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

First up, Toshio Odate: "I speak broke English. I don't speak bull***t."

And Roy Underhill: "We had a saying at Colonial Williamsburg: Stop trying to improve the 18th century."

It was that second quote that was ringing in my head this morning as I nailed some glue blocks into my latest project. I'm finishing up work on the reproduction of the Shaker sitting bench from the White Water community and I was overcome by the urge to improve the 19th century.

This bench is nailed together. There's a seat plank, two long aprons below it and three legs. This bench, unlike many Shaker benches I've seen, lacks diagonal cross-braces. Despite this, the bench has held up well and is still quite sturdy.

But I'm worried about our 21st-century girth. This bench is likely to get used, and the last thing I want is for the thing to collapse in my lifetime.

So this morning I reinforced the legs with some glue blocks. I glued and nailed them between the aprons and the legs. These glue blocks will reinforce the legs and keep them from getting pulled from side to side. Yeah, I know there's a little bit of a cross-grain problem there. But it's minimal, and the nails will bend.

And if the Friends of White Water Shaker Village decide they don't like them, they can remove them easily. I installed the glue blocks with hide glue, so they can be removed. This benefit of hide glue is definitely something from that past that cannot be improved.

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

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

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

Underhill began by asking the audience to tell him the rules of cutting dovetails, and he got a big long list of everything from the degree of the slope to the layout to the order of operations. Then he showed us a pre-Civil War tool chest – a beautiful dovetailed tool chest – that violated almost all of those rules. And that's where he began discussing his approach to through-dovetails.

Layout
Underhill likes to cut the tails first when he can, and he strikes his baselines with a cutting gauge set to the thickness of the work plus 1/32nd.

Then he lays out the tails by first marking the half pins at the edges of the tail board. How wide should the base of each half pin be? One-half your stock thickness. Underhill was joining 3/4"-thick material, so the half pins were 3/8". He laid those out with a 3/8"-wide chisel. This measurement – 3/8" in this case – is also the space between the each tail at the baseline.

How wide are the tails themselves? Underhill uses twice the thickness of the material – or 1-1/2" wide in this case. Then he lays out the tails using a ruler that he lays diagonally on the board. He marks out the centerlines where the holes for the pins should go, then strikes out the 3/8" dimension by eyeballing the 3/8" chisel on the centerline. Then pounding it with his hand.

Slope Angle
Underhill isn't much of a believer in using certain slope angles. He goes by eye and scribes them with a sharp pencil and a bevel gauge.

"Oh, that looks good," he said. Then he shows the layout to the audience and said that if it looked right it was right.

"Throw away your dovetail marker," he said. "Just do it. Throw it away." Then he cuts the tails but does not remove the waste between them.

Transfer the Marks. No Knife
To transfer the shape of the tails onto the pin board, Underhill uses his dovetail saw. He places his tail board on top of his pin board (which is clamped in a vise). And then places the dovetail saw in the kerf and scores the end grain of the pin board. It's a light mark. Too deep and your saw will jump into the kerf when you are sawing out the pins. You actually want to saw in the waste next to this line.

Then he draws the shape of his pins on the pin board and cuts them with a dovetail saw. To remove the waste between the pins, Underhill uses a coping saw, which he lubricates with mutton tallow.

Chiseling Out
When he chisels out the remaining waste he intentionally leaves a hump in the floors between the pins. Then the clamps the board upright in a face vise to pare out the remaining hump.

To remove the waste left between the tails, Underhill uses two chisels. He used a 3/8" chisel at the baseline and a 1/4" above the baseline. He beavered out a "V" using the two chisels (I've never seen this technique before).

Then he asked the audience to please not ask him about gluing dovetails.

"I'm a TV woodworker," he said. "So I can't glue anything together on camera because we might have to knock it apart and do it again."

The message from Underhill (or St. Roy to you and me) is this: Dovetails were made in a wide variety of ways by skilled craftsmen. If you are building an original design, make dovetails that look good to your eye. If you are going to copy a piece, use their layout.

"We had a saying at Colonial Williamsburg," Underhill said. "It was: 'Stop trying to improve the 18th century.'"

And if the above rational discussion doesn't settle the arguments about dovetails, I recommend you do what Underhill did later that evening: Arm wrestle the managing editor who prefers pins-first instead of tails-first.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

Well I got pulled into another project, and Senior Editor Robert W. Lang started building two of the stools last month for the Winter 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. Bob is just as interested in the stool and its joinery as I am, so he seemed happy to take up the challenge.

Until today.

As I was cutting through the shop to get to the copier Bob was at his bench working on the stool and I stopped by to check his progress. During the last month I've watched as he ran into the same challenges that I did. And he's recovered nicely each time.

But today he got one of the stretchers flipped over as he was marking it and he cut its shoulder at the opposite angle he was looking for.

But Bob is smart. He has that second stool already in the works, and I'm sure he'll pull it together in time. Meanwhile, I've got that Shaker bench to build – and I better get cracking at my presentation at Woodworking in America.

Couple quick notes on that event next weekend in Valley Forge:

1. We will have copies of my new book "Handplane Essentials" there to sell as well as our reprint of Joesph Moxon's "The Art of Joinery" with my commentary.

2. We will not have copies of the new book we're publishing with Joel Moskowitz titled "The Joiner and Cabinet Maker." However, I hope to have a printout of the book to share there and will be discussing the 1839 bench plane techniques there in public for the first time.

3. It will be a bench-lover's paradise: The Roubo, the Holtzapffel, the Gluebo and Bob's 21st -century Workbench will all be there and in use.

I hope you can stop by Oct. 2-4.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

— Rick Bowles

Non-answer: The question of leaving tool marks behind seems thorny at first. There are those who say that removing marks, such as your layout lines, is what a pre-industrial joiner or cabinet maker would consider "neat and workmanlike." And there are those who say that leaving tool marks is what separates you from the giant CNC mills that poop out almost-adequately sanded highboys every two minutes.

Here's how I approach it. My opinion is only that, but you asked for it.

Unless you roll a stump into your living room and call it a coffee table, every aspect of furniture is a tool mark. Sandpaper, for example, is a tool and leaves a distinctive surface. A router-cut moulding is almost always different than one cut with moulding planes.

So the question of tool marks is which ones you choose to leave behind. When I build a piece that is a reproduction or is in the spirit of a past style, then I try to get a feel for the marks that were typical.

So what is appropriate for a Union Village blanket chest? Let's take a look. The following shots were taken only to document this piece's construction details, so you'll have to forgive the photo quality. They were never intended to be published.

Let's start at the back of the case, near the lid. In this shot you can see that the baseline has been erased by the maker's plane (all the surfaces of this piece are planed). And this is a secondary surface that will likely be against the wall or a bed. Hmmm.

Now let's look at the base of the chest, still at the rear and still on the same corner. Here you can see toolmarks everywhere. The baseline is there, as are marks from laying out the dovetails on the plinth (aka, the base).

OK, now let's look at the front of the chest. This chest features half-blind dovetails, and the tails are on the ends. Though the photo is a tad grainy, there are faint baselines up and down the end pieces.

My conclusion here is that this maker wasn't really concerned with the baselines. When they were removed (such as at the back), that was OK. When they were left behind, that was OK, too. Bottom line: The baselines on this walnut piece are not distracting.

So Rick, I think you are done. If the piece looks good to your eye and the toolmarks are neither sloppy nor distracting, then I think you can call it a day and start finishing the piece.

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.

I love wedging up chair joints. If I could do that for a living, I probably would. It's a nice combination of applying a simple machine (a wedge) and some derring-do.

