Woodworking Magazine Blog

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.)

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.")

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."

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Many woodworkers think it's bonkers to use a curved cutting edge in a jointer plane. After all, the plane is designed to make things straight and flat, so using a curved cutter seems ... let's say "counterintuitive."

"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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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:

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

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!)

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.

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!”

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

face_veneer_full.jpg (1.74 MB)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bottom line: I'd purchase this guard again.

— Christopher Schwarz 

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

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

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

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

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

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

That last concern was Megan's objection to LVL.

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

"This is LVL," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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I feel like a dirty English tool dealer this morning. But I’m OK with that.

Recently I purchased a bunch of brass-bound folding rules to give to co-workers and friends. Most of these were Stanley No. 62s, a common rule that I really like. If you want to know my favorite one, however, you’ll have to come to Cincinnati in May and fish it out of my tool cabinet.

In any case, the last folding rule I had left to give away was definitely an Alberto Fujimori (a former ruler). The scales on the outside were too dark to read. The scales on the inside of the rule were OK. The rule had cost only $1.76, so I wasn’t feeling overly shafted.

This folding rule was special because it had been used hard. The brass corners were worn from frequent use. One of the scales was charred a bit (that must have an interesting tale behind it). But despite the bad scales, its joints worked well and the rule had two of its three alignment pins intact – so it hadn’t been mistreated. Most folding rules are missing these pins, which keep all the components locked together when the rule is folded.

So I decided to try to restore this rule and see if I could turn it back into a nice piece of workshop equipment. British tool dealers have a bad reputation of taking beautifully patinated tools and wire brushing them into pupil-piercing brilliantness. I didn’t want to do that. So I started with a mild cleaning with mineral spirits and a toothbrush.

That did absolutely nothing.

So I consulted Philip E. Stanley’s book on folding rules ("A Source Book for Rule Collectors" – love the book, by the by). He recommends using Boraxo, a hand cleaner with lanolin. You can get it at home centers. It’s a bit gritty, smells like oranges and removes grease from your hands.

Here's the ruler after I treated one scale with Boraxo (at top). The other scale is untreated.

I cleaned one arm of the folding rule with the stuff last night and things began looking up. The paper towel got a brown skid-mark and the ruler got easier to read. However, Easter morning I woke up and (after making French toast and helping the kids find their eggs) I decided to do a little ruler resurrection. I was going to potentially throw my $1.76 down the metaphorical toilet.

I mixed up some wood bleach (oxalic acid). I like a solution of three tablespoons of powdered bleach with 16 ounces of hot water in a glass salsa jar. I use this bleach solution for removing iron stains when I steam-bend wood and then nail it (like when I make Shaker oval boxes).

Here's the ruler after I treated one scale with oxalic acid (at left). The right scale is untreated.

With rubber gloves on, I applied the bleach with a woven gray pad. Within a minute, the boxwood lightened considerably. But the ink on the rule stayed intact. Whew. I rinsed the rule in running water, allowed it to dry and applied two coats of wax.

Sorry tool collectors. You’re going to have to wait for another 50 years of patina before you can have this one. It’s going back to work.

— Christopher Schwarz

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A couple years ago I finally got to go to Winterthur, the DuPont's estate in Delaware that is a shrine to early American furniture. Right as our tour of the collection was about to begin, the docents segregated me from the gaggle of chattering blue-haired old ladies.

In retrospect, the docents were probably afraid I was going to mug them in the Marlboro Room.

In any case, it was a lucky turn of events. I and the two guys with me with were paired with our own personal docent for a tour. When she found out that two of us were furniture makers, she gave us little flashlights.

"I know your type," she said. "You're gonna crawl under the highboys."

And crawl like slugs we did. I learned a lot about casework that day, but the most lasting memory was getting to examine the sides of some of the grandest bonnet-top highboys I've ever seen. These were masterpieces of design. And yet, on almost all of them the side panels were split. Plus the panels would never pass muster in Ethan Allen. You could feel and see the regular scallops of the smoothing planes. Heck – the undulations were so regular and obvious that you could tell what width the craftsman's smoothing plane was.

And that was the most beautiful thing I saw all day.

Handplaned surfaces are not perfect. And thank goodness. They have a slight irregularity to them that I embrace. While it is entirely possible to tune a smoothing plane to produce a surface that looks like a machine dressed it (I'll do it at shows to impress the power-tool guys), that's not my goal. I aim to remove tear-out but to leave my mark.

So what does this look like?

Close up, it looks like crap. The photos above show every little detail of my work on a tabletop of the server I'm trying to complete this week. You can see how I angled my plane to begin my stroke, which reduces chatter at the beginning of a pass. You can see evidence of toolmarks everywhere when you get close enough.

When this top gets a finish on it (oil followed by lacquer), these hallmarks will become less obvious, but they will still be there for someone who knows how to look. For me, they are as telling about my work as my name that I'm going to stamp on the leg.

— Christopher Schwarz

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If we haven't yet convinced you to abandon your family/job/comfortable retirement and head to Cincinnati on May 16-17, I hope this blog post will help you come to your senses. That weekend is the free Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event here at our magazine's editorial office.

But it's not just going to be me and Thomas Lie-Nielsen cooking weenies and shooting the shinola about bedding angles. The local chapter of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers (SAPFM) has volunteered to give free demonstrations during the two days on a variety of topics. Here is the schedule:
 
Saturday, May 16            
Time    Demonstrator        Topic           
noon      Robert Crouse        Hollows & Rounds    
1 p.m.    Dave Heyer           Carving Acanthus leaves on a period chair
2 p.m.    Charles Murray     Bench Planes    
3 p.m.    Dan Reahard       Carving Fluted Quarter Columns
4 p.m.    Donna Hill            Inlay: Preparing Inlays and Sandshading
5 p.m.    Bob Compton
             & Jim Crammond    Chairmaking: Windsors
            
Sunday, May 17
Time    Demonstrator        Topic           
10 a.m. Mark Arnold           Inlay & banding    
noon     George Walker        Scratch beader    
2 p.m.   Donna Hill              Inlay: Preparing Inlays and Sandshading
4 p.m.   George Walker       Design: Incorporating Ornament in a Design

And lest you forget, we'll also have other toolmakers in addition to Lie-Nielsen at the event, both showing off their wares and showing you how to use them (the real heart of these events, I might add).

John Economaki of Bridge City Tools. See the Jointmaker Pro (which we awarded a Best New Tool of 2008 award) in action.

Ron Hock of Hock Tools. Ron is a long-time bladesmith who is extremely knowledgeable about steels and sharpening. Ask him about his forthcoming book on sharpening tools.

Kevin Drake of Glen-Drake Tool Works. Kevin builds my favorite marking gauge of all time (the Tite-Mark), plus other thoughtful tools, including chisel hammers, plane hammers and the thought-provoking double-handled dovetail saw.

Ron Brese of Brese Planes. Ron makes incredible infill handplanes at down-to-earth prices. If you're in the market for an infill, he's should definitely be on your short list.

Bob Zajicek of Czeck Edge Hand Tool will be showing off his wares. He makes fantastic marking knives, awls and other tools.

Jameel Abraham of Benchcrafted will be showing his awesome wagon vise, plus I hear he has a new product in the works that is very interesting.

Need ideas for things for your family to do while you are enjoying yourself? Click here.

Again, you don't have to register. The event is free. Give up your will.

— Christopher Schwarz

In my kindergarten class, someone was snitching cookies from the lunchboxes of the rest of the class. (Spoiler alert: It was the fat kid.) While the teacher's investigation was ongoing, she gave us a speech that I still remember.

"I once had a student who stole cookies," she said. "Then he stole lunch money. Then he stole money from his parent's wallets…."

Long pause. "Then he robbed a gas station."

If you are still in the "smoothing plane" (stealing cookies) stage of your slide into handtools, let me give you a peek at some of bad deeds you'll be committing against your family's checkbook in the years ahead. First stop: plow planes.

Plow planes make grooves in the edges and faces of stock, which is great for frame-and-panel work. They also can be adjusted to make the tongue on a tongue-and-groove joint. And they are great for wasting away stock when you are making decorative moulding with moulding planes.

There are many different kids of plow planes, but I think there really are two families: the wooden plows and the metal plows. And their differences are in more than the raw materials used to make them.

Because that's the most obvious difference, however, let's start there.

Metal vs. Wooden Bodies
If you're buying a used plow, the metal ones are usually in better shape than the wooden ones. And the metal ones can usually be resurrected a little more easily. That's because the wooden body of a plow can warp (very difficult to fix), and the wooden wedge that secures the iron can be frozen in its mortise or can be so modified that it is useless.

That said, I always prefer a wooden grip on a plane, so the metal grips aren't my favorite. Heck I've thought about wrapping some friction tape around the handles to improve the feedback.

Where the Shavings Go
In use, the biggest difference for me is where each tool's shavings go. On the metal plows, the shavings eject into the fence and the user's hand. This is annoying because many times the shavings bunch up like a wad of toilet paper in the fence and you have to stop your work and clear things out.

On the wooden plows, the shavings are ejected away from the user and onto the benchtop. I have yet to find a disadvantage to this way of work – except that you have to sweep off your bench once in a while.

About that Fence
The fence on a metal plow is usually secured with two thumbscrews. Because of the tight tolerances when the tool is made, it's usually simple for the user to get the fence parallel to the tool's skate – a critical detail.

With wooden plows, it's all over the map. Fences can be fantastic or one step above semi-adjustable firewood. The bridle mechanism on my D.L. Barrett & Sons plow is perfection. It's better than a metal plow. One thumbscrew locks everything, and it's always parallel to the skate.

However, most of the wooden plows you'll find have two wooden screws that adjust the fence (or sometimes wedges do the job). With the two wooden screws, it's a bit more of a hassle to get things parallel. Plus, sometimes these screws are damaged beyond saving.

Different Depth Stops
On a metal plow, the depth stop is on the side of the skate that is opposite the fence. On the wooden plow, the depth stop is between the fence and skate. I haven't found either to be troublesome, but you do have to pay attention to your work. You don’t want to waste away part of the wood that you are going to need your depth stop to contact on a later cut.

I work with both tools and find that they both do everything a woodworker needs. The choice of tool comes down to:

• How much you can spend
• What is available in your area
• How much work you want to put into the tool
• And which form makes you drive by Texaco stations that aren't on your way home.

— Christopher Schwarz  

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Last month I got to visit Roy Underhill's new school in Pittsboro, N.C. (read about my visit here). One of the coolest parts of the visit was getting to try out his foot-powered table saw and grinder.

I've used a spring-pole lathe before while building greenwood chairs, but I'd never used a treadle-powered table saw. It was a humbling experience (crow begins here).

The correct rhythm is slow and steady. As you can hear in the video, it sounds like I'm trying to square dance while smashing cockroaches. Yet, the saw still cut fairly well until the end of the cut.

As I was using the saw, I couldn't help but ponder its similarities to the Bridge City JointMaker Pro, which uses meat power to make your cuts. The major difference between these two machines is that the treadle saw can do long rips (there's a crank that a helper monkey turns). The cut on the treadle saw is pretty good, but nothing like the glassy smooth surface left by the JointMaker.

Roy shot this short video. I'm just grateful he didn't shoot video of me using his grinder. That was humiliating.

— Christopher Schwarz


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I've seen better workbenches in prisons. Really.

And that's not a criticism of the more than 100 woodworkers (and their spouses) who entered our "Most Pathetic Workbench Contest." In truth, it's high praise. Many of the entrants also included photos of the projects they completed on their "benches."

As I've said 100 times, you don't need a good workbench to do great work. However, it does help make things easier. And that's why we put together our "Shops and Workbenches" CD of 62 of our favorite articles on building benches, setting up your shop and filling it with the jigs you need. (You can see a slideshow of the contents of our $15 CD here.)

All of the seven winners in this blog entry will win the new CD. And one – our grand-prize winner – will receive the CD, plus an autographed copy of my 2007 book "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use." Plus an autographed copy of Robert W. Lang's "Build the 21st Century Workbench" DVD.

So without further blathering, here are the runners-up and some comments on them. (The big winner is the last one.)

Jesse's Triple-Pallet Dungeon Bench
We had several entrants that were cobbled together from a pallet. But Jesse used three pallets. Also, several staff members liked the crypt-like atmosphere. We had to do some serious Photoshop work to get a good look at the photo.

Your Favorite Neighbor's Workbench
This is just one of Kevin's benches (he has a nicer one on the wall), but this one has the best base. I want to build my next deck with this guy.

It's a Bench. It's a Boat. It's Garbage.
Kyle's bench is a bit lightweight. And that was a good thing. When Hurricane Ike hit, Kyle's shop filled with 6' of water and his bench floated through the disaster. Sadly, his bench succumbed to mold and had to be pitched.

I Guess Cardboard Was Wood at One Time
This bench (sent in by the spouse) is used for working both wood and clay. Phyllis explained that it's quite tidy because it's in their two-bedroom apartment. The boxes are both a work surface and tool storage.

The World is Your Bench
Eric works overseas (follow his blog at adventuresinwoodworking.com), and I'm always amazed at what he does with what he has. My favorite is the "balcony bench." This one probably won't shimmy.

The Highest Number of Pathetic Benches
Travis misunderstood the contest, I think. We were looking for one pathetic bench. He has six of them. The washer-dryer bench. The log-shaped bench hook. The log-shaped planing stop. The garbage-can twin assembly tables. And the thing that looks like a small mammal.

The Self-cleaning Bench
This is the grand-prize winner. What clinched it for me was the vise. Clearly, Roger is in it for the long haul with this bench and needs our help. Some of the staff questioned if this was a real bench. Perhaps it was staged. Roger said he cleaned the bench right before the photo by simply lifting the top and sliding its contents to the garbage. Congratulations Roger. Once you get your prizes, you're on the hook to build a bench.

Next week we'll post a slideshow of the rest of the entrants. Did your spouse enter your bench in our contest? You'll have to wait and see.

— Christopher Schwarz

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My grandfather’s folding rule reads from right to left, while my tape measure reads from left to right. I never thought much about it, though I always did like using my folding rule when measuring the distance between the table saw’s rip fence and the blade because of this characteristic.

Then last week a reader pointed out that a new folding ruler from Holland reads from left to right – like a modern tape measure. Argh. It was a mystery that only a tool collector could unravel.

So I picked up a copy of “A Sourcebook for Rule Collectors” (Astragal Press) by Philip E. Stanley. What a delightful geek-fest. I have been consuming the thing all evening. (I even got a little chicken piccata on the cover, which explains its lemony-fresh smell.)

If you are even mildly interested in the history of measurement, this 286-page book will delight you. Not only does the book cover the different kinds of rules (carriagemaker’s rules, gear rules, glazier’s rules), it also discusses in detail how they were made. (It’s a very involved process.) And there are interesting articles on the origin of historical measurement systems, including the European units of length before the metric system.

But does the book have the answer to the question? An article by Kenneth D. Roberts in the book has this to say:

“A peculiar difference between American and English folding rules is that the former read from right to left; whereas the latter read from left to right. No known authoritative explanation has yet to be found to account for this difference. It is suggested that it was simply a matter of custom, similar to driving on different sides of the road.”

Another writer in the book notes that some English rules read from right to left.

So really, this is one for Leonard Nimoy to figure out.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Because of my unholy obsession with interest in workbenches, people send me photos of the beautiful benches they've built. They're like baby photos, and I keep them all.

Sometimes, these kind souls also send me photos of what they were working on before they built their dream bench. I've seen hollow-core doors on plastic sawhorses. A changing table converted to a workbench. A sorrowful stack of cinderblocks.

There have to be some even more pathetic workbenches out there, and we decided to hold a contest to find the photo of the lamest woodworking bench ever. The "winner" of our contest will receive all the resources he or she needs to design a first-class workbench, including:

1. A copy of our new "The Best of Shops & Workbenches" CD that contains plans for 10 workbenches, plus 11 of our best articles from the last 10 years on setting up shop and plans for 37 jigs and toolboxes. This CD, which arrived in our warehouse last week, is just $15 and contains our best writing on workshop issues. The CD is fully searchable and printable.

2. An autographed copy of my 2007 book "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use." This book walks you through the design process for any workbench and helps you pick the workholding you need and discard the features you'll never use. Plus, it includes plans for two nearly vanished workbenches, including my French Roubo-style bench. It's a $30 value.

3. An autographed copy of Robert W. Lang's "Build the 21st Century Workbench" DVD. This hour-long video shows you how Lang designed and built the bench that he now uses in the shop at Woodworking Magazine. The DVD also contains a digital SketchUp model of the bench, slideshows of its construction and additional printable drawings. It's a $20 value.

Here's what you have to do to win. Take a photo of your workbench. It has to obviously be a working bench – don't try to fool us by taking pictures of a card table. E-mail it to me at chris.schwarz@fwmedia.com with the subject line "My Pathetic Workbench" before midnight on Monday, March 23, 2009.

The editors will review all the entries and pick the one that we think is the saddest, most pathetic workbench. We'll announce the "winner" in our March 25 e-mail newsletter (and here on the blog).

We'll also publish a rogues' gallery of the winner and the runners-up (don't worry, no names will be used) plus the judges' comments on your entry.

This could be just the excuse you need to get off your duff and design your dream bench. So fire up the camera and good luck!

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. That "workbench" at the top of this entry? That's Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick's bench at home. It's the kitchen table from her house as a child. Megan, however qualified, is not eligible to win this contest.

Sometimes with woodworking, what seems crazy one day can be quite sensible the next.

I distinctly remember reading in the late 1990s a manuscript from an author who was building some Morris chairs. He used an 8'-long beam compass to lay out the shallow curves on the chairs' stretchers and had to enlist his sons to help him strike the arc.

Fellow editor David Thiel and I chuckled about that detail when we read it. It seemed like a lot of trouble for a shallow curve that we would strike using a flexible piece of thin hardwood and a couple nails.

But this week I'm not laughing anymore.

This week I'm building a Stickley sideboard for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine, and one of the prominent features of the piece is a shallow curve on the front rail. When I built the prototype of the project I used the flexible-stick-and-nails approach to lay out the curve.

After staring at that curve for many months on the prototype, it bugs me. It's not a perfect arc. It's a subtle thing, but I think the arc is a little flat.

So yesterday I built a monster beam compass that was more than 4' long. The beam itself is 1/2" x 1". At one end I drove a #8 x 2" screw through the beam. At the other end I drilled a 1/4"-diameter hole. Then I whittled a pencil to fit snugly in that hole. (Good luck trying to find the right drill bit to fit a standard pencil. Are pencils metric?)

I drove the screw into my benchtop just a tad then secured my sideboard's stretcher to the bench with a holdfast. I struck the arc then cut it out. It's perfect.

What's next? Am I doomed to build a jig that holds too-thick biscuits so I can sand them to perfect thickness? Am I going to build a router table with a micrometer built into the fence?

Shoot me if I do.

— Christopher Schwarz

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For all the girls I’ve maimed before: I’m sorry.

Though I have fairly good hand skills, my feet skills on the dance floor are murderous. When I dance, most people look for a wooden spoon in order to help me through my grand mal seizure.

So it should come as no surprise that woodworking machines powered by feet should be a challenge for me. I first started working on treadle machines when I took a chairmaking class in Canada. We turned all the spindles on a springpole lathe. And it took me an entire day to get the rhythm to actually work a chunk of ash into something round.

This week I went to visit Roy Underhill and he let me work on two of his foot-powered machines: a Graves treadle-powered table saw and a treadle grindstone.

The saw is something special. I want one, though it’s doubtful I’d ever be able to get my feets on one. You pump the treadle, which turns a flywheel, which spins the blade. You adjust the height of the blade by raising and lowering the table. You make crosscuts with a miter gauge in a miter slot.

Rips are a little different. One person turns a crank (included!) to spin the blade. A second person guides the stuff through the blade. There is a rip fence that locks into a second slot.

Roy Underhill had no problem crosscutting stuff time after time. The blade never slowed. The cuts were clean. His rhythm was slow and steady.

For me, it was like a spastic weasel pumping a Nordic Trac. Too fast. And then the thing stalled. After a few tries… it got worse.

Underhill kept saying, “It took me a whole day to get the hang of it.”

Liar.

Then we went out and played with his treadle-powered grindstone. Underhill sharpened a chisel in about a minute. Then he let me try – in front of the entire hamlet of Pittsboro, N.C. Again, my feet kept getting tangled up in themselves. I couldn’t get more than two seconds of grinding before my legs looked like something at the Auntie Anne’s pretzel counter.

Underhill kept saying, “I need to tighten up those pedals. That would make it easier.”

Again, Underhill is an excellent liar.

I think I should stick with hand tools. Foot tools are just beyond me.

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor’s note: Joel Moskowitz is the owner of ToolsforWorkingWood.com, a long-time woodworker, tool collector and book collector. He has the largest woodworking library I’ve ever encountered. During the last few weeks, the magazine’s staff has been asking people for their lists of favorite woodworking books. The results have been very interesting – we’ve even encountered a few books we’re not aware of.

Below is Joel’s list. Well, actually a couple lists. Joel’s an over-achiever.

— Christopher Schwarz

Woodworking Books in Print

Here are some book lists. I know the second I send this off, I will think of other titles that should be included. It’s hard to limit yourself to 10 or 20 “Must Have Titles” on anything. Because I love books, I have hundreds of books in my collection. Some are a learning experience on every page, some are useless but popular in their day, and others are beautiful to look at, but turgid to read. The books listed below are at least a good place for anyone to start. I prefer information that isn’t dumbed down, so my favorites mostly are books that try to talk to me like an adult, expect I’m not an idiot and are comprehensive in professional technique.

This first list is of stuff in print that we mostly stock at ToolsforWorkingWood.com and I recommend to everyone.

"Whittling and Woodcarving" by E. J. Tangerman. My first book on woodworking and still one of my favorites. Best of all: Lots of the samples of carving come from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are still on exhibit.

"The Encyclopedia of Furniture Making" by Ernest Joyce. I have an older edition but it’s a great overall resource on different approaches to making furniture the modern way. Great for figuring out the details of a design; that is, how to do stuff.

"Woodcarving Tools, Materials & Equipment (New Edition), Vol. 1" by Chris Pye. Pye is a great writer and a master carver. The book is a wonderful read, inspiring and systematic.

"The Marquetry Course" by Jack Metcalfe and John Apps. The best book on learning marquetry that’s in print at the moment.

"Modern Practical Joinery" by George Ellis. I recommend this book for anyone doing restoration on architectural woodworking. Not as good as Hasluck, but at least it’s in print.

"Modern Cabinet Work" by Percy A. Wells & John Hooper. A recent reprint; it’s not as good as Bernard Jones, but it’s worth having.

"Dictionary of Woodworking Tools" by R. A. Salaman. Anyone who is even remotely interested in tools should have this book.

"Illustrated Cabinetmaking" by Bill Hylton. A (relatively) new book. I think the drawings are great and it covers a lot of modern-built stuff.

"Japanese Woodworking Tools" by Toshio Odate. The only book on Japanese tools in English worth having. It’s a classic. It explains tons of stuff, and I’ve had a hardcover edition since it came out.

"How to Construct Rietveld Furniture" by Reter Drijver and Johannes Niemeijer. If you like modern furniture that’s easy to build, you can’t go wrong here. It features 1920s modern furniture from the original drawings of a great designer. Simple, classic stuff. The stuff is a lot more comfortable than it looks.

Out of Print and Odd Books

The following books are out of print or expensive, but I think they are some of the best around for their respective subjects. I’ve left off a lot of favorites that are better known, such as Andre Roubo’s works, and included books that I found important to me – even if they’re not directly woodworking related. (I could generate another, different list: the most important books in the history of woodworking. And another list: the most important books on historical woodworking practice.)

"Building the Georgian City" by James Ayres. A tour-de-force that puts the entire construction and woodworking of the period in context.

"China at Work" by Rudolf P. Hommel. Really interesting from an anthropological point of view.

"The Complete Woodworker, Vol. 1" and "The Practical Woodworker, Vol. 2" by Bernard Jones. Probably the best books on hand tool practice out there. A recent reprint is out of print, but easy to get. Volume 1 is essential. Volume 2 is nice to have.

"Notes from the Turning Shop" and "Further Notes from the Turning Shop" by Bill Jones. Fun-to-read books that are very inspiring and can teach you a lot about getting stuff done. Jones is the last of the professional ivory turners and knows what he is doing.

"The Woodwright’s Shop" by Roy Underhill. Roy was a big inspiration for me.

"Marquetry" by Pierre Ramond. A fabulous book on marquetry. Not a great book for beginners, but it features tons of how-to details on advanced subjects.

"Watchmaking" by George Daniels. One of the best books on craft ever written. It makes you want to build a watch.

"Carpentry and Joinery" by Paul Hasluck. The best book ever written on architectural woodworking.

"Woodwork Joints," "Tools for Woodwork," "Carpentry for Beginners," "Cabinetry for Beginners," "Antique or Fake?" and "English Period Furniture" by Charles H. Hayward. Everything by Hayward is worth reading. These books are the core of everything you need to know about woodworking.

"Adventures in Wood Finishing" by George Frank. Well, it doesn’t really belong on this list but I enjoy reading and rereading this book all the time.

"Memories of a Sheffield Toolmaker" by Ashley Iles. Interesting historically, and especially inspirational and helpful if you are yourself starting a small business.

"The Museum of Early American Tools," "A Reverence for Wood," and "Diary of an Early American Boy" by Eric Sloane. These books were very informative and helped kick off my interest in history and woodworking when I was a boy, and they’re still engaging today. Wonderfully illustrated.

"In Praise Of Shadows" by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki. I first read this book when I was in my 20s and thought it xenophobic, but when I met Toshio Odate many years later he said I should reread it. I did, and I think it is one of the greatest written appreciations of craft and how it calms our lives that there is.

— Joel Moskowitz

This week I’m at my father’s house in Charleston, S.C., to get my USRDA of grits, tasso and shrimp. Whenever I visit the Holy City, I always make sure to pack comfortable shoes and a tape measure – I never know what I’ll find.

This morning I’ve been poring over my father’s small collection of English chests. Most of them he purchased from dealers on King Street a few blocks away. When I helped him pick these chests out, I was always looking for the ones that displayed the best craftsmanship. These well-made chests, however, weren’t always the best-looking chests. So usually he purchased a chest that looked really good and was passable in the craftsmanship department. Funny, he doesn’t take me with him to shop for antiques anymore.

One of the chests in father’s dining room is similar to a piece I’ll be building at home this year. The chest is circa 1810, according a friend of my father who deals in Early American architecture and furnishings. It has some interesting details from the woodworking side of things.

The chest is a typical size: 39-1/8" high, 37-5/8" long and 19-1/4" deep with four graduated drawers: 5-1/4", 6-3/4", 7-3/4" and 8-3/4". The entire chest is pine that has been veneered with mahogany.

