The Renaissance Woodworker

After my trip to Valley Forge for the 2009 Hand Tools and Techniques conference I became a little obsessed with wooden planes. I had a particular interest in molding planes.
I was lucky enough to come across several auctions on eBay from the same tool chest. Unfortunately I was sniped on one of them, [...]

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I am introducing a new segment this week called Hand Tool Tips. I capture a lot of footage when I’m working in my shop. A lot of it really isn’t relevant to an ongoing topic or a specific project so it just gets filed away under miscellaneous tips. Hence the birth of [...]

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Maybe it is just the circles I run in lately but there are a lot of conversations about not needing this power tool or never using this jig because it is more enjoyable and sometimes faster to use a hand tool instead.
It probably has a lot to do with my personal development as [...]

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This message greeted me when I unwrapped my new back saws from Bad Axe Toolworks.

It made me laugh but it is a dogma to keep close to your heart while working with hand tools. Saws run easier, planes slide nicely, bits turn smoothly. Old English cabinetmakers often used tallow to lubricate [...]

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I sent a bunch of saws to Mark Harrell at Bad Axe Tools/Technoprimitives before Christmas and began consultation with him on what my nest of saws needed. In my quest to do more and more hand work I wanted to build out a small, albeit comprehensive nest that would allow me to work cleanly [...]

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I remember sitting in the Eight Bells pub just outside Stratford-Upon-Avon and sampling some fine sherry trifle while having a political discussion with a local about “nutter American politicians”. Our conversation eventually turned to British politics and the “royal problem”. I was very young and still really wide eyed but I remember this [...]

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Hand tools allow us to work in way not possible with a machine. Have you ever glued up a part and then thought, “dang, I should have chamfered those edges at the router table first”. While you can’t run a carcase across a router table easily, you can very easily use a block [...]

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I know there are a lot of sources on how to cut your dovetails by hand, but I figured I would try to add my own to the mix. It seems as if we can’t get enough dovetails tutorials. I know when I was learning I looked at everything so here is another [...]

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This was a piece that was commissioned at the end of summer and fortunately I caught most of the build on film. Granted it is all my old camera so the quality is a little lower than what you have been seeing as of late. I skipped most of the initial milling stages [...]

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Listen!
via AudioBoo
Posted via web from renaissanceww’s posterous

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