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

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

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

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

On Wednesday I was slathering epoxy into the cracks of my workbench top when Megan Fitzpatrick asked me if I was worried about what the epoxy would do to the blades of my handplanes.

"I don't really give a weevil's (expletive deleted)," I replied.

"Why?" she asked.

"Because I know how to sharpen."

The way I see it, unless the material I'm working is going to split my tool in half, I'll plane it. Laminated veneer lumber? Plywood? MDF? OSB? Epoxy? Plastic resin glue? Yup, I've planed them all. Here's why: It's easier to sharpen a handplane blade than it is to sharpen the blades in my electric jointer or planer. So I think a handplane is a great tool for dealing with engineered material. This is wacky chat, I know.

I too was afraid of planing odd stuff until one day in the late 1990s. We were training our fellow publishing employees in basic woodworking techniques, and each student was building a little project with our help.

We let the students pick the wood for their project, and half of the women in the class picked purpleheart. Purpleheart, I discovered, is not a wood. It's a mineral. After two swipes, my block plane began to dull. I had to hone my block plane a lot that week, but we made it through the class.

After that experience, I stopped worrying about what I was planing and focused on becoming a faster and better sharpener. The way I see things, a dull blade is a good thing because it means two things. 1. You are working the wood and not just fondling the forgings. 2. You get to sharpen it, which makes you a better sharpener.

And now back to scraping epoxy (which cuts a lot like maple).

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

I mixed my epoxy product from Advanced Repair Technology, which was recommended by several readers who restore rotted wood (this is the stuff they use at Colonial Williamsburg). It is structural and has a 30-45 minute open time.

Then I colored it. I started with one drop of India ink. Then two. Then three. It stopped getting blacker after two drops. It looked good, but the epoxy retained some of its yellowness and translucence.

Then I sprinkled a wee bit of the "Mars Black" on a second glop of epoxy. It instantly turned jet, tar, coal, pit-of-Kurt-Cobain's-soul black. And it was dark, too.

I went with the "Mars Black."

I forced the epoxy into the cracks with my putty knife. It wasn't difficult at all. The stuff is just a little thinner than peanut butter. Then I scraped off the excess. Now I have to wait for 24 hours. Then I'll finish planing the top and see what it looks like.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

So I filled the split with epoxy. The adhesive shrank out a bit. Then I filled it some more. That was 10 years ago, and the repair is still as flush and sound as the day I made it.

Today I face some bigger splits in this cherry benchtop, so my strategy is different. I cleaned out the two large splits with a putty knife and then faired the walls with a thin paring chisel. Then I glued in tapered wedges that I scavenged from some offcuts from the benchtop.

Now I'm off to the store to buy some stuff to color my epoxy black. Knife makers have suggested the following colorants:

1. Toner from a photocopier
2. Pigment used to color oil paints from the paint store
3. India ink
4. Testor's model paints
5. Epoxy colorant from K&G
6. Ebony dust

I'm sure there are other options. But these are the ones that appeal to me. (Especially the toner dust. We have a metric buttload of that stuff here.) I'll keep you posted.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

So what's stopping you? The legs?

We included a scaled pattern of the legs in the pdf, but scaled patterns put some people off. In fact, I have received quite a few calls about how to use these patterns. You have a few options. Here are four.

• The New Testament Option: Take the printout to a copying store and throw yourself on the mercy of the nice young people there. Ask them if they'll enlarge the leg pattern until each square is 1". That's full size.

• Old Testament Option: Get out your dividers and some posterboard. Set the points of the dividers to 1" and turn that posterboard into oversized graph paper with a 1" grid. Then gaze at the small drawing and attempt to replicate it on the big posterboard. It's easy.

• The Good News for Modern Man Option: Dude, you like take the SketchUp file (in our way-groovy 3D warehouse) and scale the drawing yourself. Print out the results on 8-1/2" x 11" paper and tape them together. Dude. Then stick them to your wood and go to town. Download the SketchUp file here:

Skansen_Bench.zip (12.56 KB)

Read a tutorial from Robert Lang on how to scale things to full size here.

