Plane and Chisel

Let's shine a light on a skill often overlooked in woodworking: sharpening. It's crucial yet often daunting for beginners to grasp amidst the variety of techniques out there. Our goal is to simplify the process, offering you a reliable, easy-to-follow method that seamlessly fits into your woodworking routine. Join us as we explore the art of sharpening, a must-have skill in your woodworking toolkit.

Often, when people think of furniture built with plywood, they think of cheap, poorly constructed junk. If you are a serious woodworker building serious furniture you should only be building with solid wood right? Wrong. There are actually several reasons why you would want to consider choosing plywood for your next project.

Furniture design changed drastically in the middle of the 20th century. The fine, detailed ornamentation that theretofore had been a trademark of a well built home, building or piece of furniture was stripped away with a renewed focus on functionality. Here are a few well known designers that shaped the places and things of their time, as well as the places and things of our time.

When venturing into hand tool or hybrid woodworking, you quickly find that keeping your tools razor sharp is absolutely crucial to successful and frustration-free projects. Many of us choose to use a honing guide to increase the accuracy and consistency of their sharpening. But, there are so many honing guides to choose from. Which honing guide is the right one to buy? Let's dive in.

After being gifted a Gretsch G5700 lap steel, I became enamored with the idea of adding a bender to it, in order to add some pedal steel-style versatility to the instrument. After some quick research, I found Certano benders were exactly what I wanted, so I ordered one and then sat down to install it.

There is a lot of information and opinions, facts and myths out there regarding purchasing hand planes in the modern woodworking world. In particular, purchasing a used plane vs. purchasing a new one. I recently agonized over a couple of hand plane purchases and felt compelled to share my thoughts on the matter based on what I experienced when deciding on what made the most sense for me.

I've always struggled with organizing the myriad of tools that I keep around for woodworking. Often times the tools are oddly shaped and it can be hard to find logical places to store them. Many woodworkers turn to a pegboard for organization and so did I, but recently I became fed up with pegboard and switched to something I like a lot better — wood, screws and copper wire.

In the early 1970s, a luthier who had reportedly been spurned from a job at Martin Guitars arose from the unlikely origin of Winfield, Kansas to create a guitar company that rivaled the biggest guitar makers of the day, if not in sales numbers, in the quality of the instruments being produced. Mossman Guitars were innovative, both in terms of guitar architecture and the idea that a small manufacturer of guitars could not only compete with but best some of the titans of the guitar making industry.

Lots of people use the "Scary Sharp" method to sharpen their hand tools. Rex Krueger suggests an interesting alternative approach.

Buying a router plane has become inordinately expensive in the last few years. Luckily the legend Paul Sellers comes to the rescue with a plane you can build yourself for very little money.