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In high school and college, I spent most of my summers working in factories.

I spent two summers in a liquor factory (I'll never drink straight tequila again – it's what we used to clean the concrete floors). Another summer was in a factory that made folding tables – the kind you see at church picnics with the fake walnut wood grain. The highlight there was working alongside a guy named (honest now) Meatfart, who communicated in grunts and sounds that he could make using his internal organs.

And then I spent one long summer building and staining exterior doors at Therma-Tru door company – my first woodworking job.

If you've ever worked in a factory, you know there's a caste system. If you haven't worked in a factory, then read the rest of this paragraph: At the top of the caste are the people "in the office." These are the secretaries, corporate managers and other people who make cameo appearances on the shop floor, usually to deliver bad news (you're fired) or to be wolf-whistled at by the unwashed.

Below the office types are the people who run the maintenance shed, the forklift drivers and the floor managers. These are usually people who started out as grunts on the shop floor and worked their entire lives for the privilege of wrangling the grunts on the floor.

Below that rung are the grunts, who are the backbone, hands and legs of the operation. And believe or not there are people below the grunts: the temps. And that was my lot in life. If you had to fetch a loose part from inside a running machine, you told a temp to do it. If the job was messy, hot or near Meatfart, it was a temp job.

Being a temp convinced me to stay in college if but for one reason: To work "in the office." I had no idea what happened in "the office," but it didn't involve 50-pound bags of sugar, being someone's pillow during break time or having to use a restroom that would make a Roman bath look like a private garden spot (10 holes, two sinks, zero loitering).

It's been almost 20 years since I punched a time clock in a factory. But the funny thing is that now I do everything I can to escape the office and get onto the shop floor here at the magazine. I love the noise, the dust, the heavy lifting. Heck, I like taking out the garbage and fishing unknown objects out of the dust collector.

The only things missing are a few wolf whistles and some organic offgassing and I'd by 18 all over again.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Who is now headed back to the shop to build a blanket chest for the Summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine.

Adam Cherubini, who writes the Arts & Mysteries column for Popular Woodworking, ends up making a lot of his own tools to satisfy his 18th-century urges.

The handsaws you see in the photos of his work? Those aren’t Kenyon-style saws from Wenzloff & Sons. Those are saws that Adam made himself. Same with his wooden try squares and his fore plane (which actually is a Franken-plane from several donor tools).

So it should come as no surprise that Adam makes his own brushes for finishing. Recently he and I were talking about the process while we were at the Lie-Nielsen Hand Tool show in Philadelphia. The show was winding down and people were starting to pack up, but Adam was fired up about horsehair.

He’d made some brushes that he used to finish his standing desk, which has been the topic of his Arts & Mysteries column this year. The hair he had procured had come from a horse’s mane, and it had been a bit expensive.

As he discussed the details of the follicles and how he bundled them for the brush, his voice started to trail off a bit.

Have you ever seen one of those old cartoons where one character (such as a chickenhawk) starts to gaze hungrily at another (such as Foghorn Leghorn)? And then Foghorn mutates into an enormous steaming and juicy chicken leg?

Well that’s the weird vibe I was getting from Adam. He was staring at my hair, which was particularly long and scruffy that month.

“You know,” he said, reaching up, “your hair is just about the right coarseness for a brush….”

Now, Adam is a couple inches taller than I am. And he has the advantage of some extra mass and living in New Jersey. Simply put: Adam could probably scalp me with his “The Plane My Brother Is” with ease – if he could catch me. I do run 30 miles a week.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. Shameless plug: You can buy signed, deluxe versions of my new book on workbenches at my personal site, LostArtPress.com.

In my home life, my passion for furniture design is a bit like a subscription to Playboy magazine. I keep all my books about woodworking and furniture in my office. I pore over them at night when the kids are asleep. And I don’t drone on about joinery or 18th-century workshop practices at dinner.

It’s not that I’m actively concealing the stuff. It’s just that my kids’ days are filled with so much activity and learning already, that there is little time to talk much about furniture. I’ve also been waiting for the day to arrive when they are old enough to build furniture in the shop with me.

That day arrived on Saturday.

This weekend we all drove down to Harrodsburg, Ky., for the state’s first-ever Alpaca festival. My two girls like a goofy-looking animal as much as any kid. And so the 100-mile trek to see this cousin to the camel seemed worth it. The festival was held on the grounds of Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill – one of my all-time favorite places on earth. The setting, the buildings, the furniture and the food are a balanced meal for any furniture junkie.

