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

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

I've picked up my set of six drivers through the years since 1996, when I spied my first one at a flea market and picked it up for $5. Since then I've also noticed that the prices for these tools can be ridiculous. I've seen screwdrivers go for $40. I've never paid more than $10, but I've picked up mine at antique fairs.

The reason I was able to get mine so cheaply is that mine look like dogmeat. And they look like dogmeat because they were probably used on the devil's locomotive they are so black and grungy. And they are as tough as hell.

Note that there are counterfeits out there that weren't made by Smith. Some of the tools are stamped "Germany," and some are stamped "Irwin." And some are tools that have been cobbled together by a clever welder. But if you find the real thing, I know you'll be pleased.

I've noticed that Garrett Wade carries a Chinese set that looks like my screwdrivers, but I don't have the heart to test them. Anyone out there have these?

If you'd like to learn more about the line of "perfect handle" tools, here are some good resources:

• A history of H.D. Smith & Co. at "I Like Rust."

• A reprint of the company's catalog from Martin J. Donnelly Auctions.

• A tutorial on repairing a perfect handle from Jim Thompson.
 
• Read a patent for the company's wild adjustable screwdriver. And check out their patent for a chisel handle. Look familiar?

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

Shaker_Cabinet_Door.zip (126.82 KB)

So to save some time for you, I've also included his article on the topic below. It is highly recommended reading for anyone who builds doors with flat mullions.

What's different about it? Well instead of milling the rabbets and joints in the mullions (which can be tricky), Glen builds up his mullions using thinner stock. I've used this technique for years after learning it from him.

You glue the mullions in piece by piece. It sounds trickier than it is. The first time you do it, you'll be amazed how easy it is. And yes, the result is very strong.

Hope this helps.

— Christopher Schwarz

Other Resources Related to this Blog Post

• "Building Furniture With Hand Planes" on DVD

• Woodworking Magazine Vol. 1, which features plans for this cabinet.

• Free plans for the original cabinet with a flat panel door.

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

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

You are probably asking yourself this question: Why am I reading the blog of a guy who is so dense that he has to take a class three times? That's like flunking kindergarten. Twice (I think).

For those of you still reading this, the answer is that chairmaking is one of my hobbies. I've made most of the chairs in my house, and I am fascinated by the different ways of building the same Windsor-style chair.

Windsor chairs, unlike Shaker chairs or frame chairs (such as Morris chairs) derive their strength from the seat. The legs are tenoned into the seat, as are the spindles of the chair. To me they are an interesting challenge in geometry and engineering. And they involve entirely different parts of my brain than when I am building casework. In many ways, chairs require both more and less precision than casework. If you've ever built one, you know what I mean.

This isn't my first visit to Dunbar's school, however. I've been up here to shoot photos for his articles in Popular Woodworking Magazine. And, in fact, I'm shooting photos for two article on Sunday before the class begins. (No, Asa, I won't tell you what the stories are about).

During these earlier photo shoots, I've always felt a pang of desire when I walked into the school, which is a beautiful space. This week, I get to strangle that pang.

Dunbar's chairmaking techniques are different than those of my previous two teachers. Fleming was almost entirely a hand-tool guy. Springpole lathe. Brace and bit. Hatchet. And we started from the stump. With Weber, I got to learn steam bending and his tricks for turning spindles on an electric lathe. And I'm greatly looking forward to soaking up Dunbar's decades of wisdom.

— Christopher Schwarz

Other Chair Resources I Recommend

• Visit Don Weber's web site (handcraftwoodworks.com)

• "Chairmaking Simplified" by Kerry Pierce

• Country Workshops, a chairmaking school in North Carolina (countryworkshops.org)

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

Build chairs? You need to wedge all the joints. Traditional doors? Wedge your through-tenons. Workbenches? Wedge everything you can. But where do wedges come from? There's no wedge store or magical government wedge repository. You don't want to buy wedges from the home center. Those wedges are usually pine and can't take the beating required for furniture joints.

Me, I like wedges made from white oak. Not red oak (that's an ugly weed). And not other cabinet hardwoods such as maple, walnut or cherry – they split too easily when you hit them. And not other tough hardwoods, such as hickory or locust – those are too hard to split to the right shape.

For me, white oak is the perfect wedge wood. It's tough. It rives cleanly. It's readily available.

So once you have a good chunk of white oak, you might wonder how to make good wedges. I wondered this myself many years ago. All the written accounts really sucked eggs. It wasn't until I started asking people and taking classes that I became a wedgie master.