The top is an interesting construction. The front 4-1/2" of the top is 7/8" thick. The rest is 3/4" thick. I assume that the 7/8" piece is edge-glued to the 3/4" piece – at least that’s the way it looks.

As always, the drawers are interesting. The sides and back are all 3/8"-thick material. The front is 3/4" pine veneered with mahogany (with some string inlay). Each drawer has a tail at its bottom edge that is straight instead of sloped. This straight tail houses the groove for the drawer’s bottom. Like all my dad’s English chests, the bottom of the drawer sides have been reinforced with small strips of wood to effectively double the thickness of the drawer side under the bottom.

The drawers in this chest run on solid dividers – no web frames in this chest. The back is four wide boards of pine in a rabbet. No shiplaps or grooves as far as I can tell – the backs have shrunk a bit, and you can see between them.

I really like the flowing lines of the plinth (they are repeated on the sides) and want to trace them before I leave. I’ll have to keep my eye peeled for some wide butcher’s paper in town.

— Christopher Schwarz

The afternoon is quickly fading to evening in Roy Underhill’s shop in Pittsboro, N.C. And as the shadows across the workbenches grow longer from the windows facing Hillsoboro Street, Underhill announces he is going outside to do some sharpening.

He pulls a foot-powered grindstone out onto the sidewalk and fetches a coffee cup filled with water to drip on the stone. And as the evening car traffic builds in the street, he cranks the stone and sharpens a wide firmer chisel.

About 30 seconds into the job a mother and her toddler wander up to the grindstone. The little boy stares intently at Underhill as he grinds a new bevel on the chisel. Then Underhill stops and looks up – not at the mother, but at the boy.

“This is sandstone,” he tells the boy, as if he’s addressing an adult. “I use it to sharpen things like scissors. Or maybe an axe so I can chop down a tree.”

The boy says it must be hard – really hard – to sharpen. Underhill just smiles.

That’s because if Underhill’s plan works, his latest endeavor will make it easier for the next generation to enjoy hand-tool woodworking.

“This is not about the past,” Underhill says, his arms spread wide toward the 10 beech European workbenches lined up on his shop’s floor. “Well yes, of course it’s about the past in one sense. But it’s really about the future. The objective is the future.”

Then he pauses for a moment, and you know that something important is coming.

“If you have a hobby,” he says, “why not make it an ethical one – as opposed to one that is noise-making, planet-damaging and waistline-expanding?”

Roy Underhill, host of “The Woodwright’s Shop” TV show, has opened a woodworking school in the small but artistically inclined town of Pittsboro, N.C. The hamlet of about 2,500 is right outside the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle and is a nice assemblage of tidy old homes and active storefronts.

Next door to Underhill’s place, called The Woodwright’s School, there’s an ice cream parlor. Unofficially they have the best chocolate malts ever. To the rear of the school is a cozy bar that serves Red Oak, a locally brewed beer. Plus, there are antique shops, a music store, barber shop and photographer who has Barbie issues (ask Mr. Underhill about that).

“Even the people who live here say it’s Mayberry,” Underhill says. “How about another piece of cherry pie?”

The Woodwright’s School is an ambitious venture. Not only is it a tough time to start a business, but how about a school that focuses on hand work exclusively? All the woodworking tools in Underhill’s shop are powered by cholesterol (or alcohol). The closest thing to a table saw you’ll find is a Graves foot-powered treadle circular saw (want one) and a treadle lathe and scroll saw.

“This should look like you have stepped back into a shop class in the 1930s,” he says.

There are 10 German Hoffman and Hammer workbenches, and each is equipped with a basic set of tools for joinery (and everything is sharp – I looked). The walls are decorated with old prints and photos (FDR). There’s a huge old radio at the back of the shop. If you can ignore the digital camera attached to one bench, it really does look like an old shop.

As a result, there are a few rules for students when they bring tools to his classes. No tape measures are allowed. Or plastic-handled chisels. Or Japanese-tooth saws.

“We’re going to be doing English-style joinery,” he says. “You wouldn’t build a shoji screen with a big Disston. That would be like stir-frying grits.”

Then he thinks about it for a second.

“We’re trying to do early music with the original instruments,” he says.

The first music is being made this weekend (February 2009) with a series of one-day classes on basic joinery. Those will lead to classes on building a tool chest. And Underhill says he’s going to bring in other instructors as well.

Those people will teach a class for a week and then Underhill will shoot a segment with them during the weekend for “The Woodwright’s Shop.”

The other different aspect of Underhill’s school is that he wants to ensure that locals, especially young locals, get plenty of opportunity to take classes. That’s why he’s planning shops that will run on weekends or, for example, on consecutive Thursday nights.

“We’ll see,” he says. “We’ll see if I can get people to do this sort of stuff.”

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. The school doesn’t have a web site yet (hey, it’s the 1930s OK?). If you want to get on Underhill’s mailing list to learn about future classes, send your request to woodwrightroy@gmail.com.

Our tale starts at Mike Ditka's restaurant in Chicago during a tool show. Someone at our table had just spilled red wine on Bill Krier (editor of WOOD magazine) and the place was swirling with waiters trying pat him down and clean up the mess.

That's when the guy across the table caught my eye and lowered his voice. "Say, have you ever heard about the tool vault at Stanley?" he asked.

The guy had been a product manager at Stanley several years before and he said that Stanley had a vault where they kept one new-in-the-box item of everything the company had produced. I said he was pulling my leg. He swore it was true.

Imagine, he said, a new No. 1 plane in the box, still fresh from the factory floor. New 750 chisels still in the wrappers. Even the much-hated fiberboard planes had to be worth something if they had never touched fiberboard, right?

During the last 10 years, I've made a few inquires at Stanley and sent interns to check out the story. Nobody knew what I was talking about.

Fast-forward to a few years later when our magazine staff is hosting a dinner with some officials from Porter-Cable and Delta Machinery. Somehow the topic came up about how there are all these great woodshops on military bases.

One of the Delta guys said the military was a good customer. In fact, they had bought hundreds of table saws, sealed them up and buried them in the desert. Why? In the event of a nuclear holocaust, there would be functioning table saws that could be used to rebuild the country.

Believe it?

And our last "Tale from the Wood" for the week comes from reader Bill Taggart:

In my previous career, I used to travel a lot all over the continental United States. I was at a Cracker Barrel somewhere out in the Midwest one time and saw a couple of pretty nice tools on the wall.  I called the manager over and asked him if I might buy them.  He said that they had people ask that once in a while, but they weren't allowed to sell them because they belonged to the restaurant. Then he said words that, to this day, make me feel more than slightly nauseated.

He said that Cracker Barrel corporate had people whose job it was to seek out and find all the artifacts on display in the restaurants.  He said they had a big warehouse in Kentucky with about 10,000 items in it that they used to stock the restaurants.

He did say that some things were reproductions, though.  I think those are mostly the advertising signs and such.  But you can tell that the tools are mostly the real deal.

Next time I go to a Cracker Barrel I'm taking my Milwaukee impact driver. Think anyone will notice?

— Christopher Schwarz

Reader James Carpenter is trying to put together a list of tools to purchase as a gift for his 6-year-old nephew. Man I wish I'd had an uncle like him. The best present I got from an uncle was a "Men at Work" LP.

In any case, James has been doing a lot of research and come up with this preliminary list. What do you think of his choices?

• 6" or 8" sweep Millers Falls 30 series brace with improved Barber chuck without ratchet.
• A nice complete set of auger bits appropriate to the bit brace.
• An auger bit file appropriate for sharpening the auger bits.
• Miller Falls No 2A Hand drill. (Maybe a new $20 Schroeder Hand Drill with ¼" chuck)
• Better quality small woodworker's vise (mounted into a child-sized workbench)
• Coping saw
• Well-made Ryoba or Dozuki Japanese pull saw.
• Appropriate small hammer (likely  a 225g Japanese Octagonal hammer)
• Small crow-foot for removing small nails. (I'll skip this is if the hammer has crow-foot)
• combination square
• tape measure
• Surform tool
• Assortment of slotted and Phillips screwdrivers
• Assortment of small pliers
• possibly a few books
• child safety glasses
• Nice set of appropriate portable toolboxes.  This will either be a smaller suitcase style toolbox(s) with wheels, or a few small hand carried toolboxes small enough for my nephew to carry.
• wood glue
• rubber bands for clamps

Roughly speaking, the items higher on the list are better candidates for a used purchase than a new purchase.

If you want to help James spend some money, leave a comment below. Also, check out this article on Charles Hayward's basic list.

— Christopher Schwarz

In what is surely one of the signs of the apocalypse, The Wood Whisperer is now selling T-shirts that mash together my likeness with the most memorable line from the forgettable 1987 movie "Spaceballs."

The T-shirt features a highly posterized image of my face (with beard, for those of you playing our home game) and the words: "May 'The Schwarz' Be With You." Sadly, this "Spaceballs" catchphrase is the most famous thing that any Schwarz (or Schwartz) has ever done.

Marc Spagnuolo (The Wood Whisperer) and his cohorts have come to call me "The Schwarz" – like other one-name celebs such as Cher or Madonna. This T-shirt is the result.

It's available for $15 from The Wood Whisperer on a shirt that is chestnut in color. And before anyone asks, I'm not getting a dime from these T-shirts (it all goes to Marc and Nicole); and yes, he had my permission.

Marc did send me a few of the shirts, which we'll attempt to give away here on the blog shortly with a ridiculous contest. Or, if we don't have any takers, maybe I'll make one into my own personal Woobie.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of the few other people on this earth who understand my sickness affection for workbenches is Rob Giovannetti.

I met Rob at a Gallotapalooza event outside Chicago several years ago, and we've stayed in contact via e-mail. Rob – and I say this in the most affectionate manner possible – has a workbench problem.

He's built eight workbenches (all different styles) and taught two classes about it. You might remember is Rob-O workbench from 2006 that I featured here on the blog.

Rob is about to embark on another bench-building adventure real soon. His next bench I have named the "Manufactured Wood Smurf Bench." Long story. It's going to be cool when it's done, I'm sure.

In the meantime, Rob sent me the following list of the top 10 things he's learned about workbenches. It's an interesting list.

— Christopher Schwarz

1. Benches don't need to made of hardwood. I've made several benches from hard maple, but the ones I've made from Borg Douglas fir worked just as well and were usually easier to make.

2. I have a love/hate relationship with tail vises. I've tried every vise you could think of as an end vise, including none, and I keep coming back to the tail vise. I can't fully explain why this is, but it just is.

3. The shoulder vise is the easiest face vise to use, but the most time consuming and complicated to build. Go figure. If you like to dovetail and hand cut your tenons, I recommend this as the vise of choice. A close second would be a twin-screw.

4. Square dogs aren't worth the effort. This may sound like laziness, but aside from a sense of "tradition," there is no reason for me to have square dogs. Round holes are quicker and easier to make, and they hold just as well. Plus, the 3/4" holes can be used for a wide variety of other purposes.

5. If one row of dogs is good, one is even better. In other words, I've not encountered a single situation where multiple rows of dogs was a benefit; and I have a bench with four rows of 'em.

6. Tool trays are for people who are clutter-aholics. I am one of them. Even with my tools hanging above my bench, I'm much more likely to throw a tool in the tray than put it back where it belongs. I've found more organized people don't use them.

7. A good bench NEEDS a board jack. Whether the base is flush with the front edge of the top or not, a sliding deadman is a must-have accessory.

8. The only reasons I can figure for having endcaps on a bench are either 1) they support a tool tray at the rear of the bench, or 2) they support a vise of some kind on one, or both, ends of the bench. I don't believe an endcap has the rigidity to keep a top from cupping.

9. If I had a dedicated gluing/assembly table, my bench would have no finish on it at all. Even with dogs, wood on wood is the best grip you can get. Even one coat of oil can make a benchtop overly slippery.

10. None of these things apply if you can make masterwork furniture on a sheet of plywood on sawhorses. Some of the best work I've seen has come from the simplest of assembly tables; but if you do a lot of hand tool work, I think the aforementioned points will help make building furniture much easier.

Please note I didn't mention plywood as a bench material. Truth be told, I don't know much about building benches from man-made materials. I do, however, have an idea of building a top from 3" wide ripped Baltic birch and face gluing them together to form a core. Laminate with hardwood veneer or hardboard on the top and bottom, and add equal thickness solid wood skirting around the edges, I think it would be quite suitable for pounding on without much flex.

— Rob Giovannetti

Perhaps I should break my vow to my wife and build some more workbenches.

During a routine audit of our web traffic on this blog, I was surprised to learn that the most popular page on the blog in 2008 was the "Workbenches" page. (You can access this page by clicking on "Workbenches" in the Navigation bar at right. It calls up all the stories I've tagged as dealing with workbenches and workholding. More than 20,000 people browsed that page last year.

Here the next nine most-popular stories, along with some updates.

2. Free Drawing of the Knockdown Holtzapffel Workbench. The lesson: Give away something free about a workbench and it's bound to attract some attention.  

3. First Look at the Jointmaker Pro. This incredible new saw from Bridge City Tools attracted a lot of interest and controversy. Just this week, Bridge City announced that it is assembling the Jointmaker Pro. You can read all about that here.

4. The Handplanes page. Click on "Handplanes" in the Navigation bar and hope you have a good connection to the Internet.

5. A Japanese Workbench. This was a real shocker. Not a single person commented on this blog post. And it had a cute photo of one of Harrelson Stanley's kids. Almost 9,000 people read the story. Go figure.

6. Free eDrawings of the Tabouret Table. This was a popular project (I get mail about it almost every week). So no surprises here.

7. My First Pair of Pantyhose. Note to self: Write more stories with undergarments and cross-dressing in the headlines.

8. The Holtzapffel Workbench. Another workbench story. Click.

9. The Electronic Drawings page. This is encouraging. We really like the SketchUp and eDrawing files we provide. And it looks like you guys do, too. Or perhaps we just got a lot of clicks from Eastern European thieves who are ripping us off.

10. New Premium Handplanes From Stanley. Production on these planes has been delayed while Stanley officials make sure that the quality is where they want it. Officials say they are very close to being ready to crank up production.

Next week: The least popular stories of 2008. Or maybe not. I'm afraid it will be my "Personal Favorites" page.

— Christopher Schwarz

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The first time I saw a chisel plane was at an antique market in Kentucky. It was sitting out on a table with a bunch of common planes. Every person who walked up to the table picked it up to check its price tag, but the seller knew what he had. The original Stanley No. 97 "Cabinet Makers' Edge Plane" is a fairly rare bird.

It turns out that wooden-bodied chisel planes are also uncommon, according to John M. Whelan's essential book "The Wooden Plane." As a result, I've always been a bit skeptical as to how useful the form is.

One user told me that he used it for trimming plugs flush to the surrounding surface. I haven't had much luck with the plane for this purpose. Most of my plugs are a tough species, such as oak. And no matter how closely I saw them, there's still too much wood there for me to pare with a chisel plane. Instead, I've had far more success using a plain old smoothing plane for trimming plugs flush.

Lately, however, I have found a few instances where the chisel plane earned its keep.

• Fairing one surface to another. Recently I had to extend the slot on my bench's top to install some new vise hardware. I sawed out the waste and then used the chisel plane to bring the sawn surface into the same plane as the existing slot. It worked brilliantly. The sole of the chisel plane rode the existing slot and pared the face grain with ease. And because there was no mouth on the tool I could work right up to the end of the slot. This operation could have been done with a paring chisel, but it was much easier with the chisel plane. Similarly, the chisel plane helps me fair up the corners of rabbets after I've chopped out the waste with a chisel. Again, this can also be done with a chisel, but the chisel plane makes for tidier results.

• Removing glue. I've been turning to the chisel plane to remove the globs of glue that remain after a panel glue-up. I pare these globs away by working across the grain. The chisel plane works well at this because it doesn't have a mouth. When I'd do this with a block plane, softer globs of glue would get squished by the tool and make a mess of things. I also prefer the chisel plane to a glue scraper because it is less likely to damage the panel.

• Removing finish sags. When I get sags on my film finish, I like to cut them away before adding another coat. I used to use an old block plane iron for this, but it can be hard to hold on vertical surfaces. The chisel plane makes quick work of sags.

In the end, I don't think the chisel plane is an essential tool for your kit – all of the operations above could be handled by other edge tools. But they are handy. If you have found a good use for your chisel plane, I'd like to hear about it, and so would other woodworkers. Post a comment and let us know.

– Christopher Schwarz

When I first bought my chisel plane I tried using it to trim some oak plugs flush. It was not ideal.

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Nothing is more fundamental to woodworking than the wood itself, however even professional cabinetmakers struggle with understanding how wood works and how to make it work for them.

In our Spring 2009 issue, we show you how the way that a tree grows in the woods directly affects the way we design and build furniture. And understanding wood is the first step to building projects that look better, last longer and are easier to build. Here are a few of the stories we've been researching for the next issue for you. This issue will arrive in your mailbox if you order your subscription by Jan. 30. The issue ships to subscribers in mid-February and will be on newsstands in early March.

• Composing With Grain: Paying close attention to the grain lines in a board is essential to building a harmonious-looking piece of furniture. We show you the rarely explored rules of composing with wood grain that the best furniture makers use to ensure that their projects look their best.

• Understanding Grain Direction: Most people learn to read the grain of boards through trial-and-error. Few people know that there are two reliable ways to read aboard's grain direction: using the edges of a board, and using the end grain and face grain. Knowing both of these methods will ensure you will work faster and with far less tear-out.

• 18th Century Connecticut Dry Sink: Our cover project features an early American dry sink with classic lines. We show you how to build this project using either traditional or modern techniques.

• Water-resistant Finishes: Some of the projects we build, such as dining room tables and bathroom mirrors, need to survive in wet environments. What's the most water-resistant finish that can be applied easily at home with simple tools? We find out.

• Countersinks: There are so many kinds of countersinks on the market that even we're bewildered. We explore when you need a tapered countersink vs. when you need a straight one. Plus we explore how quickly and cleanly some of the new countersink designs cut.

Plus, as always, we features shop tips in our Shortcuts section, your Letters, a woodworking Glossary and absolutely no advertisements whatsoever.

This issue can be yours if you subscribe by Jan. 30, which will get you four issues for $19.96. Click here to subscribe or call 800-283-3542.

— Christopher Schwarz, editor

Pint-sized router planes see a lot of use in my shop. Instead of using a trim router, I always prefer to cut mortises for hinges with a chisel and a router plane. So as soon as Veritas and Lie-Nielsen started making small router planes based loosely on the Stanley No. 271 about 18 months ago, I was first in line.

I now have many hours on both tools – I've sharpened each one about seven or eight times. And I have developed some firm likes and dislikes about each tool. The next paragraph is a spoiler, so if you like a little suspense when reading blogs, skip it.

Neither router plane is perfect. But nor is there one clear winner in the category. If I could combine the best of both tools (the Lie-Veritas?) I think it would be the router plane of my dreams. Here's the lowdown on each tool.

The Veritas Small Router Plane
First the good: This plane has a closed throat and is quite compact. The closed throat allows you to work on the edges of boards without any danger of the tool tipping. The downside to a closed throat is you sacrifice a little visibility – it's a tad more difficult to see where you are cutting.

The compact size is a big plus with the Veritas. The tool is 3-1/4" at its widest, and that is an asset when you are cutting hinge mortises inside assembled casework. Sometimes larger router planes are too big and ram into the top or bottom of your case. This little guy sneaks in everywhere I ask it to go. The fit and finish is excellent, as is the knurled brass locking knob. The iron is durable.

The downside: I don't care for the round shank that the iron is mounted to. No matter how tightly I secure the locking knob, the shank can shift if you take a big bite of wood with the plane. When the shank slips, usually the blade height doesn't change, but the iron rotates left or right. You can rotate it back, but there is the danger of changing your blade's projection. So take light cuts.

Lie-Nielsen Small Router Plane
The good: The blade-locking mechanism is incredibly solid and the iron never slips. The iron is mounted to a square shank, so there's no chance that the iron can rotate during heavy use. Plus, I quite like the fact that the blade-locking knob can be turned with a straight screwdriver. The knob is small, so this is a big plus.

I also like the curved fingerholds on the body. These are comfortable and feel right when you are skewing the tool into a hinge mortise. Plus, they give the tool a little sex appeal. The fit and finish on this tool is also excellent. The iron is quite durable.

The downside: The tool has an open throat. The almost 3/4"-wide open section on the sole makes the tool unsuitable for work on narrow edges, such as cleaning up the ends of haunches in frame-and-panel work. If your work consists of a lot of work on edges, this isn't the tool for you.

Bottom line: I think the perfect plane for my work would be a router plane that had a closed throat, a compact size, curved fingerholds and an iron that had a square shank. Perhaps there's a vintage tool out there that meets these criteria, but I don't plan to start scouring eBay any time soon. Having both these tools covers all my needs.

— Christopher Schwarz


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The August 2000 issue of Popular Woodworking is one of my favorites. On the cover is a secretary that Troy Sexton built that was the result of a lot of hard work by the entire staff. We worked with Troy during almost an entire year to pull together the story about his excellent design.

So you can imagine my dismay when the magazine went out to subscribers, and my phone started ringing off the hook with angry readers on the other end of the line.

“Where,” they would ask, “is the story on wainscoting?”

It seems that as we were carefully massaging the story on the secretary we had messed up the cover. The top headline on the cover was “Wainscotting in a Weekend.” Only there was no story about wainscotting in the issue. We had removed it and then forgotten to change the cover.

Grrr.

It seems that we spend most of our days at the magazine making our own mistakes and cleaning up the mistakes of others. That is the job description that should be on my business card (if I had business cards – long story).

Some of my mistakes are mistakes of omission. For example, for the last 12 months I have been meaning to write a review of the shoulder plane kit produced by Legacy Toolworks. It’s a gorgeous kit and looks about 10 times better than the shoulder plane kit I’d built from Shepherd Tool years ago. But I overbooked myself this year and haven’t started the kit. And now Legacy has announced it is closing its doors. If I had been able to review the kit, perhaps that could have helped them.

Other mistakes are what we call in Arkansas: “Getting bit by the dumb-a**.” This is where you do something so stupid that the tale should begin with, “Hold my beer while I….” Such as when I told 200,000 readers to run the router the wrong way to cut a rabbet on a door frame. I didn’t mean to do it, I just got turned around and never caught my error.

So it should come as no surprise that toolmakers also make mistakes. Most readers probably think that the tools that come into our shop have been carefully tested and tuned by the manufacturers to make sure they are perfect. Based on how many goofed-up tools I’ve seen in 13 years, I doubt that’s the case.

And in fact, I take it as a mark of the toolmakers’ honesty that they send us one right off the warehouse floor.

Here’s a small sample of some of the stuff we’ve seen:

DeWalt: The company makes good tools, but we had a jigsaw come into the shop where the blade clamping mechanism failed. It went click, click, and then the blade dropped out like a rotten tooth. When DeWalt introduced its first hybrid table saw, the first rip fence we got was twisted. So was the second. The third replacement was fine.

Delta: When Delta introduced its C-arm drum sander, we were all excited in the shop. We set it up, plugged it in and cranked the puppy up. It spun up and then spun down forever. The motor burned out after three seconds.

Harbor Freight: It might sound too easy to pick on this discount seller. But they sell tools and people buy them. So here goes: When we tested the company’s plunge router, the collet failed. The bit slipped out and flew out. That was one of the days that I wished we had some Depends in the first aid kit.

Black & Decker: Here’s every tool marketer’s worst nightmare. Black & Decker sent us its new cordless tape measure. Now let’s ignore for a moment the possibility that you do not need an electric tape measure. So Senior Editor David Thiel takes it out of the box in front of the entire staff and demonstrates how it works. The tape extends about a foot and then dies forever.

Metabo: Cordless drills aren’t supposed to shoot flames out the back are they?

Lobo: When we tested its edge sander the sheet metal base flexed like tin foil. You would turn the machine on, and the thing would do the twist like Chubby Checker.

Powermatic: Yes, even Powermatic. An early version of its benchtop mortiser had a flaw in the piece of metal that joined the motor to the arm mechanism. The gears on the interior stripped out. So when you pulled the arm, the motor never moved.

Tools for Working Wood: The Ray Iles mortising chisels are great, but one of my students at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking snapped the tip off one when working in poplar. I heard it from across the room. It turned out that a few of the tools had been made from A2 instead of D2. It did make for an amusing day as everyone crowded around the chisel like the victim of a car accident.

Lie-Nielsen Toolworks: I had a narrow iron shoulder plane that was an early production run. The bronze grip wouldn’t stay in place when you retracted the iron. When I turned the screw, the plane disassembled itself in my hands.

Veritas: An early version of the Veritas cabinet scraper (an adaptation of the No. 80) would clog after a few passes like Crystal Gayle’s shower’s drain. The company has since fixed that problem and the tool works great.

Stanley Tools: During a test of jack planes, we had a tool that simply would not function. It was like it was haunted. If you snugged up the frog screw to where you thought it should be, you couldn’t adjust the iron. If you loosened the frog screw so you could adjust the iron, the thing would chatter and shake like a Vega going 56 mph. We never figured that one out.

Wenzloff & Sons: While teaching a sawing class at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking, one student’s carcase saw was misbehaving. It was tearing out the shoulders of his tenons something fierce. At first I though it was user error. Turns out the saw was filed for rip when it was supposed to be crosscut.

Let me conclude by saying that mistakes slip out the door for every toolmaker (and magazine editor). We’ve never heard of any toolmaker with zero returns. The real test of a toolmaker (and editor) is how you deal with the mistakes when they occur.

We published the “Wainscotting in a Weekend” story in the following issue and have not made an error on the cover since that day. And almost all of the toolmakers above are known for cheerfully replacing any defective unit and then correcting the problem.

And that’s one of the reasons we’re all still in business.

— Christopher Schwarz

There are so many fine Western sawmakers today that it's hard to believe that there were virtually none in 1996 – the year Independence Tool was founded.

New sawmakers are cropping up so quickly that it's tough for me to keep track (and heck, it's my job). I do try to stay on top of the market as best I can, and during the last couple years I've gotten to use saws from almost every maker – thanks to the handsawing classes I've taught in Michigan, Kentucky and Oregon.

I'm telling you all this because I've been working with a dovetail saw these last two weeks that has blown me away. It is, compared to its peers, the first among equals.

The dovetail saw from Andrew Lunn's Eccentric Toolworks is a super-tuned jewel of a saw. It starts easier than any Western saw I've used – much like a Japanese saw. It flies through ½" and ¾" stock with ease. It is extraordinarily balanced. It leaves a whisper of a kerf behind.

And on top of all that, the saw has handmade touches (such as carving on the tote and engraving on the brass back) that make it as nice to look at as it is to use.