Making good wedges is always something that frustrates beginners. They try to saw them out by hand or split them or come up with some wack-nutty dangerous way to make a good wooden wedge.

I make mine on the band saw. I have a jig at home for it, but you don't need a jig. Just blue tape.

Step 1: Use the blue tape to seal up the throat insert of your band saw. The insert on our Steel City is a gaping maw that chews up small parts. One piece of tape in front of the blade and one right behind it should do.

Step 2: Lay down a piece of blue tape on your band saw's table that is in line with the blade. This will help you enormously when you make your wedges.

Step 3: Set your band saw's miter gauge. I like 5° for most jobs – that makes a nice slim wedge. A 7° setting will give you a big fatty that can be useful for big jobs.

Step 4: Cut yourself some stock. Crosscut a 1-1/2"-long piece of some wide stock. I like white oak for this job because it can take a beating and a bending. I've also used ash with good results. I don't recommend ebony. It splits.

Step 5: Cut one end off your block. Throw away the off fall – it's only half a wedge. Now flip the block over and line up the piece of the work nearest you with the blue tape.

Step 6: Make the cut. What falls off is a perfect wedge. Flip the work and cut again. Keep going until your fingers get too close to the blade.

To apply the wedges, I like to put glue in the mortise and on the wedge. Then you tap it home. Where "home" is exactly is the exact question. Too much "home" and you're going to have a broken one. There's feel and sound involved.

The stool went together just fine. The monkeys who disassembled it did a real job on one of the tenons. I had to make a new tenon and wedge that in two directions. I love Fridays in the shop.

One of best ways to learn how a piece of furniture is put together is to take it apart. Many of the 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.

Want to know how to make a curved French foot? They showed us how. It's so simple that I am now crazy to give it a try myself.

They explained how they do complex angled work. In a nutshell: Don't angle the tenons. Angle the mortises. And when they passed the pieces around, the scales fell from my eyes.

I attended one of their lectures on Saturday where they assembled a Chippendale chest of drawers, a Hepplewhite chest of drawers with a French foot and a gate-leg table with some incredible angled work. Plus they disassembled a scale highboy (I think it was Queen Anne).

But that wasn't the half of it.

At the two-hour-long question and answer sessions, Steve and Jeff worked with everyone one-on-one and showed us even more pieces, such as a Winchester drop-front desk with 13 secret compartments and a tall clock. And they had dozens of examples of carving and joinery to pass around for us to inspect.

They explained why they use white glue almost exclusively in their shop. How they finish their pieces. All the carving tools they use (by brand, number and sweep). In two hours I think I took in about as much information as I can gather by hunting myself in a year.

This is the same format (lectures plus extended hands-on/question-and-answer sessions) that we're going to be using for our hand-tool conference in October in Valley Forge, Pa. If you liked our conference in Berea, you'll be blown away by our conference in Valley Forge. I can't wait.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

Other glue experts would say I use too little glue. I rarely wet both surfaces of a joint (though I’m trying to change my ways on that). I prefer to apply it fairly liberally on one surface then work quickly to get the two surfaces together, especially when I’m using yellow glue.

On Friday we laminated the pieces for the legs on the new LVL workbench. The photo above shows about how much glue I use to join these two surfaces, which make up about 155 square inches on each face.

I poured out a thick bead from the bottle (no fancy glue bottles here) then used a scrap of thin wood about the size of a credit card to trowel the glue to a thin layer. Then I quickly put the two parts together and got a clamp on the lamination at the center.

In the end I looked for a bead of glue squeeze-out at the seam that looks like water beads arrayed on a spider’s web.

Actually, in the end I’m looking for joints that won’t fail. So far, so good.

In the coming days we’ll cut all the joinery for this bench using one setting on our table saw with a dado stack. Then we’ll start bolting it together.

One promising sign that this is going to be a good bench: The 2-1/2"-thick top came out quite flat, stiff and gap-free. And people in the shop are already starting to work on it.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

I’ve been visiting this store every year since 1991 and have watched the owners try to introduce various styles to the Charlestonians. In the early 1990s, they brought in some Arts & Crafts pieces. Then they tried some Frenchier stuff. A few years ago there were even some Danish modern pieces in the back. But it seems they always carry lots and lots of English stuff.

During this visit I focused on five-drawer chests from the early 19th century. All of the 10 or so chests I examined from this period were obviously works of a cabinet maker. They were all veneered (usually with mahogany) and featured stringing or banding and nicely formed plinths.

After that, the similarities ended. The drawers showed a diverse range of dovetailing skills. On the best-looking chest in the store, every dang dovetail was overcut, patched with shims, oddly sloped – just a rotten mess. And these were the half-blind dovetails at the front of the chest. My theory: DWI (Dovetailing While Intoxicated). Or a ham-handed apprentice. Or both.

But the chest’s proportions were perfect. The veneer matching was an A+. And, as my dad pointed out, the drawers were still together.

On another chest, which was fairly nice, the dovetails were what some call “London pattern.” The space between the tails was just a saw kerf. And the slopes were bold and consistent.

It was also hard to make any generalizations about the quality of the chests based on other factors. Some chests had 3/8"-thick quartersawn oak sides, nice drawer slips and sides that finished in a nice rounded corner at the rear. Others had sides that were 1/2" thick (or thicker) in pine with bottoms that had split because the grain was running front to back. The craftsmanship did not seem to match the fineness of the exterior.

The backs of the chests were all over the place. Only one was a frame-and-panel job. The others were shiplapped or simply butt-jointed boards (you could see through them). Sometimes the grain ran horizontal. Sometimes vertical. And the boards all looked rough enough to be shingle material.

And the Earlier Stuff
I also couldn’t help but notice two pieces in the store that were advertised as English oak pieces from the Jacobean period in the early 17th century. Those of you who have been following the work of Peter Follansbee will recognize the overall look of these pieces.

To be honest, I wasn’t impressed by these two examples. The chest looked like it had been refinished by an English tool dealer. All the surfaces throughout were too perfect, like they had been stripped, power-sanded, stained and finished.

But perhaps I’m just cynical.

The other piece was a tall cupboard, what an antique dealer might call a Welsh dresser. The top was shallow and was for displaying plates. The bottom section had two drawers. I liked some of the carving on this piece, though the drawers puzzled me.

The drawers were finely dovetailed with thin sides. Typical Jacobean drawers would be thick, side-hung and nailed together, no? Perhaps the piece’s earlier drawers were a victim of their original construction or some fashion change. Or perhaps I’m just cynical.

In the end, the visit made me glad I’ll probably never need to purchase an antique. Once you start looking at them closely and with a woodworker’s eye, the more wary and paralyzed you become. The owners of this store have always been upfront about everything they know about a piece – flaws and uncertainties are listed on the card describing the piece – and they even get the wood identified by a scientist to authenticate special pieces. But even with all that caution and openess, I'll stick to making my own antiques.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

Heck, I don’t even know who makes the knife. The handle says “KST,” but my catalogs don’t turn up any tools for sale from that company. And during the last 16 years or so I’ve slightly altered its profile to suit my work. I don’t think it’s the same knife.

I don’t know where I got the knife. It’s always been in my toolbox. Did it come from my grandfather’s shop? My dad’s? I honestly don’t remember.

Yet every time I’m cutting dovetails, this knife is in my hand. I won’t demonstrate dovetails without it. If I lost it, I’d have to make a substitute.

What does this useless tool do? It’s the tool I use to make my dovetails fit the first time. After I cut the tails, this knife quickly pops out any remaining waste or fur in the acute corner that my chisel didn’t pop out.