To make your wedges, you can go all hand tool or all power tool. Both techniques work great. And if you know what the heck you are doing, both are fairly fast. One method uses a band saw. The other uses a handsaw.

One quick tip. Make lots of wedges when you have the time. I make dozens at a time and split them (using a chisel) to the width I need for the joint at hand. I store them in Ziploc bags (yes, I'm anal retentive) and whip them out when wedgie duty calls.

Watch the video above for the methods I use to make wedges.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. The video above was shot by Narayan Nayar.

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

As a result, I tried to give myself some wiggle room. I fit the edge cheeks of the tenons a little looser than normal so they could shift around. I made my tenons' face cheeks a shade thinner than when I build a typical door, for example. And I cut the through-tenons so that I will have to wedge them.

That said, getting this bench together for a dry-fit required Mongo, the 2-pound English mallet. I tried my other wimpier mallets first. I would have been banging all day with the little guys.

But Mongo made it happen.

Each leg had to be pounded about 20 times to get it to seat. Then I clamped the lower stretchers to the legs to see how all the shoulders looked. The shoulders on the front stretcher look good. The side stretchers each have a gap I need to tend to. The rear stretcher is just going to have to learn to be different. (Like the kid in my high school who had a weird affection for live poultry.)

Next up: Fix the shoulders (if the workbench will come apart), start drawboring the joints and select a glue with a two-day open time.

But I'm about to hit a wall. This weekend I've got to build a birdhouse. Yup, you read that right.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

1. Almost any species of wood will do fine for your workbench.

2. There is no quality difference between Veritas and Lie-Nielsen handplanes.

3. Eagle, and sometimes plov.

When I stop answering my phone and e-mail, it's amazing how much more woodworking gets done. Today I finished all the mortises and tenons for the base, fit the short stretchers and trued up the shoulders. As luck would have it, two of the four joints went together right from the the saw. The other two required a tad more plov.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

Here's what it looked like: Jeff took a hunk out of a plastic bag then ripped off a thin sliver on his band saw. Then he started bending it like it was taffy. He said this stuff was pretty stiff because it was a year old and getting pretty dry.

Here's the science: This is a Danish process (as far as I know) where wood is compressed lengthwise under heat and steam, which compresses the wood fibers along their length. Then, as long as the moisture content stays above 20 percent, the wood can be cold bent. You can twist it around like it is spaghetti. Then you clamp it in a form and let the moisture content drop. When it reaches equilibrium with your shop, the wood retains its shape. No springback. No splintering on the curves. Oh and I need to mention that it's easy to bend in all three dimensions.

The bendable wood comes wrapped in plastic and ready to work. Jeff, who specializes in chairs, uses the stuff where he would normally use a cold lamination. But when using the Compwood, there are no lines between individual layers like on a cold lamination and no springback. And Jeff says he saves a lot of time when he uses the stuff.

The product isn't cheap. I ordered a hunk of 3.5" x 6" x 50" white ash for about $194 (before shipping). However, I think I'll be able to get at least 15 arm bows for Welsh stick chairs out of that chunk. That's about $13 per arm bow with no wood failure. So I'm willing to give it a try.

If you want to read more (and who wouldn't), here are some links:

The Compwood site in English.

FlutedBeams.com, which sells the stuff.

Jeff Miller's site, which displays his work.

And below is a short clip of Jeff bending a piece. It was about a year old, so it was fairly dry. Jeff reports that when it is fresh from the package it bends easily. I've seen this technology discussed elsewhere, but I really didn't believe it until I saw it. It took only about 10 minutes for me to decide to buy a hunk. If you work with curves, you are going to want to take a look at this stuff.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

I began to worry that when I drove the leg home that it would split off a big section of the benchtop right along the punk line. Game over, man. Game over. So I fussed over the joint. I did some type-A procrastination and swept up my bench area. Put some tools away. Checked my e-mail. Played with my hammer that is in the shape of a nut-fondling squirrel.

But I couldn't put the process off any longer. I put two bar clamps across the benchtop's weak spot and began gingerly driving the leg into the benchtop. After 10 taps I heard a popping noise from the benchtop. My heart sank. I walked to the back of the shop and rearranged the clamps on our rack. I answered a couple of text messages.

All my fellow employees had left except Robert W. Lang. Bob's seen me do some dumb stuff, so I decided it was time to drive the leg in the last 2" or so. Bob came over to watch. We all love a train wreck.