The price of all this amazingness? As of Jan. 5, 2009, it's $350.

So who the heck is Andrew Lunn? And where did he come from?

Denizens of the discussion groups, such as WoodNet, have seen Lunn's work. And if you were at the Woodworking in America conference, you might have seen some of Lunn's saws in Mike Wenzloff's booth (Wenzloff graciously agreed to host a couple toolmakers in his booth).

But Lunn is not a professional toolmaker. He's a 37-year-old 911 paramedic who lives in Worthington, Ohio, and makes saws in his spare time. He describes himself as "obsessed" with saws, and that's not an overstatement.

His dovetail saws are different than other premium saws in several significant ways. The blade is thinner than any other Western saw I've used at .015" thick. Other saws use steel that is .018" or .020" thick. One criticism of this thin steel is that it will kink more easily if the saw is abused. Perhaps. But I think the saw's blade feels very steady.

The teeth are minimally set – Lunn sets them with a special hammer that he forged himself. As a result, the saw removes very little wood and produces a razor-thin kerf that looks like a kerf from a Japanese saw. This is one of the other factors that makes the saw plunge through wood.

Also different: The saw's rake. Most commercial saws have a consistent rake on every tooth. Relax the rake and the saw is easier to start but slow. Tighten it up and the saw becomes more aggressive but harder to start.

Lunn has relaxed the rake at the toe, which makes the saw easy to start. In the middle of the blade the rake is almost zero, which makes the saw aggressive once you start it. And he's relaxed the rake at the heel as well, which prevents the saw from sticking there. It really works.

A criticism of this filing is that it is going to be a challenge for the user to replicate. Perhaps, but you can always get Lunn to resharpen it.

Another interesting difference is the folded brass back. The back is narrower at the toe than at the heel, which reduces weight at the toe. Also, the saw's blade is "canted," which means it's narrower at the toe than at the heel. Both of these tweaks help give the saw its excellent balance.

And finally, the tote is thicker than those on other saws. When I first picked it up I thought the tote felt too thick (so did Senior Editor Glen D. Huey). But after working with the saw a bit, we changed our minds on that score. It's a very comfortable handle.

The handmade touches only add to the whole package. The saw uses traditional split nuts, with a hand-engraved medallion. The tote itself feels very handmade with no sharp edges for your hand and has the subtle toolmarks of good hand work. The engraving is just cool.

All in all, I'm profoundly impressed and recommend this saw without reservation. Lunn loaned it to us to try, but it's not going back. I am buying this one personally for my shop at home.

To contact Lunn about making a saw for you, visit his web site at Eccentric Toolworks.

To download a chart comparing the saws in our shop right now, click the file below.

Dovetail Saw.pdf (23.5 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

I really need to start keeping a list of all the things I use my sawbenches for. Sure, I saw stuff on them. And I stand on them while go-go dancing in the shop to amuse visitors. Those things are obvious. What's not so obvious is how often they get me out of weird jams with my handplanes.

On Monday as I was planing down the face frame of this dry sink, the sawbench was the obvious choice to lend a hand. I wedged it between my bench and the dry sink, and voila. The job was done.

I also plane down table aprons in the same fashion with a sawbench (this particular sawbench was made by craftsman John Wilson; all mine seem to end up in the shops of friends). Frequently, I'll assemble cabinets or glue up panels on them as well.

If you've come up with other good uses for the shop appliance, post them here. Your suggestion might convince another woodworker that they should build a pair.

— Christopher Schwarz

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When I first got serious about woodworking after college, I remember reading a dire warning in a woodworking book about working with pine:

“If you work with pine, be sure to purchase your material, mill it, cut it and assemble the entire project all in a single day. If you let pine sit overnight, it will warp and be unusable.”

At the time, the warning flummoxed me. Sure, the pine from our home center tended to cup a bit if left to its own devices. But the pine I'd salvaged from my home’s 100-year-old floor was the most righteous and stable stuff I’d ever laid hands on.

Since those early days, I have had lots of experience with pine. Thousands of board feet of all sorts of species have passed under my hands: yellow pine, sugar pine, some wacky junk from Sweden, and (this week) Eastern white pine.

All of the species have their charms. The yellow pine is tough like maple but is difficult to saw. The sugar pine is lightweight and stable but splintery. The Swedish stuff reminds me of some exchange students at my high school. And the Eastern white pine cuts and planes beautifully.

Here’s the truth: What I have found is that pine is stable when it’s properly dried and at equilibrium with its environment. Pine’s bad rap comes from the fact that it’s usually sold a little wet at the lumberyard. As it dries, it moves. Also, I've found that construction-grade pine is prone to suffer from drying defects, such as case-hardening, which also besmirches its name.

The hard data from the U.S. Forestry Service backs all this up. The government’s “dimensional change coefficient” figures for hardwoods and softwoods predict how much a species will move when the humidity changes.

Most of the pines are more stable than typical domestic hardwoods. Eastern white pine and sugar pine, for example, move less in service than all the typical domestic hardwoods: maple, cherry, oak, walnut, alder, beech, birch, hickory and ash. And quartersawn Eastern white pine barely moves at all, according to our government. It’s like the MDF of the softwood world. A theoretical 12"-wide quartersawn board would move about .009" when its moisture content changed by one percentage point. That ain’t much.

The pine in our shop this week is a joy. When we brought it in, the moisture meter readings indicated it was actually a little drier than the rest of the wood in our shop. And so I knew what to do: Cut the stuff to length and let it soak up a bit of moisture. It moved a bit. And now it’s tamed.

— Christopher Schwarz

When pine goes bad. Here's a piece of yellow pine that was brought in right from the lumberyard and planed to 3/4" thick. Overnight, it cupped like this. Of course, this could be a novel way to make a coopered door....

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Cabinetry is made of chunks of wood that are fairly standard in size. Most of your parts are going to be shorter than 48" long. It’s rare that individual planks will be wider than 12", or that your casework is going to be much deeper than 24" or so.

And so most of our tools, workbenches and shops are set up to deal with parts and assemblies that fall into those ranges. What’s really amazing to me, however, is how things can fall apart when you step just a little outside those standard sizes.

This week I’m building a reproduction of an 18th-century dry sink that is based on a Connecticut piece. I drew up the plans after studying a lot of photos of the piece and its actual measurements. In my zeal to make my reproduction look spot-on, I glossed over some details that should have raised red flags as I was sketching.

1. Danger, Wide Load: The carcase of this dry sink is 50" wide. That gave our table saw’s sliding table some fits, but I was able to work around its limitations. Where things got hairy was when I assembled the carcase. I needed some 50" clamps to secure the sides to the bottom. But all our clamps only go to a shade more than 48". Our shop's band clamps have fallen into the same black hole as a set of long-missing bed bolts. So I drove the bottom into the dados in the side pieces and used cut nails to hold everything in place while the glue dried. Good thing the original used cut nails as well.

2. In Too Deep: The carcase is almost 27" deep, which means the side panels were too wide for my 24"-wide workbench. So I had to work in stages: I planed as much as I could. Then I shifted the panel and planed the remainder. It was slow, but it worked.

3. Wood Too Wide: The dry sink's door requires panels that are 14" wide. Even our massive machinery can only face-joint a 12"-wide piece. So those boards for the doors had to be processed with handplanes. It wasn’t a show-stopper, but it sure slowed me down.

4. Two Inches Too Long: Because the carcase is 50" wide, many of the boards for the top and bottom were 49" to 50" long. Because the rough stock was 8' long, there was no way to get two 50"-long pieces for the top from a 96"-long piece. As a result, I had to struggle not to waste too much wood.

The good news is that I’m going to adjust the construction drawings and cutting lists for the readers so they won’t stumble with these slightly oversized parts and assemblies. Shaving an inch or two will save a thousand headaches. The bad news is that I probably should spring for a few 52"-long clamps for the shop so this doesn’t happen again.

— Christopher Schwarz

During the Woodworking in America conference, I moderated a discussion on saws between toolmakers Mike Wenzloff, from Wenzloff & Sons, and Joel Moskowitz, from Tools for Working Wood.

Both men are knowledgeable and have firm opinions about the topic of saws. The discussion was spirited and at some points contentious, though no blood was drawn. It took a long time for the three of us to navigate the technical details of the shape of sawteeth, and so we didn't get to spend much time discussing what saws you need to build furniture. Several attendees approached me after the session for guidance, and so I decided to share it with everyone here on the blog.

Earlier this year I wrote an entry that explains my personal set of saws (check it out here) and their configurations. This is a good place to start.

Number of Teeth
In general, when I choose a saw I try to match the number of teeth on the saw (called the pitch) to the thickness of my work. With backless saws, such as handsaws and rip saws, I aim to keep six or seven teeth buried in the wood at all times. With backsaws (such as dovetail and carcase saws) I aim to keep 10 teeth buried in the wood at all times.

Here's an example of how this works. If I have a 3/4"-thick carcase to dovetail, I'm going to pick a 15-points-per-inch (ppi) saw. But if I am dovetailing a 1/2"-thick drawer side, I'm going to reach for something finer, such as an 18-point or 20-point saw.

Either saw will work for carcasses or drawers, it's more a matter of what will work better. You don't have to own two dovetail saws. Just pick the one that suits the style of work you do. (Note that these rules don't apply to Japanese saws because they have deeper gullets that don't fill with sawdust.)

And note that there are practical limits. Few tenon saws come coarser than 10 ppi, but sometimes you have to saw a 2"-wide tenon cheek. A 5-point tenon saw would be a bear to start. So be flexible.

Kinds of Saws and What Order to Buy Them In
If you build typical furniture – cabinets, chairs, tables and chests – the following list of saws is meaningful. If you build smaller stuff (jewelry boxes) or bigger stuff (huge armoires), you are going to have to adjust. But I think this is a good list.

Carcase Saw
Typical blade length: 10" to 14"
Points: 12 to 14 ppi
Type of filing: Crosscut
I think this is a great saw to purchase first. It is easy to start and control, and it is useful for all sorts of crosscuts with a bench hook. Practicing with this saw will prepare you for the more challenging backsaws. What length should you choose? As with all saws, I think longer saws make straighter cuts, but they can be harder for beginners to control. My favorite is 14" long. I'm not worked up about the ppi. I see little difference between 12 ppi and 14 ppi.

Dovetail Saw
Length: 6" to 10"
Points: 14 ppi to 21 ppi
Type of filing: Rip
No matter what I write you'll buy a dovetail saw as soon as possible. We all want to cut dovetails. So go ahead. The smaller dovetail saws generally have finer teeth so the length isn't as issue as much as the ppi. Choose a ppi that matches what you like to do. Do you build lots of drawers? Get a finer saw (18 to 20 ppi). Like blanket chests? Get something in the 15 ppi neighborhood. What about the "progressive-pitch" saws, where the teeth are finer at the toe and coarser at the heel? I like them, but it took me a bit of time to acquire a taste for them. If you can try one before you buy it, that's ideal.

Tenon Saw
Length: 16" to 20"
Points: 10 ppi to 11 ppi
Type of filing: Rip
I'm using the specifications for an old-style tenon saw. Usually they don't come this big anymore, except for one made by Wenzloff & Sons. I like a big tenon saw (19"), but I seem to like bigger saws in general. When I teach sawing, my students are split: Half like the bigger saw for cutting tenon cheeks; the other half like a smaller sash saw instead.

Sash Saw (aka a Modern Tenon Saw)
Length: 14" to 16"
Points: 10 ppi is typical
Type of filing: Rip or Crosscut is available
The name "sash saw" has disappeared from most catalogs, but the form lives on as a "tenon saw" or a "crosscut tenon saw." I like a rip-filed tenon/sash saw because cutting the cheeks is a rip operation. Some people choose a crosscut sash saw in place of a crosscut carcase saw because they like big saws or have larger-scale work to do. As you can see, this is where it gets complex. You don't need both a rip tenon saw and a rip sash saw (though you are free to get both). Choose one that suits you. I like a 14" sash saw no matter what the filing. Go figure.

Handsaw
Length: 22" to 26"
Points: 5 ppi to 12 ppi
Type of filing: Crosscut
These backless saws are used to break down rough stock before you process it and to cut larger components to size before you shoot them to their final lengths. I like a 7 ppi saw (they're as common as dirt). Choose a shorter saw if it matches your stature or if you work on top of a workbench. Choose a longer saw if you are taller (I like 26") or if you work on a sawbench (an 18"-high platform designed for sawing). I think these saws are great because they give you lots of sawing practice, which pays off big when you cut dovetails. Usually the saws shorter than 26" are called panel saws.

Ripsaw
Length: 22" to 26"
Points: 3-1/2" ppi to 5 ppi
Type of filing: Rip
I don't use a ripsaw all that much (see the dust on the sawplate?). Honestly, I prefer a powered band saw. Long rip cuts are a lot like work. I'd get a ripsaw only if you are deep into the purity of hand work or you have kids sleeping upstairs.

I hope this has helped some of you at the conference. If you didn't like the session, I apologize. We'll do better next time.

— Christopher Schwarz

I've been doing this job for 12 years now; and that's the longest commitment I've given anything, except for maybe shaving, remaining married and pork barbecue. So clearly I like my job, or I'm un-hirable in any other profession.

Most days are great: I read about woodworking, write about woodworking and do woodworking. But there are a few days that make me grind my teeth in frustration. This is one of those days.

I'm editing a piece by bodger and blacksmith Don Weber for the February 2009 issue of Popular Woodworking. Don has built an interpretation of a Sidney Barnsley hay-rake table and has done a beautiful job. And that's the problem.

I've been dying to build one of these tables since before I came to work here. Barnsley has long been one of my heroes. He was a trained architect who chucked it all to design and build furniture mostly by hand. And to top it all off he had great design sensibilities.

Of course, now that Weber has built this table for the magazine, there's little chance that I'll be able to build one unless I can find a customer. Casa Schwarz doesn't need a massive dining table (already got one). Nor does anyone in my family. I could build one on spec and try to sell it, but I think I'd probably end up with the world's fanciest basement Pla-Doh table.

Maybe I could just build a small model of it…. Aw crud.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Getting all the bits of hardware to match on a project is a critical detail for me. I go to great lengths to ensure the hinges, pulls and other assorted metal bits look like they came from the same family.

For example, for the blanket chest on the cover of the Summer 2008 issue I wanted to get the brown steel stays to match the black iron chest hinges. I ended up painting the steel stays black, then lacquering them and rubbing them out until they looked like the powdery black iron.

This might seem excessive, but every time anyone (even my kids) opens the chest for the first time, they comment on the cool hardware. It's definitely worth it.

One of the biggest problems with getting your hardware to match is dealing with shiny brass. I really dislike the way it looks for some reason. So I usually end up aging all the brass bits until they look like they have seen about 100 years of use.

Here's how I do it. First I strip any lacquer off the hinges. I'll pour a little bit of lacquer thinner into a Mason jar, drop the hardware in and shake the jar for a few minutes. Usually the thinner gets a little tinge of color (sometimes green).

I discard the thinner, dry off the hinges and clean out the jar. Then I drop the hardware back into the jar and add a tablespoon of liquid gun blue (I use Perma Blue made by Birchwood Casey). I shake it around until the brasses and screws are colored. Then I pour the gun blue back into the bottle and pour cold tap water into the jar.

After rinsing the hardware, I'll dry it off and let it sit out awhile. The instructions say you should allow the stuff to cure overnight. I haven't had any problems installing the hardware almost immediately.

I really like the color that gun blue imparts. It's always consistent, never streaky and doesn't look like a dye job.

There are other ways to go about this process. You could install the hinges and wait 100 years. You could use ammonia, which is the process Senior Editor Robert W. Lang uses. And I'm sure there are even more out there. If you have a favorite one that you think is even easier, post a comment below.

— Christopher Schwarz

Reader Tim Williams writes: I have a number of old Stanley planes that I’ve spent a lot of hours cleaning and refurbishing. I’ve read multiple places about how when tuning up a plane, it’s a good idea to flatten the mating surfaces of the frog so the iron beds well, with lots of contact, to avoid chattering.

However, I find that whenever I take a flat iron and attach a chipbreaker to it, the tension of the chipbreaker on the iron puts a very gentle curve on the iron. So, when I attach the chipbreaker and iron to the frog, there’s a very slight gap under the middle of the iron (just enough to see light through if I hold it up to a light). I’ve tried loosening the bolt holding the chipbreaker and iron together to reduce the tension, but if I loosen it enough to remove the tension, the iron slides against chipbreaker.

 On one plane, I’m using a Hock chipbreaker. It mates more fully against the iron and doesn’t curve the iron, so it appears to bed better on the frog.  Finally, I’ve not really used these enough to notice much chattering.  Should I even be worrying about this?
 
What's happening here is that you have too much curvature in your chipbreaker. When you cinch down the iron, it bends to match the shape of the breaker. There are several solutions to this: You can remove some of the curvature in your chipbreaker. Place one end of the breaker in a vise and push against it gently. It will bend easily. Then try again.

Another solution is to replace the iron with a thicker aftermarket iron. This is always a good idea. The thicker iron will resist bending. Or you can replace both the iron and chipbreaker, which is what I like to do with vintage handplanes that I am going to use for high-tolerance planing (jointing or smoothing).

The bigger question is if the bending is even a problem. It depends. With some forms of planes (such as infill planes) the lever cap puts so much pressure on the iron and breaker right up by the mouth that it doesn't matter if the iron ouches the frog or not.

In Bailey-style planes, the more contact you get between the frog and iron the more stable the whole assembly will be and the less likely that bad things will happen, such chattering or the plane going out of adjustment while planing.

When I set up a Bailey plane, what I shoot for is a flat sandwich of frog, iron and breaker, as shown in the photo above. That works best.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Our RSS feed has been bockety this week. If you like this post, you might also like my post earlier this week on how to understand the system of bench planes which is here.

Normally when a book publishing company sends out a copy of its newest book, the marketing people will include a transcript of a short interview with the author that discusses the book. This is so that a lazy writer can quote the interview without having to actually do the interview.

What, you didn't know this? Well that's because these canned interviews are about 97 percent worthless. And any writer who quotes from them will be ritually shunned at the next gathering of media professionals (usually held at a stinky bar).

Not so with the interview that accompanied Roy Underhill's new book, "The Woodwright's Guide: Working Wood with Wedge & Edge" (UNC Press). The folks at the University of North Carolina Press conducted a fairly amusing interview with St. Roy. And so we're reprinting it here in its entirety for you to enjoy.

By the way, in case you missed it, check out the review I wrote of Underhill's new book for the blog last week.

— Christopher Schwarz

Q: How does The Woodwright’s Guide differ from other books in the Woodwright’s series?
A: The Woodwright’s Guide is an environmentally organized guide to woodcraft. It starts in the forest with felling the tree and ends with the final finishing in the workshop. My other books have followed a similar path, but this is the most comprehensive guide in the series, benefiting from thirty years of experience. It is also my first line-illustrated book with brilliant drawings by my daughter Eleanor. Her drawings, done from my photographs, give clarity to the ideas but retain the specificity of the places and the real people who do this wonderful work.

Q: How did your collaboration with daughter, Eleanor, come about?
A: Both my daughters, Eleanor and Rachel, worked with me on television and traveled with me to museums around the world. When it came time for the new book, I was looking at thirty years of photography of tools and techniques. Having Eleanor make drawings from the photos gave us both consistency and specificity.

Actually both daughters worked on the book. Eleanor did the drawings, and the ones that needed retouching went to Rachel. Both my daughters grew up surrounded by wood and tools, and it’s wonderful that we can still work together!

Q: Are there any special features of this book you’d like readers to be aware of?
A: The Woodwright’s Guide is a book with grain—just like wood. You can work it with your left-brain intellect, following the ideas in the text like a wedge following a split. You can also engage your right brain by grasping the “gestalt” captured in the illustrations. You can also put both the brain and hands to work because in the back of the book I have plans for workbenches, screw-cutting engines, and treadle lathes. I only regret that we weren’t able to include a few Band-Aids with each copy—but that’s in the works.

Q: What is the meaning of the book’s subtitle, Working Wood with Wedge and Edge?
A: The thread of “wedge and edge” runs through the entire book. A blade meeting wood either splits it as a wedge or cuts it as an edge. Wedge and edge consciousness in your woodworking gives meaning to the feedback through the tool handle, guiding your decisions with every move. Wedge and edge means honest woodworking that engages both the grain and the brain.

Q: What do you hope this book will impart to your many readers and fans?
A: I hope everyone can share the sense of wonder at the complexity and beauty of our connection to tools and wood. Our language, our culture, our ways of thinking, all evolved with the tools in our ancestors’ hands. Artisanship in wood is part of every human’s legacy, so let’s honor it.

And it’s not just nostalgia. We know that biodiversity is important to us. Well, so is techno-diversity. We can value heirloom technology just as we value heirloom tomatoes. It may not be commercial, but it sure tastes better!

Q: What led you to give up power tools and devote yourself to a career of working exclusively with hand tools?
A: During the back to the land movement of the 1970s I was homesteading in the New Mexico mountains, struggling to live off the grid. A chance encounter with a tool collector’s trove of treadle-powered tools made me realize that an advanced technology of non-electric machines had once flourished and then been abandoned. This was during the energy crisis of the 1970s and the deep significance of sustainable technology hit many of us like a trip hammer (a water-powered trip hammer, of course).

Q: What about woodworkers who blend the use of power tools with hand tools? Is this book also for them?
A: Curiosity is the ultimate power tool. If you work with wood, or just live on a planet where people work with wood, this is the book for you. That’s because The Woodwright’s Guide cuts deep, both into the way wood works, and into the history of the way we work it. So, if you’re trying to do better at a single task of joinery, this book brings you the observations of a thousand years. And, if you’re curious about our enduring relationship with the natural world, The Woodwright’s Guide will give you a sharper axe to hew your own insights.

Q: What have you been up to since your last Woodwright’s book, published in 1996, and how has it influenced this volume?
A: Shooting the PBS series The Woodwright’s Shop gives me the chance to travel and meet craftsmen and women from all over the world. It’s astounding the extraordinary depth of knowledge so many people have about specific areas of the craft. But it’s the stories I appreciate the most. From woodcarver Nora Hall, I heard stories of her father’s carving shop during the Nazi occupation of Holland. Even the work-worn log cabins and ground-down tools preserved at the Museum of Appalachia tell stories—stories of life and hard work in America’s “wooden age.”

Q: What or who have been the major inspirations during your career?
A: Working at Colonial Williamsburg (in spite of the fife and drum parades) was my university of hand craft. The master craftsmen at Colonial Williamsburg are people at the top of their art. It was a constant struggle for me to live up to their high standards of historical research, craftsmanship, and aesthetic sensibility. Still, it was a great place for me, a generalist, to be. If I needed to know something about wheel wrighting, blacksmithing, cooperage, or any of the trades that built our civilization, all I had to do was walk down the street and ask one of the master craftsmen. As Francis Bacon put it, this was a place where “Many ingenious practizes in all trades . . . shall fall under the consideration of one man’s mind.”

Q: You wrote your first Woodwright’s Book in 1981, over 25 years ago. Have you seen a resurgence in interest in hand-crafted woodworking during this period? Have attitudes changed? Has working with hand-tools gone in and out of style, according to larger trends in popular culture?
A: The cycle of high tech and high touch goes back hundreds of years. The first hand-craft, how-to book in English, Mechanick Exercises, or the Doctrine of Handiworks, was published in 1678. Even then, they were as much concerned with the virtues of “vanishing” hand craft as they were in getting the job done.

Now, of course, we are at a technical crossroads, and it’s good to have a back-up in case the big machine breaks down or runs out of gas. And if you’re going to have a hobby, it might as well be ethical. It seems counterproductive to make a nice wooden cradle for your grandchildren if you choose to make the planet uninhabitable in the process.

But even without the green issue, making things directly with our hands goes to the full depth of our humanity. We’ll never be done with it. Making something gives us the same kind of primal happiness we feel when we encounter a berry bush loaded with ripe fruit. Just as the old hunter-gatherer still resides in each of us, so too does the ancient hand craftsman.  

Q: How does the work you do and the way you do it connect to a larger philosophy of life?
A: It’s a mission. With the gross failure of the intellectual class, it has fallen to the craftsman to expose the hidden power inequities of society. Subversive woodworking has to take the lead, helping people make a choice between mindless consumerism and conscious craftsmanship. Just say “NO” to power tools! Let’s take a bite outta Norm!

Q: Why do you think your many fans have coined the nickname “St. Roy” to describe their devotion to you?
A: I’ve cut myself so many times on the television program that I remind folks of unfortunate martyrs like St. Sebastian. He met his fate on the receiving end of arrows, and St. Simon has an even more distressing history with the saw. I have the chisel. 

In my own defense, however, my TV director kept yelling “Cut!” and I was just trying to oblige.

Ever since we published plans for the Holtzapffel Cabinetmaker's Workbench in Issue 8 of Woodworking Magazine, readers have requested information on how to build the bench so it could be easily knocked down and moved.

The version I built and published plans for in Issue 8 used old-world bench-building principles where the legs were tenoned into the top and the base parts were permanently drawbored. But when Kelly Mehler and I taught a class in constructing the bench last month, we decided to modify the plans to make the whole thing break down for easy transport. The students hailed from all over the country (Missouri, Alaska, Michigan), and so a portable version was necessary.

By the way, if you missed my daily blog posts about this class, you can find them over at the Popular Woodworking editor's blog by clicking below.

Day 1: Sticks
Day 2: Glue
Day 3: Grit
Day 4: Gruntwork
Day 5: Grease
Day 6: Guessing
Day 7: Gone


This weekend my blisters from the class began to fade, and so I cleaned up the construction drawing and cutting list a bit – you can download them for free below.

Here's how the knockdown construction works in a nutshell: The workbench's base is made up of two end assemblies, which are permanently glued and drawbored, plus two long stretchers.

Compared to the original design, the only changes to the end assemblies are that the legs don't have tenons on the top and you need to add a 3"-wide top stretcher to each end assembly. These top stretchers will help you attach the base to the benchtop.

The base's long stretchers are significantly different. The long stretchers have short tenons and are attached to the end assemblies with 1/2" x 8"-long hex-head cap screws, washers and nuts. All in all, the base's joinery works a lot like a traditional bed.

The assembled joint that shows the cap screws in place and the plywood template.

The disassembled joint that shows the short tenon on the long stretcher.

To install the cap screws, drill 5/8"-diameter holes through the legs. Then rout out slots for the nuts and washers in the long stretchers using a plywood pattern, a 1/2" spiral bit and a guide bushing (see the photo for what this looks like). With the slots routed, install the cap screws, washers and nuts. Snug everything up with a socket set and box wrench.

