The best tool to use for sanding curves is a drum sander. The thing interesting to note is that drum sanders come in all kinds of sizes and even different textures aside from all the different grits and types of sandpaper.For very small work, there are miniature drum sanders that are used wi...
What do you do with the wood plane in the first photo? Not only does the base adjust to different curves, but can be reversed for outside curves. This is the standard plane for making barrel staves and wagon wheels. Although I have never made a wagon wheel I have used it for finishing off ...
You often see my beautiful workbench on the show.It is a Veritas bench with some very special features, like a double drive end vice. What makes workbenches work so well is to have holes in them to receive "dogs". Some of these holes are even in the top of the vise, so that you can move those d...
Arlette from Victoria BC is trying to dig through the confusion of all the power tool marketing. Let me copy much of her letter here, because she really is asking the kind of questions we all ask sometimes when looking at that wall of tools where each claims to be as good as the next and we ...
Probably your first cordless tool was a flashlight, but you never even thought of it as a cordless tool. Then we got some low powered battery operated drills, B&D made the first one in 1961. However it took another 30 years before cordless got powerful enough to go mainstream. Not so l...
Foam guns are the air sealing tool of our epoch. We all use them. We all kill them. We all wish they would last longer and clog less. Of course there are as many different qualities of single component poly-urethane foam guns as there are different qualities of foams — at least we can be happy t...
When you need to cut heavy sheet metal, like the fire-rated door cover that we saw in this TV show, regular shears are not good enough. You could do it with a metal cutting blade in a jig saw, but that is very slow.
The professional will use electric shears that make the job easy, but they are o...
The larger and wider the blade, the more power is required to drive it through wood. When we are talking about corded tools, this usually translates into a question of weight and over-all size of the saw. Using a very large and heavy saw for light duty work is simply cumbersome and tiring. When w...
Over the years I have had the occasion to teach working with tools to kids as young as 3 years old. At whatever age the secret is to know the individual kids attention span and prepair the work to give them a feeling of completion and success within those limits. Regular sessions of success and...
Woodworking requires glue and a good glue joint is one that has just the right quantity of glue spread evenly over the entire surface being glued. When you run the glue bottle down the edge of a board and simply push up another board, the glue tends to spread out as in the first photo, where I am...