• And the "Please Don't Teach Me to Fish" Solution: Download a pdf of the leg template here. Print it out. Tape it together. Forget about it.

Skansenleg.pdf (105.81 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

Most of the workbenches I've built have been constructed on sawhorses. Start by making the top. Yeah, it's a bit wobbly on horses, but it works OK. When the top is built, flatten it and attach one of your vises.

Now you have a benchtop with a sawhorse base.

Build the bench's base on the benchtop. Yeah, it feels a bit like working on a car while the engine is running, but it's totally do-able. When the base is built, attach it to the top. Flip the puppy off the sawhorses, and you are ready to finish up work on your bench.

This is the exact path I'm following with this small-scale Roubo bench I'm building this week. I finished sizing up the top on Friday, which came out to 4-3/4" x 19" x 67". That's a little narrower than a modern bench, but I've seen older benches this narrow (and even narrower). I will be interested to see how tippy it is (or isn't).

Today I installed a vintage vise I've been hoarding for some time that looks like the vises in old French woodworking catalogs. Ooo la la. I like it. It's a mite fussy, but it's cool. Next I'll install a wooden chop on the vise, drill some dog holes and get to work on the legs.

And then the much-maligned epoxy.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

First: Thanks for your letters – both positive and negative – about the new magazine. We read them all and respond to every one that we can. In my e-mail inbox, the sentiment about the new magazine is about 2-to-1 in favor of the changes. The criticisms have mostly been about the addition of advertising and the amount of woodworking information we are now delivering. So let's take a look there.

The April 2010 Popular Woodworking Magazine is a 68-page issue with 19 pages that are advertisements. That's 49 pages of "meat," for lack of a better wood. Let's check the "meat index" of an issue of Woodworking Magazine. There are 36 pages in each issue with only one page of advertising (the "Extras" page on page 35). That's 35 pages of meat.

What about Popular Woodworking before the merger? The February 2010 issue was 76 pages with 17 pages of advertisements. That's 59 pages of stories. (Note that we have averaged about 60 pages of meat in each issue during the last couple years.)

It looks like Popular Woodworking Magazine is smaller than Popular Woodworking but larger than Woodworking Magazine. Right?

It's not that simple.

The design of the new magazine is quite different. The paper is larger than what we used with Popular Woodworking, and we have less white space. We also have constrained the size of the photographs at the beginning of each article – no more full-page spreads. And we have tightened up the columnists. "Arts & Mysteries," "Flexner on Finishing" and "Design Matters" are all two pages each instead of three. We tightened things up with old-fashioned editing, by the way. Instead of removing information, we removed unnecessary words that weren't doing their jobs.

So counting pages isn't a good indicator. Why don't we count the words instead?

Personally, I think counting words is silly. No one will argue that Golden Corral is better than The French Laundry because the Golden Corral gives you more calories. But it is one indicator. Here are the numbers:

1. During the last year, Popular Woodworking has averaged 33,642 words of editorial coverage in each issue.

2. Woodworking Magazine has averaged 24,850 words of editorial per issue.

3. The April 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine has 34,254 words of editorial coverage – about the same as you would get in an issue of Popular Woodworking during the last couple years.

Second Complaint: Those tinyurls
At the end of each article in the magazine is a box that points you to online stories and web sites that are related to the article so you can dive deeper into a topic that interests you. In this issue we used "tinyurls," a long-standing Internet redirect service, so you don't have as many characters to type.

A fair number of readers don't like tinyurls. We don't particularly like them, either. But they are a stopgap until we get a new web site in place this summer. We won't use tinyurls going forward, and if you want to find any of the links listed in the print issue you can go to this page: popularwoodworking.com/apr10 (we're building out this page right now. Links are being added as I type).

Third Complaint: When Does My Subscription Run Out?
Some customers have been confused by the merger, especially if they had subscriptions to both publications. If you want to confirm the number of issues remaining in your subscription, check the line on the mailing label above your name; the last issue in your subscription is printed there. If you'd like to clear up a problem, send a message with your name and mailing address where you receive your subscription to Debbie Paolello, our subscription specialist: debbie.paolello@fwmedia.com.