I figured that the last thing the kids would want to do would be to tour buildings and workshops, but that was OK by me. Saturday was for the alpacas, which hum when they are distressed. So we heard a lot of alpaca humming, chased some wild turkeys, saw a sheep being sheared in 4 minutes, made felted soap and bought finger puppets.

After some lunch, we had an hour before we had to head back home, and I thought I’d sneak off to the Centre Family Dwelling to take some photos of the firewood box there, which I’m building for the “I Can Do That” column in the February issue of Popular Woodworking. I told the girls they could go pet some more alpacas or come with me into the building. Surprisingly, everyone wanted to go with me.

After an hour in the Centre Family Dwelling, we almost had to drag the girls out of there. They were both bewitched by the building itself and the objects inside. They wanted to see every room, look at all the tables and chairs and learn about all the displays. They marveled at the acoustics in the meeting halls. They pointed out unusual dovetail joints on a seed box (I guess I’ve been droning on at dinner more than I thought).

Maddy, my 11-year-old, pointed out pieces that she thought I should build for the magazine. Katy, the 6-year-old, was fascinated by the system of pegs on the walls (she also is quite the cleaner, so that’s understandable).

Then they discovered the continuous banisters that run from the ground floor to the third. They immediately knew what a technical challenge it was. They asked to borrow my camera so they could take pictures of things that interested them (they took about 50). Katy’s photo of the peg system is at the top of this entry.

Then the two girls pulled themselves up into one of the deep window wells and looked out over the rolling hills of Central Kentucky, which look the same as they did in the early 19th century when the building was built.

“We could live here dad,” Maddy says. “I could look out this window forever.”

Sometimes I forget about the power that furniture and architectural design has, even over people who don’t immerse themselves in it. On Saturday, the long-gone brothers and sisters of that vanished order reached across almost two centuries of time and planted a seed in the minds of my girls.

Next stop: To the shop to build a wagon for their toy horses to pull. It’s time.

— Christopher Schwarz

Yesterday I was at a local auto body shop, poring over an El Camino in the back room and struggling mightily to see what was 6” from my eyes.

Let me back up a minute: I’m having a mid-life crisis. And the way it is manifesting itself is in a most foolish enterprise: Restoring a 1968 Volkwagen Karmann Ghia. These cars have beautiful Italian lines, pokey 1,500cc air-cooled engines and a tendency to rust out from the inside (as mine is).

So I took it to a guy who specializes in restoring cars and we go over the details of the job. What he will do. What I will do. And how many visits I’m going to have to make to the plasma donation center to pay for it all.

Then he asks, “What chrome do you want replaced?”

“The chrome looks fine,” I say. “Leave it.”

I can tell that he’s trying to stuff down an urge. He shakes his head and takes me to the back room with the El Camino. He shows off the beautiful two-tone paint and then points to the chrome strip that traces the top of the truck’s bed.

“See,” he says. “This dull chrome looks horrible next to this paint job. I hate it.”

I cannot for the life of me see what he’s talking about. The chrome looks fine; it’s not flaking a bit. After a few minutes of examination, I realize that this is a lot like learning the craft of woodworking and furniture design. Most beginners (and non-woodworkers) are blind to the palette of grain and color match that most of us struggle with. The things that we work so hard to achieve (tight reveals on door and drawers, for example) are lost to most.

Even when I point these details out to people on a piece, I can tell that most of them don’t see it. As soon as their eyes move to another piece of furniture, the lesson I tried to teach them on the first piece is completely gone. They simply cannot see the details until they have tried to achieve them in their own shops or have had them pointed out 10,000 times by another woodworker (sorry about that, Lucy).

That same evening I drove home with some friends from a bourbon tasting and we discussed some bookshelves I will design and build for them this fall. To begin, I ask what furniture styles they like. And I list a few.

Silence.

I probe a little shallower. Do they like antiques? Contemporary furniture? What furniture catalogs do they like? Where would they like to buy furniture if they could afford anything?

“It’s hard to say” is the response.

OK, it’s time to hit the books. I assemble a stack of furniture books and catalogs and ask them to page through them and put a sticky note on anything they like. A style. A color. A detail. A shape.