With the base assembled, attach the workbench's top to the base with 3/8" x 5"-long lag screws through the top stretchers in the end assemblies. We used four lag screws per bench. The screws at the front of the bench were in 3/8"-diameter holes. The screws at the rear of the bench were in 1/2"-diameter holes, which allows for wood movement.

Everything else about this bench is identical to the plans found in Issue 8.

Holtzapffel_KD_Bench.pdf (52.91 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

I'm passionate about cooking, but I don't get excited about cooking equipment. I've got decent cookware, questionable Far East knives bought from an infomercial and (somehow) enough silicone basting brushes for the whole neighborhood. Want one?

But when it comes to marking knives for woodworking, I'm tough to please. Exhibit A is over at WKfinetools.com. I've probably had about a dozen marking knives pass through my hands during the last decade, and none has pleased me as much as the small knife from Blue Spruce Toolworks.

It's the only knife that does everything I ask from a knife, from marking out skinny dovetails to making a coarse cutline for a crosscut handsaw. And I've written over and over how much I like it – perhaps to the point where you're wondering if Dave Jeske at Blue Spruce is padding my secret account in the Cayman Islands.

So a few weeks ago, I got a small box from Steve Quehl, who runs the Woodcraft store outside Atlanta. In it was a new knife made by Bob Zajicek of Czeck Edge. It's called the Kerf Kadet, and Steve offered to loan it to me to test in the shop.

I used it to mark out the joints on a Gustav Stickley plant stand I built last month, and today I spent some time marking out dovetails with it. And I can safely tell you that Steve is not getting this knife back. The most he can hope for is a check to reimburse him.

The knife is similar in some ways to the Blue Spruce knife, but it has some significant differences that are worth noting. The Czech Edge blade is a bit narrower (5/16" compared to 23/64") and shorter past the ferrule (1-5/16" compared to 1-1/2"). With those statistics, both knives will do most standard joint-marking chores.

Where the knives differ is in the handle and ferrule (the metallic transition from the blade to the wood). The Blue Spruce uses a smooth two-piece ferrule. The Czeck Edge uses a single machined bronze ferrule with three grooves turned into it. The grooves are not decorative. When you pinch the knife at the ferrule, the grooves improve your grip on the knife. I was surprised how much I liked the feel.

The wooden part of each tool's handle is also different. The Blue Spruce has a somewhat vase-like shape that opens up at the ferrule. When I grip the Blue Spruce, I put my fingers behind this area, which prevents my fingers from slipping off the knife when I add downward pressure.

The Czeck Edge has more of a pencil-like shape and is lighter in the hand. Both are comfortable in my hands.

How about fit and finish? It's impossible to beat Blue Spruce on this point, but the Czeck Edge is in a tie for first place. The knife is flawless. Crisp and smooth with a perfect transition from wood to metal. It's what you would hope for in your own work. One other nice touch: The Czeck Edge knives come with blade guards for storing the knife. And the price? It's fair: $37.95 to $41.95 depending on the wood you select.

I'm eager to put the Czeck Edge Kerf Kadet to some more use. Lucky for me I have a shop here at the magazine and a shop at home. So I really don't have to choose favorites.  

— Christopher Schwarz

Thanks to everyone who entered our Shortcut contest to win the restored Millers Falls 2A drill from WKTools.com. About 100 people entered the contest, and about one-third of those entries will end up in print in the coming year. So even if you didn't win the drill, you still might will a free one-year subscription to Woodworking Magazine.

The winning Shortcut is what I like to call a "Jedi Mind Trick." It's a little way to remember something very important – in this case, the rotation direction of any router bit. As soon as I read this Shortcut I slapped my forehead.

And that's the sign of a good Shortcut. Here it is from reader Regis de Andrade:

The Right-Hand Thumb Rule

I learned this in engineering school and soon found out it worked for my router. It is called the "right-hand thumb rule."

When trying to remember which way your router bit is spinning so you can feed the wood in the correct direction, you can use the right-hand thumb rule.

Pretend your right hand is a router and your thumb is the router bit. If you are holding the router with your hands and the bit is pointing down to the floor, then hold your hand in front of you with your thumb pointing to the floor. Then curl your fingers. That's the direction your router bit is spinning.

If you are using a router table, hold your hand with your thumb pointing to the sky. Curl your fingers, and that's the direction your router bit is spinning.

That way you will never get confused again and always know the correct feed direction.

And it works for almost anything that spins: faucets, screws (regular thread), changing a tire (if you want to know which way to tighten or loosen the nuts) etc.

— Christopher Schwarz

The new Stanley No. 4 smoothing plane.

Stanley Works will release five premium-grade handplane models this year that are designed to compete with planes from Veritas and Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, officials said.

The line includes new designs for a No. 4 smoothing plane, a low-angle jack plane, a shoulder plane and two block planes. All of the Stanley planes will have features that users have come to expect from high-end tools, including irons made from thicker A2 steel, bodies made from ductile iron and handles made from highly polished rosewood.

The new Stanley No. 62 low-angle jack plane.

Additionally, the sole castings will be heavier, all the knobs will be made of brass, the soles will be flat to .003" and many of the planes will incorporate a "patented lateral adjustment locking lever," according to company officials and literature.

The planes, which should be available by November, will have the following manufacturer's suggested retail price: The No. 4 and the low-angle jack will list for $179. The block planes and the shoulder plane will list for $99. The planes will be available through woodworking specialty stores, not home centers. Company officials said the tools’ A2 irons will be made in England and the plane bodies will be made in Mexico.

Stanley officials said they designed these planes after working with the company's "discovery teams." These teams went into specialty stores and furniture-making shops and conducted two-hour interviews with woodworkers about what they wanted in a handplane.

Stanley then designed prototypes and solicited feedback from these users, which they then incorporated into the tools' final designs.

The end results were very interesting. For example, the new Stanley No. 4 is a bevel-down plane. What's different is that the frog and base are cast as one piece. This reduces the opportunity for blade chatter to occur. Also interesting: The plane has an adjustable mouth like a block plane. You unscrew the front knob and slide a throat plate forward and back for different mouth apertures.

The No. 62 Low-Angle Jack Plane also has many of these refinements, including the patented lateral-adjustment mechanism.

The new Stanley No. 92 shoulder/chisel plane.

The No. 92 Shoulder/Chisel Plane also features brass adjustment knobs and a wooden grip at the rear. Though Stanley officials didn't have the finished width of the tool available, the No. 92 was historically a 3/4"-wide tool.

The new Stanley No. 60-1/2 block plane.

The two block planes – the No. 9-1/2 standard-angle plane and the No. 60-1/2 low-angle block plane – have less radical changes compared to their historic brethren. However, they have been redesigned to look like the rest of the new family of planes, and all the planes will use the famous Stanley "Sweetheart" logo from the early part of the 20th century.

When asked if other plane designs were in the works, a Stanley official said there was nothing they could discuss at this time.

As soon as functional production models become available, we’ll be testing these new planes and will report the results in an upcoming issue of Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine.

— Christopher Schwarz

The new Stanley No. 9-1/2 block plane.

For the next issue of Woodworking Magazine, we’re investigating the best way to make through-tenons – a hallmark of early American furniture, Arts & Crafts pieces and people who like to show off.

I’ve spent a good deal of energy investigating the joint personally. When I started collecting Arts & Crafts furniture in 1990, I quickly became attuned to spotting the joint in pieces for my collection.

Even better, I had a mentor with an incredible collection. Owen Riley was a photographer at the newspaper where I worked, and he had been collecting Arts & Crafts furniture for many years. His entire apartment was stuffed to the gills with the stuff. And he took great pains to teach me the difference between the makers – I can spot an L & J.G. tusk tenon over a Gustav Stickley tusk tenon from across a room.

And so I’ve always had a realistic view of how this joint appears in real-deal furniture that now costs five or six figures.

Here’s the real truth: The craftsmanship is all over the place. Take a look at the photo above. That’s a through-tenon on a signed Gustav Stickley slipper rocker from my collection. All the through-tenons on the piece look exactly like this. Clearly, they were made with some sort of boring tool, perhaps a drill press or perhaps some form of spindle machine. Heck you can still see some torn grain on the surface of the joint that indicates the rotation of the cutter.

No effort was made to square up the ends of the joint. No effort was made to round over the tenon to match the radiused mortise. There’s just a gap that’s plainly visible on the outside surfaces of the leg.

I always like to compare that joint to the through-tenons on my Charles Stickley arm chair. Charles was one of the “lesser” Stickley brothers, and the craftsmanship and style of his work is often derided by modern writers. The through-tenons on his chair are perfect, as good as any high-class modern work in a gallery.

There’s no consistency by maker. Roycroft through-tenons? Raggy. Limbert through-tenons? Not bad except for a couple overcuts – probably from a saw.

So what’s the pattern? Visibility. The more visible the joint, the more likely that the maker went to great lengths to make it tidy. That seems like it should be obvious, but that has not been my experience with modern work (especially my own).

My inclination is to make the suckers perfect. Why? Because I often have other woodworkers snooping around my house, pulling out my drawers, turning over my tables and the like.

So how do you make these joints spot-on? I’ve used several methods, which we’ll be exploring in the issue. For long and skinny joints, it’s hard to beat a highly-tuned hollow-chisel mortiser (though I’m going to try). For squarish joints, it’s hard to beat a template and a router.

And, in the end, it’s hard to beat wedging, which can expand a tenon into a loosely fit joint. Or, if you’ve had a bad day, putty and a dark dark stain…..

— Christopher Schwarz

Veritas has just released its much-awaited Side Rabbet Plane (at a special introductory price) and Veritas was generous enough to permit me to test-drive it here in our workshop.

Though I still am getting comfortable with the tool, below are my initial impressions after trimming out about a dozen grooves and rabbets this week.

About Side Rabbet Planes
Side-rabbet planes are specialty tools that belong in the family of joinery planes. They are used to clean up and widen the difficult-to-trim walls of rabbets, grooves and dados. To be honest, some craftsmen don't use these planes at all. Instead of trimming a dado wider, they will trim the mating panel instead. Both perspectives work.
 
There are two kinds of metal-bodied side-rabbet planes (and there are wooden ones as well). The Stanley Nos. 98 and 99 have a right-hand version and a left-hand version so you can work with the grain in grooves in rabbets. The other format is to combine both cutters into one tool. Stanley did that in its No. 79 (with mixed results in my book). And the English Preston version (and later Record version) got it right.

Lie-Nielsen makes versions similar to the Stanley, but in bronze. I've used them and they work quite well.

Veritas Specifications
The Veritas Side Rabbet Plane is similar to the Preston plane: One cutter is on top. One is below. A handle is in the middle. Veritas, as always, has made improvements to the design that are beyond the "socks on a squirrel" variety.

The sleek handle – which reminds me of a beetle's back – pivots up and down depending on which cutter you are using. The handle is spring-loaded and doesn't slip during use – which is saying something because you have to apply significant hand pressure to these tools in use.

The handle is comfortable. It burrows into your palm without poking you.

The other major advancement for the user is the irons. Veritas has lapped the flat faces of these O1 (high-carbon) steel irons so sharpening them up takes only minutes. And when it comes to skew-cutting planes this is critical. A small sharpening error with a skew plane and the tool won't function correctly.

The other thing to note about the tool is its depth stop, which locks quickly and squarely (thanks to some clever machining) in either direction. You also can remove the toe piece of the tool with a screwdriver so you can work into the corners of stopped rabbets, grooves and dados.

In putting the tool to use, I was impressed (as always) with the irons and how easy they took an edge. Sharpening them without a jig is fairly simple work because the bevels are quite large and register firmly on a sharpening stone.

The only modification I'd recommend to the irons is to relieve the acute corner of each iron as it will dig in a little deeply in use (and will get worn away anyway). Veritas recommends this in the manual, and it is a two-minute job with a file. Be careful not to go too far – the point needs to extend beyond the sole a tad.

The real skill to learn with this plane is starting the tool. All the varieties of this tool have a small nose that you have to register against the sidewall of the joint you are going to trim. So it takes a steady hand to start a clean cut. Once you begin, the tool is easy to manage in the cut. The Veritas works in cuts up to 1/2" deep.

Trimming the long grain of grooves and rabbets is easier than trimming the end grain in dados, so start with the easy stuff first. This style of tool isn't hard to use, but I wouldn't practice on a live project piece.

The Veritas Side Rabbet plane costs $139, but it will be offered at a special introductory price of $119. You can order one through this link.

— Christopher Schwarz

When it comes to dovetailing, I’ve never really had a dog in the fight between dovetailers who cut the pins first and those who cut the tails first. I was first taught to cut my tails first, though I’m also comfortable cutting the pins first (I spent a whole year cutting pins first so I understand its advantages).

But as I get older, I guess I’m getting more set in my ways and am officially entrenched with the tails-first crowd. Why? Well I guess it’s because of the tools I use and processes I have chosen through the years that make my choice inevitable.

Reason 1: Gang cutting. I like cutting two sets of tails simultaneously for drawers. This is impossible to do (well) if you cut pins-first.

Reason 2: I own a narrow-bladed knife. One of the big advantages of cutting pins-first is that you have a lot of room to navigate when you transfer your marks to the tail board. I have a very narrow-bladed knife, so sneaking it between the tails is no hassle for me. If I didn’t have this tool, I’d probably be a pins-first person.

Reason 3: I rabbet my boards before cutting the tails. Years ago, Glen D. Huey showed me a trick where you rabbet the inside face of your tails to make transferring the marks to the pin board easier. The shallow rabbet (about 1/8") gives you enormous precision in aligning your pieces. Glen is a pins-first guy, and the system works with pins-first dovetailing. But I think it really shines with tails-first because you can clamp your pin board in a vise and really apply pressure with the tail board.

Reason 4: Gravitational forces. This one is a subtle argument, and I don’t expect it to sway many people, but it is a strong one for me. I think it’s easier to cut a true vertical line than it is to cut a true line at an angle. This is because of the way gravity tugs at the heavy back of the saw. This little detail makes cutting tails-first easier for me. Here’s how:

When you cut any dovetail, the first half of the joint is the pattern for the second. So your first part doesn’t have to be precise when it comes to its angles. It just needs to be clean and neat. If you cut your tails first, that means your first cuts are angled. If you don’t have to be precise with these cuts, then you have one less thing to worry about with this part of the joint. All you really need to worry about is being straight. The actual angle is incidental. Heck I use a pencil alone to mark out my tails.

When it comes to the second part of the joint, it must be an exact complement of the first. Accuracy counts a great deal. When you cut tails-first, that means your second cut is pins. And pins are straight up and down. And straight up and down is easier to do perfectly. Well, straight is easier is for me at least.

If you reverse the process and cut the pins-first, the second part is making the angled tails. And I think those lines are harder to track because gravity isn’t on your side.

Of course, if you do this stuff every day, all this becomes moot. You just do it the way you do it. And you ignore the gravitational prattling of a magazine editor.

— Christopher Schwarz

Good books on hand work are hard to find, and after I recommended Robert Wearing's "The Essential Woodworker" in 2007, copies became difficult to find at a reasonable price. I swear I don't have a secret stash of these books I like, though it would be a nifty way to make some cash on the side.

If you cannot get Wearing's excellent book, I have a great alternative: Charles H. Hayward's "Carpentry for Beginners" (Emerson Books). This little jewel slipped under my radar for many years because of the title. Carpentry? Why would I want a book about building a coal hutch?

Well as it turns out, we moderns are a bunch of unskilled dufuses (or should that be that dufi? I forget). What a mid-century Briton considers carpentry is more like what we would consider fine furniture building. (And what we call carpentry must be one notch above flint knives and bear skins, I suppose).

"Carpentry for Beginners" is an excellent book for building basic hand skills. Hayward covers it all, from basic sharpening to flattening a board, mortising, basic dovetailing, half-laps and even case construction. The book is entirely focused on hand work because it is assumed that the home carpenter wouldn't have any machines lurking in the scullery.

What I think is brilliant about the book (and I hope to steal for my own future efforts) is how Hayward first teaches you the basic strokes: sawing, chiseling, boring, planing, marking, testing. Then he shows you how to combine these basic skills into dealing with real-life assemblies. There are entire chapters on "How to Make a Door," "How to Make a Box" and "How to Make a Drawer."

Then these are followed by informative single-page illustrations that walk you through many of the basic joints.

That's the first 109 pages; the rest of the book is a walk through your swinging uncle's house. Hayward shows you how to build swanky item after swanky item for your pad, including a television chair and some Danish un-modern tables. You can probably skip these chapters, except for the section on building a tool chest and workbench trestles.

Where do I find out-of-print books such as this? Try:

bookfinder.com

abebooks.com

alibris.com

powells.com  

Now I'm off to troll these sites to buy up 100 copies of Graham Blackburn's old books for next week's blog entry.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Click here to read about other books I've recommended.

One of the best recommendations I’ve ever received in the world of hand tools came from a power-tool user who has 660-volt three-phase pumping through his veins.

It’s 1996, and I’m a newly minted managing editor at Popular Woodworking. David Thiel, then an associate editor at the magazine, has been assigned to give me a tour of the workshop and check me out on the machines.

I’ve been woodworking on my back porch seriously for a few years and am comfortable on a table saw, radial-arm saw and a band saw, but I’ve never seen a drum sander, spray booth or shaper. I know I came off like a hayseed because I was dumbfounded by the sheer volume of cast iron and steel now at my disposal.

At the end of the tour, David showed me his work area and made a generous offer: Until I got set up in the shop I could use any of the hand tools hanging in his tool cabinets above his bench.

Several weeks later I’m in the shop building my first serious project for the magazine (an Arts & Crafts project from the Byrdcliffe Colony) and I need a combination square to mark out some joinery before I cut it on the table saw. I snatch one of the squares above his bench and go to work.

That was a Friday afternoon. I remember that because I was compelled to drive up to our local tool supplier Saturday morning to buy my own L.S. Starrett 12" combination square. I didn’t care what the price was. I didn’t care how far I had to drive across town with a squealing 1-year-old in the back seat to get it. I just knew that after an afternoon of working with David’s square that I had to have one for myself.

After a few more weeks I bought a 6" version for $25 at a local antiques market.

During the last 12 years, I’ve had a variety of marking and measuring tools try to shake that Starrett from my toolbox. The magazine’s staff tested all the squares on the market in the late 1990s and somehow the General version ended up on my bench. It’s a nice square, and on the outside would appear to be every bit as good as the Starrett, but something is missing. The blade in the Starrett just moves a bit more sweetly and the engraved markings are just a bit crisper.

As I got more into traditional hand work, I considered trading in my Starrett for a traditional try square (perhaps a wooden one). After all, combination squares were built originally for machinists, not woodworkers. But after dabbling with the old-Testament gear, I fled back into the arms of Starrett. It’s just too darn perfect and useful.

I keep the 6" version tucked into my shop apron and use it for laying out and measuring joinery. The 12" one hangs above my bench and comes into play any time I need to keep two measurements locked in (which is typical) or the joinery is beyond the range of the 6" tool.

It’s almost impossible to overstate my affection for this tool. If I had a family crest, I’d put it on there. If I’m buried with one tool, this will probably be the one I ask my wife to tuck into the pocket of my last suit.

But I probably won’t want to be buried with this square. Instead, I plan to hang it on the wall of my shop in plain view in the hopes that one of my children will pick the thing up when they need a tool for a quick measurement. Perhaps the same bolt of lightning will strike them.

— Christopher Schwarz

Today I'm abandoning a prototype design I've been working on this week between bouts of tending our gerund farm. I'd like to have a Viking funeral for this little end table, but I'm sure the fire inspector would scowl.

Despite the failed design, the experience hasn't been a total loss. While Senior Editor Robert W. Lang wasn't looking, I snitched his Bosch I-Driver, which I've been using all week. You see, I'm in the market for a new cordless drill. My 12-volt tools are more than five years old and feel like they weigh a ton compared to the newest generation of tools.

The I-Driver, what Bosch calls the PS10-2, is just about everything I want in a cordless tool. Where to start? The sucker is built like a tank. Everything is tightly constructed on this tool; many low-priced drills feel like they are going to fall apart on you (and we've had several flame out on us over the years as well).

Second: I love the pivoting head. The chuck pivots 90°, which allows you to get into places that no other drill will go. The low-profile chuck also aids in making this the sneakiest drill I've ever used. The chuck accepts ¼" hex-shank tooling, which some will see as a downside, but I consider it a minor inconvenience for the low profile.

What else? The tool goes and goes. Yes, it's only 10.8 volts, but it took me a long time to drain the battery – and these batteries are a couple years old and have lots of cycles on them. Other plusses: It has a fine clutch (not all right-angle dills do, which is stupid). Plus, the oversized trigger allows you to use two fingers, so your control of the speed is greatly enhanced.

I think I've found my next drill. Sure, it's not going to easily spin 1/16" twist bits, but that's what I have my Millers Falls eggbeater drill for, right?

And now to see if we have any gasoline in the shop. I have a prototype to deal with.

— Christopher Schwarz

Lately I've been planing stuff that has been a lot nastier than your typical run-of-the-mill cherry, oak and walnut. First Senior Editor Glen D. Huey tried to torture me by bringing in some curly maple for the blanket chest on cover the Summer 2008 issue.

Then I built the cover project for the Fall 2008 issue from some walnut that should have been on the burn pile. Honestly, I had to go through about twice as much material as usual to find enough wood to build this 18th-century wall cabinet.

Then, this weekend I had to plane some rowy mahogany while teaching at Kelly Mehler's School of Woodworking. Kelly had prepared mahogany pieces for the project that the students built (a Shaker utensil tray). And a lot of that was rowy – which is when the wood has rope-like bands of grain through it where the grain reverses in each rope.

The tool that has kept me away from the wide belt sander these last few months has been my little Wayne Anderson smoothing plane. I've had this tool for more than two years now and have published an article on its long-term performance in the most recent edition of Popular Woodworking, the August 2008 issue.

Below is the text of that article, plus a link to download a pdf slideshow presentation that shows the evolution of this form of plane using pictures supplied by Wayne himself. Enjoy.

Despite the amount of bronze, iron and beech in my tool cabinet, most woodworkers need only three bench planes: A fore plane to reduce the thickness of boards, a jointer plane to flatten them and a smoothing plane to prepare them for finishing.

That’s in a perfect world. In reality, we work with a material (wood) that is unpredictable, cantankerous and vexing – like my first redheaded girlfriend.

During the last few years, I’ve gradually folded a fourth plane into my  arsenal, and now I cannot imagine working without it.

It’s a small smoothing plane with a steeply pitched iron (a 57° angle of attack), no chipbreaker and a mouth aperture that a gnat would have a hard time squeezing through without damaging his Dipteran hinder.

This is my plane of last resort. When my 50°-pitch smoothing plane leaves nasty torn grain in its wake, I pull out this plane. It doesn’t care if there’s a grain reversal in the board. Or if I’m planing against the grain. Or if the grain is interlocked, curly or worse. When set for a fine cut, this plane almost never fails me.

This plane has become a staple of Wayne Anderson, a custom planemaker in Elk River, Minn. (andersonplanes.com or 763-486-0834). This form of plane started out several years ago with Wayne’s interest in high-angle planes without a chipbreaker. He built this version for writer Kerry Pierce to test for a competing magazine. Then I bought the plane from Wayne. (Despite the fact that it was a used tool, I paid full price.)

Since that time, I’ve fallen head-over-heels for the plane, and Wayne has pushed the tool’s design in new directions for other customers. If you’re not familiar with Wayne’s work, he’s a bit different than other custom makers. He seldom makes the same tool twice.

The profile on the rear of the iron might change. Or the shape of the sidewall or lever cap will morph. But the tool still looks like itself – like a fraternal twin.

As to the function of the tool, you could set up a 6"-long block plane to do the exact same job, but there’s no way the tool will look as good or fit your hand so well.

With this small smoothing plane, the coffin shape of the body lets you squeeze the tool right in the middle by its mouth. And having mastered the tool, I find I can change the depth of cut merely by squeezing and pressing at the center of the tool, or by releasing that pressure. The weight of the plane (2 lbs. 2 oz.) keeps the tool in the cut without chattering (try that with your block plane) even when I use little-girl pressure to control it. The result: Thin shavings; no tearing.

The rear bun is rounded nicely so it feels good against my right palm, and the tall iron keeps my hand right where it should be.

The short sole (about 5-1/2") allows you to plane in areas that longer smoothing planes can’t get to. When I say this I don’t mean tight little spaces inside a cabinet, I mean the small and large hollows that occur on any flat board. A small tool rides the gentle waves of a board where a longer plane skims off the peaks instead. And when you’re trying to get a tabletop looking right (perfect flatness be darned) a short plane is invaluable.

If you’re thinking of investing in one custom plane, this plane would be an excellent addition to any standard lineup. These tools start at $825. Need more convincing? Wayne has provided a slide show of the different forms of this plane during the last few years that you can download below. I’ll warn you, however, it’s dangerous to watch.

WAminis-1.pdf (2.16 MB)

— Christopher Schwarz

What I dislike most about the Summer 2008 issue is the fact that I didn't get to build the Sea Chest that Glen D. Huey constructed. I had designed the entire issue around me getting to build the thing. Then we ran out of time. Or, put more correctly, I had to choose between building and occasionally chewing my food.

So Glen built the Sea Chest and did great job (grumble). During construction, he had to bend the hinges on the sucker to fit the canted sides. We promised a short tutorial on the process and here it is, with photos.

And by the way, the story has a happy ending (for me). I ended up with the Sea Chest gracing my living room as a coffee table. And I experienced some evenings of fine digestion. Win-win!

Manipulating hinges for the sea chest is extremely easy. To begin, use a combination square or small square to strike a line across the back face of the hinge leaf that fits to the chest. The line should be at 3/4” off the barrel (or equal the thickness of your chest back).

Place the scribed hinge leaf into a vise leaving the line about a 1/16” above the jaws. This compensates for rounding the metal as you bend the leaf. Then, grab a stout hammer and relieve your frustrations by pounding over the leaf. Be sure to make the bend toward you or so the barrel is folded away from you as you finish shaping the bend. Keep a hand pulling on the opposite leaf to help bend the leaf (the metal is not that rigid). Keep in mind hitting that hand with a hammer is not much fun, so slide back the leaf a bit.

That leaves the leaf at something near 90º. Due to the cant of the front and back of the chest, it’s necessary to continue the bend a few degrees more. To complete the bending, remove the hinge from the vise, hold the hinge against the vise and add a couple firm hits with my hammer. That should bring the hinge to a match with the chest.

— Christopher Schwarz (with captions by Glen D. Huey)

Anyone who builds furniture while in a wheelchair is up against serious challenges. Not only are the machines and workbenches too high off the floor, getting the wheelchair close enough to the workbench to actually work is a serious problem.

All the workbenches I built for "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use," are unsuitable for the wheelchair user. The bench's bases won't let a wheelchair user get anywhere near the working surface.