After I cut the pins, this tool really goes to work. It cleans out the corners, natch, but it also flattens the floor of the pins. The cutting edge has a very slight curve. This allows me to put it on its side and shave any waste in the center of the pin floor down. Thanks to the curve, the knife edge never touches the baseline.

And when I go to knock the joint together, this knife eases the inside corners of the tailboard to make starting the joint easy and prevent any bruising of the pin board.

But anytime I show someone how I use the knife, they just look at me more puzzled than enlightened.

In my years of visiting other shops, I’ve found that most woodworkers have some sort of odd piece of metal on a stick that they have ground to their personal liking to do some specific chore. I’ve seen Senior Editor Bob Lang’s version (a brand of knife also lost to time). Senior Editor Glen Huey hasn’t shown me his yet. I don’t know if Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick has acquired one. Publisher Steve Shanesy’s is made from a car bumper I think.

In any case, this is my knife. There are none like it and this one is mine.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. The dark lines around those dovetails are pencil marks, not gaps. Really. Come to my house and check it out for yourself.

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

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

In any case, several of the accounts I read sternly stated that you should never saw past the baseline when dovetailing.

Not even when cutting the half-blinds on a drawer front? Those overcuts will never show.

No, not even then.

Of course, the historical record begs to differ. Today we measured four pieces of furniture belonging to the White Water Shaker Village in Hamilton County, Ohio, and I spent a lot of time pondering the drawers.

All three drawers in one stepback cupboard we measured had drawers where the craftsman overcut the baseline by as much as 1-3/4" to make it easier to clear out the waste.

Like all drawers, this Shaker one has its own personality. Check out the through-dovetails at the rear. On the right side you can see there's a straight tail to house the groove for the bottom. I've seen that detail before, and I use it in my work as well.

On the top of the drawer there is a very unusual partial tail – about 1/4" wide – that overlaps the back of the drawer. I don't think I've seen that one before.

And if you think that's an unusual drawer, here's a peek at what I like to call the condor-tail joint.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

This week I was finishing up work on the joined Chinese stool for the cover of the Autumn 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. I took the components to my shop at home – mostly to avoid all the scatological jokes we all were making about it. ("Hey Chris, you gonna push out that stool this week?")

On Tuesday I had just a couple joints left to cut – easy stuff. Then I just had to do a little shaping and assembly. It was going to be no problem to get the stool ready for the shoot on Friday.

About 10 a.m., I got bit by the dumb-donkey – as we say in Arkansas.

I'd taken the wrong construction drawing home with me. That preliminary drawing showed tenons that were angled at 5°. The final construction drawing had them at 8.7°.

As soon as I assembled the stool without glue I knew I had a huge problem. I spent about an hour trying to figure a way out of the mistake. But the best course was to flush it and start over. So I headed back to the office to get some more 8/4 stock for the legs.

After talking about my mistake with the magazine's staff, we decided to switch a few things around. As a result the Chinese stool will be featured in the Winter 2009 issue instead. For the cover of the Autumn 2009 issue we're going to use another project I had in the can for a book I'm writing. I'll post details on that project next week – I think you'll like it just as much as the stool.

In the meantime, feel free to snicker openly that Chris couldn't make a stool this week.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

As I wrap up the joinery on the Chinese stool I’m building this week, I already know which tool is a shoo-in for the award: My Chris Vesper bevel gauge. Every joint in this stool is completely hand-cut. And every joint is at an angle or is compound. (The tenons that attach the stretchers to the legs are angled at 5° while the shoulders are at 14.5°. Wacky.)

So the Vesper bevel gauge is one of four bevel gauges I’m using to guide my layout and my mortise chopping. Last night as I was cutting a tenon I pushed my carcase saw aside, which pushed my mallet, which pushed the Vesper gauge onto the concrete floor, lemming-style.

I picked it up and checked for damage. There was none to the brass body – I think the gauge landed on its blade. Then I checked the bevel’s angle setting, which has been locked in for two weeks. It hadn’t budged.

The Vesper gauge really has an iron grip. I’ve yet to encounter one that does a better job. Plus, like all the tools made by this young Australian, it is flawless. If you’d like to read more about Vesper and his tools, borrow or buy a copy of the latest Fine Tool Journal. I interviewed Vesper after he visited our Woodworking in America show in Berea.

His bevels start at $160 U.S. In the interests of full disclosure: I bought this gauge from Chris during his visit. Actually he bought two of my books and I paid him the difference. I think I paid him all in $20 bills. Now that I've admitted this in public, my wife has carte blanche to buy another pair of shoes.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

The most important step is to make the repair immediately. If you put off the fix, one of two bad things can happen.

1. You can lose the piece of loose grain.

2. The wound will collect dust, or the strings of torn grain will get knocked around. If either of these things happens, you'll never get the piece back together.

The first step with this repair is to clean the wound. When mortising, you can drive some chips into the gash. Get a knife or a chisel and clean out the junk you might have forced into the split. Sometimes you have to make the split worse to do this. That's OK.

Get your glue. I use yellow glue for most of these repairs. It's fast-drying and strong. Cyanoacrylate is faster, but I have found that it's also quite brittle. One good knock and the split will open again.

Pry open the wound a bit and wick the glue into the split. If possible, I'll hold the workpiece so that gravity will help wick the glue in. If you can't get the glue to wick into the split, pry the opening a little more. Or thin a little yellow glue with water. (This will also slow its drying time.)

Press the grain flat with your fingers and ensure that glue is squeezing out where it should – all around the split. Then tape the grain down. I use blue painter's tape. Then put a clamp on the repair. Or use the pad of a holdfast if it's a chair seat or some other large piece of work where your clamps won't reach.

You can remove the clamp after an hour or so. I don't recommend you work the split until the glue has reached its full strength, which usually takes a day.

— Christopher Schwarz

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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?

No.

Making stick chairs uses another part of my brain. And any time I venture into building chairs I have to re-learn some of the rules. In some ways, chairmaking is more demanding than building cabinets. You have to create great joint strength with little material. You have to use wack-tastic unmeasurable angles. And curves… everything is curved. It’s like a high school cheerleading team – and just as difficult to comprehend.

But in other ways, the craft of building stick chairs is forgiving. If the end result sits well, looks good and endures, then it’s a great chair (no matter how odd the building process). There is less measuring and more “cutting to fit.” The work requires as much eye skill as it does hand skill.

As I legged up a Chinese stool on Wednesday I uttered several unprintable curses. When I drove the first leg home into its mortise I blew out the seat’s grain around the exit hole. I always do that on my first leg.

In fact, I have a theory about chairs. I wonder if people began scooping out their seats (called “saddling”) to remove this blown-out grain. Then they found that these seats were more comfortable than flat seats.

This idea has just as much merit as my “early man had abrasive buttocks” theory of scooped seats.

After messing up the first mortise, I repaired the damage, got some coffee and waited for the glue to dry – and for my head to shift into the proper chair-making gear. It did. The next two legs went in perfectly. And by perfectly I meant that they will be tight when wedged.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

How do I handle crosscuts? With a chisel, of course. If you first create a V-groove with a chisel you can get away with almost anything. When cutting tenon shoulders, I’ve been making a V-shaped trench with a chisel before cutting the shoulder. (Author Robert Wearing calls this a “first-class saw cut.”)

Then I drop the sash saw into the trench and cut the shoulder. The chiseled trench makes sure the shoulder is clean.

I’ve been doing the same thing when crosscutting the ends off my tail boards when dovetailing. First make a trench with a chisel, then drop the saw into the trench.

And what about cutting rails and stiles to final length? In those cases I’ve been cutting a hair long and removing the ragged end on a shooting board.

