I just finished up writing a series of posts about milling lumber with hand tools. In the past, I’ve done several videos that cover the process pretty well. They’re older videos, but still valuable for seeing the process. Here’s one of the better ones.
In the late 18th and into the 19th centuries, drawers with extremely thin, delicate sides become fashionable. While these very thin drawer sides look light and dainty, they present challenges for attaching drawer bottoms.
On my old workbench, I had a drawer that I found extremely convenient for keeping things like pencils, a pair of scissors, and other odds and ends. I had always intended to add a drawer to my current bench, but just haven’t gotten around to it until now.
One way to mitigate wood movement that can occur after planing is to not plane the wood to final dimensions right away. This is often referred to as skip planing, and it’s a technique can aid in keeping wood flat whether working by hand or machine.
Sometimes, tuning up a wooden hand plane requires a little more than sharpening the blade and flattening the sole.
Here’s the final video of building the American chestnut coat rack.
Match planing is a method whereby two boards are placed face-to-face and their mating edges are planed simultaneously. If you aren’t familiar with the technique, allow me to present you with a crash course.
I use card scrapers a lot in my work. They’re not only extremely valuable for smoothing areas of difficult long grain, I also use them all the time for cleaning up and smoothing end grain as well. However, for a …
I’m working on a project that I’m assembling with tapered sliding dovetails. So in this video I discuss the method that I’ve settled on for making this uncommon form of joinery.
Just about everyone who has ever used a hand saw has bent or kinked a saw in use at some point. Sometimes the bend springs back, and sometimes it doesn’t. However, bending a saw doesn’t necessarily relegate it to becoming scraper stock or wall art. In many, if not most cases, the saw can probably be straightened out again.
Milk paint is an easy finish to apply, and gives pieces a beautiful and lively color with lots of character. Here’s my method for mixing and applying it.
In the power tool world they’re called jigs. In the hand tool world, we call them appliances.
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