Woodworking Tools

The ugly thing that has replaced all my purdy things. In Stanley Kubriks “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the opening scene of our primate ancestors contends that the earliest tool was the mallet. It was made from a femur, but a mallet all the same. Woodworkers have since refined that original …

When Scott Francis at Popular Woodworking Books asked me to revise my 2009 book “Handplane Essentials,” I thought it would be a short job. The plan was to add a handful of articles I’d written on specialty planes and update the text to accurately reflect toolmakers who had entered or …

In this article we’re going to talk about the big guns; the tools that you see in all the TV shows and all the pictures of “serious” woodworking shops. I’m going to go though the list of stationary power tools that I think make up a basic shop. Again, if …

In this article we’ll be discussing power hand tools and which ones you need to get started woodworking. I’ll also throw in a few “nice to have but not necessary tools” (and my wife said I couldn’t say “not necessary tools” together in one sentence, I don’t really mean it, …