The leg seated home. I took the clamps off. Everything looked and felt surprisingly sound.

Then I noticed that there was an ugly gap where the leg's shoulders met the underside of the top. I needed to disassemble the joint and tune up the shoulder.

Three attempts later I was ready for a beer.

But the leg went in. The shoulder was tight. Everything felt tight and right. I looked over the top and tried to figure out what went right. After I drove the other three legs home and flipped the whole thing on its feet I realized what had saved my hinder.

I think it was the epoxy.

I took some video of me driving the leg home, but it's too boring to post even here. It was like watching a video of skateboarders where no one slips and racks himself on a handrail.

That's my favorite kind of boring.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

I've dealt with this issue in several ways.

1. I have ignored the problem. I just glued and drawbored everything up tight on the French-style bench I built in 2005. The result: The legs pivot a bit on the lower stretchers as the top expands and contracts. There are a couple small gaps on the shoulders on the end stretchers. No other problems to report.

2. I altered the mortises in the benchtop. On a couple workbenches I've made the mortises in the benchtop that receive the rear legs a little wider. And I didn't glue the rear legs into the benchtop – I just pegged them in place. The result: The top moves. The base doesn't. No real problems here either.

3. I've bolted the top to the base. This is the modern solution. I used tight holes at the front of the bench and reamed-out holes at the rear. This forces the wood movement to the rear of the bench. When the top moves, it shifts where you don't see it. The only issue here is I wonder about the long-term lifespan of the hardware.

And now I'm pondering solution No. 4 for the workbench I'm working on now. Here goes: On the end stretchers I'm going to glue them into the front legs, but I'm going to leave the tenons into the rear legs loose.

I was inspired to do this by Roubo's plates. Last night I was looking over all the A.J. Roubo volumes (yes another high time at the Schwarz household) and noticed that Roubo shows the front stretcher clearly pegged into the legs, but it doesn't look like the end stretchers are pegged into the legs.

This got me thinking.

The other thing I'm considering is stealing a trick from the Hall Brothers, who built almost all of the Greene and Greene furniture. They made double mortises in some legs. So the tenon and the shoulder are buried in the leg. If I do this little trick, I'll never have an open shoulder.

Yeah, it's fussier than is probably necessary. But I've wanted an excuse to try these ideas out.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

1. The dovetail socket takes about half the time and effort to make compared to the 5" x 5" x 1-1/2" mortise. And it's a cinch to get it crisp and perfect.

2. I'm glad I own a 2 lb. 9 oz. mallet.

3. I'm glad the benchtop isn't hard maple.

To cut the mortise, I bored out most of the waste with an 1" auger and a 10"-sweep brace (where did my 12" brace go? And my 14"? Hmm). Then I bashed out the waste with a 1/2" mortising chisel and the mallet, which I will henceforth from this day refer to as "Mongo."

To fair the walls of the mortise, I used a big float. This is such a testosterone-laden task that – ouch – I can feel my forehead becoming more sloped as I type.

The dovetail socket, by comparison, was for wussy hominids. I sawed out the slopes of the socket. Then I cut a few kerfs down the middle of the waste and popped it out with a mortise chisel. Then I faired the wall of the socket with a router plane and cleaned up the corners with a paring chisel.

Then I walked to Kroger to get some Ben-Gay (just kidding; I actually bought some Rare VOS). Both are effective against sore joints.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

It's been a week since I've been able to devote any time to the legs of my workbench. This morning I sneaked into the shop and hid there for three hours. My plan was to start mortising the top to receive the legs. The legs, meanwhile, had other ideas.

These legs are still a little wet. They're not squirting like FreshenUp gum, but they are a little moister than I like. After I cut these honking-long joints and departed for Indiana (and then New York), the joints dried out a bit in my absence and a couple of them twisted a little.

So I fetched my big Buck Bros. chisel this morning and pared away. They're in good shape – for now. But you can bet that tomorrow morning I'm going to bust my hump to get the legs driven into the top.

— Christopher Schwarz

All week I've been itching to saw these joints that connect the legs to the benchtop. I've never cut a 5"-deep dovetail joint in a 6x6, so I wasn't sure what to expect.

It was easy going until my enormous saw suddenly stopped cutting. Had the flesh-detecting technology in my tenon saw kicked in? (Ye Olde Saw Astyntan?) But I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Let's back up to Tuesday when I was laying out these joints. I spent a long time staring at the original plate from Roubo's "L'Art du Menuisier," and it wasn't making sense to me. Robert Lang and I tried sketching the joint (electronically and on paper) to reconcile the odd perspective of the joint (I believe it's supposed to be in parallel projection instead of in perspective, but even that doesn't really explain it).