All in all, it works well. And while it sounds like the chisel work is an extra step, I think I’m making up that time by the fact that I’m not having to switch saws so much. I have one saw for tenoning and one saw for dovetailing.

Will this experiment stick? I cannot say. I was always lousy at giving up jelly doughnuts for Lent as a kid.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

If you are a careful woodworker, this might sound like an unnecessary step. But I don’t think so. Early woodworking writers advocated horns as a way to protect the ends of your stiles from self-destructing when you are mortising your stiles by hand. This is a real danger when hand-mortising; without the horns, it’s easy to lever the stile in twain with your mortise chisel.

But I add horns to my stiles even when I use a hollow-chisel mortiser. Here are the reasons why.

• They protect the end of the stiles during assembly. If you have beefy tenons and long rails, it’s easy to bust out the end of your stiles during glue-up. I’ve also watched many people blow out the ends of their stiles when disassembling a dry-fit. They wiggle the rail to remove it, which makes it a lever, which makes bad things happen.

• Horns allow extra purchase for your clamps. If you build traditional doors with through-tenons, you limit the area where you can clamp the joint during assembly. You have to clamp to the side of the tenon. If you have horns, you can get two clamps on the joint if need be.

• Horns play nice with plow planes. Perhaps I’m ham-handed with a plow plane, but whenever I plow a stile or rail, the far end of the groove (where the cut begins) is always a little more raggy than the rest of the groove. My guess is that because this area sees the most action, it gets a little more wallered out. If I have horns on my stiles, that ragged area gets trimmed away (also, it gets trimmed away on the rails when I cut the tenons).

• My stiles are never too short. I always make my mortises a little longer than they need to be so I can knock the rail exactly where I want it during glue-up to get a tight seam at the shoulder of the tenon. If I have a horn on my stile, I’ll never end up making my stile too short. It will always need to be trimmed to fit. Side note: I also make my rails a little wider (about 1/16") than necessary to ensure my finished assembly will never be too small for its opening.

• Horns protect the stile during wedging. Traditional workshop practice is to wedge the through-tenon from the outside during glue-up. If you have a horn, you are much less likely to split the stile during wedging.

I’m sure there are other reasons for horns. If you have some that I’ve missed, add them in the comments below.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

Step one is to lay out all your joints using your marking knife. Mark all the extents of the dado, including its depth, width and length. If I have a lot of dados to cut I’ll set my dividers to the thickness of the mating piece. That allows me to mark both sides of the dado simultaneously and means no measuring errors.

So here’s the drill: You’re going to saw out the walls of the dado using a piece of scrap as a fence. Then you’ll chisel out the waste – or remove it with a router plane.

It sounds simple. But positioning the fence can be a real trick. Doing it by eye almost always results in errors. So you should do it by feel. Here’s how. Take your marking knife and drop its tip into the knife line that defines one wall of your dado as shown above. Slide your combination square up to the knife so its ruler is flat against the knife and the combination square’s head is against your work.

Hold the square in position. Remove the knife. Now slide the piece of scrap up to your fence. How you slide your scrap is important. If you simply clap it to the ruler of your square you’ll knock it off your line. Instead, slide the scrap-wood fence forward and back and gently bring it up to the ruler, like a piece of paper swishing back and forth as it comes to a gentle landing on the floor. This keeps your square in place.

Pull the square away and clamp the fence down. Now use your backsaw to sink one wall of the dado. Use your fingers to press the sawplate against the fence; you don’t need a lot of pressure. Tip the tote of the saw up so the cut begins at the toe of the sawplate. This dado is going to be 1/8” deep so I tip the tote up about 1/8”. This might result in the kerf being a little deeper than it needs to be where the dado stops, but this is a good thing. It makes the waste easier to remove and provides a place for excess glue to go.

Also, I always allow the saw to cut beyond the end of the dado. This area is almost always hidden by drawer runners or (at the least is inside the case).

Saw until you hit your depth mark on the front of your work. Remove the fence and repeat this for the other wall of the dado. Then define where the dado stops with a chisel cut – straight down.

Now you can remove the waste with a chisel or with a router plane. If you use a chisel, first trim the corners of the waste, creating a hill shape. Then remove the hill with more shaving cuts. Check your progress with a rule.

If you have a router plane, set its depth stop to match the finished depth of your dado and work away the waste in stages until your dado is the right depth.

I think you’ll be surprised at how fast this technique is – and the results look like you used a plunge router with a square bit.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

Here are the results left by the fret saw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

The hardest thing about dovetailing isn't the sawing or the chiseling or the layout.

It's the seeing.

I don’t think I can teach anyone to see, but I can show you where to look. Developing your eye – plus your ability to sense the perpendicular – will do more for your dovetailing skills than any jig, square, knife or saw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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While my dad was sleeping off the flu in February, I was plundering his drawers. The man has an English chest problem like I have a hammer problem. I pulled out all the drawers of his six or seven 19th-century chests of drawers and gave a close look at their construction details.

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz


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The last few weeks I've been doing lots of hand joinery, and in that short period of time I have completely fallen for my Blue Spruce Toolworks mallet.

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

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

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

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

I think this plastic technology could be used in other woodworking tools. Blue Spruce already uses it in handles for bench chisels. It would be great for the handles of mortise chisels – those receive a whooping. It also could be used in the totes for saws and planes – these are notoriously fragile. How about a wooden try square made from it? (I assume the acrylic reduces or eliminates the expansion and contraction process.) Hammer handles?

— Christopher Schwarz

In the shop, my mechanical pencil is as important as my eyeglasses. I use a mechanical pencil with a 0.5mm lead to darken in my knife lines when cutting dovetails, tenons or other joinery.

I like the really thin lead because I can usually drop it into a knife line and – with just light pressure – the lead will mark only the right and left sides of the knife line. That makes it easier to split my pencil line when sawing.

I know you are beginning to think I have an engineering background. Really, I’m not all that fussy.

While I like my mechanical pencils, I’ve always hated three things about them: the pencil mechanism itself, the lead and the eraser. Oh, and the pocket clip is flimsy, too.

I generally buy the Pentel pencils, which are the top of the line here in Kentucky. Their mechanisms tend to jam; I get about six months out of a pencil. The eraser is as effective as a gummy bear. The lead breaks too easily.

But heck, that’s what you get, right?

Today I was at Staples looking to replace my latest ex-Pentels when I noticed something I’d never seen before: “Super Hi-Polymer Lead,” which is supposed to be 25 percent stronger. (Stronger than what? Stinky cheese?)

I picked up a pack of the stuff with my new soon-to-be-dead pencils and used it to mark half-blind dovetails all afternoon. You know what? It really is stronger than the regular lead. I didn’t snap a single lead through six sets of dovetails. That is a record.

So if you’re a mechanical pencil dweeb like me, check out the Hi-Polymer stuff next time you need a refill. Hey, now I only hate two things about my mechanical pencils.

— Christopher Schwarz

When most people think about cutting dovetails, they think: handsaws. However, there’s more to dovetailing than sawing. You also need to be mindful of your handplanes when you’re dovetailing. They can create gaps or help prevent them.

This week I’m dovetailing a bunch of drawers and smallish boxes, so my planes are heavy on my mind.

If I remove any material from the inside of this pin board, the joint will become gap-tacular.

First, let’s talk about how handplanes can cause gaps. If you cut your pins and tails for your box and then plane all the inside surfaces, then you are asking for trouble. Planing the inside surfaces of your pin boards will make you look like a crap-tacular sawyer.

Don’t get it? Think about it for a minute: The interior surface of your pin board contains the wide triangles that fit into your tail board. Every stroke of your handplane on the interior of your pin board makes the joint looser and looser by removing the widest part of the joint (the same advice holds true for the belt-sander crowd).