But Why Did You Do It?
The other big question from readers is "Why?" While I tried to address this in my column in the April 2010 issue, I'll add some more details for you.

Many of my colleagues in the magazine business think we're all swirling around the toilet bowl to our watery grave. I'm not that grim, but it's hard to ignore the fact that a lot of my friends in media are out of work.

We know that big changes are coming. And instead of waiting to have it roll over us, we decided to sprint in front of this boulder. While both our magazines were profitable and stable, they consumed all our staff's time and energy to produce 11 yearly issues (those of you who get e-mails from us during nights and weekends can attest to this).

We decided that we had to put more energy into growing our quickly growing online business. And we knew there was no hope of expanding our staff in this time of dwindling corporate resources.

So that's what drove the decision to merge the two magazines. And it's the honest truth. Any speculation you might read on the message boards is simply not grounded in our world, which is based on raw number-crunching, decades of media experience and a desire to stay employed in the best job in the world – getting to write and edit a woodworking magazine.

It is indeed a dream job. But it's a dream that has to live in the real world.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

Then I dressed the front edge of the benchtop. It was straight from the sawmill, so it was as rough as a cob. So I started out planing the edge with a jack plane to get it straight and square to the bench's top surface. Then I dressed the front edge with a jointer plane with a 50° pitch – the reversing grain is a bear on this piece because of the knots.

With the front edge in shape I marked out the final length of the benchtop. I was going for 72", but by settling on 67" I was able to remove a nasty low spot, a knot and some big checks. This bench won't be as long as I prefer, but sometimes you have to let the material dictate the design.

Then I sawed off the ends (yes, I did it by hand). I used a standard crosscutting stroke to make an accurate kerf. Then I used an overhand stroke (as shown) so I could bring the saw almost vertical. This is fast. And it uses different muscles. By switching back and forth between these two positions I was able to cut off the two ends without a break (except for one glug of water).

Then it was back to the jack plane to dress the benchtop and make it true. To do this, I put the benchtop on some risers on my sawhorses to lift it up to a comfortable working height. I clamped four f-style clamps to the risers in order to fence in the top and prevent it from moving.

Traversing the top with the jack was quick work – about 15 minutes worth to remove the rough-sawn fur. Then I went to lunch and started typing this. And I'm still typing, as you can see. Now it's time to stop typing.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Next week I'll be filling the checks in with tinted epoxy. Might look good. Might look like holes filled with black snot.

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

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

But we did need extra glue. I started troweling liquid hide glue on the two edges when my glue bottle made a sound akin to that of a whoopee cushion after a big Mexican meal. Yup, my glue bottle had run dry.

Megan Fitzpatrick scurried over to the sink to heat up another bottle of liquid hide, which was still in "gelatinous dog turd" form. Those of you who use the stuff know what I'm describing here.

Then Glen Huey saved the day with a big bottle of liquid hide glue that was ready to go. We covered both edges with glue, dropped one slab on top of the other. Glen manipulated the seam while I clamped.

It looks pretty good. It weighs about as much as my first car. And after I fill the cracks with black-dyed epoxy resin it will look great.

Note that I'm not using a bench to build this bench. I did all the edge jointing with the pieces on sawhorses. Tomorrow I'll take the top out of the clamps and flatten the benchtop and underside with a fore plane. Then I'll start building the bench base using my new benchtop.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

Late last night as I was headed to the grocery store for milk and yogurt, my mind was churning with what I should do about my four punky legs that were supposed to be the legs of my latest workbench. Before I could get to the grocery store, the tempting lights of our home center pulled me into its nearly empty parking lot. There were maybe three customers milling about, and a squadron of idle employees.

I wandered into the lumber racks. Two employees tailed me.

I stopped at a rack of 6 x 6 x 8' timbers in the pressure-treated lumber section. Inset into this wall of light-green wood was a single bunk of stuff that was totally white.

"Is this pressure-treated?" I asked one of my stalkers. "It looks really white, like plain white pine."

The employee brought me a step ladder and showed me the timbers at the back of the pile. They were rotting and covered in bugs. The stuff at the front – which was the same color – was drier and quite sound – just some minor end-checking.