Several wheelchair users have approached me about designing a bench for wheelchair users, but I wasn't sure where to begin. Sjoberg makes this version that is adjustable in height, which is very similar to Jeff Noden's Adjust-a-bench – at least in basic form.

Reader Larry Arnold, a wheelchair user, designed and built this workbench, which is quite stout, passes my kitchen door test and is handsome to boot. Here are some of the statistics:

The base is made using ¼" steel tubing. The legs are 3" square; the other steel rails are 2" x 3". The base weighs 106 lbs.

The top is 2-1/4" thick, 24" wide and 66" long. The top is 29" off the floor and made from Douglas fir. Both the vises are Lee Valley face vises, which Arnold said he chose because they have a low profile under the bench, allowing him clearance to roll under there.

He also has a deadman he bolts to the top, which will allow him to clamp long boards, doors and the like.

"I built it all myself with no help, except for the top which I took to a cabinet shop to run through their wide belt sander," he says. "I have full access under the bench with no restrictions except for the vertical legs. It's going to be so much better than what I have been using, wish I would have built one sooner. I know it's not what you would build for yourself,  but for me in my situation I can't think of much I could add to make it work better for me."

And here's the best news about the bench: Arnold is going to put it into service to build two Shaker-style tables from Issue 2.

Congratulations to Arnold on his new bench.

— Christopher Schwarz

Learning to cut woodworking joints is one thing. Figuring out how to assemble all those joints in a correct and efficient order for a project is another skill entirely.

In the upcoming Fall 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine, we're delving deep into the topic of cabinet construction. And the method we have developed during the last decade is different than any other you have read, but it will do three things for your woodworking:

1. You'll make fewer mistakes and waste less wood.

2. You'll have an easier time fitting your doors and drawers.

3. Your cabinets will go together faster with tighter joints.

If you'd like to learn about our new method, then I encourage you to subscribe to the magazine by May 30 to guarantee you will receive a copy of the Fall 2008 issue. In addition to our research into cabinet construction, you'll also find:

Fitting Doors & Drawers: We show you how to square up doors with a table saw and fit it precisely with a hand plane. Plus, we explain how to size your drawers so they'll fit properly with only minor adjustments with a plane.

Tool Review – Sliding Bevels: Why do so many of them slip and slide around on you? We investigate the major brands available today and find the best ones.

Coloring Walnut: Walnut with a simple clear finish looks cold and lifeless.
We show you how to warm up this beautiful wood with a variety of approaches, including shellac and stains.

So why should you subscribe to Woodworking Magazine? We think it's different than every other magazine out there. It's written to help all woodworkers fill in the inevitable gaps in our skills that result from teaching ourselves woodworking.

We show you the historical, time-tested and frequently forgotten methods to saw any joint, drawboring, wedged through-tenons and splines. We review tools that other magazines won't touch but are extremely important: like 6" rules, screws, combination squares and moisture meters.

Plus, we offer projects you won't elsewhere. We build only time-tested forms in classic styles, such as Arts & Crafts, Shaker and early American. More importantly, we pick projects that can be built without an enormous outlay of time, wood or tools.

And that's not all that's different. Woodworking Magazine has no advertisements and is printed in glorious sepia-toned black-and-white on its inside pages.

If you're ready to subscribe, we're ready to take your order. Click here and we'll sign you up to receive the next issue.

— Christopher Schwarz

Between bites of salad, Kevin Drake pauses to take a close look at the common chair sitting in our local Panera.
 
When I look at the chair, all I see is your typical bent-lamination, factory-made, comfortable-for-about-32-minutes padded chair.
 
But Kevin, the founder of Glen-Drake Toolworks, sees a lesson in Japanese aesthetics and composition by Japanese arts teacher Shozo Sato. What is the dominant focus for the viewer? What is the sub-dominant; the subordinate?

I was chewing my food at the beginning of the explanation, but by the end I was listening so intently that I forgot about the baguette soaking in my own mouth juices as I finally "saw" the chair.

Nothing makes me happier than to have lunch with someone whose brain is on fire with ideas different than mine. Someone who sees the same world with different eyes.

Which brings us to handsaws.

It's a common thing to read in woodworking texts that the ripping teeth in a Western saw (power- or hand-driven) are shaped like chisels. And that crosscutting teeth are shaped like knives.

But when Kevin sees sawteeth, he sees something different. He sees the function of the teeth relating more to its "rake," which is how forward or backwards each sawtooth leans. On a handsaw, teeth with the cutting face straight up have "zero rake." Teeth that lean forward into the cut have a more aggressive rake. And teeth that lean backward have a relaxed rake. (Whether the rake is "postive" or "negative" depends on whether it's a power tool or hand tool user describing it.)
 
To Kevin, Western ripping teeth don't look like chisels; they look like scrapers. Scrapers attack the work in an almost vertical position – like a zero-rake sawtooth. I can see this (see the photo at the top of this entry of a wooden model of Western sawteeth).
 
And to Kevin, it's the Japanese-style sawteeth (shown above right) that look like chisels. They lean forward like a chisel being used for paring. And I can see this, too.
 
So Kevin then asks three questions:
 
1. What type of wood scrapes better, hardwoods or softwoods? Easy. The harder the wood, the easier it scrapes.
 
2. In general, which woods are harder, Japanese woods or Western woods? Again, it's an easy question. Western woods are harder.
 
3. When you scrape a wood, is it easier to push the tool or pull it? You can do it both ways, but I definitely prefer to push the tool.
 
"That," Kevin says, "is why I prefer Western push-style saws."
 
That statement was like a Zen Buddhist riddle (called a koan) for me. Thanks Kevin. Now I'll never look at my saws (or the Panera chairs) in the same way ever again.
 
— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. This coming week (May 19 to 23) I'll be teaching at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking, so there won't be many (if any) updates to the blog. Enjoy your vacation!

As woodworkers dive into handwork, they usually start with a block plane, then the bench planes, the saws and the joinery planes.

Joinery planes – such as plow planes, router planes, shoulder planes and rabbeting planes – are some of the easiest planes to set up and use. Their irons are straighforward to sharpen (no curves needed), and because the tool doesn’t produce a show surface, you don’t need to be a maniac about the keenness of your cutting edges.

One of the most essential joinery planes is the moving fillister. It cuts a rabbet either across the grain or with the grain. And it can make a rabbet of almost any size thanks to its adjustable fence.

Moving fillisters are different than other planes in the rabbeting family in that its fence is adjustable (planes with a fixed fence are called standing fillisters), plus it can work across the grain because it has retractable nickers (planes without the nickers are just plain old rabbet planes).

The iron Stanley No. 78 is the most common vintage version of this tool, however I’m not fond of the form. The fence wobbles because of the way it is attached to the body, so the plane does a poor job in hard woods (in my experience). Record, by the way, fixed this problem with its metal version of this plane, though it’s a tough tool to find in North America.

This really is a case where the wooden versions of a plane are superior. Wooden-stock moving fillisters are fairly common in the secondary market, though they usually require some rehabbing to be usable. So what do you do?

You could ask Clark & Williams to make you one – they showed me an excellent moving fillister they make a couple years ago. You could buy an ECE from toolsforworkingwood.com. Or you could buy a new traditional one from Philip Edwards at Philly Planes in England.

Philip’s planes are excellent. I recently reviewed his miter plane plus a plane designed for raising panels for drawer bottoms. They both work like a charm. So it’s very exciting to me (and a good sign for hand work in general) that there is a new moving fillister on the market from Philip’s shop.

We’ve ordered one for our shop here, and I will offer a full report once it arrives. Until then, however, if you need a moving fillister, I can recommend Philip’s planes highly.  

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Want to learn more about joinery planes? Then definitely pick up a copy of “The Wooden Plane” by John M. Whelan.

For me, finger joints have always been the nerdy, square cousin to the dovetail.

Finger joints are immensely strong when glued properly. But they are usually used by beginning woodworkers in places where a dovetail would be more appropriate, such as on a piece of 18th-century casework.

Add to that the fact that finger joints are tricky or dangerous to make on wide boards (without a commercial jig) plus the fact that gluing them with yellow glue is stressful, and it's a wonder that anyone uses them at all.

And so we decided to tackle finger joints for the Summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine, which will be shipping to subscribers next month. It took us a few months to really pin them down (pun intended), but I think we nailed it (and no, cut nails are not involved).

Here's a small taste of some of the problems of the joint we solved after three months of testing in our shop:

Appearance: Finger joints are a product of the machine age. Using them in styles before circa 1900 is just wrong to the eye. So consider the joint for more contemporary pieces only.

Cutting them Accurately: Right now there are basically two different ways to cut the joint: A shop-made jig for the table saw for narrow boards, and using a router jig that costs several hundred dollars for wide boards. We set out to develop a simple and safe shop-made jig that could handle both wide and narrow boards. Senior Editor Robert W. Lang had a stroke of genius on this and solved the problem forever (in my opinion).

Gluing Them Easily: You can assemble small boxes with finger joints fairly easily when using yellow glue. But at a certain point, you hit the wall because the glue sets up before you can close all the joints. So the solution would seem to be a slow-setting glue. Well, that's one way to go about it. But we found an easier and faster way that is super-strong (see the photo of Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick's boot on a sample joint). In the end, it took an anvil to bust up our sample joints.

Also in the Summer 2008 Issue
The finger joint is just one of the major themes running through the issue. Here are some of the other stories you can look for in the coming issue:

Building a Better Chest: Most woodworkers build chests using the most convoluted and fussy assembly imaginable. After reviewing hundreds of historical models, we settle on a method for building a chest that looks more complex at first glance, but actually saves an immense amount of shop time, requires less fussing around and allows more design flexibility.

Crackle Finishing: Many woodworkers who try a crackle finish have inconsistent results. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't. And predicting how much it's going to crackle is almost impossible. Senior Editor Glen D. Huey cracks the code of crackle finish and finds out that the easiest and most predictable way to do it is also the simplest.

Trimming End Grain: When you have to cut back some end grain so it's flush with some face grain, it's always an opportunity to mess up the project. We show you two (actually three) methods for doing it right every time with a block plane, sander and pencil eraser.

And one more thing about the Summer 2008 issue: This issue is going to be mailed out to subscribers in a protective plastic bag, which will reduce the chances that the postal service will mangle it. If the plastic bag works for you, let us know so we can encourage our manufacturing division to continue using it.

And if you're not a subscriber, you can easily remedy that here.

— Christopher Schwarz

About a decade ago, my boss Steve Shanesy told me something about design that knocked me flat. When he was a struggling custom furniture maker, he took some time off to do something that few people do.

Create a new style of furniture.

That is one of the most ambitious personal projects I could imagine. I wonder if there has there been a new style of furniture created in my lifetime. Does James Krenov’s work constitute a new style? Sam Maloof? George Nakashima? I don’t know the answer to this question, but I do know how one mouth-breather of a woodworker (me) goes about it.

And because I never tire of hearing how other people design pieces, I thought I’d share with you the convoluted path I’m taking this week to make a simple thing for our fall 2008 issue.

I like old furniture – anything from Ancient Egypt to World War II interests me greatly. So when I set out to build something I hit the books to look at as many examples of furniture and decorative objects from that period as I can. In this case, we decided to build an 18th-century wall cabinet for the fall issue, so I cracked open all my books from Wallace Nutting, particularly “A Furniture Treasury.” This out-of-print book is available in many forms and is fairly inexpensive. I paid $20 for my two-volume set at Half-Price Books.

I might not look at wall cabinets when I scan these books. I look at lots of casework pieces and their proportions, mouldings and the arrangement of the components, such rails and stiles from doors.

When I’m saturated (a few trips through the treasury will do that), I’ll start sketching. It’s not formal. I just draw without regard to perfectly straight lines or dimensions. I sketch in the car while waiting for the kids to finish track practice. Or in the few minutes of peace I get between the bedtimes of the two kids. I sketch things that I’m sure won’t work just to give them their day in ink.

The more examples I draw, the better the chance I’ll hit something I really like. I don’t use the Golden Section or any other mathematical formula. It’s all gut.

Then I fire up a CAD program on my laptop and try to turn the sketches into something that can be built and has some dimensions that make sense – a dining table that’s 30” high, for example.

While In CAD I’ll make a few variations that take advantage of the cut-and-paste power of the program. I’ll move the drawers and doors around. Add a cupholder. With this wall cabinet I tried it with two doors (like the Nutting original), one door, then a door with a drawer.

Then I show the CAD drawings to others and ask them which ones they like. Why they like it isn’t as important – though I always ask. Maddy, my 12-year-old, liked the two-door version of this cabinet because of the symmetry and that you could display two contrasting pieces of pottery behind the glass panes. Katy, the 8-year-old, liked the drawer because it could be used to “hold little things.” Lucy, my wife, declined to put a dog in that fight.

Next stop: If I have time, I’ll knock together a prototype in poplar to see if it looks awkward. Prototyping always pays off in two ways: I make small adjustments that improve the design, and I’ll typically keep the prototype for our family.

— Christopher Schwarz

Now you can download six free SketchUp drawings for projects published in Woodworking Magazine during the last four years.

These files work with Google's free drafting program, SketchUp, and allow you to take the projects apart, see the joinery and view the projects at any angle. These files are great for understanding how a project goes together before you start building it.

These files were provided by draughtsman Louis Bois, who has been providing technical illustrations for Woodworking Magazine for the last couple issues. Louis does these drawings as a free service to the readers, so please join me in thanking him for his hard work.

The projects below are some our favorites:

Shaker Hanging Cabinet: This is the cover project from Issue No. 1. I've built this project about five times now for various family members and customers, and it is always well-received.

HangingShakerCabinet.zip (100.4 KB)

Shaker Side Table: This project from Issue 2 has enormous popularity. The delicate legs and fine proportions of the top make this project one of my favorites.

ShakerEndTable.zip (125.94 KB)

Sliding-lid Box: Also from Issue 2, this box is a great lesson in how to build drawer boxes (with one table-saw set-up) and makes a great home for your chisels.

SlidingLidBox.zip (31.44 KB)

Dining Room Tray: From Issue 5, this project is a great lesson in learning to use cut nails (and a tanning bed) to build a nice cherry project.

DiningRoomTray.zip (24.34 KB)

Enfield Cabinet: Also from Issue 6, this tall cabinet -- it looks like a jelly cupboard I suppose -- is an excellent lesson in vintage case construction techniques.

EnfieldShakerCabinet.zip (128.46 KB)

American Trestle Table: This cover project from Issue 6 has a special place in my heart because the prototype is my dining room table. Endless nights of homework have trashed the perfect film finish, but I like it even more now than they day I finished it.

AmericanTrestleTable.zip (75.25 KB)

All of these files are compressed in a .zip format. Double-clicking on them will unzip them.

— Christopher Schwarz

As I was unpacking my tools for the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool Event in Chicago this weekend, John Economaki from Bridge City Tools stepped up to my workbench with an astonishing piece of wood.

It was a narrow slice off the end of a dowel that was .004" thick. It was cut with a handsaw.

"I cut this with my new saw," Economaki said. "You ready for a rematch?"

Earlier this fall, he and I had a sawing contest to see who could make the thinnest crosscut (he won that contest; see the full story here). Economaki handed me the paper-thin slice and I knew two things: I didn't want a rematch, but I definitely wanted to see his new saw.

Turns out it is more than just a handsaw. It's a Japanese sawblade mounted in a frame that was topped with sliding tables. It is, in essence, a hand-powered table saw with sliding tables. Economaki calls it the Jointmaker Pro, and it's going to be available this summer (most likely June, Economaki said).

In this photo, Economaki pulled away the stops so you can see what the cutting action looks like across the sloped blade.

Here are the particulars: The sawblade is mounted teeth-up in the frame of the Jointmaker. And the blade slopes up from the front of the tool to the rear. On top of the Jointmaker are two sliding tables – one on either side of the blade – that slide on dovetailed ways (no bearings, just a perfect fit).

Some of the controls are like a table saw: You raise and lower the blade with a crank, and you can bevel the blade left and right. To make common cuts, the Jointmaker Pro comes with a series of stops that you can set for the particular bevel angles.

Look familiar? The Jointmaker Pro has controls similar to a table saw. And as a bonus it bevels both left and right.

The two sliding tables can be moved in tandem at any angle between 0° to 47° by securing the Jointmaker Pro's wooden fence across them. Then you simply secure your work on the table with a couple very clever hold-downs and – zip – push the work over the blade.

The slope of the 28-tpi crosscut blade (a rip blade is available) cuts the work with surprisingly little effort. But how much wood can you cut with a human-powered table saw? Economaki said you can cut stock up to 5" wide and 1-1/2" thick. Thick stock requires a lot more strokes against the blade, but it's easy (I tried it).

What is most surprising about the tool is the resulting cut. It is the cleanest sawcut I've ever seen, whether by hand or power. Economaki made dozens of different kinds of cuts during the hand-tool event for dovetails, tenons, half-laps and bridles – and all them were flawless from the saw.

At the end of the show, he made a series of compound miters, and they went together with an air-tight fit.

Economaki said the idea for the tool came to him during a sleepless night.

"I began by putting a Japanese saw blade upside down in a vise," he said. "I made a cut by pushing the work over the blade, and the light went on."
 
The Jointmaker Pro will cost $1,195 retail, Economaki said, but there will be an introductory price of $995.

"It costs 10 times that of a good dozuki," he said. "Yet you get perfect results."

— Christopher Schwarz

If you haven't surmised it yet, one of the themes running through the Spring 2008 issue is the fact that accurate sawing has a lot more to do with accurate chisel work than anything else. When you cut a tenon shoulder, it's the chisel that cuts the part of the joint that shows – the saw just removes the waste below.

Several readers have picked up on this theme, and they've also pointed out (politely, I might add) what looks like a contradiction in my instructions about chiseling.

In the article on the Stickley Tabourets, I'm chiseling the joint line for the half-lap joint with the bevel of the chisel facing away from the waste (you can see this on page 10). A few pages later (page 19) I'm chiseling the shoulder for a tenon with the bevel of the chisel facing into the waste.

Have I finally taken one too many sips of La Fin Du Monde?

Perhaps, but I did have a good reason for what I did – I just didn't have the room in the issue to explain it. So here goes:

When you deepen a knife line by striking it with a chisel, there are two important things to consider. First is what shape the resulting knife line will be, and second is how much the chisel will shift when you rap its handle with a mallet.

The first part is easy to understand. Chisels are wedge-shaped. They have a flat face and a bevel. So when you knock the tool straight down into your work it makes a "V"-shaped cut that is a photocopy of this shape. One side of the V is straight up and down. The other side of the V is sloped.

The second part also has to do with the fact that chisels are wedges. When you drive a chisel with a mallet, it doesn't want to travel straight down in a line that's parallel to the flat face of the chisel. Instead, it wants to travel at an angle that is halfway between the bevel and the flat face. So if you have a 20° bevel on your chisel (as I do in the paring chisel shown in the articles), the chisel doesn't want to travel at 90° (straight down), it wants to move at 80°. (This assumes you have wood pushing back equally on the bevel and the face of the chisel.)

This is why when you are chiseling out your waste between dovetails that the chisel is always trying to move toward (and even cross) your baseline.

Whew. With all that on the table, I can now explain why I did what I did.

When chiseling a tenon shoulder, the shape of the line created by the chisel is critical. I want it perfectly square so it will close tight with the stile. So I chisel the joint with the bevel facing the waste. If this so happens to shrink the overall length of the tenoned part by 1/128", I can live with that. I want the joint to be tight more than I care about its final length.

When chiseling a half-lap joint, my considerations are different. This isn't a show joint, so I just want it to be tight and structural. The shoulder line isn't as critical. That's why I chisel with the bevel facing away from the waste. The chisel will then drift into the waste a tad. So when I saw the joint, the notch made by the chisel will encourage the saw to cut a half-lap that is just a tad tight. Then I can plane the piece's mate to get a perfect fit.

This might be a little fussy for you. If so, I apologize. A chisel seems so simple (it's a steel and wooden corndog!), but it actually is a subtle instrument (like a corndog with chorizo inside). Play around with the tool. Try it with the bevel out and then with the bevel in. And let us know what you discover.

— Christopher Schwarz

When it comes to saws, aspiring sawyers have two basic questions: What saws should I own to build furniture? And where can I get them?

During the last couple years I've been teaching a few classes on sawing, with more classes on the horizon. So I've been asked these two questions a lot. Below is my basic set, which is based on the furniture I build (casework, chairs, tables, general stuff), my personal preferences (I like longer, coarser saws) and established historical practice.

In other words, if you have a problem with my list, make you own list and post it below in the comments. Perspectives from other sawyers are useful and interesting.

1. Crosscut handsaw: I like an 8-point crosscut handsaw for breaking down rough stock and general dimensioning of material. It cuts quickly (yea!), and the resulting surface is easy enough to clean up on a shooting board. Some woodworkers like 12-point saws, but I think they are slow and the resulting surface isn't significantly cleaner. My personal saw is a 24"-long panel saw (most handsaws are 26" long). It's a private-label saw made by Disston & Sons for an old Boston hardware store.

2. Ripsaw: I don't rip a lot by hand, but when I do, I want to be done with it. So I like a coarse ripsaw. The one shown in the photo is a 6-point Disston D-8. I also have a Wenzloff & Sons 5-point saw. Both are good workers. Some day I'll be man enough to use something even coarser.

3. Tenon saw: I have a few tenon saws. I prefer a saw that is about 10 points, though saws that are as fine as 13 points are OK by me (as long as the rake isn't significantly relaxed). Tenon saws start at 12" long, though I recommend the longer ones. Shoot for 14" at least; they make them as long as 19", which are surprisingly easy to wield. All tenon saws should be filed with rip teeth. They are designed to rip tenon cheeks.

4. Carcase saw: This is the backsaw I use more than any other. I like something that is 12 points to 14 points, filed crosscut, and about 14" long. The long sawplate helps improve my accuracy. The carcase saw shown in the photo is a sweet Wheeler, Madden & Clemson XLCR saw.

5. Dovetail saw: This is perhaps the most personal saw, so ignore my recommendation completely. If you like a 23-tooth Japanese crosscut dozuki, stick with it. Or a hacksaw. It doesn't matter. I like a 15-point Western saw with rip teeth. Shown is my Lie-Nielsen progressive-pitch saw, which has 15 points at the toe and about 9 at the heel. This is a love-it-or-leave-it saw for most people, so I recommend you try before you buy.

The names of saws are confusing. The types of saws overlap with one another in size and tooth configuration. I'd ignore the names in the catalogs and just buy them based on their specifications. It's much less confusing that way. Also, I use a lot of other specialty saws, including a flooring saw, jeweler's saw and a flush-cut saw. But those aren't necessary for all furniture-making.

Where to Buy Saws
There are lots of places to buy new, sharp backsaws, but buying a sharp handsaw or ripsaw is more of a challenge. However, there are three gentlemen I have bought handsaws and ripsaws from that I can recommend. Sometimes they also have backsaws in stock, though vintage backsaws are a lot more rare than handsaws.

Daryl Weir (weir@gallatinriver.net): 781 S. Market St., Knoxville IL 61448. Daryl sharpens saws and sells saws on eBay on occasion.

Steve Cook (SharpeningGuy01@aol.com): 1160 Taxville Road, York, PA 17408. Steve also sharpens saws if you have an old saw that you need toughed up (or completely refiled).

Tom Law: 62 West Water St., Smithsburg MD, 21783, 301-824-5223. Tom no longer sharpens saws for hire, but he will sell you a saw that he has rehabbed and sharpened.

If you know of other reliable sources for buying sharp handsaws, add a comment below.

— Christopher Schwarz

Tenon saws are one of the three essential backsaws for building furniture (the other two are the carcase saw and the dovetail saw), but until recently your choices were limited to:

1. A vintage tenon saw that you resurrected from the dead
2. A Japanese saw that may or may not be suited to cutting tenons
3. The excellent Lie-Nielsen tenon saw
4. Some other frustrating new English-named saw.

A couple years ago, sawmaker Mike Wenzloff started making tenon saws, including my freakishly huge Kenyon-style tenon saw that I have waxed on about so endlessly that you’d think that Mike must be washing and waxing my car every weekend. (He’s not, though he’s offered; it’s a long drive from Oregon to Cincinnati.)

And now Wenzloff, his sons, his lovely spouse and probably the family dog all make thousands of Western saws for Lee Valley Tools. It’s a lot of work for the Wenzloff family, I know, but it’s an absolute boon to woodworkers because now we have more choices in the marketplace. (Also, as noted in the comments, I don't own an Adria tenon saw, another new premium brand. I've used the Adria carcase and dovetail saws and they are good. I have no reason to suspect the tenon is any different.)

At issue here is not which brand of saw cuts better tenons. That point is honestly and truly moot. Both the Lie-Nielsen and Wenzloff brands come sharp, accurately filed and well-set. They both cut well once the saw has been broken in with some work and wax.

Instead, what’s important is the handle of the saw and the number of teeth. These factors will help you determine which saw is right for you. I’ve had a Lie-Nielsen tenon saw since the day the company started making them. I’ve had the Kenyon tenon saw for a couple years, and two weeks ago I ordered the Wenzloff Large Tenon Saw from Lee Valley. After a weekend of breaking in the new saw during a sawing class at Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking, I have a good feel for the Wenzloff tool and how is compares to the Lie-Nielsen version and the Kenyon tenon saw.

Let’s start with the teeth: The Kenyon tenon saw sold today is 10 points per inch (ppi). On my unit, Wenzloff filed the first couple inches with progressive rake. These few extra degrees of rake in the starting teeth make the saw easier to start, though not as easy as a progressive-pitch saw. Wenzloff says he'll add this rake (no more than 4°) to custom saws by request.

The Wenzloff & Sons Large Tenon Saw has 12 ppi. And the Lie-Nielsen has 10 ppi.

I was surprised how the difference in the number of teeth made a difference in the tool's cutting speed. The Kenyon tenon saw was the fastest because it was the longest, heaviest and (tied for) coarsest. The Lie-Nielsen was the second fastest, and the Wenzloff Large Tenon was a bit slower.

I prefer fast and coarse saws, but not everyone does. Beginners like finer saws, and people who do work in thin stock really like finer saws. So don’t judge a saw on its speed. It’s not a race. But if you work with thick stock, think coarse. Thin stock? Think fine.

The handles are also different. The Kenyon tenon saw has the most curves and feels more “made by hand” than the other saws. But the Lie-Nielsen is the most comfortable handle to my hand overall. I’m told that I have “girl hands,” but these girl hands seem to like slightly larger saw totes.

The Wenzloff Large Tenon Saw has a tote that appears to have more hand work than the Lie-Nielsen. The flats on the sides of the tote have been well-faired into the curves, and I suspect it is a process done by hand or with an inflatable drum on a sanding machine.