You can, however, plane the interior surfaces of your tail boards with little consequence. The more planing you do, the more trimming you will have to do after assembly, but this is really no big deal.

So how do you avoid this problem? Plane the interiors of all your surfaces before you cut your joinery. This is a good idea for many reasons. First, planing helps remove any twist or bow in your stock, which makes joinery easier. And second, it prevents your joints from getting looser as you refine their surfaces.

For casework, here’s how I do it: First, I dress all the long-grain surfaces with a jointer plane. Then I cut the joinery. Assemble the carcase. Trim the proud nubs. Smooth plane the exterior. Be done with it.

When cutting a cross-grain rabbet, first draw the tool backwards so the nicker can define the shoulder. This results in cleaner cuts (and is historically accurate, thank you Peter Nicholson).

Here's the completed rabbet. It's less than 1/32" and a bit more than 1/64". It's all you need.

Now that we know that handplanes have an evil side, how can we use them to tighten our dovetails? Use a moving fillister plane to cut a shallow rabbet on the inside of each tail board.

This shallow rabbet is the width of your stock’s thickness (use a 3/4”-wide rabbet for 3/4”-thick stock). And the rabbet is less than 1/32” deep. What does this rabbet do? It makes transferring your marks from your tail board to your pin board (or vice-versa) much easier. The mating board nests right into the rabbet so you don’t have to fuss around with lining things up on the baseline.

Senior Editor Glen D. Huey showed me this trick in 2002. He was using it to line up pieces of differing thicknesses, but the rabbet also made transferring the marks from one board to another almost foolproof.

I use a moving fillister plane to cut the shallow rabbets. A true moving fillister has a depth stop and fence to regulate the depth and width of the cut – plus it has a nicker that scores the cross grain ahead of the cut. This reduces tearing.

This shallow rabbet, which is used by other dovetailers such as Rob Cosman, is completely worth the effort to make it. It takes just a few strokes with your plane and prevents an endless cycle of fussing and adjusting.

The Veritas Skew Rabbet Plane meets all the criteria to make this cut, as does the Philly Planes moving fillister plane and vintage moving fillisters. The Lie-Nielsen Skew Block Plane (with nicker) is lacking only a depth stop (you have to count the shavings and be careful if you use it for this purpose).

Next week: How a hammer can tighten up your dovetails.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here I'm pushing the rabbet against my pin board. This makes transferring the shape of the tails a can't miss affair.

Plow planes are some of the easiest joinery planes to use – once you know a few tricks to getting good results. I struggled with the tools until Don McConnell (now a planemaker at Clark & Williams) set me straight years ago with one simple piece of advice:

"Each hand should have a separate job," he said. "One hand holds the fence. The other pushes the tool forward."

Before that point, both of my hands were engaged in job sharing. My hand on the fence was also pushing forward. My hand on the tote was twisting the tool to keep the fence tight on the work.

Here are the other things I've learned about gripping a plow plane over the years:

1. It's a bit like sawing. The hand that holds the tote (or the stock) should be directly lined up with the cut and should swing free. Sometimes this means getting your body over the work (a low bench is helpful here). If your forearm is not in line with the skate of the tool, it's gonna be a roughie.

2. It's a bit like jointing an edge. For my fence hand, I wrap the web between my thumb and index finger around the stems (sometimes called posts) of the tool. I reach my fingers around the fence and touch the work and the front edge of the bench if possible. My thumb is pressing down. If you joint edges of boards by hand, you'll recognize this hand position immediately.

Workholding: Keep it Simple
There are lots of ways to hold your work for plowing. If your end vise and dogs are positioned near the front edge of the bench, you can usually pinch things directly between dogs. You also can use a sticking board, which is a little shelf that holds your work.

Or you can do what I do: Clamp a batten to the benchtop to brace the edge of your workpiece. And plow into the tip of a holdfast. This is very quick for plowing drawer parts – there's no clamping and unclamping and you can work with a bunch of different lengths easily.

Set the Fence
Set your plow's fence so it is parallel to the skate and the desired distance from your cutter. The most common cut I make is a 1/4"-wide groove that's 1/4" from the fence. Conveniently, the brass section on my folding rule is exactly 1/4" long, so it’s easy to set things at a glance.

Begin at the End
You can use a plow plane like a bench plane and make full strokes that run from the near end to the far end. But I have found this to be sometimes troublesome. Sometimes the cutter will follow the grain in the board and the tool's fence will drift away from the work. The results are ugly.

Instead, I start at the far end of the board and make short cuts. Each succeeding cut gets a little longer until I am making full-length cuts. The advantage to this is that if your plane wanders, it will only be for a short distance and the next cut will correct the error.

After you are making full-length cuts there's little danger of the tool wandering.

The shavings should be fairly thick – you don't want to do this all day. These shavings are .015" thick. I could probably go a little thicker in pine.

Results and Then…
When the tool stops cutting, you stop stroking. The edges of the groove might be a little furry – that's typical even for the best work. That's why I wait to smooth plane my pieces after I have grooved them. That removes the fur. Here's what the groove looks like when I'm done.

— Christopher Schwarz

Milford Brown writes: Since you are interested in the older hand-powered woodworking, I wonder what, if anything, you know about the history of marking knife use?

I recently had occasion to dismantle an old pine blanket chest (because of extensive powderpost beetle damage in the sapwood edges of its top and bottom boards) that had been assembled with the later-style cut nails, and had hinges attached with screws that had no point, but with the top of the head showing circular machining marks, which from what I could find, dates it to somewhere after 1837.  

I found also that in places such as rabbets for corner joints and cuts to inset the hinges and the small inner compartment, the necessary lines had been cut rather deeply with a knife.  

The joiners that Joseph Moxon ("Mechanick Exercises") wrote about had pin-style marking gauges that followed an edge, but in either the original or your easy-to-read version, I didn't see anything about how other cuts were marked. According to the Wikipedia article on pencils, various writing sticks with graphite cores were available long before this chest, but its maker, as many now, preferred a knife. Web-searching for marking knives located a variety of modern products, such as the ones you wrote about, but I didn't find anything in the way of history. Did you?

While teaching a class on handsawing a couple years ago, one student lost his cool. He was cutting a tenon for his sawbench, and he strayed over the line and the result looked rough to him. He grunted, threw his saw down with a clatter and stomped away from the bench.

The classroom got real quiet. This student was a big fella – he probably had 100 pounds of muscle on me, a ZZ Top beard and a short fuse. As he angled toward the classroom door to leave, I wasn’t sure what to do.

So I picked up one of his uncut legs, marked out the joint he needed and sawed it out without saying a word. I didn’t do it like when I teach (history, blah, blah, joke, blah, technical detail, blah, sidebar, blah, blah) where it takes 20 minutes to make a tenon. Instead, I cut it like I do it at home with the radio on. One tenon. One minute.

I left the tenon on the bench and walked away. I was a bit freaked about what would happen next. I was out of ideas. The other students walked up to see my work.

“I get it now,” one student said. “That’s what it looks like – from start to finish. That’s what the joint looks like at the end. That’s what I needed.”

The big guy came over for a look, too. I got him a new workpiece to replace his ruined one. The rest of the day went smoothly.

It’s easy to get intimidated by hand joinery. We expect it to look like router-cut joinery, or some trumped-up bit of fakery by photographers. The truth is that in some cases hand joinery looks better when compared to joints made by power tools and worse in others.

In my work, for example, I don’t go for slick end-grain surfaces. What’s the use? They offer little gluing strength. I focus on the getting the gluing surfaces flat and smooth. And I try to get the fit as close as I can.