"I don't think these are treated, so I wouldn't use them," the employee said. "I don't even think we can sell these."

I told them I might take a couple and the guy knocked $3 off the price of each. Instead of $15.97 each, I paid $12.97. They cut them up to fit in my car and I headed off to the grocery.

Normally, I'm not a big fan of mixing wood species on the visible surfaces of a project. So I wondered if a cherry benchtop and a pine base would be ugly. Could I bleach the cherry? Or perhaps color the pine with a reddish toner?

When I arrived home, my wife, Lucy, was sitting at our dining room table. It's a Shaker thing I built for Woodworking Magazine with a pine trestle base, a long cherry top made with only two boards and lots of exposed joinery. Just like this workbench would have.

Maybe mixing species will work out. Or maybe I'll sell this bench.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

I set the legs aside. I have a plan to replace them with some 4x4 Douglas fir fence posts. I can still make the legs totally by hand with only one glue line to make each 6" x 3-1/2" leg. I can manage that.

So I turned my attention to the two pieces for the top slab. They also had checked a little more during the last two weeks, but not to the point where I wanted to make firewood. So I started out dressing the edges to glue up the top. The work was fairly easy. I started with a fore plane and finished up the edges with a jointer plane.

Once they are glued up I plan to surface the entire top.

After dressing up the edges it was obvious I needed to take off a couple inches to remove some punkiness, nasty checking, bark and a little dirt. I got out my coarsest ripsaw and went to work. After 2 feet of ripping the 5"-thick cherry, I gave up. I am generally a stubborn person, but the sawing was too slow-going to be practical. It was going to take an hour of ripping for each slab.

Senior Editor Glen Huey came into the shop. He raised one eyebrow, but he didn't say anything about the sweat drips all over the slabs.

"I'm gonna cheat," I said, "and I need your help."

We humped each slab onto the band saw. In less than five minutes the deed was done. I can rationalize this a million ways: This is work for a pitsawyer. The lumberyard would have dressed these slabs for the pre-industrial woodworker.

But the bottom line was that ripping these slab wasn't fun. And that's where I drew the line. The purists can feel free to throw stones now.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

And if all goes as planned, we hope to offer attendees at our Woodworking in America conference (Oct. 1-3 here in Cincinnati) a special chance to tour this untouched gem. The village is still in its rural setting and is not yet open to the public. Stay tuned here for more details as they develop.

The volunteers are at the last stages at restoring the wainscotting in the ground floor of the Meeting House, which mostly had been ripped out by previous inhabitants. Even more exciting is the installation of one of the first reproduction windows on the north side of the building.

These custom windows use custom tooling to replicate the delicate mullions and muntins. The glass will be salvaged from rotten sash and then the sills will be incorporated into the interior woodwork. After that, the volunteers will turn their attention to the truss system in the attic.

As one of the volunteers put it, the Meeting House is "transforming into a meeting room that the Shakers would know."

We're excited about being involved with the White Water Village and hope that you get the opportunity to see first-hand what a wonderful place it is becoming. For more information on the village or to join the organization (it takes just a small, tax-deductible donation), visit whitewatershakervillage.org.

— Christopher Schwarz

Photos courtesy of Joe Grittani

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

A couple details and thoughts:

1. You can use a chisel to help position the saw's guide on the work. This is especially helpful when dealing with angled shoulders. Here's how you do it: Drop the chisel into the knife line for your shoulder with the tool's bevel facing the waste. Slide the guide up to the chisel and secure it with a clamp or hold-down.

2. Be sure to use a flush-cut saw that has no set to the teeth. A saw with set will mangle the guide.

3. Take light strokes with your saw and use light finger pressure against the wooden guide.

The results speak for themselves. The shoulder above is straight from the saw with no cleaning up. This technique allows me to split my knife line, or obliterate it if I so desire (and I do desire it – on the shoulder that will face the inside of the work.)

— Christopher Schwarz

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. This flies in the face of modern handplane dogma. That surface is supposed to be flat and polished so our ancestors could see just how rotten their teeth were.

About half the time the face of the iron looks untouched. The other half of the time it looks like they dubbed over that edge – rounding it over. Bad form, no?

