When chairmaker Chris Williams became concerned about brash wood, he devised a test to detect it. Put the stick up on blocks and whack it with a mallet. Brash wood, which is very brittle, will usually snap in two. I took Chris’s idea and expanded it. I now use “The Sledgehammer Test” to select wood…
Read moreWe get a fair number of complaints about the price of the Crucible Card Scraper. (Not from blog readers; y’all are nice.) Why does a piece of steel cost $23? So we prepared this video to explain the steps that go into making it. And explain why we think $23 is a fair price for…
Read moreI finished writing “The Stick Chair Book” last year with great reluctance. There were scads of techniques and forms of stick chairs that I still wanted to explore. But I knew that I was reaching the mechanical limits of our bindery (the book is 632 pages) and the patience of the readers (the book is…
Read moreLarry Williams of Old Street Tool has a lot of good jokes about people with “Infill Disease.” This expensive malady plagues woodworkers who become smitten with these curious tools – infill handplanes – and spread the contagion by claiming that they outperform all other tools. Larry, who recovered from Infill Disease many years ago, now…
Read moreWhen I put out a call for readers to help fund the upcoming free chair class for people who have been historically excluded from woodworking, my hope was to be able to buy a truckload of clear cherry for the students for their chairs. But y’all dumped about five times the amount of money I…
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