But don’t we all? What does this really look like?

Now that we have a macro lens at the magazine, I’ve started taking photos of things that our lenses couldn’t show before, such as close-ups of joinery surfaces.

Here’s what a casework dovetail looks like that I cut two weeks ago. It’s for a sideboard for the Summer 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine.

In the first shot above you can see how things are pretty clean, but nothing like a router-cut surface. I cut that rabbet on one of the faces of the piece to make it easier to lay out the mating socket.

In the second shot, this is how things looked right before I knocked the dovetail home. Yes, the end grain looks rough. Yes, that’s some junk in the corners. I could pare it with a chisel, but why bother?

And third, you can see the end result. The fit is OK around the dovetail – nothing like you see on a magazine cover. There's a gap at the back shoulder I could slip a playing card into. But the joint is tight at the front shoulder, which is all that will ever show. I am done and ready to move to the other side of this joint.

I hope this helps you – like my frustrated mountain man student – to relax a bit when it comes to sawing joints.

— Christopher Schwarz


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When I glue up panels from several narrow boards, I use my jointer plane to dress all the mating edges. While our power jointer is fairly well tuned, it's rarely perfect – we have a busy shop. So I find it easier to dress my edges by hand than to fuss with the powered jointer.

My jointer plane has a cambered iron, which allows me to correct an out-of-square edge. (I'll cover this in a future blog post after I pick up some Kevlar undergarments to protect me from the flak.)

Until I mastered using a cambered iron in my jointer plane, I used to use a straight iron and a jointer plane fence to dress my edges. I still use a jointer plane fence on occasion when I only have one or two chances at getting an edge dead-nuts square.

There are two kinds of commercial jointer plane fences. The more common one now is the Veritas Jointer Fence, which attaches to the plane with two rare earth magnets and a post that wedges the whole thing on your plane's sidewall. This fence works with almost any bench plane, though I usually use it with a plane the size of a jack or a jointer (14" to 22" long).

The other kind of fence is like the discontinued Stanley No. 386. This fence attaches to the plane using thumbscrews. The nice thing about the No. 386 is that you can set it for a wide range of angles and it has a knob that I find useful for the edge-jointing process. The other nice thing about the No. 386 is that I can use it with a cambered iron because the fence is under the sole of the tool. The fence centers the plane over a typical edge, where the cambered iron is basically straight. (You can do this with the Veritas fence by adding a wooden block to the fence.)

The No. 386 can be tough to find in the wild. St. James Bay Tool Co. makes one that is similar, but I haven't tried it.

How to Joint Edges With a Fence
Just like with using a power jointer, there is some technique involved in using a jointer plane fence.

Things to watch: The cutter has to be sticking out of the tool dead square. This is why I learned to use a curved iron in my jointer plane – it's actually a more forgiving setup than using a straight iron.

Second: Use your dominant hand to push the plane forward and your off-hand to control the fence. With your off-hand, use your thumb to push the toe down against the edge and use your fingers to push the fence against the face of your board.

Third: What you have to understand about handplanes is that the tool's cutter sticks out below the sole of the tool. As a result, the tool takes a slightly heavier cut at the beginning of the pass when only part of the plane is on the edge.

Last week I tried to measure this by edge jointing a 30"-long board and then measuring the shaving's thickness at five points along its length. At the beginning of the cut (toe engaged only) my cuts were consistently .0055" thick. In the middle and end of the cut the shaving was .005" thick.

That is not much difference. But it can add up. After several strokes the edge develops a gentle curve to it. And that's no good for gluing.

So here's what I do: First remove some of the middle section of the edge. I start the cut a few inches in from the end of the board, and I end the cut a few inches from the end. I'll usually take two passes like this. (This is similar to what David Charlesworth does, though I believe he continues to make passes until the plane stops cutting.)

Then I take a pass all the way through the edge. If I get one perfect unbroken shaving, I'll test the edge with a straightedge or the board's mating edge. If the edge is perfect or is a little hollow in the middle, I'll get the glue and the clamps. If the edge still bulges, I'll remove another shaving in the middle.

One more thing: Some woodworkers poo-poo the jointer plane fence. As Senior Editor Bob Lang might say: "You might as well show up on the job site wearing a dress."

Well since today is "National Tartan Day," I think you can get away with it.

— Christopher Schwarz


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I noticed the head on my trusty Hamilton hammer was loose last weekend as I was driving a bunch of nails (good thing I have an extra hammer or two). This morning I decided to do something about it.

Conventional wisdom is that the head works loose because of the shock that the tool is subjected to daily. Sounds conventional. Sounds wise. But R. Bruce Hoadley, author of "Understanding Wood," claims otherwise. He says it is the continuous cycle of seasonal expansion and contraction that results in the handle shrinking out.

In either case, the fix is the same in my shop. First I probe around in the head to find an area of the handle that I'm certain is wood. I'm going to be driving a chisel down there, so I don't want any metallic surprises.

The adze eye here is 1/2" wide, so I need a wedge that is that same width.

Make a Wedge
I tighten up my heads with wooden wedges. You can buy metal ones at the store, but I have lots of wood. I scrounged up a piece of 1/2"-thick maple (ash, oak or hickory are all good choices as well). Then I crosscut off a piece about 3/4" long.

I created the wedge on the band saw. I have a little sled that presents the wood to the blade at 7° (you can set your saw's miter gauge and attach an auxiliary fence if you like). You cut one end of your stock, flip it and cut the other. The result is a wedge with a 14° taper. Make a bunch of wedges and find the one that comes to the finest point.

Chisel Down
Fetch a 1/2"-wide chisel. Not the nice one; the other one that belongs to your neighbor. Secure your hammer with clamps or in a vise and drive the chisel as deeply as you can into the adze eye. Don't be shy here.

Remove the chisel, turn it around and drive it in again. When you are done, this is about what it should look like.

Glue and Wedge
Apply glue to the chiseled slot in your handle and on both faces of the wedge. (I use yellow glue.) Drive the wedge in as deeply as you can.

This is why you need two hammers in your shop. This is exactly what got me in trouble in the first place. (See "Daddy has a hammer problem" for details.)  

Wait for the glue to cure and trim the excess with a chisel or saw. Now you're ready for another beating.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz  

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Despite the fact that monkeys were as rare as hen's teeth in the mountains of Arkansas, the highest praise for intelligence there was to be called a "clever monkey."

To wit: "When Clem saw the Law, he slammed on brakes. That clever monkey got out of a speeding ticket by saying he was trying to stomp a sweat bee."

But I digress. This month I'm reviewing new drawbore pins from four manufacturers for the Summer 2009 issue of Woodworking Magazine. One of the new entrants to the field is Lee Valley – its drawbore pins will be available in the next couple weeks at a special introductory price ($49 a pair).

When company officials sent me a couple for evaluation, they also sent a disassembled one so I could see how it was made (and presumably to keep me from sawing apart their pre-production models). It is cool. Monkey cool.

The stainless steel shaft passes entirely through the octagonal bubinga handle. And the tool is capped at the top with a strike button. Though you normally don't need to strike drawbore pins, some people do.

The metal shaft is barbed to grab onto the inside of the handle. And it has a rubberish O-ring. Company officials were quick to point out the function of the O-ring. It is not a shock absorber (like leather between the bolster and handle of a chisel). Instead, it is an assembly aid at the factory.

The handles are epoxied on. When the cap is screwed in place, there is enough vacuum pressure to cause the epoxy to squirt out the bottom of the handle. Hence, the O-ring to seal things up.