Plane pundits I know have speculated that this is the result of the plane falling into inexperienced hands after its previous owner retired and died. Or perhaps it was a carpenter's tool that planed softwood and didn't require a super-keen edge.

I have another crazy theory. Perhaps in some of these cases the woodworker had dubbed the face intentionally to create a back bevel.

Why would anyone do this? To increase the pitch of the plane and reduce tear-out. The higher the pitch, the less tearing. And because bevel-down planes are somewhat fixed at a 45° pitch, the only ways to increase your cutting angle are to get a new higher-pitched frog (a modern option for Lie-Nielsen plane users) or to apply a back bevel.

I have some smaller Stanley-style planes that I quite like. A No. 3 Bed Rock and a No. 2 Lie-Nielsen. Both have 45° frogs, which makes them unsuitable for reversing, interlocked or curly grain. So I polish a 15° back bevel on those tools, which transforms them into a 60° tool.

With the help of my cheapie honing guide, this is easy and repeatable. After honing the bevel, I'll flip the iron over in the guide, set it to 15° by sighting it against a block of wood (someday – how about today – I'll make a jig to set it automatically), and chase the burr off on an #8,000-grit waterstone.

It adds about five minutes to the sharpening time. And that's well worth it because removing tear-out takes a lot longer than that. Give it a try on your 45° planes and test it on some mahogany with interlocked grain. Work against the grain (like I am below). I think you'll be impressed.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

Last month I wrote a blog entry about a style of ripping that was common in France and Germany (and, as I later found out, lots of other countries as well). The reaction from the people was mostly that of concern – that I would rip myself in two and do it by starting in the softest place possible.

So I wanted to post a short video that shows this in action and also points out that the saw's teeth face away from the user. This method of ripping is tons easier than crouching on sawhorses. And I actually found that the saw was easier for me to control.

I did a fair amount of ripping like this while I was up in Maine last week. We didn't have any power equipment around. Check it out above. First: I usually use a full-size ripsaw for this operation, but mine is in the mail, so I used a rip-filed panel saw instead. It's fine for this operation – just slower.

And here's a quick tip: If the saw starts to jam, lean the saw's tote forward (away from you), which will make the teeth engage more sweetly.

Also, here's another form of ripping I like better than crouching: overhand ripping at the bench. You actually have to stand up for this, but it does have one distinct advantage compared to ripping while sitting: The saw is unlikely to hit the floor or your bench.

Give these a try before you scoff.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

The source of this obviously old chart has been lost to me – a victim of the fast-moving, fast-rotting Internet. Also lost: A helpful article called "Moldings: The Atomic Units of Classical Architecture" by Donald M. Rattner. It was on the Traditional Builder web site until June 2008. Then it disappeared.

Thanks to the Internet "Wayback Machine" at archive.org,  however, you can still read this article in its entirety -- and all the links to images even work. This link will take you directly to the article. This is a good primer to read, and the chart above is a nice thing to hold onto if you watch George R. Walker's new DVD on mouldings (read my review here).

Get the chart here.

moldings.jpg (330.31 KB)

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. George Walker points out in the comments below that the above chart is from "The American Vignola" by William Robert Ware. It's available to read at Google Books.

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

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

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

When I build a drawer for a piece of casework, it takes me about two hours. That includes dimensioning the stock, planing it flat, plowing the groove for the bottom and dovetailing all the corners.

Is this too slow? Should I reserve a spot on the short bus of dovetailers? Truth is, I don't care. I love cutting dovetails so much that even if it took four hours I wouldn't buy a dovetailing jig. I enjoy the process of building things with this joint because it's straightforward, mechanical and a bit physical.

So you are probably wondering if I've knit a little cozy for my marking gauge. Or if I pare every joint to perfection using feeler gauges as a guide.

Neither is the case. I work with joints where the walls are cut with the saw and the floors are bashed out with a chisel. I don't find myself tweaking every surface with a chisel or a paring guide. So I cut my dovetails like the big boys, I just do it at my own pace.

Perhaps I should be ashamed. I cut my first dovetails in 1993 – that's 17 years ago. I should be better, right?

— Christopher Schwarz