While I wait for them to do their homework, I’m going to do mine. I’ve been paging through Malcolm Bobbit’s book “Karmann Ghia: Coupe & Cabriolet” to stare at acres of chrome. So far, I still don't see it.

— Christopher Schwarz

Reminder: We’ve just published a hardbound book of the first seven issues of Woodworking Magazine. Shipping is free through Sept. 21, 2007. Click here for details.

Sometimes I wonder if morticians can tell a lot about a person’s character by the body left on the slab. Do fine lines around the mouth indicate an easygoing person who always smiled perhaps?

I ask this because woodworkers – myself included – know a lot more about trees when they are dead, dried and cut to ribbons than they know about trees when they are living. We can tell the difference between soft maple and hard maple the instant we put it to the tools. But most woodworkers are hard-pressed to identify a species in the wild.

We know little about how the species grow. Or where they grow. Or what their leaves or fruit looks like.

I’ve always wanted to be able to identify species around the neighborhood, and I used to carry around a book that showed each species' canopy, leaves and fruit. I can pick out the obvious ones (silver maples, sycamores, willows and the like). But on others I am hopeless.

Today my friend John Hoffman and I were loading up several hundred pounds of concrete pavers for my mom (and 20 bags of mulch). As we were snaking the pickup truck down a steep hill in the yard, Hoffman looked up and said, “White oak. Round like the white man’s bullets.”

Huh?

“And there. Pointed like the red man’s arrows,” he said. “Red oak.” I stopped the truck mid-hill and asked what he was jabbering about. It turns out that Hoffman’s wife, Sharon, has been taking classes on naturalism given by the state of Indiana and was taught that little trick about differentiating the oaks. The white oaks have rounded lobes on the leaves, like a bullet. The red oaks have pointed lobes, like an arrowhead. Brilliant.

So this afternoon I took a walk into a forest preserve next to my mother’s property. This stretch of untouched land was always off-limits to us as kids, but recently it was opened to the public with a hiking trail. There’s an imposing sign on the property next to the preserve that reads: Lord Lanto. Plus a bunch of signs about trespassing and security cameras. I’ve always wondered about Lord Lanto and thought I might be able to catch a glimpse of his land (or perhaps the lord) at long last by taking a walk through the preserve.

No luck. No Lord Lanto. But I did find some nice white oak and red oak leaves. But still I struggled with the other species. I think I saw some walnut. If I could get a saw and kill the sucker I could tell you for sure.

— Christopher Schwarz

The Connecticut road the next morning.

As I sprint down the gravel driveway at my mother’s house, the lights begin to dim and I begin to wonder if a 10 p.m. three-mile run in semi-rural Connecticut was a good idea.

I’ve made this run so many times since I was 11 years old that I push on. I’m fueled partly by the intense memory of this road, partly by the two glasses of red wine at dinner and partly by the fact that I’ve been sitting on my backside for more than 13 hours in a drive in my wife’s mini-van to get to Old Lyme, Conn.

I’m on the way to Maine this week to shoot a DVD (this one on using a workbench, natch) and to do a seminar on Saturday on workbench design at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. But for the next couple days I’m at my mother’s house, which also was my grandparent’s house. It’s where I learned to use a table saw and a band saw. It’s where I spent summers in my grandfather’s workshop, which is now empty except for a few boxes.

After a half mile, I look up and can barely separate the sky from the canopy of trees. Streetlights are few. Lights from the homes are infrequent, and I can see the median of the road as a slightly brighter line stretching ahead. I follow that line.

Almost 20 years ago, my grandfather walked this same road, just as he did every morning on his way to pick up the newspaper at the Laysville convenience store. But on that morning in the late 1980s, my grandfather had a stroke in this driveway, incapacitating him for the last years of his life. It took away his ability to walk, work in the shop and say more than three things: “Yes!” (which meant “no”), “No!” (which usually meant “yes”) and “love you” (which I hope wasn’t an antonym).

And now it’s dark on the driveway, like I’m in a sensory deprivation tank. The dim line marking the median is gone. I press on, and I look for the median using my feet instead of my eyes. I chuckle for a moment because this is all a bit like work in the shop. You need to use senses other than your sight. Your sense of touch, in particular, lets you know how a handplane is working, if a chisel is sharp, if the surface of your wood is free of plane tracks or planer snipe. Your hearing lets you know if your band saw is aligned, if your table saw is in trouble. (Yes, everything can be a blog entry about woodworking.)