The tote of this Wenzloff saw feels good in my hands, but it’s just a little on the small side for me.

The other differences are aesthetic. The Lie-Nielsen comes stock with a maple handle (usually curly maple) and it looks like a 19th-century Disston. The Kenyon tenon saw is traditional European beech and reeks of the late 18th-century aesthetic. The Wenzloff Large Tenon Saw is bubinga, which matches Lee Valley’s house line of Veritas planes, and looks quite old school.

If you’ve read this far, you probably feel like I owe you a solid recommendation. I’m going to let you down. I’m delighted with all three saws and wouldn’t sell a single one. (Yes, Scott, I’m talking to you.) But what delights me even more is that we have a choice about what to buy. Not as many choices as the 1808 furniture-maker, but it’s a start.

— Christopher Schwarz

When you buy a handplane (even a Veritas or a Lie-Nielsen), it's not going to work well out of the box. You really need to hone the iron to do decent work.

However, with saws, it's more complicated.

If you buy a cheap Western handsaw or backsaw, chances are that the teeth aren't sharp or properly set. So you need to either learn to sharpen your saw or send it to somebody who already knows.

But if you buy a premium Western saw – Lie-Nielsen, Adria, Wenzloff & Sons – the challenges are different. The premium saws are set up and sharp, but I think you need to break in the saw before it will cut smoothly. Most new Western saws are too grabby at first, especially for beginners. But after about a dozen tenons the saw will be easier to start and will run more smoothly in its kerf.

I was reminded of this when I was teaching a class in precision sawing this weekend at Kelly Mehler's School of Woodworking. Many of the students brought new premium saws to the class, and several of them brought their new saws up to my bench and asked the question: "Could you try my saw and tell me if it's cutting well?"

On a couple saws, the teeth were set too strong on one side. We stoned those teeth (a couple strokes on a #1,000-grit stone) to help straighten out the way they steered.

But with most of the students' saws I tried out they cut true, but they were harder to start than my saws or they didn't run as smoothly in the kerf. In fact, one student, Glen Koopmans, had a heck of a time with his new tenon saw. It was hanging in the cut and just not working well at all.

He stayed late into the evening trying to figure out if it was just him or just the saw.

The next morning, we cut a few tenons with his saw and then lubricated the blade with some paraffin wax (I use canning wax from the grocery). By the end of the weekend class, Glen's saw was running as smoothly as mine, which has logged a couple hundred tenons by now.

What happened? Three things. One: The wax helped lubricate the blade in the cut, which helped reduce the grabbiness of the new teeth. Two: the dozen or so joints that Glen cut with the saw helped ease the freshly filed edges on the teeth. And three: After about a dozen tenons, Glen was a much better sawyer.

At the end of the day Sunday, Glen was cutting the cheeks of massive half-lap joints in resinous yellow pine for the sawbenches we were constructing. Even all the way across the room, you could hear how smoothly his tenon saw was cutting. And the resulting cheek looked as good as the cheek of a table-saw tenon.

So before you send your new saw back to the factory, put some wax on the blade and cut some tenons first. You might just be surprised how nice your saw is and how easy it is (really!) to saw.

— Christopher Schwarz

There is something deep inside our DNA that ties us to the chest as a form of furniture. First off, how many other kinds of furniture do we have that are named after critical parts of our own bodies? We are all, in essence, “chests on stands.” The feet give way to the legs. The legs are attached to the waist. And the waist supports the chest itself.

Also, few forms of furniture evoke such strong emotional response in both men and women. Whenever I mention among acquaintances that I’m building a chest, the women (sorry to generalize) always seem far more interested in this work than they are in my table-, chair- or cabinet-building enterprises.

“Is it a blanket chest?” is the first question. And that’s usually followed by, “Is this for you or will you sell it?”

Men react differently, though equally with emotion. “Is it a tool chest?” they ask. “And what will happen to your old tool chest?”

So with our species’s strong attraction to the chest, it’s surprising how many of them are designed so poorly. This became evident as I reviewed about a dozen plans for chests from the last 100 years that I dug up from my library.

Unlike the “chest on stand” that I mentioned above, most chests are low-slung affairs with three major components. The plinth, sometimes called the base, the waist moulding and the chest itself.

The plinth is almost always wider and deeper than the chest above. And the waist mould provides the transition between these two separate assemblies. It is this transition point between plinth and chest where many woodworkers make the construction far too fussy, complex and apt to fail.

Perhaps the most difficult way to build a chest goes something like this: Build the chest proper. Take your four plinth pieces and mould their long, top edges. Then wrap the four (sometimes three) plinth pieces around the chest, joining them at the corners. Finally, cope the mouldings at the corners so the moulding profiles wraps seamlessly around the chest.

If you’ve ever built a chest this way, I don’t need to tell you why it’s a bear to pull it off. First, fitting the plinth pieces around the chest requires persnickety layout. The joints have to be dead-on, or your plinth won’t sleeve nicely over the chest. Also, the exterior of your chest has to be completely true and the assembly dead-square, otherwise, you’ll have ugly gaps between the plinth and chest proper. Finally, it’s quite trying to execute the moulding at the corners of the plinth because you are moulding end grain with rasps, files and chisels.

One improvement over this form is to sleeve the plinth over the chest and then to miter and nail moulding into the transition. This is better, but it still requires a lot of fussy layout and fussy fitting of the chest to the plinth.

The third method looks like more labor than these other two methods, but it’s not. You assemble the plinth and chest assemblies separately. Then you add either a web frame or just a couple runners into the top of the plinth. It’s best to sink the web frame or runners into rabbets in the plinth.

Then you attach the chest to the plinth with screws and wrap the transition with moulding that is a wee bit wide. Finally, trim the moulding flush to the plinth with a plane.

I’ve built chests all three ways, and I can tell you that even though the third method requires more wood and one extra assembly, it is easier to fit all the parts and a faster way of building a chest.

The next issue of Woodworking Magazine (Summer 2008) will focus on building chests, both with and without plinths. The only thing we haven’t been able to answer in our research on this topic is if the chests we’re building will end up holding tools or plushy things.

— Christopher Schwarz

Last year while I was teaching a sawing class in Michigan, one of the students brought along a dovetail saw he had purchased almost 10 years earlier but had never used. When I spied it on his workbench, I snatched it.

It looked like the classic Lie-Nielsen Toolworks dovetail saw, but there was something different about it. When I took it out of its package, I had my answer. This was a mint Independence Tool dovetail saw that was made before Lie-Nielsen purchased the company in September 1998.

Holding this pristine little saw was a little like driving a 1948 Porsche 356. This was the saw that changed everything for hand tool woodworkers. And it started with a friendship between an Army officer and a software developer that was struck up during early days of the Internet.

The story of Independence Tool isn't well-known among woodworkers, and so I gave one of its founders a phone call to chat about the early days of the market for premium Western-style saws, which has blossomed in the last 10 years.

The primordial stew for the story begins with an Internet listserv called "oldtools" (it's still around and thriving – I'm a mostly lurking member). Oldtools is an e-mail based discussion group that started in 1995 where the members chat about hand tools and hand work – anything meat-powered that cuts wood, really.

Two of the founding members were Pete Taran, then an Army officer in Maryland, and Patrick Leach, then a Boston software developer. They struck up a friendship through the oldtools list, Taran said, and that led to a discussion of quitting their day jobs and starting a tool-making company.

"Patrick was burned out," Taran said. "And I was ready to leave the Army."

The question was: What tool should they make? Taran said they had to pick a tool that didn't require a lot of heavy metal-working machinery to make. While Taran had some machine training in his background, it wasn't like he had a fully-equipped metal shop at home.

Coincidentally, Leach had just purchased a nice Groves & Sons dovetail saw that had beautiful lines.

"I was the resident engineer," Taran said. "So I sort of deconstructed the saw and figured out how we could make it. We made a prototype."

Leach and Taran showed off the prototype at an old tool sale in March 1996. Everyone who looked at the saw said they would buy one, Taran said. So they bought a couple machines and got to work on nights and weekends (they kept their day jobs at first). Taran was in charge of production of the tools. Leach was in charge of sales, marketing and the company's web site. (An early flyer for the company is pictured above. Click on the image to see it full-size.)

(While little Internet start-ups like this are now common, Taran points out that it was quite rare in 1996 to start a company that was little more than a web site and a couple guys working from home.)

By the end of 1996, Taran had made 500 saws.

"The word spread like wildfire," Taran said. "We couldn't keep up with demand."

Dovetail maestro Frank Klausz ordered one off of the Independence Tool web site, and Taran delivered it to him personally.

"Frank Klausz is the quintessential perfectionist," Taran said. "He became our biggest supporter."

With craftsmen like Klausz and others speaking out for the saw, the catalog companies began to call, but Taran said they resisted getting into the wholesale business. Eventually they sold their saws (both a dovetail saw and a carcase saw) through Highland Hardware in Atlanta, Ga., but the rest of the sales were direct to the customer.

After two years, Taran said that he had made about 2,000 saws. He had figured out how to outsource some of the parts (such as the brass backs and the special split nuts that attach the blade to the handle). But Taran said his relationship with Leach was strained by the work. Taran bought out Leach's part of the business, but that wasn't the cure-all.

"It became drudgery after two years," Taran said. "I looked at my life and said, 'This is fun, but I don't want to do this the rest of my life.' "

Plus, he had a sweet job offer on the table from a former superior officer who was working in the private sector. Taran said he put out some feelers about selling the business. One of those feelers made it to Thomas Lie-Nielsen through Clarence Blanchard, owner of the Fine Tool Journal.

Lie-Nielsen bought Independence Tool in September 1998 and has greatly expanded the line of saws to include tenon saws, gent's saws and a variety of saws with different filings and tooth counts.

"He's taken it and run with it," Taran said.

The original Independence Tool saws and the Lie-Nielsen versions are in many ways identical. The tooth configuration is the same. The length and depth of the blade are virtually identical. The brass back has the same crisp bevels. But the handles are different. The Lie-Nielsen handles have crisp details – a product of machine manufacturing. The Independence Tool saw has rounder edges throughout, a product of all the hand work that Taran put into the saws.

Though some people would disagree (one way or the other) I found both to be quite comfortable and wouldn't say that one was markedly superior to the other. But dovetail saws are a personal thing, so it's a bit beside the point.

Australian woodworker and writer Derek Cohen has done a nice side-by-side comparison of the two tools on the WKFineTools.com site if you'd like to read more and see some photos.

It's now been 10 years since the saw business was sold to Lie-Nielsen, and both Taran and Leach still have a hand in world of hand tools. Leach buys and sells some of the finer vintage British and American hand tools through his site at Supertool.com. (Be sure to subscribe to his monthly e-mail newsletter. It's filled with hundreds of excellent tools and photos – plus Leach happens to be a great writer.)

While you're at the Supertool site, visit the "Blood & Gore" section of the site – it's required reading for handtool geeks-in-training.

And Taran is now a Six Sigma Master Black Belt and a Cleveland-based corporate consultant who helps weed out inefficient processes in companies. He also runs the excellent VintageSaws.com site. He sells hand saws and back saws (all of which are sharpened and ready to go). And he has posted a great series of articles he wrote for The Fine Tool Journal on selecting, cleaning  and sharpening saws. They are in the Library section of the site.

And Taran said he may someday make some more saws, perhaps if only for himself. You see, Taran said he doesn't even own one of his own production saws from his Independence Tool days, though he does own the prototype he built.

"And I probably have parts for 50 or 60 saws still lying around," Taran said. "Some day I should dig those out and make a nice set of saws – just for me."

Coming soon: We take a close look at the Independence Tool prototype, on loan from Pete Taran.

— Christopher Schwarz

In high school and college, I spent most of my summers working in factories.

I spent two summers in a liquor factory (I'll never drink straight tequila again – it's what we used to clean the concrete floors). Another summer was in a factory that made folding tables – the kind you see at church picnics with the fake walnut wood grain. The highlight there was working alongside a guy named (honest now) Meatfart, who communicated in grunts and sounds that he could make using his internal organs.

And then I spent one long summer building and staining exterior doors at Therma-Tru door company – my first woodworking job.

If you've ever worked in a factory, you know there's a caste system. If you haven't worked in a factory, then read the rest of this paragraph: At the top of the caste are the people "in the office." These are the secretaries, corporate managers and other people who make cameo appearances on the shop floor, usually to deliver bad news (you're fired) or to be wolf-whistled at by the unwashed.

Below the office types are the people who run the maintenance shed, the forklift drivers and the floor managers. These are usually people who started out as grunts on the shop floor and worked their entire lives for the privilege of wrangling the grunts on the floor.

Below that rung are the grunts, who are the backbone, hands and legs of the operation. And believe or not there are people below the grunts: the temps. And that was my lot in life. If you had to fetch a loose part from inside a running machine, you told a temp to do it. If the job was messy, hot or near Meatfart, it was a temp job.

Being a temp convinced me to stay in college if but for one reason: To work "in the office." I had no idea what happened in "the office," but it didn't involve 50-pound bags of sugar, being someone's pillow during break time or having to use a restroom that would make a Roman bath look like a private garden spot (10 holes, two sinks, zero loitering).

It's been almost 20 years since I punched a time clock in a factory. But the funny thing is that now I do everything I can to escape the office and get onto the shop floor here at the magazine. I love the noise, the dust, the heavy lifting. Heck, I like taking out the garbage and fishing unknown objects out of the dust collector.

The only things missing are a few wolf whistles and some organic offgassing and I'd by 18 all over again.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Who is now headed back to the shop to build a blanket chest for the Summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine.

If you aren’t yet completely saturated with information on workbenches, then get comfortable and read on. Craig Stevens at the Woodworkers Resource has just released an hour-long interview of me about my book, my work at the magazine and the craft in general.

The interview is in mp3 format (it’s about 55mb) and can be streamed from most internet browsers. You can even save it to your hard drive and load it on an iPod. You can read more about the interview and start streaming it here – but be sure to check out the rest of the excellent site, which includes video, Craig’s blog, a newsletter and an eBook of strategies for teaching woodworking to kids.

Craig conducted the interview on Jan. 13 while I was in my shop working some frustrating bookcases made from sub-standard plywood (that long national nightmare is almost at an end, by the way). During our chat we discussed:

• How I got interested (read: freakishly obsessed) with the topic of workbenches.
• What a typical workday is like at Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine.
• My favorite workbench (which doesn’t exist as of yet).
• The types of furniture and projects I build at home.
• A little bit about the future of my Lost Art Press web site.

Craig did a great job with the interview and kept it casual yet highly focused (I have a tendency to blather; just ask my kids). So thanks to Craig and I hope you like the interview.

— Christopher Schwarz

Reader Michael Holcomb writes: I'm writing to ask your advice about an old Pennsylvania cabinet maker's workbench I was lucky enough to buy a couple of years ago. It came from the shop of a Berks County, Penn., cabinet maker and has many of the features of the line drawing in Eric Sloane's book on early American tools. It's massive: The top is just shy of 9' and is made of two planks of 3" chestnut (I think). It has a leg vise on one end, an end vise on the other, and a board jack which slides the entire length of the front. I sent photos to a friend, Ernie Conover, who thought its construction techniques might date it to the 1830s. 

My question is, should I do anything to plane and resurface the top, which has the normal nicks, dings, holes and abrasions from almost two centuries of use? There is slight warpage on one end of one of the planks, but otherwise the surface is certainly usable, due mainly to its substantial construction and weight. Would I destroy its historical value by planing the surface? Or is it better just left alone?

Answer: It's a good question that deserves some consideration and debate.

Here's my take: If you are going to use the bench for hand work, then you don't have much of a choice. You should flatten the top. Otherwise, handplaning will be impossible. I find that once the top goes out of flat by .006" or so, then my work tends to spring on the top unacceptably.

I take flattening to be routine maintenance for a piece that is in service -- like waxing the top of a dining table that is in use in your home.

While I'm sure there are some workbenches that are truly "museum pieces" (such as the Dominy bench at Winterthur), most benches should be put to use in workshops so they avoid a worse fate -- being used as houseplant holders or decorative accents by sellers of antiques. Maybe someday there will be a "workbench museum" and I'll change my tune. Until then, do your best to bring this bench back to life.

— Christopher Schwarz

The last time I completely lost my composure, a piece of office equipment almost died.

This was in 1995, when I was running a start-up newspaper in Frankfort, Ky., and was sleeping under my desk some nights. Our company was broke, I had just spent an hour cleaning the bathrooms and our automatic paper-folding machine decided to clog because the humidity was a couple points too high.

After the machine ruined hundreds of valuable pieces of mail, I freaked. I grabbed a broken table leg (why we had a broken table leg in the newsroom is a mystery to me) and beat the machine senseless in front of the entire staff. Then I took a walk.

Last night, I was looking around my workshop for another spare table leg.

Let me back up for a moment. I'm building a fairly large shelving unit for a local couple and am now sanding all the components before finishing and final assembly (the photos here are of the finishing sample boards I'm preparing).

Against my better judgment, I bought some Far East red oak plywood from the home center for the shelves. It looked OK in the store, but it has been a nightmare. The surface veneer is woefully thin. Typically, I can dress plywood with a handplane and make four or five passes before I'm in danger of cutting through the veneer. But not this stuff. The veneer seems as thin as notebook paper. And so I decided to sand it to be safe.

I started sanding with #150-grit – typically a good place to start with quality plywood. But not this stuff. The machining marks on the surface veneers are so pronounced that I had to start with #120-grit. That's a mite aggressive for thin veneer, so I hunched over the work while sanding so I could keep a sharp eye on the veneer in case I started to cut through it.

That's when I noticed the veneer lifting in a few places, like a blister about to pop. Either this is a new development, or I didn't notice it (I'm guessing the former). So I couldn't power sand these blisters.

So after four hours of power sanding and hand-sanding, I'm now about halfway done with the project. But I am completely done with cheap plywood.

Believe me, I don't blame Far East manufacturing for this (so please don't bash an entire nation or culture if you leave a comment). Someone in our country ordered the plywood be made like this. Someone at the home center agreed to stock it. And I was stupid enough to buy it. I blame myself and no one else.

But it's just a good thing that all my table legs are still attached to tables, or I'd be sanding out quite a few big dents in these shelves.

— Christopher Schwarz

Probably the silliest thing about woodworking journalism is the "in a weekend" project that we promise readers on the cover of the magazine: "Build a John Goddard Highboy With Four Sticks and Pocket Knife – In a Weekend!"

(And trust me, it's the exclamation point at the end of that sentence that makes you buy the magazine and puts food on my table.)

Anyway, loyal reader and blogger Eric Seidlitz sent me the above photo of his Roubo-style workbench that he built over a holiday weekend. Eric, who works in Malaysia, said he's been frustrated with his bench-building efforts lately and has been having trouble finding good material and getting his tools to work. So he absconded with his children's Christmas present and built the above bench.

I think it's lacking in the mass department, but otherwise he did a fine job.

What would really improve this photo would be the addition of some Lego Frenchmen with frilly cuffs and collars at work at the bench. I checked the Lego web site, and though you can get Lego dudes dressed up like knights, astronauts and Indiana Jones, Lego doesn't appear to have any 18th-century French Joiners in its product line.

I think the Lego Pirates would be a good substitute. However, their eye patches aren't going to help with their sawing.

— Christopher Schwarz

On Friday, Jan. 11, we will make an important announcement in our newsletter about our future  plans for subscriptions to Woodworking Magazine. And shortly after that, I'll also post the news here on the blog.

The reason I'm writing to you today is two-fold. First, I'd like to encourage you to sign up for our newsletter so you will be the first to get the news. And second, I'm writing to ask for your assistance. If you know any other woodworkers who would be interested in the kind of woodworking journalism we practice here, I'd appreciate it if you could send them a short note and encourage them to sign up for this free newsletter.

We've made this easy to do. You can send a message to up to three people through our Tell a Friend page. Or you can simply direct them to our home page to sign up for this newsletter (the sign-up box is in the top right of the page). They also can download an entire sample issue of the magazine from the home page, which will give them a good taste of what we're about.

Anything you could do in this regard would be greatly appreciated.

Sorry I can't say more about the announcement right now. We're still working out some important details to make sure next week goes smoothly. Thanks to all of you for your letters of support since we started this magazine in 2004. You can rest assured that you have been heard and that your voice has made a difference.

Until next week,

— Christopher Schwarz
editor, Woodworking Magazine

P.S. You can now download Issue #2 free from our home page (look on the right side of our home page where it says "Download a free issue"). Issue No. 2 has one of my favorite projects on the cover: A cherry Shaker side table with delicate proportions.

I've probably built four or five of these tables and have sold them all except the one shown on the cover. That table sits beside my bed and holds the books that I pore over at night to help me chart the future issues of this magazine. The table is a fantastic project that I never get tired of building because the joinery is so simple and you don't need a lot of material.

That issue also has some other fine articles that we're proud of, including an interesting method of making the joinery for drawers that requires only one table saw set-up. Plus, an article on how to set up and sharpen chisels and how to use brushing lacquer. If you don't own that issue check it out on our home page.

Thanks to the maturing of my two daughters (and the waning of the “Days of Dark Diapers”), I’ve decided to teach two more rounds of handsawing classes in 2008 – two one-day classes in Sterling Heights, Mich.; and a one-week intensive class at the Northwest Woodworking Studio in Portland, Ore.

As of now, there are spaces available in all of these three classes. Here are the details and link to the schools where you can register:

Hand-cut Dovetails
Saturday, March 15
Woodcraft, Sterling Heights, Mich.
To register, send an email to: sterlingheights-retail@woodcraft.com or call 586-268-1919.

Learn to saw dovetails by hand while building a cherry Shaker silverware tray with through-dovetails. You'll learn to lay out your dovetails so they look nice, saw them accurately, chisel out the waste quickly, and fit them right the first time (plus, how to hide any mistakes). This is a great class for first-time dovetailers or anyone who has struggled to learn this classic hand-cut joint.

The Forgotten Art of Handsawing
Sunday, March 16
Woodcraft, Sterling Heights, Mich.
To register, send an email to: sterlingheights-retail@woodcraft.com or call 586-268-1919.

In this class, you'll learn to use handsaws and backsaws to track a line like a bloodhound. With a series of special exercises, you will learn to make the three different classes of sawcuts: rough cutting for dimensioning stock, standard cutting for final sizing of casework pieces and fine cutting for precision joinery. You'll learn the proper stance, grip and body motion for accurate sawcuts and receive the instant feedback and corrections from an instructor that will make you develop your skills quickly. You will also build a basic sawbench - the most important workshop appliance for handsaws.

Handsawing, Handsaws and Sawbenches
July 14-18
Northwest Woodworking Studio, Portland, Ore.

In a traditional shop, sawing was reserved for the most skilled cabinetmakers on the floor. Most anyone could use a plane or chisel, but it was the sawyers who transformed the timber into furniture with rips, crosscuts and joinery.

And though we now have accurate power equipment in our workshops, sawing by hand is still a tremendous skill that – when done properly -- can save time and effort. That’s because handsawing can be done without jigs or guides and without regard to the angle of the cut or its bevel. In short, if you can see the line, you can cut the line with a handsaw.

Honing this simple skill allows you to easily cut compound angles, angled joinery and cuts that might take hours of jig-building and test-cutting on a table saw. And, as a bonus, learning basic sawing trains your hand, eye and mind to cut any sort of dovetail joint you can imagine.

In this class, you’ll learn to use handsaws and backsaws to cut joints as precisely as any power tool. With a series of special exercises, you will learn to make the three different classes of sawcuts: rough cutting for dimensioning stock, standard cutting for final sizing of casework pieces and fine cutting for precision joinery.

You’ll learn the proper stance, grip and body motions for accurate sawcuts and receive the instant feedback and corrections that will make you develop your skills quickly. During the first part of the class you will build a basic sawbench – the most important workshop appliance for handsaws – and a bench hook – the most important appliance for wielding a backsaw.

With your appliances built and your handsaw skills in place, we’ll dive into dovetails during the second half of the week. We’ll explore both English and Continental styles of making this joint (both are valid) so you can find the approach that is right for your work. And at the end of the week we’ll build a simple dovetailed Shaker silverware tray.

— Christopher Schwarz

We're in the midst of working on the March 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine. The projects are built and the editing has begun, but we still have some screws left to test. This issue will be printed on the glossy stock we used on the first seven issues (that will make Issue 8 a collectors' item – ha!). And we are going to put this issue back into the wholesale newsstand market. So you should be able to find it at more bookstores and newsagents than you did with Issue 8.

As always, Issue 9 will be available directly from us, either in printed form or in an instant digital download. While we don't have a definite release date for Issue 9 yet, here's my best guess: The digital download version will be available Feb. 1. The printed version will start going out by mid-March. Below is the line-up for Issue 9. (And by the way, work has already begun on Issue 10, which is where we're going to make sense of finger joints).

Cover Project: Two Stickley Tabourets
By Christopher Schwarz
We build the same Gustav Stickley No. 603 tabouret two different ways: one with mostly hand tools and the other with mostly power tools. Plus we explain how each perspective requires a different approach for layout and assembly.

Technique: Learn to Saw
By Christopher Schwarz
Details: Sawing by hand is one of the most fundamental hand skills you should develop. But it's not all practice, practice. Chris takes a look back at the historical techniques (now forgotten) that woodworkers used to get accurate sawcuts. Plus, we list the 10 most important rules for sawing.

Tools: Understand Western Backsaws
By Christopher Schwarz
Why would anyone (with the exception of a historical re-enactor or purist) buy an expensive Western saw? We investigate the Western backsaw and explain why it might be a good idea for your shop. Plus, we explain what three saws you need to do to perform all the common cabinetry joints and why.

Technique: Cutting Circles
By Robert W. Lang
We explore the best way to cut circular work, including router trammels and circle-cutting jigs for band saws and spindle sanders (and dismiss the table saw). Once we settle on a technique, we explore the best way to proceed with a minimum amount of clean-up afterward. It uses a router. But which bit is best (Straight? Spiral up-cut? Down-cut? Something else?). How close to the line should you rough-cut? Should you climb-cut? And if so, at what point on the circle – give some guidelines and rules. Plus: Build your own router trammel.
   
Tool Review: Premium Screws
By Glen D. Huey
Some woodworkers buy the cheapest drywall screws they can find. Others spend a pretty penny on stainless-steel beauties from Spax or McFeely's. What is the difference between these (beside the price)? Are they different steel? Different hardness? Why do some screws cam out and some hold tough. We pit the premium brands against some home center specials to find out if the extra money is justified.

Project: Circular Cutting Board
By Robert W. Lang
We build a simple round cutting board using the jigs and techniques featured in this issue.

Finishing: Glazing for the Ages
By Glen D. Huey
Glaze isn't a product as much as it a process. We explain how to apply color between layers of finish to subtly age a piece. We explore different products, including shoe polish, gel stain and traditional glaze. What are the differences, advantages and pitfalls of each.

