of a nutritious diet in a world of Snickers bars.

“The Essential Woodworker” begins with a chapter on basic operations: sharpening, planing, sawing and boring. Wearing teaches his techniques mostly with hundreds of simple and clear line drawings, though there are a few black-and-white photos scattered throughout.

With the basic skills wrapped up, Wearing launches into a chapter on building tables and stools. Good choice. Tables are an excellent project for beginners. As Wearing introduces each essential skill, he shows you how to accomplish each task at the bench. This information is like a slice of fried gold. This book is the one that taught me how to clamp up a table base to my bench to work the aprons. It showed me how to size door parts without measuring. It taught me a better way to make hinge mortises that I still use today.

After mastering the table, Wearing moves onto basic carcase construction, with particular emphasis on dovetailing the carcase components and fabricating backs that are far more interesting than what you read about in most books. In other words, there is detail here that you just don’t find elsewhere.

Then Wearing finishes up with designing, building and fitting drawers. By the end of the book’s 160 pages I think I’d learned as much from this book as I’d learned from 10 other books purporting to “essential” for the hand-tool woodworker.

Are there any downsides to the book? Well, I think you can skip the parts about doweling carcases together, that’s a technique that I don’t cotton to (for all the effort required in doweling, I’d just dovetail it).

“The Essential Woodworker” is widely available. In addition to Amazon, check bookfinder.com, abebooks.com, powells.com and alibris.com to find a copy. I paid $8 for mine, you shouldn’t have to pay too much more.

— Christopher Schwarz

This week I begin a long-awaited project: A Russian workbench. Nah, I'm just messing with you. Now that I have fully exorcised the bench-building demon, I can move onto other long-awaited projects, such as the Gustav Stickley No. 802 Sideboard.

This Harvey Ellis-designed sideboard has long been a source of fascination for me. I first saw one (or one very much like it) in the home of a photographer friend. His weekends consisted of driving around poor neighborhoods in rural South Carolina and looking for Arts & Crafts masterpieces on people's porches.

You might not believe this, but he found quite a lot of them. He bought his Stickley sideboard for about $100 in 1990.

Now that furniture masterpieces like this cost a bit more, I'm going to build a version for myself. And, like every other woodworking editor drawing breath on the planet, I'm going to use the sexy new Festool Domino for the vast majority of the operations. The Domino will, I suspect, make several of the tricky operations in this project a snap, particularly joining the side panels and legs (no stopped grooves!) and joining the backsplash to the top (no screws or other wackiness). I am, of course, going to use hand-cut dovetails for the drawers. I have my limits when it comes to technology.

The plans for this sideboard come from Robert W. Lang's landmark "Shop Drawings for Craftsman Furniture." When I went through the plans with a fine comb last week, I was stumped by the way the drawers worked. The plans show the drawers using side-hung guides, and I remember this particular sideboard using a web frame.

So I went directly to the author of the book (he sits exactly 10 steps away from me), and he acknowledged that I could be right. So I'm reworking the guts a bit.

This project is going to be the first major project for my new Holtzapffel Workbench, so I'm going to be test-driving both the Domino and my own handiwork.

— Christopher Schwarz

Everything I know that is worth a darn was taught to me by someone else who knew their stuff – planing, sawing and all my machine skills came from other woodworkers to whom I owe a huge debt. I try pass this knowledge on to our readers in the magazine, but sometimes it's quite frustrating because of the limited space and the format – words and still photos. Showing someone face-to-face how to shoot an edge square is simple; telling them about it in words and pictures is a challenge.

That's why I'm particularly pleased to tell you that I'll be teaching a class May 8-12 at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking outside Indianapolis. In this five-day class we'll be exploring how to blend hand and power tools to add accuracy and speed to many woodworking operations. These techniques work. The cabinet on the cover of the newest issue was built in less than 20 hours of shop time. And I was proud to sign the work as my own.

Despite the bravado of my sentences above, I'm a bit humbled by this teaching job. If you browse around the list of instructors that Marc Adams hand picks, you'll see what I mean. Heck, there are about a dozen class at the school in 2006 that I want to enroll in. But I'm going to give this my all. I've put a lot of thought into a curriculum that ties together many of the threads and themes you've seen in Woodworking Magazine. For information about the details of the class, visit this page about the curriculum.

As a preview, here are objectives of the course. If you have any questions, you know that you can of course email or call me. I'll be happy to chat with you about it.

Course Goals & Objectives
Wielded correctly, hand tools can make your work faster, your joints tighter and your sanding chores almost non-existent. The key is to select the right tool for the job, set it up correctly and use it properly. In this class you will learn to blend hand tool and machine operations in a way that fully exploits the strengths of every tool and machine. During the five days we are going to focus heavily on the bench plane system, mortise-and-tenon joints, drawboring, wedging, nailing and some curved work. To learn all of the principles of this system, you'll build a traditional sawbench/mortising stool from longleaf pine that will – at the end of the class – unlock yet another frontier of woodworking for you to explore in your shop at home.

Woodworkers of all skill levels are welcome; the only prerequisite I ask is that you have very basic sharpening skills. In a nutshell, here is what we will be covering during our five days together:

• Understanding bench planes. How to set up a fore plane, jointer plane and smoothing plane properly. We'll cover proper blade shapes, how to use the tools in the correct order, when to switch from one tool to the next and the proper strokes to develop flat stock. You'll learn how to incorporate machine jointers and planers into our work with bench planes so that your stock is flatter than most machines can make it, and it does not require power sanding. We'll also cover sharpening and using card scrapers and the politics of hand sanding.