I’m feeling my way across Sill Lane with my feet when I find the yellow center line. I can’t see a dang thing, but I know I’m running full-tilt down the center of the road and headed in the right direction. I laugh out loud and run the next two miles without seeing anything, navigating entirely by my feet.

Then I feel a brush of some brush on my legs and then my left shoulder slams into a tree trunk. I’ve lost my line. So much for navigating using your other senses. Next time I’ll run when there’s daylight.

— Christopher Schwarz

During the last several months I’ve gotten several e-mails, phone calls and comments from people who aren’t readers. Instead these communiqués are from the wives of our readers, who are about 95 percent male.

These are not friendly conversations.

They go something like this: “My husband buys every tool you recommend. Whenever your magazine comes out or you post something on your blog, my husband buys it. For the sake of our bank account, please die.”

Well, that last sentence is hyperbolic (I’m from the South, what do you expect?). But the rest of the sentiment is accurate. One woman said that my writing had cost her $12,000 last year and $9,000 so far this year. And here I thought my writing cost people $19.96 a year for a seven-issue subscription.

Now I actually feel pretty bad about this recent development. As a writer (who is married to a writer), I’ve always lived modestly. I drive a six-year-old bare-bones Honda. Many of my clothes are hand-me-downs from my father, a man with excellent taste. Heck, I started building furniture because we couldn’t afford the antiques we wanted.

But I’ve never developed a taste for cheap tools. My first table saw was a 1970s-era Craftsman (price: free). I spent as much time adjusting the lame fence as I did ripping with it. My first chisels and planes were the Popular Mechanics brand (yes, I see the irony), and the edges folded like tin foil whenever they were asked to cut anything other than pine. I could go on and on with this list.

Poor-quality tools stink. So I began acquiring high-quality vintage tools and machines (an Atlas drill press, Swan chisels, Stanley Type 11 handplanes). These were (and still are) great tools. But they took a lot of work to bring back to life. Metalwork. Filings. Grease. Pressing bearing. I found that I don’t like metalworking nearly as much as woodworking.

So I bought a Delta Unisaw. I bought nice Japanese chisels and saws from Lee Valley Tools. I bought a Lie-Nielsen plane. Each purchase hurt the bank account; but on the plus side, I’ve never had to replace any of these tools. And I suspect I never will. Every time I turn on my table saw, it works as advertised. Every time I cut a dovetail, the only errors are caused by my own ineptness. And every time I go to plane a board, the results are completely predictable.

But these arguments don’t work well with the spouses. I’ve tried. So I apologize to them. I try to untangle myself from the conversation. And I furiously hope that each of you will build something spectacular with these tools. Nothing defuses the expense of the means like the beauty of the results.

— Christopher Schwarz

This weekend I got a chance to show off the Holtzapffel workbench at the Sindelar Tool Meet, talk to a bunch of tool collectors and buy some tools I've been coveting for too long.

But the absolute highlight of the entire event was a brush with greatness.

You see, I got to meet "the boy."

OK, some background for the uninitiated: Tool dealer Patrick Leach has been selling tools on the Internet for as long as I've been buying them. Every month, Leach sends out an e-mail newsletter that is (hands-down) the best-written tool newsletter in the business. His tools for sale are always the cream of the crop and his descriptions are oft hilarious.

(By the way, Leach is also the founder of the Blood & Gore web site, the best online reference on Stanley planes, and started Independence Tool with Pete Taran, which made the dovetail saw that Lie-Nielsen now sells. That saw launched the premium handsaw market.)

Anyway, one of my favorite parts of Leach's newsletter is that he has a "Tool of the Month," which is usually the most unusual, minty or rarest tool on offer. And every month, one of the photos that shows the tool features Leach's son holding the tool.

As I've been getting this newsletter for years, I've watched the child grow up, and Leach always peppers the tool's description with some comment about "the boy" or the "tool youth." For example: "Fresh from stuffing his mouth with Oreos while playing with his toy motorcycle, the tool youth wasn’t too happy to pose with this one, the much coveted #164 low angle smooth plane…."

So on Saturday afternoon I took a moment away from my demonstrating at John Sindelar's event to browse some of the tool dealer's tables. I was looking at a small router plane when I glanced up. Now it's rare for me to be speechless (just ask the magazine's staff), but I saw The Boy and all I could do was stutter: "Uhhhh, it's….uhhhh… The Boy!"