As always, there will be Letters, Shortcuts, a Glossary and a back-of-the-book essay by Glen Huey on the tools he wished he'd never bought. And the back-page poster will cover butt hinges.

— Christopher Schwarz

In my family we have a saying, "German humor is no laughing matter."

The things that I find hilarious often evoke much eye-rolling around the family dinner table from both the children and my spouse. (Like she should talk. The most hilarious thing in my wife's pantheon of humor is a dog behind the wheel of an automobile.)

So when I point you to Jeff Skiver's blog, I want to warn you first. While I almost soiled myself as I read about his alleged deeds heading up a Weebelo troop, you might just shake your head as you clear the cache and history of your Internet browser.

Skiver wrote a column for the back page of Popular Woodworking's December 2007 issue, and if I had my way, he would own that real estate in our magazine. He's a funny guy, especially for someone in the automotive business, which is generally not fertile ground for anything hilarious (save the AMC Pacer and the Gremlin).

So with that caveat, I encourage you to add the blog "Skiving Off" to your list of woodworking blogs. And do post some comments on his blog so that he feels suitably adored.

— Christopher Schwarz

Adrian Mariano writes: I just watched your DVD ("Forgotten Hand Tools" from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks) in which you advocate the use of nails and drawbores to overcome the flaws in the glue. And there were a couple things I was wondering about.

One is the question of glue longevity. If I glue together a tabletop with hide glue will it fall apart in 100 years? Two hundred? Or do glue joints only fail if they are stressed? (Presumably the side-grain-to-side-grain joint of a tabletop creates very little stress in the joint.) I haven't heard of people, say, putting together tabletops using sliding dovetails to ensure strength.

Answer: Any good glue joint can last centuries. Its life will be shortened by moisture, heat and stress. Moisture on a tabletop is a common factor. Heat can be. And tabletop joints are stressed at the ends by the migration of moisture through the end grain -- that's why antique tops split on the ends typically.

Breadboard ends and cross-battens are typical and historically correct methods of helping to keep a top together.

Question No. 2: Why are nails better than screws?  I haven't tried to use nails in cabinetry, but I've tried to use them in carpentry and my experience has led me to hate nails and to use screws instead whenever possible.  They bend over, they split the work (sometimes even with a pilot hold), and hammering them in can be very loud, and it subjects the work to stresses, possibly causing parts to move or shift. Maybe a screw head is harder to hide than a nail head. But is there some other reason to prefer nails?

Answer: Hmmm. I don't consider nails to be better than screws for all occasions. But there are some advantages to using nails at times. Nails will bend to accommodate wood movement. Screws won't bend. They'll split the work. Nails are smaller and can be used in places that screws would be ugly (nailing on face frames and moulding). They are inserted faster than screws (removing them sure is slower!). And they can be historically correct in pieces, which can be important to some woodworkers (such as myself).

Question No. 3: Another thing I was wondering about is that I saw an article a few months ago (which, alas, I have not been able to find again). This was an article by Bob Flexner on furniture repair and restoration in which he claims that the use of metal fasteners guarantees problems down the road, and I recall that he said pinning a mortise-and-tenon joint would cause it to split eventually.  He seems almost directly in opposition to the use of nails and the drawbore, and justifies his position based on the types of damage he sees in old furniture.  Do you have any thoughts on how to reconcile this with your claims in the DVD?

Answer: Bob is one of the people I highly respect in this business. He also comes at this problem from a restorer's viewpoint. It's more difficult for him to disassemble a joint pinned with a mechanical fastener, be it a wooden or metal one. His comment was aimed also at people who nail a loose joint instead of disassembling it and regluing. That is indeed bad practice.

I don't think a pinned joint guarantees joint failure at all. I have seen pinned joints that are 400 years old and are completely sound. Drawboring is a sound practice for certain kinds of applications where mechanical strength is key or you are working under unusual conditions (wet wood, long spans and no clamps) or you are striving for historical accuracy.

-- Christopher Schwarz

This weekend I put the finishing touches on two Stickley tabourets; and while the little tables turned out to my satisfaction, the construction process proved quite vexing considering there are only nine pieces of wood in each.

The theme of Issue 9 is sawing – understanding sawtooth technology and how to use that knowledge in your work with both hand and power tools. So when I started building these tables I resolved to build one table with the joints sawn by hand and the other with the joints cut by machine.

And that turned out to be harder than I expected.

Though I am comfortable doing all of the necessary operations by both hand and machine, I kept running into situations where sticking to the hand tools or sticking to the power tools was a dumb choice.

For example: The cross stretchers beneath the tabletops are joined to the legs with a single lap dovetail joint. This is an easy joint to cut by hand: Saw the tail, saw out the socket, then remove the waste with a chisel and a router plane.

But when it came to doing this operation by machine it just ticked me off. I cut the shoulders of the dovetail with a dado stack in my table saw at the same time I cut the tenons. That was fairly efficient. Then I cut the dovetail shape on the band saw. Still OK. Then it came time to waste away the dovetail socket in the top of the 1-1/2"-square leg. I picked up the shop’s trim router and contemplated the platform jig I was going to have to build to do this with the router. I shook my head, put the router down and got my dovetail saw. I was done in 10 minutes.

Similarly, when it came time to mortise the legs I used my hollow-chisel mortiser for the power-tool version of the table. My mortiser is always set up with a 1/4" chisel that’s perfectly parallel to the machine’s fence. So when it came time to mortise the legs by hand I faced the same struggle. My mortiser was all set up and I could be done in five minutes. Or I could mortise the legs by hand, which would take a little longer and had the risk of me splitting the leg or wandering left or right. So I used the machine.

These little struggles reminded me of how I don’t understand how some people can work exclusively with hand tools or with machines. I know it can be done and done quite well, but just not by me.

— Christopher Schwarz

Preparing small tabletops or irregular-shaped tops for finishing can be difficult with handplanes. If the top has a lot of mass, you can usually count on friction to help hold the top in place. Or you can screw it down from the underside – assuming the underside is not a show surface.

But sometimes the best solution is to make some cauls to grip your work, which is what I did this morning in the shop to plane the top of some 18"-diameter tabletops for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine. The cauls are made from the scrap parts that fell off when I cut the tops to rough shape on the band saw.

Then I skipped the scrap pieces through my planer to reduce their thickness (I also could have used a jack plane). Then I bored 3/4"- diameter holes in the cauls so they would press-fit over my 3/4"- diameter round dogs in my benchtop. Finally, I pinched the top between the two cauls using my wagon vise (though any end vise can do the trick).

When I've done this on workbenches with square dogs, the solution is to cut the pointy end of the caul so it is flat. Then you brace the flat against your square dog.

No matter how you rig your cauls, pinching the work between two cauls has some advantages, as long as you don't use too much pressure. With two cauls you can rotate the top to work cross-grain if necessary or move the top so it's more convenient to plane.

This arrangement works great with belt sanders. It's not necessary if you use a random-orbit sander to prepare your work. Then you can just place the work on a blanket and get to work.

— Christopher Schwarz

I've never been satisfied with any shop apron. They have been too flimsy, too hot to wear, poorly designed and uncomfortable (for starters). For about a year I've been tinkering with my own design for a shop apron that I was going to commission my sister-in-law to make for me.

The only problem is that my seamstress is also a lawyer by day, and so her hourly rate is a bit steep.

But now, after a few weeks of trying out a new redesigned shop apron from Lee Valley Tools, I just might be able to put my shop apron plans aside. This new apron is comfortable, cool to wear all day and holds tools in an intelligent manner (most shop aprons spill your tools everywhere when you bend at your waist).

The only question mark is the long-term durability of the apron – I'll let you know how it stands up in a year or so.

Here's why I like it: The Mk. II Canvas shop apron has the cross-back shoulder straps that take the weight of the apron off your neck and place it on your shoulders. This is a big deal if you are a tool marsupial because your neck gets tired. I can wear this apron all day with no neck fatigue. Plus, the apron attaches snugly with plastic clips, which is faster than tying strings behind your back to secure the apron.

The cotton canvas is lightweight. So even after a long day of planing and chopping (such as today, which is why I look like such a tired dork above) I don't have a sweaty, apron-shaped patch of moisture on my midsection.

And the lower two pockets are deep enough that when I bend over, the contents don't spill everywhere. And the upper pencil pocket works as well as an upper pencil pocket can.

If you're in the market for an apron, this is as good a one as I can recommend. That is, until I can afford $200 an hour from my sister-in-law. (The Lee Valley Mk. II sells for $27.50.)

— Christopher Schwarz

In my home life, my passion for furniture design is a bit like a subscription to Playboy magazine. I keep all my books about woodworking and furniture in my office. I pore over them at night when the kids are asleep. And I don’t drone on about joinery or 18th-century workshop practices at dinner.

It’s not that I’m actively concealing the stuff. It’s just that my kids’ days are filled with so much activity and learning already, that there is little time to talk much about furniture. I’ve also been waiting for the day to arrive when they are old enough to build furniture in the shop with me.

That day arrived on Saturday.

This weekend we all drove down to Harrodsburg, Ky., for the state’s first-ever Alpaca festival. My two girls like a goofy-looking animal as much as any kid. And so the 100-mile trek to see this cousin to the camel seemed worth it. The festival was held on the grounds of Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill – one of my all-time favorite places on earth. The setting, the buildings, the furniture and the food are a balanced meal for any furniture junkie.

I figured that the last thing the kids would want to do would be to tour buildings and workshops, but that was OK by me. Saturday was for the alpacas, which hum when they are distressed. So we heard a lot of alpaca humming, chased some wild turkeys, saw a sheep being sheared in 4 minutes, made felted soap and bought finger puppets.

After some lunch, we had an hour before we had to head back home, and I thought I’d sneak off to the Centre Family Dwelling to take some photos of the firewood box there, which I’m building for the “I Can Do That” column in the February issue of Popular Woodworking. I told the girls they could go pet some more alpacas or come with me into the building. Surprisingly, everyone wanted to go with me.

After an hour in the Centre Family Dwelling, we almost had to drag the girls out of there. They were both bewitched by the building itself and the objects inside. They wanted to see every room, look at all the tables and chairs and learn about all the displays. They marveled at the acoustics in the meeting halls. They pointed out unusual dovetail joints on a seed box (I guess I’ve been droning on at dinner more than I thought).

Maddy, my 11-year-old, pointed out pieces that she thought I should build for the magazine. Katy, the 6-year-old, was fascinated by the system of pegs on the walls (she also is quite the cleaner, so that’s understandable).

Then they discovered the continuous banisters that run from the ground floor to the third. They immediately knew what a technical challenge it was. They asked to borrow my camera so they could take pictures of things that interested them (they took about 50). Katy’s photo of the peg system is at the top of this entry.

Then the two girls pulled themselves up into one of the deep window wells and looked out over the rolling hills of Central Kentucky, which look the same as they did in the early 19th century when the building was built.

“We could live here dad,” Maddy says. “I could look out this window forever.”

Sometimes I forget about the power that furniture and architectural design has, even over people who don’t immerse themselves in it. On Saturday, the long-gone brothers and sisters of that vanished order reached across almost two centuries of time and planted a seed in the minds of my girls.

Next stop: To the shop to build a wagon for their toy horses to pull. It’s time.

— Christopher Schwarz

"But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools."
— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), "Walden"

When I started building furniture on my back porch after college, I was sure of only one thing: I didn't want to use a radial-arm saw.

My aversion to the machine had nothing to do with safety, accuracy, philosophy or shop space. Instead, I despised the radial-arm saw because I spent one long hot summer as a slave to that machine at the Therma-Tru door factory in Arkansas.

I worked on the assembly line that built the fire doors. It was my job to crosscut the internal rails and stiles that were then skinned with the exterior metal (in a pleasing Colonial look!). The radial-arm saw was right next to the furnace that baked on some sort of coating (you know, I never asked what that stuff was).

No matter how fast I cut, I could never keep up. And the workers on the line were always reaching for the stile I had just put down. After a few weeks of this, the radial-arm saw and I became enemies and we remain so to this day.

For me, woodworking is about balancing the role of the hand and the machine. But there is more than one balancing point. And that's the theme of Issue 9 of Woodworking Magazine, which we are beginning to work on. The cover project is an adaptation of the Gustav Stickley No. 603 tabouret shown in Robert W. Lang's "Shop Drawings for Craftsman Furniture."

I picked an Arts & Crafts project for the issue because the best examples of this furniture style incorporate both machine- and hand-work. Right now I'm building two of these tables. One table is being built with machines carrying most of the load, including joinery. With the other table, hand tools will have the upper hand.

This isn't just about substituting a tenon saw for a 40-tooth flat-tooth rip blade. There are differences in the way you lay out your work and move through the construction process. The resulting tables should look identical, though you can be the judge of that (assuming you purchase the issue).

I have other aversions in addition to the radial-arm saw, including broasted chicken, glazed doughnuts and bagging ice. All those aversions were the result of a hot summer working in a gas station. But those stories are for another kind of blog.

— Christopher Schwarz

During the last few years I’ve begun to teach classes at schools that I really like, such as the Marc Adams School of Woodworking in Franklin, Ind., and Kelly Mehler’s School of Woodworking in Berea, Ky. But the funny thing is that just because I’m now a teacher, I also really like to take woodworking classes.

In fact, if it weren’t for woodworking classes, I might not be the editor of this magazine.

In 1992, a close friend and I started building furniture in his basement. We were really, really serious about it, but we really, really stank at it. No matter how many books or magazines or TV shows we consumed, our cutting boards, side tables and umbrella stands looked like dogmeat.

Then my buddy, Chris Poore, twisted my arm to take a night class in woodworking at the University of Kentucky. Taught by Lynn Sweet in a big industrial building (probably a converted tobacco warehouse), the class was a completely intimidating idea. But Chris can be persuasive. He even talked his wife, Lee, into taking the class with us.

After one week, I knew that this was going to be my life’s work.

Classes are a fantastic way to learn. You can ask questions. You aren’t interrupted by life. You can focus on the task at hand and get immediate feedback. So I’ve continued to take classes, including a couple chairmaking classes, a class in advanced dovetails and a class in boat-building. In 2008, I really, really want to take a class at Mike Dunbar’s Windsor Institute.

If you’ve ever wanted to get a small taste of what a class is like, I highly recommend you check out a weekend seminar at a local woodworking store, or (at the least) take a gander at this slideshow Kelly Mehler posted on his site from our class last week. Good stuff.

— Christopher Schwarz

Get Free Shipping if You Order before Sept. 21

Every issue of Woodworking Magazine is designed without an "expiration date" – we strive to make the instructions and projects that we write to be just as good in 20 years as they are today. To ensure the magazine will endure, we've just published a hardbound book containing the first seven issues, including issues that have long been sold out and unavailable.

These are the complete issues, just as they appeared in the magazine, and they are printed on paper that is even heavier and brighter than the originals. The book's 252 pages are bound in red cloth, stamped with gold foil and covered with a nice glossy dust jacket that features the Roubo workbench on the cover.

If you're not familiar with Woodworking Magazine, you're probably wondering why we're making such a fuss about it. Here's the deal: Woodworking Magazine is different than other woodworking magazines. We seek to challenge the conventional wisdom of the craft to find the most accurate, fast and straightforward way to perform an operation, whether it's cutting dados or making cherry look 100 years old. Our staff tests dozens of techniques in our shop in Cincinnati to find the ones worth using in your shop.

We publish projects that are historical classics, from the 18th-century Roubo workbench to a Gustav Stickley Magazine Stand to a Shaker Tall Cabinet from the Enfield Community. These are pieces of furniture that have earned their status as classics.

And even the way we review tools is different. We don't review table saws (there are enough table saw reviews already). We review the tools and items that we consider critical to good work: 6" rulers, hinges, marking knives, moisture meters, combination squares and the like.

Plus, we accept no outside advertising. Our interior pages are black-and-white. And we're not afraid to blend the use of hand and power tools to get good results.

This book is about to arrive in our warehouse, and we are making a special offer for readers who order the book before midnight on Friday, Sept. 21. If you order before that date, the book is $30 and we'll pay the shipping and handling. Orders placed after that will be $30 plus $4.95 shipping and handling.

This book will not be available in stores. You can order on our secure web site or call toll-free 800-258-0929 and ask for item# WWCMP7A.

— Christopher Schwarz
editor, Woodworking Magazine and Popular Woodworking

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

It’s lunchtime, but as I gaze into the fridge the only thing that looks good to me is a beer. I reach for the yogurt, but I almost change direction and grab the bottle of Fat Tire on the shelf above my milky bacterial fermentation.

Now before you start to worry that I’m in need of an intervention, hear me out. This craving for beer is what happens every time I spray lacquer. The first time I felt this urge more than 10 years ago I dismissed it as my brain telling me to take a victory lap because I’d finished a big project.

Now I think it’s something else. Perhaps my body is trying to replace one toxin with another. Perhaps something in lacquer or the thinner unlocks some alcoholic alter-ego. Believe me, I’m careful around finishing materials and their solvents. I wear a cartridge respirator the entire time I’m working. I wear gloves as I mix the lacquer and thinner. I spray outside on a breezy day.

But no matter what precautions I take, the result is always the same: Beer, beer, beer.

This morning I sprayed the finish coats of lacquer on the Gustav Stickley 802 sideboard that has been languishing in my shop as I’ve gallivanted through Maine and Las Vegas these last few weeks. My original plan to finish the sideboard was to use the suntan finish we developed for cherry in Woodworking Magazine Issue No. 5.

But I didn’t use that finish on the cherry dining table I built in 2005, so that gave me a bit of pause. In 10 years, I’d like these two pieces to look the same color in the same room. So I simply shot the sideboard with clear lacquer, which is the finish on the dining table. Three coats in two hours. God I love spray finishing.

Here’s a little tip for you the next time you’re at the hardware store: Pick up one of the 3M #180-grit sanding sponges. For the last couple years I’ve been using that between coats of lacquer and have decided that it is the bee’s knees. It levels lacquer quickly and brings up the white powdery look you want before shooting the next coat. Plus, the sponges last much longer than the lubricated sandpaper we use at work. When the sponges get a little clogged after a few months, just rinse them out with water and you’ll get some more life out of them.

So far, the sideboard looks pretty good. I like to let the lacquer level and cure for a day and then I rub it out with a plain brown paper bag to remove any dust nibs and give the finish a silky feel. So now I’m going to go down and see if we have any plain paper bags in the pantry.

If we don’t, I’m going to go to the liquor store and kill two needs with one purchase.

— Christopher Schwarz

Shooting boards are one of those hand-tool jigs that people talk about (a lot) but few people actually know much about. Whenever I teach, students always clamor for a demonstration of the device, even when I'm teaching something that doesn't directly relate (sawing tenons, sharpening, steaming salmon).

Recently, Bill Kohr at Craftsman Studios in San Diego loaned me a ramped shooting board that he sells in his catalog and store to try. So here's a short review of the shooting board and a brief tutorial on using it to trim end grain.

First things first: Why do you need one? Shooting boards are one of the most powerful trimming tools in my shop. They are the only tool, machine or jig that I have that reduces the length of a board in .001" increments. They adjust the ends of boards so they are square, even if you have only 1/32" or less to remove. Trimming cuts like this can be tricky on power equipment because the spinning saw blade can deflect in the cut, giving you an inconsistent cut through the thickness.

The shooting board (some call it a "chute board") holds your work in position and 90° to a track that a handplane rides in. Push the plane in the track and it will trim the end of the board until it is square. (Note: There also are shooting boards designed for long grain, but I generally plane these freehand or use the tail vise and dogs to do the job – but that's an entry for another day.)

The shooting board shown here is made by Micheal Connor in Australia from New Guinea Rosewood, a dense and stable material. This shooting board is unusual in that the area that holds the work is ramped about 4° along its length. This ramping does two things: It spreads out the wear on your plane's iron a little. For example, a 3/4" x 6"-wide piece of stock will wear an area of your iron that's 1-3/32" instead of a 3/4"-wide area of your iron. Plus, the ramp makes the plane a bit easier to push through the end grain because the ramp creates a shearing cut.

Having the ramp is nice, but I wouldn't call it a do-or-die feature. My shop-made shooting board is flat and made from plywood. It's fine. I just have to push a little harder and sharpen more often.

The downside to the ramp is that you have to do some extra rigging to support long workpieces that stick out off the shooting board. I have an adjustable planing stop on one of our benches that can be angled to support the work at 4°. Another option is to make a block of wood that has a 4° ramp – easy work on a band saw.

The Connor shooting board is well made and dead-nuts accurate. The fence, which is the most critical component of the jig, is secured in a dado in the ramp, so it's not ever going to move. My only real quibble with the jig is that the finish on the fence and ramp allow your work to slide around more than I like. I'd put a layer of stick-on sandpaper on the fence, which is what I have on my shopmade shooting board.

Shooting Board Use
There are many ways to go about using a shooting board. David Charlesworth has an excellent DVD on the topic that explores his simple shooting board and the techniques to use it. I've used his shooting board and his techniques with excellent results. But perhaps because of my American-ness, I do it differently. Charlesworth takes a pass with the plane, then pushes the work up against the sole of the tool and makes another pass. He repeats this until he makes a full-width cut and is at his destination length. I usually use his technique when reducing boards in length, but do it a bit differently when correcting the angle on the end of a board.

So I start with my out with a board I've trimmed on our out-of-whack (surprise!) miter saw. It's out by a couple degrees. I put plane in the track (I always use a heavy plane with an iron that is sharpened straight across). Then I put the jointed edge of the board against the shooting board's fence and show the wonky end to the plane's sole. That shows me which corner is high and which corner is low.

Now relieve the corner of the work that will go against the fence. Cut a tiny bevel with a chisel to reduce blow-out on the end. If I am working to a knife line I'll chisel the corner to that line.

I take the plane off the track and position the board so the low corner is flush to the track and the high corner stick out over the track. Then I push the work against the fence (push hard!) and then place the plane in the track and begin planing. Focus on pushing the plane down and forward. Use just enough force against your workpiece to keep the tool in the cut. If you push too much to the side you'll push the work out of position instead of cutting it.

When the plane stops cutting, the edge is square. Check your work to confirm.

The Connor shooting board is available in both left- and right-hand versions and is $95. For woodworkers who don't want to build one or question their ability to do so, I think it's an excellent way to get a jump-start on shooting.

— Christopher Schwarz

Issue 8 is now available in both digital and printed formats directly from us. We've shipped out the issues to our newsstand distributors  (see below to download a list of dealers that will sell it).

The staff is particularly proud of this issue. It's our biggest issue ever and we think it breaks some new ground on some important topics: workbench design, constructing tool racks and choosing a flush-cutting saw.

You have several choices as to how you can purchase this issue. It’s not complicated, but it is new, and so here is a complete explanation.

1. Buy the printed edition: You can order a printed copy of Issue 8 directly from us through our Internet store for $8 or by calling toll-free 800-258-0929 (ask for item #PW0907). You also will be able to purchase the issue from a select number of specialty stores, including all of the Lee Valley retail stores in Canada and woodworking stores in the United States. You can download a complete list of stores arranged by state to find a location near you. The issue should be available on newsstands in early August.

Download a list of Dealers: WM_Dealers.doc (83.5 KB)

2. Buy a digital download edition:  You can download Issue 8 from our Internet store right now for $6. The digital edition is a pdf file that has been enhanced with additional links and resources. We’ve added buttons in the issue that will call up additional related stories, video and slideshows on our web site. The pdf can be read by any computer with the free Acrobat Reader program from Adobe (most computers come loaded with this program already). Here’s how the digital download works. It’s quite easy. After you pay for the issue you will be sent an e-mail. Inside that e-mail is a link that you’ll click that will allow you to log in to our web site with a username and password. When you log in, you’ll be taken to a page that will let you download the file. It’s a large file (about 8mb), but if you have trouble downloading it, you can come back to that page as many times as you like if you encounter some sort of problem. Our connection is fast and stable, and we haven’t had anyone encounter any serious difficulty yet.

3. Buy both digital and printed editions:  You can order both the digital and printed editions of Issue 8 from our Internet store for $10. If you choose this option, you will be able to download the digital issue immediately, as described above. Plus you will be shipped the printed copy of the magazine from our warehouse in Wisconsin.

— Christopher Schwarz

Some manufacturers require a thousand square feet of booth space to show you the new tools they are going to introduce before the end of the year. Others require you to simply push the water glasses aside on the dinner table to see the new line.

This evening the editors of Popular Woodworking had dinner with Robin Lee, president of Lee Valley Tools, and his spouse, Lucie. We brought our appetites. Robin brought a bag of new handplanes and tools that he pulled out one after another. First there was a round of beer. Then came the new router plane and some new rulers. Salads. Squirrel-tail planes. Bread. The long-awaited plow plane. (While I had salmon for dinner, this tool was the main course for me.)

Plus, Robin shared lots of information about the products you are going to see appearing in the catalogs in the coming months. Just remember this: You are among the first to see some of these tools, so the photographs aren’t my best (a bedspread is a poor photographic sweep). And that you should be patient when trying to get your hands on them. With that in mind, here’s some of the really cool stuff.

Veritas Small Router Plane
The Veritas Router Plane is one of the company’s most finely made tools, in my opinion. So I’m pleased to report that the Veritas Small Router plane is another winner. This is a closed-throat router, and it reminds me more of the routers built by pattermakers than it does of any historical model.

Here are some details: The small-scale router is ideal for cleaning out shallow grooves or recesses, such as hinge mortises. The 1/4"-wide blade is simple to adjust up and down using a knurled brass knob threaded through the body. Loosen the knob to adjust the blade and nothing happens. Yup. Nothing. That’s because of a wave washer that keeps the blade in position quite well, even with the blade’s locking mechanism loosened.

Nudge the blade and it shifts in position. Then lock the sucker back up. The router is quite comfortable to hold with the tips of your fingers. And the 3-1/4"-wide and 2-1/4"-deep body is made from ductile iron; the sole is flattened with a special lapping process that makes it dead flat. In addition to the standard position in the mouth of the tool, the blade also can be adjusted for use in bullnose work. The price is $45 (U.S.). Lee said this tool should be ready by Sept. 1.

Other cool planes and accessories in the works:

• Two Squirrel-handled Planes: Based on the “Little Victor” handplane released recently, the company is expanding the line of tools with these two new palm-sized planes. One is quite similar to the Little Victor except it has a nice palm-rest that looks much like the curled tail of a squirrel. The sole is flat and the blade-clamping mechanism is the same as on the “Little Victor.” (Read a review of this plane on our blog.)

The second plane has the same body style but the sole is curved, like that on the Stanley Model-Makers Plane. However, the curvature on the sole of the Lee Valley version is not as extreme. The side-to-side radius is 1-1/2". Front-to-back radius: 12".