The engineering is extremely clever, all-in-all. And though I won't say which of the new tools I prefer (you'll have to read the Summer 2009 issue for that), I will say that I favor the Lee Valley's handle.

It should come as no surprise that around the office, one of the highest praises for intelligence is: "Clever Canadians."

— Christopher Schwarz

Blacksmith David Maydole was the SawStop of the 19th century.

Sometimes hammerheads would fly loose from their handles on the job site. This could be troublesome or deadly because occasionally the steel head would strike a fleshy one (the steel usually wins this competition).

So there were many efforts to improve how the tool's head affixes to the handle. One early and successful method was to add metal straps that kept the head and handle together. Sometimes these straps were forged from the hammerhead itself. Sometimes they were added separately. In either case, the straps were then riveted through the wooden handle.

This worked (lots of strapped hammers survive). But there are disadvantages. These tools require more labor to make. Plus, replacing the handle is inconvenient because of the rivet.

Then, as legend has it, blacksmith David Maydole of Norwich, N.Y., began experimenting with metal and the shape of the hammer's head. Hammerheads that are too soft get deformed. Heads that are too hard will split. Maydole found a happy medium: the hammer's interior was soft and the exterior was hard – like a lobster.

But that's not what made Maydole famous. History remembers Maydole because of the hole he made in the hammerhead. He made the hole longer, adding a metal neck below the head, which is the form that is familiar to all of us today. And he shaped the hole like one found in an adze: At the top the hole is wider and it gets narrower at the neck. Once this hole is wedged up, the handle is much more secure.

The joint is not, however, bulletproof. I have had several Maydoles that had loose heads. I have not, however, had one fly off the handle. (That is allegedly where the expression comes from.)

When Maydole's hammers were first sold in 1840, carpenters were delighted.

"(H)e could hammer away with confidence, and without fear of seeing the head of his hammer leap into the next field unless stopped by a comrade's head," according to the 1873 account "A Captain of Industry."

I've got lots of these so-called adze-eye hammers. Plus I have some earlier ones with a straight hole (including one that flew off on a backstroke – very exciting). But I've never owned a strapped hammer.

I remedied that omission last week by purchasing the hammer in the photo above and have been using it on a side project that has hundreds of nails. The strapped hammers I've seen tend to have longer handles – this one is no exception. And many of them have an interesting and elegant swelling at the base of the handle (this one does not).

How does it work? Like a rock on a stick. That's my highest praise.

— Christopher Schwarz


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Some of the best workholding ideas rely on simple wedging action. This weekend I stumbled onto one more great wedging trick using cut nails.

This might be old hat for you. If so, forgive my waste of bandwidth (which should be the motto of my blog).

I’m creating some wide panels from narrow boards using an early woodworking technique of nailing cross-stretchers across the joints of the panel. There’s no glue involved in this panel. And no Bessey K-bodies, either.

The technique calls for placing your boards on your bench and securing them edge-to-edge by nailing into your bench around the perimeter of the panel. Then you nail the cross-stretchers down to the panel and clench them.

As you probably know, cut nails taper along two of their edges. The other two edges are parallel. When you build furniture you orient the taper so the tapered edges of the nail bite into the end grain of your top board. This reduces the chance of your work splitting.

So when I nailed into my bench using this principle, two things happened. First, Managing Editor Megan Fitzpatrick exclaimed: “Oh my! What are you doing?” I just cracked a wicked grin.

And second, the edges of the panel came together OK.

I thought about this for a minute, then I pulled two of the nails out of my benchtop and oriented them so the tapers bit into the edge grain – both of my panel and the workbench.

Then my joints closed up so tightly I could plane the entire panel and the pieces didn’t slip. Dang. The slight wedging action of the nails was surprisingly effective (and no, it didn’t split the top of my 4"-thick benchtop).

If you are interested in learning more about the history and use of cut nails, I wrote a lengthy story about building furniture with hammer and nails in issue five (Spring 2006) of Woodworking Magazine.

— Christopher Schwarz

The most stressful glue-up of my life was assembling my tool chest in 1998. The main carcase had 120 mating surfaces that had to be glued. Foolishly, I chose yellow glue as the adhesive.

As a result, another editor and I spent an hour furiously beating and clamping the chest together. In the end, there were a few gaps we couldn't close because the yellow glue had set – luckily it was nothing milk paint couldn't fix.

These days I'm smarter about glue. When I started building chairs years ago, I was introduced to liquid hide glue, and boy has that changed the way I work. I think I have an extra inch of stomach lining thanks to liquid hide glue (and no, that's not because I drank some).

The liquid hide glue is almost as simple to use as yellow glue (warming it up a little in a water bath helps it flow). It's reversible. Let me say that again: It's reversible! Once I stuck a chair leg in the wrong socket. All it took was a little heat and moisture and the leg came right out. Easy-peasy.

Liquid hide glue also cleans up nicely with water, doesn't smell bad and gives you a long open time for complex assemblies. If my shop is warm (65° F or so) I can manipulate my parts for 45 minutes or more before things start to get hairy.

I normally use Old Brown Glue. It's non-toxic (the manufacturer lets his dogs eat it!). But I've also used the Titebond product with good results.

I still use yellow glue – just not for everything. When I'm gluing up lots of panels, for example, I like the way yellow glue sets up quickly and doesn't need a lot of clamping time. This frees up clamps and lets me work faster. Ditto that when building jigs and fixtures or planting mouldings on a carcase – I want a glue that sets up fast.

I'll also choose a yellow glue that is water-resistant for projects that might have to endure a soaking.

What about other adhesives? Hot hide glue? Polyurethane? Epoxy? Plastic resin? I've used them all and sometimes I do break them out for certain applications. But for most of my work, which is building new pieces of furniture, liquid hide glue and yellow glue get used the most.

Maybe some day I'll get even smarter and get one of these.

— Christopher Schwarz

Some day I expect one of my little girls to tell a school counselor (between sobs): "Daddy has a hammer problem."

My, ahem, problem started innocently enough years ago. I got interested in David Maydole, the father of the legendary adze-eye hammer. I read James Parton's 1884 article about Maydole and thought: Wouldn't it be cool to own one of his hammers?

So I bought one off eBay for $20. It had a cool bull's eye cast into its face. Its handle was worlds better than the rubber-wrapped hammer-shaped object I'd had since childhood. I even think that Maydole drove nails a little faster. So I bought a 16-ounce Maydole for my shop at home.

Fast forward about five years. I'm looking for a plane at the bottom of my tool chest. I pull out a few hammers. Then a few more. Then a big Cheney. My bench has a heap of hammers on it. How many dang hammers have I bought?

Fourteen, as it turns out. And probably another seven at home (I can't bear to count).

You don't need this many hammers. However, I do think you need more than one. If someone put a nail gun in my mouth and made me choose my three essential hammers for making furniture, here would be my list:

1. A 16-ounce hammer for all-purpose nail whacking.

2. A Warrington-style hammer with a cross-peen/pein/pane. I use this hammer to tweak the lateral adjustment on my metal-bodied handplanes. I use the cross-peen/pein/pane to start short brads. And I use the striking face to finish small brads.

3. A plane-adjusting hammer. I have one from Chester Toolworks. It has a brass face and a wooden face (Lee Valley makes one like this). I use this tool for adjusting my wooden-bodied planes. The brass face is for tapping the iron. The wooden face is for tapping the stock and the wedge.

If you are similarly afflicted, I warn you there is little hope. Lie-Nielsen Toolworks just started making Warrington-style hammers. I ordered all three, however I don't remember how that happened. It's a bit of a blur.

— Christopher Schwarz

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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.

There are so many ways to construct a drawer that someone could write an entire book on the variations across time and cultures. I’d buy it. One curious drawer detail that I quite like is to house a drawer’s bottom in slips.