He and his father were set up right by the entrance to the building that houses the collection. Leach was working the crowd, cracking jokes and making deals. The Boy was helping out, arranging the tools and tending to the tool bargains that were arrayed on the blue plastic tarp off to the side.

"The best tools are back over here," The Boy called out to the crowd.

I obeyed him and went to have a look. I snatched up a brass router plane made by a patternmaker and an accessory for my brace that would allow it to accept small round-shank bits. The Boy was right.

I wanted to say something like, "I've known you since you were just a wee lad holding an ebony plow plane in a bouncy seat." But that sounded stupid. And I'm sure that it would seem creepy if I started talking to The Boy, and so I just admired him from afar. If you've ever wondered about it, The Boy is a good kid. He helped Leach the entire weekend and was one of the most well-behaved elementary-school kids I've met.



A smallish router plane by Paul Hamler. Yes, I ordered one..

Other highlights: Getting to meet toolmakers Paul Hamler and Jim Leamy. Konrad Sauer from Sauer & Steiner was there as well. I know Konrad quite well and we spent our evenings trying to find a decent beer (we looked a lot, but that's another story for another kind of blog). I did learn that Konrad has a profound weakness for powdered sugar doughnuts. John Sindelar, the host of this incredible event, bought about 3,000 doughnuts for the event. No lie. Konrad ate his fair share.

— Christopher Schwarz

“It will be necessary that I teach them how to choose their tools that are made by Smiths, that they may use them more with ease and delight, and make both quicker and neater Work with them.”

Few people in the world of hand tools rouse people as much as John Economaki, the founder of Bridge City Tool Works. He has a passionate customer base that keeps its collective lip buttoned on the Internet, and a vocal chorus of critics that doesn’t.

Critics charge that his tools are too expensive, that some of his tool designs are too specialized to one segment of the craft and that his marketing copy tries too hard. So when you meet him, you expect Economaki to be rich, snobbish and overly proud of his product.

During the last 16 months, I’ve become acquainted with Economaki. And the more I talk to him, the less I understand the critics. He is, unlike many people who make tools in this world, one of us. He was a woodworker, an industrial arts teacher and a professional furniture maker before he started making tools.

He is, like many toolmakers, struggling to remain profitable, he’s quite earthy and he’s the biggest critic of his own designs.

“Ah, you see this,” he said today about one of the parts of one of his planes, “this is a design flaw. I should have put a magnet in there so it would stay in place as you tighten the lever cap.”

This week, Economaki is in our shop here in Cincinnati to show us some of his newest designs, share thoughts on CAD software and give a presentation to a group of our readers. Today, Economaki and our staff spent the day in the shop, working with his tools, chatting about woodworking and discussing the state of toolmaking in this country.

Time with Economaki makes my head hurt. It’s common to start on a conversation about try squares that shifts to tricks to determine accuracy using a cylinder of steel to biographies of Albert Einstein to the legacy of Sam Maloof. All that happened in about three stoplights while in my car on the way to his hotel.

But the most interesting thing about the day was getting to spend time with his tools. They are as much about design as they are about function (kind of like fine furniture, don’t you think?). He admits that freely and says his tools aren’t for everyone. As to the criticism that the tools are “too expensive,” you don’t feel that way after you use the tools and understand a bit how they are made (entirely in the United States).

I’ll admit, some of his tools don’t appeal to my eye or the way I work, such as the Japanese saws. But other tools of his have a remarkable pull.

When Bridge City started making the SS-2 Saddle Square, I ordered it as soon as I saw it and have never regretted it. The tool has been in every shop apron that I’ve worn to shreds while working at the magazine, and I carry it to every show.

The Saddle Square is functional, yes, but it also delights me. It pushes me to work better. And as its brass surface has become scratched, tarnished and worn over the years, my woodworking has become tighter, lighter and easier.

And that’s worth something.

— Christopher Schwarz

Whenever I attempt to teach a bit of woodworking I say things that don’t come out quite right. Things like: “Sharpening is perhaps the most fundamental of hand skills.” Or: “Handsawing is the most fundamental of joinery skills.” Also: “Design is the most blah, blah skill.” And finally: “I think it’s time for a group hug.”

When I say these things, what I’m really trying to say is that there’s a basic skill beneath all the other high-level skills. But it’s not sharpening, sawing, planing or design.

It’s seeing.