Both planes measure 3-3/8" long at the sole, 4-7/8" long overall and 1-3/8" wide. Pricing: The pair will be sold for an introductory price of $65. After that, the planes will be $36 for the flat-soled tool and $42 for the curved one.

• A set of Phi Rulers: These cool rulers allow you to draw Golden Rectangles using the Golden Section (a proportion of 1 to 1.618). The rulers work like a CenterPoint ruler with a direct-reading scale. Translation: No math! You use one edge of the ruler to draw the longer dimension of the project, then you use the Phi ruler to generate the shorter one. You also can start with the smaller dimension of the rectangle and determine the longer side. A fair number of woodworkers use the Golden Section in designing furniture as this ration of 1 to 1.618 is pleasing to our eyes.

Also, Lee says that his staff prepared a 16-page instruction manual for the rulers that covered the history of the Golden Section and explored its application. Lee said, with a laugh, that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to send a 16-page instruction sheet with a ruler, so they’re going to post that on the web site.

The price of the rulers is right: A set of 6", 12" 18" and 24" is $15.95. (Available soon, if not now.)

• Veritas Small Plow Plane: The highlight was getting to see the much-anticipated Veritas plow plane, which is based loosely on the Record #044 plow plane. The plow plane is still a useful plane today for making the grooves for drawers bottoms and for small-scale box and door work – grooves for panels in rails and stiles. This plane (which was not ready for me to photograph) has a streamlined design.

Unlike other plow planes, the rear tote is wood instead of metal, which feels nice to the hand. The fence is designed to encourage the proper grip of the tool. And the way that the fence is held fast has more to do with the technology surrounding router bits than with historic tools. Think: router collet. Then think: very cool.

The Veritas Small Plow Plane should be available by the end of September. It will come standard with an A2 1/4"-wide blade and sell for $199. You also will be able to purchase the plane with four additional blades (1/8" up to 3/8") for $245, or purchase individual blades.

I didn’t get to use the plow plane (a couple key parts were plastic, plus we were in a restaurant), but the overall profile of the plow is curvier and more fluid than I expected. It was a bit hard to hand back over the table.

• A 30th Anniversary Plane: To celebrate the company’s 30th anniversary, Lee Valley is going to make a limited edition stainless steel edge plane. Lee says they are going to make 300 of them (using the lost wax process) and then destroy the molds. The plane looks like a cross between the company’s bronze version of the edge-trimming plane and they company’s more recent ductile iron version. No word on pricing or availability (and that’s my fault – I forgot to ask).

• The Veritas Hold-Down is getting an accessory – an optional shorter post. This will be a boon for people who don’t have a lot of extra space below their benchtops but still want to use a hold-down. The post is 5-1/2" long and will cost $7.20.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Connecticut road the next morning.

As I sprint down the gravel driveway at my mother’s house, the lights begin to dim and I begin to wonder if a 10 p.m. three-mile run in semi-rural Connecticut was a good idea.

I’ve made this run so many times since I was 11 years old that I push on. I’m fueled partly by the intense memory of this road, partly by the two glasses of red wine at dinner and partly by the fact that I’ve been sitting on my backside for more than 13 hours in a drive in my wife’s mini-van to get to Old Lyme, Conn.

I’m on the way to Maine this week to shoot a DVD (this one on using a workbench, natch) and to do a seminar on Saturday on workbench design at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. But for the next couple days I’m at my mother’s house, which also was my grandparent’s house. It’s where I learned to use a table saw and a band saw. It’s where I spent summers in my grandfather’s workshop, which is now empty except for a few boxes.

After a half mile, I look up and can barely separate the sky from the canopy of trees. Streetlights are few. Lights from the homes are infrequent, and I can see the median of the road as a slightly brighter line stretching ahead. I follow that line.

Almost 20 years ago, my grandfather walked this same road, just as he did every morning on his way to pick up the newspaper at the Laysville convenience store. But on that morning in the late 1980s, my grandfather had a stroke in this driveway, incapacitating him for the last years of his life. It took away his ability to walk, work in the shop and say more than three things: “Yes!” (which meant “no”), “No!” (which usually meant “yes”) and “love you” (which I hope wasn’t an antonym).

And now it’s dark on the driveway, like I’m in a sensory deprivation tank. The dim line marking the median is gone. I press on, and I look for the median using my feet instead of my eyes. I chuckle for a moment because this is all a bit like work in the shop. You need to use senses other than your sight. Your sense of touch, in particular, lets you know how a handplane is working, if a chisel is sharp, if the surface of your wood is free of plane tracks or planer snipe. Your hearing lets you know if your band saw is aligned, if your table saw is in trouble. (Yes, everything can be a blog entry about woodworking.)

I’m feeling my way across Sill Lane with my feet when I find the yellow center line. I can’t see a dang thing, but I know I’m running full-tilt down the center of the road and headed in the right direction. I laugh out loud and run the next two miles without seeing anything, navigating entirely by my feet.

Then I feel a brush of some brush on my legs and then my left shoulder slams into a tree trunk. I’ve lost my line. So much for navigating using your other senses. Next time I’ll run when there’s daylight.

— Christopher Schwarz

Long-time toolmaker Paul Hamler has developed a new device that can turn many handplanes (both vintage and new) into a scraping plane that is easier to set up, tune and use than any other scraping plane I’ve used.

I’ve been working with a pre-production version of this scraping insert – which simply replaces the frog on your plane – for about three weeks now. And already I’m convinced that I want one in my personal toolkit and I’ve placed an order with Hamler. This is despite the fact that neither the price (an estimated $125 to $150) nor the delivery date (some time later in 2007) is yet firm.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. There are lots of questions that first must be answered about this unusual piece of equipment and why it might belong in your shop. Some readers might even wonder why anyone should spend money on a scraping plane when a card scraper can be had for $7 to do the same job. (The reason is that a card scraper is more likely to dish your surface, leaving ugly ripples that show up when you apply a film finish. Scraper planes don't do that.)

In fact, one of the first questions is why bother with this scraping insert when there’s another one available from Lee Valley Tools. Good question. The interesting answer is that the Veritas Scraping Plane Insert was invented by Hamler (he, Leonard Lee and John S. Lynn are listed as the inventors on the 1996 patent papers). Hamler says he thought the design and materials of the original could be improved upon and so he developed this new insert and is producing and selling it himself.

And indeed, this new insert is almost nothing like the Veritas version. Here’s how it works:

The insert fits into the wide-bodied Bailey-pattern and Bed Rock-pattern planes made by Stanley – the Nos. 4-1/2, 5-1/2, 6 and 7. The Bed Rock version also will fit Lie-Nielsen wide-bodied planes of the same sizes.

To install the insert you remove the entire frog assembly of your plane and replace it with Hamler’s device. Tighten the plane’s frog mounting screws and the job is done. The scraper, a thin 2-1/2"-wide piece of steel, drops into the tool and is secured with a single thumbscrew. This looks and feels just like Stanley’s old scraper planes, such as the Nos. 12, 112 and 212. But this is where the similarity to the old (and existing new) tools ends.

Intuitive Controls
The way you adjust Hamler’s scraping insert is truly ingenious and improves upon more than 100 years of doing things the hard way. What’s the hard way? If you own a scraping plane, you already know the answer. You adjust the cut of a traditional scraping plane by pitching the scraper backward and forward. Tipping the scraper forward makes the cut deeper and more aggressive. Tipping it back has the opposite effect.

One of the most frustrating things about the old mechanism is that it’s a true pain to change the angle. You change it by loosening two jam nuts. Then you twist one to tip the tooling forward or twist the other tip it back. Then you have to retighten the two jam nuts and test your cut. If you don’t get it the first time (and you won’t) then it’s back to the jam nuts for another round of righty-tighty time.

Hamler’s insert replaced the forward jam nut with a strong spring. So to adjust the scraper forward you turn the knob counter-clockwise and take a cut. To move the scraper back you turn the knob clockwise and take a cut. No jam nuts. No overshooting your mark. It works and feels much more like using a bench plane than the torture device that is the No. 112’s mechanism.

So how does Hamler get away with removing that forward jam nut? Isn’t it necessary to keep the insert rigid during the cut? Nope. The forward jam nut is a gill slit or an appendix. You need only one nut to keep the insert rigid because rigidity is important only when the tool is cutting – and that’s what the rear knob does. The spring keeps all the parts in tension so things aren’t flopping around annoyingly on the return stroke.

But About That Length…
The other curious aspect of the insert is that Hamler made it for (and demonstrates it in) a jointer plane body. That’s a 22"-long plane. Traditional scraper planes are much more like smoothing planes (the No. 112 is about 9" long). Why do you need a scraper insert in a jointer plane?

I haven’t talked to Hamler about this specifically, so he might have another opinion on it. But here are my thoughts. Scraper planes excel at dealing with large surfaces that have a lot of grain problems. I use them especially when dealing with glued-up tabletops. When you glue up a top, the first order of business is to arrange the boards to best appearance. But that might involve a lot of boards that have grain running in opposite directions.

Handplaning a top like this is a massive pain. And getting the seams right is enough to drive one to the random-orbit sander. But a scraper plane can generally ignore grain reversals. So you can flatten the top with a jointer plane and then follow up with a jointer-sized scraper with no problem. In other words, just skip the smoothing plane when the deck is stacked against you and go right to the scraper plane.

This is a time-saver in unexpected ways. Typically, I’d try to deal with a top first with a jointer plane, then a high-angle smooth plane, then a card scraper to deal with localized tear-out, then sandpaper to blend the planed and scraped surfaces together. With the Hamler insert I can go from jointer plane to jointer scraper to a bit of hand sanding.

If you like the shorter format, you can always put the insert in a No. 4-1/2 and it will be much like a No. 112. But I like the extra mass of the No. 6 that I have the prototype in. Plus, the longer plane will result in a flatter surface than a shorter plane or the washboarding that comes with a card scraper in inexperienced hands.

Another objection that some woodworkers might make is that you can convert a bench plane, HNT Gordon plane or bevel-up plane to a scraping plane using various tricks (such as large back bevels, turning the iron over or honing a very steep secondary bevel). All of these work; I’ve tried them. But they don’t allow you to change the pitch of the tool forward and back, and that’s useful when dealing with different species and different hooks on the scraper. The Hamler insert handles this task with enormous ease. Plus, the Hamler insert can hold scrapers of different thicknesses so you can choose a thick one for aggressive work or a thin one for light cuts in tricky burls.

The pre-production model shown in these photos is utilitarian-looking, according to Hamler. The production version will have more spit and polish. Believe that. If you’ve ever seen any of Hamler’s other work (he specializes in miniature tools), it’s impressive.

Hamler doesn’t have a web site, but you can contact him via e-mail at hamlertools@alltel.net to inquire about getting your name on the list for one of these tools.

— 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

During the last several months I’ve gotten several e-mails, phone calls and comments from people who aren’t readers. Instead these communiqués are from the wives of our readers, who are about 95 percent male.

These are not friendly conversations.

They go something like this: “My husband buys every tool you recommend. Whenever your magazine comes out or you post something on your blog, my husband buys it. For the sake of our bank account, please die.”

Well, that last sentence is hyperbolic (I’m from the South, what do you expect?). But the rest of the sentiment is accurate. One woman said that my writing had cost her $12,000 last year and $9,000 so far this year. And here I thought my writing cost people $19.96 a year for a seven-issue subscription.

Now I actually feel pretty bad about this recent development. As a writer (who is married to a writer), I’ve always lived modestly. I drive a six-year-old bare-bones Honda. Many of my clothes are hand-me-downs from my father, a man with excellent taste. Heck, I started building furniture because we couldn’t afford the antiques we wanted.

But I’ve never developed a taste for cheap tools. My first table saw was a 1970s-era Craftsman (price: free). I spent as much time adjusting the lame fence as I did ripping with it. My first chisels and planes were the Popular Mechanics brand (yes, I see the irony), and the edges folded like tin foil whenever they were asked to cut anything other than pine. I could go on and on with this list.

Poor-quality tools stink. So I began acquiring high-quality vintage tools and machines (an Atlas drill press, Swan chisels, Stanley Type 11 handplanes). These were (and still are) great tools. But they took a lot of work to bring back to life. Metalwork. Filings. Grease. Pressing bearing. I found that I don’t like metalworking nearly as much as woodworking.

So I bought a Delta Unisaw. I bought nice Japanese chisels and saws from Lee Valley Tools. I bought a Lie-Nielsen plane. Each purchase hurt the bank account; but on the plus side, I’ve never had to replace any of these tools. And I suspect I never will. Every time I turn on my table saw, it works as advertised. Every time I cut a dovetail, the only errors are caused by my own ineptness. And every time I go to plane a board, the results are completely predictable.

But these arguments don’t work well with the spouses. I’ve tried. So I apologize to them. I try to untangle myself from the conversation. And I furiously hope that each of you will build something spectacular with these tools. Nothing defuses the expense of the means like the beauty of the results.

— 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 weekend I got a chance to show off the Holtzapffel workbench at the Sindelar Tool Meet, talk to a bunch of tool collectors and buy some tools I've been coveting for too long.

But the absolute highlight of the entire event was a brush with greatness.

You see, I got to meet "the boy."

OK, some background for the uninitiated: Tool dealer Patrick Leach has been selling tools on the Internet for as long as I've been buying them. Every month, Leach sends out an e-mail newsletter that is (hands-down) the best-written tool newsletter in the business. His tools for sale are always the cream of the crop and his descriptions are oft hilarious.

(By the way, Leach is also the founder of the Blood & Gore web site, the best online reference on Stanley planes, and started Independence Tool with Pete Taran, which made the dovetail saw that Lie-Nielsen now sells. That saw launched the premium handsaw market.)

Anyway, one of my favorite parts of Leach's newsletter is that he has a "Tool of the Month," which is usually the most unusual, minty or rarest tool on offer. And every month, one of the photos that shows the tool features Leach's son holding the tool.

As I've been getting this newsletter for years, I've watched the child grow up, and Leach always peppers the tool's description with some comment about "the boy" or the "tool youth." For example: "Fresh from stuffing his mouth with Oreos while playing with his toy motorcycle, the tool youth wasn’t too happy to pose with this one, the much coveted #164 low angle smooth plane…."

So on Saturday afternoon I took a moment away from my demonstrating at John Sindelar's event to browse some of the tool dealer's tables. I was looking at a small router plane when I glanced up. Now it's rare for me to be speechless (just ask the magazine's staff), but I saw The Boy and all I could do was stutter: "Uhhhh, it's….uhhhh… The Boy!"

He and his father were set up right by the entrance to the building that houses the collection. Leach was working the crowd, cracking jokes and making deals. The Boy was helping out, arranging the tools and tending to the tool bargains that were arrayed on the blue plastic tarp off to the side.

"The best tools are back over here," The Boy called out to the crowd.

I obeyed him and went to have a look. I snatched up a brass router plane made by a patternmaker and an accessory for my brace that would allow it to accept small round-shank bits. The Boy was right.

I wanted to say something like, "I've known you since you were just a wee lad holding an ebony plow plane in a bouncy seat." But that sounded stupid. And I'm sure that it would seem creepy if I started talking to The Boy, and so I just admired him from afar. If you've ever wondered about it, The Boy is a good kid. He helped Leach the entire weekend and was one of the most well-behaved elementary-school kids I've met.



A smallish router plane by Paul Hamler. Yes, I ordered one..

Other highlights: Getting to meet toolmakers Paul Hamler and Jim Leamy. Konrad Sauer from Sauer & Steiner was there as well. I know Konrad quite well and we spent our evenings trying to find a decent beer (we looked a lot, but that's another story for another kind of blog). I did learn that Konrad has a profound weakness for powdered sugar doughnuts. John Sindelar, the host of this incredible event, bought about 3,000 doughnuts for the event. No lie. Konrad ate his fair share.

— Christopher Schwarz

“It will be necessary that I teach them how to choose their tools that are made by Smiths, that they may use them more with ease and delight, and make both quicker and neater Work with them.”

Few people in the world of hand tools rouse people as much as John Economaki, the founder of Bridge City Tool Works. He has a passionate customer base that keeps its collective lip buttoned on the Internet, and a vocal chorus of critics that doesn’t.

Critics charge that his tools are too expensive, that some of his tool designs are too specialized to one segment of the craft and that his marketing copy tries too hard. So when you meet him, you expect Economaki to be rich, snobbish and overly proud of his product.

During the last 16 months, I’ve become acquainted with Economaki. And the more I talk to him, the less I understand the critics. He is, unlike many people who make tools in this world, one of us. He was a woodworker, an industrial arts teacher and a professional furniture maker before he started making tools.

He is, like many toolmakers, struggling to remain profitable, he’s quite earthy and he’s the biggest critic of his own designs.

“Ah, you see this,” he said today about one of the parts of one of his planes, “this is a design flaw. I should have put a magnet in there so it would stay in place as you tighten the lever cap.”

This week, Economaki is in our shop here in Cincinnati to show us some of his newest designs, share thoughts on CAD software and give a presentation to a group of our readers. Today, Economaki and our staff spent the day in the shop, working with his tools, chatting about woodworking and discussing the state of toolmaking in this country.

Time with Economaki makes my head hurt. It’s common to start on a conversation about try squares that shifts to tricks to determine accuracy using a cylinder of steel to biographies of Albert Einstein to the legacy of Sam Maloof. All that happened in about three stoplights while in my car on the way to his hotel.

But the most interesting thing about the day was getting to spend time with his tools. They are as much about design as they are about function (kind of like fine furniture, don’t you think?). He admits that freely and says his tools aren’t for everyone. As to the criticism that the tools are “too expensive,” you don’t feel that way after you use the tools and understand a bit how they are made (entirely in the United States).

I’ll admit, some of his tools don’t appeal to my eye or the way I work, such as the Japanese saws. But other tools of his have a remarkable pull.

When Bridge City started making the SS-2 Saddle Square, I ordered it as soon as I saw it and have never regretted it. The tool has been in every shop apron that I’ve worn to shreds while working at the magazine, and I carry it to every show.

The Saddle Square is functional, yes, but it also delights me. It pushes me to work better. And as its brass surface has become scratched, tarnished and worn over the years, my woodworking has become tighter, lighter and easier.

And that’s worth something.

— Christopher Schwarz

I've been involved in hundreds of professional photography shoots in my journalism career, and each one is ridiculous in its own way.

Yesterday we shot the image for my forthcoming book, "Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use," which is scheduled to come out in early October. So at 7 a.m., I began cleaning up the shop, which was a wreck as a result of our struggle to finish up the August issue of Popular Woodworking. I pulled the bench out from the wall and began the archaeological dig through the mountain of shaving and sawdust (ah yes, something from the Creole Table Era, circa 2006).

Then Al Parrish, our staff photographer, came in to survey the scene. He didn't like the fact that the bank of windows on the right side of the bench didn't have a tool rack and you could see the cars in our parking lot. "Can we build a tool rack?" he asked.

Today? No.

So we put some of the parts from my sideboard project in the window to obscure the Chevy pickup truck. Then the designers came in. I braced myself because designers have asked for some pretty ridiculous things of me over the years. They had one change: Designer Terri Woesner went over to my broom, picked it up and walked to my bench.

What? Not clean enough?

Terri pushed the broom into the pile of shavings and dust and then artfully sprayed the mess across our shop floor. Then she walked around the bench, positioning the shavings in a thoughtful manner, using the bristles of broom to place them.

Then Al went to work. The image above was shot with our shop lights turned off (which is how I work anyway) and one strobe positioned off to the right of the frame. He also did a little work on the image in Photoshop. Anyone notice what he changed on the bench?

— Christopher Schwarz

One of the side benefits of writing a book on workbenches is that I got to see hundreds of variations on the traditional designs, both in person and in old books. I also dug up some dead-end designs – benches that looked liked a good idea at first glance but turned out to be much more like the 8-track of the workbench world.

Both of these benches are from "The Great Tool Emporium" (Popular Science) by David X. Manners, a 1979 survey of tools both modern and archaic. The book's section on workbenches was clearly an afterthought – it shares a chapter with Dremel-style rotary tools and glue guns.

Exhibit A: From an unsourced engraving (above). This bench has a leg vise mounted on the left end of the bench. It's a loony, but not entirely stupid idea. There's a pop-up dog on the leg vise that allows you to pinch your work between it and a dog in the benchtop. You probably could use the vise for crosscutting your stock without too much trouble.

But how in the heck are you going to clamp wide boards on edge? And why is the apron on the end notched to receive the jaw of the leg vise? This prohibits some basic clamping jobs. And one minor gripe: Having your vise on the end like this could be a recipe for disaster when planing. If you slip at the end of the stroke, your plane is more likely to go crashing to the floor. That's one of the reasons it's nice to have your planing stop several inches in from the end (mine's located 12" in from the end on the Roubo). I give this bench a D+.



Exhibit B: This is a Lervad 610 "Single Technology" bench made of Danish beech and once distributed by Leichtung Inc. Check out the shoulder vise on the left. It has two jaws! One is in the traditional spot to press against the benchtop. The other is outside the dogleg section of the bench. I suppose that this outside jaw is intended for working small parts and will allow you to come in at an angle with your rasps etc. and not hit the vise.

But this extra jaw seems vestigial, the gill slits of the workbench world.

And, once again, I think this bench lacks a way for you to work the edges of long boards and assemblies. I suppose you could clamp a bench slave in the end vise on the right, but that wouldn't solve all your problems when faced with edges.

What also is interesting about this bench is how the tool tray is so short. As tool tray ideas go, this one isn't too mad. Having the open section at the rear would allow you to do some clamping on the backside of the bench. I give this bench a C.

By the way, if you are a bench nut, you really should dig into the Lervad site. There's some really cool stuff here:

• A Height-adjustable Bench: I want to try this bench.

• A Height- and Angle-adjustable Bench: A bit like the Veritas carving bench, except that it is totally insane.

• The Wacky Tool Well Bench: Why not put it here?

• Benches for Schools: This could work, as long as you don't want to teach dovetailing.

— Christopher Schwarz

Question: When is your book on workbenches coming out? I read the    excerpts in your magazine this weekend and decided to purchase it before I attempt a bench of my own, I can’t wait. I have acquired some Southern Yellow Pine that I intend to use on my bench (it's fire-rated 2 x 12 x 8’). It has been in my climate-controlled garage for about three months. The last time I used construction grade (non-rated) SYP she moved all over the place once cut. What do you recommend?
 
— Andy Scott

Answer: Southern Yellow Pine moves a lot as it dries, but once it’s dry, it is quite stable. How stable? Download the pdf below that explains how to figure wood movement for a variety of species.

Here’s what I do when I use yellow pine in any project:

1. Crosscut and rip everything to close size. Moisture migrates through the end grain, so cutting it close to size will make it dry faster.

2. Use a moisture meter to check your progress. Some SYP comes nearly dry (9 percent moisture content (MC)). I’ve seen some boards at 17 percent MC. It usually takes a few months for things to equalize with big projects such as this. Patience pays.

3. Only surface the wood for one assembly at a time. Work rapidly. When you glue up the top, clear the day. Surface and rip all the stock and glue it that day. When you glue up the legs, use the same strategy. It takes more time, but it really pays off.

4. When you glue it up, let it sit in the clamps at least five hours. The resins in the wood prevent the water in yellow glue from pentrating as quickly – this tip is from the chemists at Titebond.

On a final note: With Southern Yellow Pine that has been in my shop for a year or so, I can deal with it just like I deal with hardwoods. So it really is about managing the moisture because waiting a year is not a reasonable solution for most woodworkers.

I'm sure there are other good tips that I'm forgetting. If you have one, please leave it in the Comments section below (click on Comments and you'll see how this works).

The book comes out Oct. 10. You can read more about it here.

— Christopher Schwarz

WoodMovement.pdf (272.5 KB)

The dominant style of workbench in the Western world is what we call the European form. It's the bench that Ulmia made famous and the bench that built a million cabinets in the 20th century. It was, in fact, the first "real" workbench I ever worked on at the University of Kentucky, and I got along fine with it.

So it might seem blasphemous to point out limitations of this venerable form. After all, millions of woodworkers use this bench. They love this bench. They wouldn't trade it for anything.

But here goes.

Please keep in mind that if you like your workbench, I'm not encouraging you to chop it into firewood and give it a Viking funeral. You don't need a special kind of bench to do woodworking that is extraordinary. The following is intended only to make you think about what a workbench should do with ease. (If you're interested in delving deeper into the topic, check out my eight-page article on workbench design in the June 2007 issue of Popular Woodworking.)

Each part of every workbench has pros and cons. Let's start with the base of this bench.

The Base: Most European workbenches have a trestle design as shown above. These bases can be massive (which I prefer) or can be spindly. The nice thing about this style of base is that it can be disassembled (by removing wedges or bolts) to be transported. The downside is that the trestle-style legs are inset at the front and therefore can't act as a clamping surface for long boards, panels or door assemblies. You can build a so-called bench slave (a portable stand with adjustable pegs) to help perform this function, but many other simple benches don't require this extra equipment. And, I'd like to point out, that not all European benches were made like this. Some more Germanic-looking benches had the legs flush to the front edge of the top, allowing you to use the legs as a clamping surface.

The Tool Tray:  Tool trays are great for keeping your tools at hand – and at collecting detritus. They allow you to use less raw material when making your benchtop, but they offer less support when you are working on flat panels. You don't have to have a tool tray to keep your tools close at hand. We use racks above our benches in our shop.

The Tail Vise: The L-shaped tail vise on the right side of the bench above is good for clamping panels for planing or sanding (I use a planing stop for individual boards). I like the tail vise for shooting edges of boards and doors. It's a great spreader clamp. It's superb for dovetailing narrow drawer sides. But it has demerits. You cannot work directly on the tail vise – pounding and hammering there are a no-no. Plus, I've worked on a lot of tail vises that sag as they wear. This sag lifts your work off the benchtop. Some woodworkers like to saw on the end of the bench, and the tail vise gets in the way of this. I don't saw there so it's not an issue for me.

The Face Vise: These vises are great for a lot of work on smaller workpieces. But the vise's guide bars get in the way when you are dovetailing, and the jaws rack when you clamp using only one corner of the vise (a common operation because the guide bars encourage this). Vise blocks help control the racking, but that's one more little jig to mess with.

The Benchtop Itself: Some European-style benches have a wide apron that bands a thin interior core. This apron drives me nuts when I'm trying to clamp stuff to the benchtop. Other European benches have a nice solid and thick top (as shown above) that is great for clamping. Also (and this is supposed to be a nice feature) many of the commercial versions of this bench form offer a handy drawer below the top. This drawer interferes with clamping and sometimes even with the operation of the dogs.

The Verdict: You can work around all of the limitations of a European workbench, so it's a good form. But if you are considering building it for your shop, making a few small changes to the form might make your life easier.

— Christopher Schwarz