Drawer slips are narrow pieces of wood that are grooved to accept the drawer bottom. The slips are glued to the drawer sides (and sometimes the drawer front). Why would you do such a thing?

• Dovetail layout is cleaner: Because you don’t have to sink a groove in the drawer sides, you don’t have to use a half-tail at the bottom of the drawer side or risk a bad split by putting a whole tail close to the bottom edge. You can use any layout you please. The slips handle the groove.

• They look nice. This is probably the reason I like them. It adds an extra level of detail to the drawer bottom. Most people probably won’t notice, but I do.

• They make the drawer easier to use. You can fish coins and the like easily out of the drawer because of the beveled edge on the slip. Some people say they make the drawers easier to clean and dust. But I don’t dust much.

There is some debate about whether each drawer requires three slips or only two. Some account have slips attached to the sides and drawer front – the slips are mitered at the corners. Other accounts have slips attached to the sides only and a groove in the drawer front.

In some accounts, drawer slips are a mark of quality work. David Denning in “The Art and Craft of Cabinet-making” (Pitman, page 186) says that joiners typically grooved their drawer sides. Cabinetmakers typically used slips.

— Christopher Schwarz

Here you can see the symmetrical dovetail layout, which I like. Drawer slips make this easy.

Here's a close shot of some slip material before it is installed. Note the bevel on the corner.

This is what the underside of the drawer looks like with slips. My slips are mitered. The slip attached to the drawer front is cherry.

And here's what they look like from the rear of the drawer.

You can do fancy things with a hammer and the right nails. And lately, I've been doing a lot of practicing with cut nails for a series of projects I'm working on that feature nails (including the dry sink in the next issue of Woodworking Magazine).

The more I learn about nails, the more I find out there are lots of interesting things you do with them. You probably have heard about "clinching" (sometimes spelled "clenching") nails. This is when the tip of the nail passes entirely through both of your workpieces. Then you use your hammer to bend the nail's tip over and back into the work.

You see lots of this in boat building and in old work, especially where battens have been attached to doors.

Some people can't quite visualize this, and so I was happy to find the illustration above in "Exercises in Woodworking," a late 19th-century book that I need to do a full blog entry on. It's quite cool. You can download the whole book at Google Books.

I've found the trick to clinching nails is to have the nail's head resting on a piece of steel plate or some small anvil. It makes it much easier to turn over the tip.

While I was browsing this book, I also found a description of how to swing a hammer to encourage floorboards or backboards to mate together tightly along their edges. I've done this before (by accident), but I didn't know exactly what was going on inside. The illustration (figure 5 above) shows it brilliantly.

"Fig. 5 illustrates a peculiar drawn blow of the hammer. Starting at d, it follows the direction of the broken line in its course; the effect of which is to bend the nail in such a manner that it forces the board a close up to c, as shown at f. This blow is practiced in nailing floors and in clinching wrought nails."

Or you can try finding this device….

— 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

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

Whenever John Economaki of Bridge City Tools teaches classes about furniture design, he always asks his students a question that seems to have no good answer.

The question goes something like this: Would you rather have a piece of furniture with great lines but so-so craftsmanship, or a somewhat dumpy-looking project with perfect and crisp joinery throughout?

You'll have to read to the bottom of this entry to find out how John's students answer the question. Me? I've been struggling with the question all week.

I'm just now applying the first coat of color to a Gustav Stickley plant stand for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine, and I've been beating myself up all week over this piece and my workmanship on it.

The project itself is straightforward and is all familiar ground for me. Whenever I work on a project like this, I try to stretch myself by focusing on some detail to see if I can make it more refined and crisp than before.

For this project, I focused on the curves, and I went to great lengths to get the swoops just right on the aprons and stretchers. And for the most part, I was pleased with how they came out.

And that's when the tenons for the top rails came and bit me on the hinder.

During the final assembly I clamped everything up, drove in the tusk tenons at the bottom of the plant stand and walked away for about eight hours. When I removed the clamps, everything looked good for about a half an hour. Then two of the tenons at the top of the plant stand began to separate at their shoulders. Each one opened up about .006". I think the tusk tenons are pulling them apart. Something was a little bit off in the assembly and there wasn't any good way to turn back.

So I spent an hour on Tuesday morning feeding white oak shavings from my jointer plane into these gaps in an effort to obscure them. After forcing the glue-covered shavings into the gaps with tweezers, things looked better. But they sure as heck weren't "according to Hoyle."

I have to have this project done by Monday, and I have an involved finishing schedule ahead, so I grabbed the stain today and went to work. As the color went on, two things happened: One, I could see my mistakes just as well. You can't fill gaps with stain. Well, I sure can't.

And second, I became smitten with the genius of Gustav Stickley, who designed this plant stand. As the color went on I began to see how the overall piece would begin to look. I stopped seeing the individual components.

So to answer John Economaki's question, I think I prefer a project with beautiful lines to a project with perfect craftsmanship. I want both. Maybe next time.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Here's how John's students answer the question: He told me that virtually everyone he's taught says they would prefer the perfectly joined clunky one.

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

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

When I first opened the package, I assumed that the tool inside was a prototype that had a plastic blade. That happens occasionally here at the magazine when a manufacturer wants our opinion on a tool’s ergonomics before they crank up production.

But no, the white chunk of stuff at the end of the Gladstone Tools marking knife actually was the working blade. And this was no prototype.

The spear point of this 8”-long knife is ceramic. Ceramax 80, to be precise, a material you can find in a variety of industrial and home applications, including some kitchen knives.

According to the manufacturer, the knife is second in hardness only to diamond and “will never need sharpening.”

That is quite a claim, and so I immediately put the knife to work today to see how it performed. The ceramic blade is a spear-point shape that is about 1/8” thick. It has the same general shape as the now-discontinued Veritas marking knife we reviewed a few years ago.

The knife’s edges don’t feel as keen as a freshly sharpened steel knife, but the tool does lay down a fine line with little effort. It also offers the same feedback to the user as a steel knife as it makes its mark. I thought the Gladstone might feel a bit gummy (like a stainless tool), but perhaps I was just getting over the shock that it wasn’t a chunk of white plastic.

The handle that was shipped to me is not the same shape as shown on the Gladstone Tools web site. This knife has two pronounced flats that prevent the tool from rolling on the bench (always nice) and has a thin neck for your middle finger while marking joints.

The padouk handle (it’s also available in zebrawood) is well finished. It’s not as nicely turned and finished as the Blue Spruce knives, but it is nicer than most manufactured knives I’ve used. The price is $29.95 for the padouk and $31.95 for the zebrawood – those are fair prices for a nice piece of work like this.

Will the edge hold up? I sure hope so. Gladstone Tools is run by a man that many of us simply know as “Manny,” who runs Manny’s Woodworkers Place in Lexington, Ky. When I was first taking woodworking classes, I and my fellow students would hang out at Manny’s place and drool over the amazing selection of books (still the best, even today) and hand tools. Manny was always patient with us as we would fondle the Japanese chisels but purchase a small set of brad points.

Though Manny carried a few machines and power tools, the majority of his inventory has always been hand tools, including many hard-to-find things. When I first started woodworking seriously, it was Manny’s place that made a huge impression on me. I thought all furniture making used both hand and power tools. (A rude awakening was to follow.)

If you purchase this knife, add a comment below after you use it for a while and let me know how it held up. I’ll use it exclusively for a while and report back as well.

If Manny has come up with a way to ensure that I have one less tool to sharpen, that’s a pretty amazing accomplishment.

— Christopher Schwarz

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