Tools

Until recently, my go-to glue-spreading tool for small joints was always a cheap nickel-plated steel brush with natural bristols. I still use these brushes, but ever since I discovered the [...]

The awl is one of the most useful tools in woodworking and perhaps the most basic of them all. Awls help to initiate indentations into which screws, nails, and drill bits will bore. We use them [...]

It’s an age-old question I hear uttered hundreds of times a year: What hand tool should I buy first? Without context, the question is impossible to answer. Most times, I fire back several [...]

One of the first things that many people notice when advancing the blade of a Preston/Record style shoulder plane (today’s Clifton and Lie Nielsen planes are based on that design) is a scratching [...]

A few years ago, my friend Cambell Albritton gifted me with a small Clifton #410 shoulder plane that he no longer needed. The plane was still in its original box but unfortunately developed a few [...]

Demystifying volts, amp hours, and types of cordless tool motors. More and more, cordless tools are becoming everyday fixtures in the woodworking shop. The most common of these is the drill, [...]

After 50 years of woodworking, I’ve got a confession to make. I enjoy fixing up an old machine or rearranging my shop more than woodworking itself. A few years ago a friend gave me an old [...]

How to choose, condition, and clean a finishing brush. It’s really tempting to buy an inexpensive brush for finishing. Say you spend $4 on a standard paint brush and throw it away rather than [...]

An ancient European tool that still has a place in the modern American shop. Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in the November 2008 issue of Popular Woodworking Magazine. Why [...]

This versatile hand tool should be every woodworker’s first plane purchase. As a “professional woodworker” I often get asked what’s the best bang-for-the-buck tool by people getting into [...]

These five specialty chisels will be the perfect compliment to your bench chisels. The amount of woodworkers that I meet that don’t have a good set of chisels nearly floors me. With the work I [...]

Most of the clamps in our woodworking arsenal are designed to produce tons of pressure per square inch. While we use them to hold pieces over the workbench, close joints, or keep glued parts from [...]