• Advanced bench plane techniques. You'll learn to flatten glued-up panels, plane frame-and-panel assembles in a smart manner (no need to learn to plane around corners), fine-fit cabinet components with your bench planes, make tapered cuts for door and drawer fitting, lengthen moulding, planing identical widths/thicknesses, edge-jointing and springing joints.

• Forgotten tools. You'll make your own drawbore pins and wedge-cutting sled, which will unlock two of the hot-rodding tricks used by traditional woodworkers that virtually eliminate the need for a shop full of clamps and downtime waiting for glue to dry. Plus, these two techniques produce joints that are mechanically superior.

• Mortise-and-tenon joinery. We explore the most fundamental joint in woodworking and learn to blend hand and power tools to make these joints extremely fast, fit like a glove and stronger than necessary. We'll explore five traditional methods for making mortises by hand and two that incorporate machinery.

• Sawing. With your sawbench complete, you'll learn to properly use a Western saw, which will unlock the next phase of your journey.

— Christopher Schwarz

Amerock's customer service department promptly responded to my question about its new Chinese-made hinges (to the company's credit, they didn't know the query was from a magazine editor and still responded within a few hours). There's good news and bad.

The bad news is that the company is indeed replacing its USA hinges with Chinese-made ones, shown above. And the company acknowledged that there have been some quality-control issues with the early batches. The good news is that Amerock is working on it and want to get it right. So it's still a good idea to check the hardware before you check out – look for tight barrel tolerances and smooth action. If the hinge feels wiggly, you might want to keep looking.

The other good news/bad news item: After seeing the photo, Amerock officials say my hinge is defective and should be returned to Rockler. Of course, the bad news is the hinge is kinda screwed to something already....

— Christopher Schwarz

In the first issue of Woodworking Magazine I wrote a half-page article titled "A Better Hinge" that sang the praises of the Amerock non-mortise hinges, which I have used for many years with great success. But today I'm considering withdrawing that recommendation.

During the summer I bought four of these hinges from my local Rockler for the cover project slated for issue 5. All the hinges were labeled the same, had the same price and were in the same bin at the store. When I unpacked them I noticed that two of them looked a little different. They were branded as Amerock but were labeled as "Made in China." The other two were labeled "Made in USA." Hmmmm.

After some debate, I decided to install both sets and see if there was any difference. It would be a fair test – same cabinet, same-size door, same wood, same installer.

I was not impressed with the Chinese-made hinges. The pin and barrel were unacceptably sloppy – one of them had almost an 1/8" gap between the barrel and the top of the hinge pin. The Chinese hinge wiggled on its pin. The tight tolerances that I loved on the USA Amerocks was gone. The door even has a cheesier feel when you open and shut it.

I've asked Amerock if the company is going to offer both lines of hinges or if it is going to discontinue the USA hinges. When I receive a response, I'll post it here. Until then, you might want to check your hinges before you pay for them and check the tolerances if they read "Made in China."

— Christopher Schwarz

One of the curious aspects of investigating drawboring has been the mystery surrounding antique drawbore pins. Almost all of the examples of pins I come across are big – too big for cabinet work, really. They would require a 3/8"-diameter peg, which would be bucky for most furniture. I do have set of boxwood-handles pins that will work with a 5/16"-diameter peg, and they look like drawbore pins shown in early sources.

I don't really have any answers here, but I do have some clues. Charles Hayward's classic "Woodwork Joints" spends a page (page 60) discussing drawboring but notes, "It is mostly used in carpentry and joinery as distinct from cabinet work." If that's true, it might explain why the pins are generally larger – they were being used for larger-scale sash work, entry doors, timber-framing and the like.

But earlier sources dug up by John Alexander seem to indicate that drawboring was indeed used in early American cabinetwork, and I'm told he has a forthcoming book that will discuss this in detail ("Make a Stool from a Tree: An Introduction to 17th Century New England Joinery," to be published jointly by Cambium and Astragal presses). So if early woodworkers didn't use steel drawbore pins to test-fit their joints, what did they use? Henry Mercer's "Ancient Carpenters Tools" is almost silent on the drawbore pin – it's mentioned only in the appendix and no examples of the pins are shown in the photographs. However, there is an intriguing photo on page 78 that shows "hook pins" or "drift hooks." These are tapered wooden pins with a flag-shaped top. Mercer states they were used for "test-pegging wooden framework."

Could early pins have been made of wood? I'm going to need to make some wooden pins from white oak to find out if they'll work, but I suspect they will indeed.

A couple other developments to note: If you're interested in trying out drawboring on a joint, try using a nail set if you don't own a drift pin or drawbore pin. Most nail sets work OK with 1/4"-diameter pegs. They taper a little quickly for my tastes, but they worked fine on a sample joint I tried yesterday.

Also, Joseph Moxon's 17th century text "Mechanick Exercises" specified using the width of a shilling to measure to offset in the holes for drawboring. I've found that an offset somewhere between 1/16" and 3/32" works great. To keep the tradition alive, I've been using a coin to measure my offsets. It turns out that a U.S. nickel is .072" thick (3/32" is .094") and is a very nice offset. A penny is .056" thick – and 1/16" is .063". Close enough! So use a nickel for heavy offsets and a penny for small ones.

— Christopher Schwarz