Oh, and there was the fact that the original text's dimensions don't really jibe with the drawings.

So I set forth to create a joint that resembled the drawings of workbenches shown throughout the four volumes of Roubo – and that obeyed some of the basic rules of wood-to-wood joinery set down by Joesph Moxon. And it would split my top like a muffin.

The first question was proportioning the thickness of the sliding dovetail and the tenon. These legs are finishing out a little bigger than 5" x 5". So I went for a 1-1/2"-thick dovetail, a 1-1/2" thick tenon and 1-1/2" space between the two. The remainder (a bit more than 1/2") was the shoulder at the back.

About that angle on the dovetail. It looks a lot steeper than is typical in a drawer or carcase. Roy Underhill suggested in "The Woodwright's Shop" to use a dovetail that has a slope of 2-1/2" to 1" when he built his bench with a rising dovetail.

That sloped looked too shallow. After fussing around, we settled on a slope that was 1-3/4" to 1". That is one steep slope (about 30°), but it looks right. So be it.

I laid out the joints last night before I left work and started in on the sawing this morning with a honking enormous 11-point tenon saw that's 16" long.

I needed a bigger saw. I couldn't reach the baseline because the brass back hit the top of the leg. That was a new sensation.

So I got out my full-size ripsaw. And that's when the fun began. Even with the big saw, it took some time to rip those cheeks. I could have written a couple blog entries while sawing one joint. But it's going well.

Soon I'll get to make the female part of the joint and give my mortise chisel and brace a workout.

— Christopher Schwarz

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

A couple details and thoughts:

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Christopher Schwarz

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

But the more I use a curved iron, the more I like it. I'm always stumbling on little ways it can help me.

Today I glued up the base of a small table that has hand-cut tenons. The aprons have 4-1/2"-long shoulders, which is a lot of wood to get mated perfectly against the leg. And this is where my curved iron came in handy today.

As I was dressing the legs with my jointer plane, I did something a little odd when working the area where the aprons attach. After dressing the area to remove the toolmarks, I took three or four stokes with the jointer plane running right down the center of the leg.

This made a very small curved depression on the face of the leg – it imitated the curve of the iron. You can see this (kinda) in the photo above. It's quite evident under a ruler to the naked eye.

When I assembled the table base, the slight curve ensured that the visible tenon shoulder would close up before the tenon shoulder on the inside of the table base. Works like a peach.

— Christopher Schwarz

Perhaps I'm the oddball here, but I've always found cutting tenons by hand to be more challenging than any sort of dovetailing.

Tenons require a lot of precision sawing if you want to avoid farting around with a shoulder plane, chisel or float. And teaching others to cut perfect shoulders is a challenge. I usually show them Robert Wearing's trick called a "first-class sawcut." Basically, you create a quick V-groove at the shoulder line and drop the saw into that.

It works great, but you still have to keep the saw vertical. And you have to keep it from jumping out of the kerf and marring your work.

Today I was cutting some tenons and was clamping my work down to my bench hook to hold it immobile while I focused on cutting the 4-1/2"-long shoulders. Like always, I clamped a piece of waste between my hold-down and my work to keep the hold-down from marring the walnut.

I looked at the waste. Its straight edge whispered: "Use me, Seymour."

I shifted the waste right onto my shoulder line and clamped down the waste. I picked up my flush-cutting saw and used the waste as a fence to guide the saw – just like I do when I cut the walls of dados.

It worked brilliantly, even without a chiseled v-groove. This tenon shoulder won't need any work.

If you struggle cutting long shoulders, it's worth trying.

— Christopher Schwarz

My next project is a close copy of a walnut side table from the White Water Shaker community. We'll be publishing the plans in an upcoming issue and donating the finished project to the nonprofit group of volunteers who are restoring the amazingly intact Shaker buildings.

I spent a summer afternoon measuring the project and just staring at it. The more I looked at it, the more it puzzled me.

Mystery No. 1: The top of the original might not be original to the piece. The base of the table is quartersawn walnut and the craftsmanship is top shelf (except for the drawer -- more on that in a second). The top just doesn't look like it belongs to the base. The walnut is plainsawn and the way the top is assembled just doesn't live up to the craftsmanship of the base.

Mystery No. 2: The drawer is all kinds of wacky. I am certain it is original because it was sawn from the front apron. Each corner of the drawer has one big dovetail. There are nails everywhere (which might not be original). The drawer groove is exposed on the ends of the front. The half-blind dovetail on the front is but a hair's breadth from showing through the drawer front.

I have some theories about this drawer, but I'll keep them to myself until I get deeper into the project.

So as I gathered my materials this week for the project I was torn about what to do. While at the Woodworking in America conference at Valley Forge, Pa., last fall, Roy Underhill said something that is lodged in my noggin.

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

So I have St. Roy standing on one of my shoulders, sporting angel wings, of course. On my other shoulder is Frank Klausz, with devil horns and a pitchfork. Here's what Frank says:

"Whatever it is you do, always do your best."

Today I sided with Frank Klausz. I made the top using quartersawn walnut and carefully matched the edges to make the seams disappear as much as possible.

We'll see who wins the next battle.

— Christopher Schwarz

My sister-in-law killed her college landlord with a voodoo doll, so don't try tell me that curses don't exist.

The curse du jour is an innocent flat-panel door I'm building for a wall-hung cabinet. It couldn't be a simpler piece of work. It's a single panel of cherry with two battens on the backside that are nailed and clinched.

On the last nail on the last batten, the batten split in twain as I clinched it. So that meant I had to de-clinch five nails, remove them from the door and do all of this without damaging the rest of the door.

Here's how I did it.

If awls rule the afterlife (and I hope they do not), they are going to have an especially pointy place reserved for me when I depart for the workroom in the sky. That's because I have found birdcage awls to be excellent at removing clinched nails.

I simply use the awl to burrow a hole next to and under the nail. Then I lever the clinched section up with the awl. Birdcage and brad awls are especially good at this because they are boring tools, unlike the scratch awl.

Then I can use my nippers to pull the nails out and start over again.

So how do I know this door is cursed? Check out this hinge mortise. Yup. I snapped two brass screws as I was driving them home. Lucky for me, Glen Huey has a 1/4" screw extractor.

This will teach me to never leave my chicken bones at home.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of my favorite advertisements shows a guy with a handsaw staring at a chair that has legs that are about 4" long. In his efforts to stop the chair from wobbling, he kept cutting down the legs until they would look about right if they were attached to an opossum.

(The ad is a complete failure, however, because I cannot for the life of me remember what they were selling.)

In any case, I was taught years ago a method of leveling legs that hasn't let me down. Today I had to level the legs of the next "I Can Do That" project I built for the April 2010 issue of Popular Woodworking. It's a rustic Swedish bench from the Skansen living history museum in Stockholm.

Step 1: Level your work surface. You need a flat and level surface to true up the legs of a chair or bench. At my shop at home I've leveled my table saw (which also helps keep its sliding cutoff table working well). Here I'm leveling Megan's workbench with builders' shims and a long level. Check along the length and the width of your surface. Megan is out sick today so I annexed her workbench. Neener neener, Megan.

Step 2: Level the top of your project. Place the project on the work surface and get the top of it level – if you want it level. Many chairs lean backwards. If you want the chair to lean backwards, level the front two legs to the work surface and shim under the feet until the chair is level side-to-side and slopes backwards as you desire. In this case, I wanted the top level. So I shimmed under the feet until the top of the bench was level across its width and length.

Step 3: Shim the feet. I use builders' shims if there's just a little wobble. Big wobbles require blocks and/or big shims.

Step 4: Set your scriber. Now open your compass so it matches the largest gap between the feet and your work surface. Note: You can also cut a block of wood to this same width and achieve the same result.

Step 5: Scribe around the feet. Run the compass around your feet, scribing the finished length all around. If you are using a block of wood instead of a compass, use that block of wood like a ruler all around the legs.

Step 6: Saw or plane away the waste. If I have a lot of material to remove, I'll saw to the lines. I prefer to saw the legs whenever possible. If I have only a little material to remove I'll use a block plane. If planing, I'll first bevel the foot all around down to the pencil line. Then I'll remove the middle of each foot with the block plane (skewing and a little mineral spirits help make this easier).

Step 7: Check your work. Use a straightedge or ruler to confirm that the feet are in the plane you desire. When they are, turn the project back over and test your work with your butt, which is very accurate (I have Starrett-brand buttocks!).

The total elapsed shop time for this operation is usually about 15 minutes.

I'm sure there are other ways to do this (I've seen some ridiculous methods in magazines, including ours). If you have a better way to do this, let us know.

— Christopher Schwarz

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?