This past weekend I was at the Sterling Heights, Mich., Woodcraft store to teach two one-day classes. One class on planing and the other on sawing. So inevitably I made some grandiose sweeping statements like the ones above. But as I got into the down-and-dirty part of teaching these skills, I kept running into the problem of myopia.

Sharpening isn’t about rubbing tools on abrasive as much as it is knowing when to stop rubbing the tool on the abrasive. And the way you know when to stop is by observing the cutting edge.

Planing isn’t about making shavings, it’s about seeing the resulting surface you are leaving. Is it flat, true and free of tear-out? And sawing is about muscle memory, but it’s also about seeing a line and following it with your saw using subtle hand pressure.

The good news is that teaching one-on-one is the absolute best place to give the gift of sight. I don’t know how many frustrating and circular phone conversations I’ve had with woodworkers who are trying to teach themselves to sharpen, plane or saw. They struggle longer than necessary because they don’t know when they have a sharp saw, a flat board or a correctly cut tenon.

But when you can get that in-person feedback and observe what a really sharp edge, flat board and perfect sawcut looks like, your skills advance in great strides. I was amazed at how quickly all of the students caught on once the scales fell from their eyes and they could see the scratches, gaps of light and miscuts.

What I didn’t really have the heart to say is that seeing is a blessing as well as a curse. Once you can see the scratches, you will work like heck to remove them. You won’t settle for bowed stock. And you will correct miscuts. And learning to do those things quickly takes time and effort.

And there’s one more curse. It’s even worse, and it deals with design. Once you can truly see good design, you will never be able to walk into a furniture store or neighbor’s house without the occasional wince.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I first started working at Popular Woodworking magazine, we’d sometimes have summer interns help out, and they were almost always female and working on a staff that was (at the time) almost entirely male. We didn’t think anything of it, really. All magazines need people with writing and editing skills to research some weird narrow specialty.

And the interns didn’t think anything of the gender disparity, as far as I could tell. But the other people in our publishing company always asked our interns questions such as:

“What’s it like being down there with all that testosterone?”

Or, my favorite, “Don’t you ever get tired of all those men talking about sports?”

The truth of the matter is that there isn’t much sports talk in the office. In fact, some (female) employees used to run an NCAA bracket in our building. We woodworkers would play along, chip in a dollar each and fill out the brackets. Our picks were always, without fail, the worst of the bunch.

I’ve never gotten a taste for following college or pro sports, and I’m always surprised by how few woodworkers I meet seem to be rabid sports fans. One exception is Deneb Puchalski, who works for Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, teaches at Kelly Mehler’s school and is an excellent woodworker. One late night we were in a bar in Vegas (don’t ask) and started talking about sports and woodworking. I asked him why he liked sports.

He said he liked the math involved, the statistics and following the small details. There’s a little science, a little drama. He said he liked to see how those statistics created a bigger picture and you could see patterns.

But, I pointed out, I get the same stimulation from woodworking. I enjoy the math. I relish the small details of a project that I assemble into a bigger piece of finished furniture. There’s science (engineering and chemistry), and more than enough drama. And don’t get me started about the patterns.

I’ll never forget his response. Deneb took a swig of Fat Tire beer and grinned.

“Yeah, but can you drink a beer while woodworking?”

Score one for organized sporting events.

— Christopher Schwarz

An excerpt from the Spring 2007 issue of Woodworking Magazine, available on the newsstands now.

My boss, Steve Shanesy, held up a dial caliper to make his point about precision woodworking. “If you can work to 1", then you can work to 11⁄64", or to .005" or to whatever,” he said. “Those are all just arbitrary numbers, and you can work to any of them.”

I allowed Steve’s admonition to become ingrained in my heart and hands that day. I bought a dial caliper. And for years I used that caliper as my sixth sense in the shop and experienced every aspect of my joinery through its steel jaws.

In many ways, the caliper pushed me to become a better woodworker. It showed me how closely each of my tenons fit. It pointed out every joinery flaw and forced me to find ways to work that were more precise and repeatable.

But the dial caliper can be a cruel master.

It measures things that are difficult – sometimes impossible – to do anything about. Let’s say your boards come out of the planer and they are .004" thicker than what you wanted. What do you do? For years I struggled to get a sensitive touch with the adjustment wheels on my heavy machines. I succeeded, but I could never live up to the expectations of my caliper.

Then one day I was at a woodworking show in Canada and there was an old-timer there who was selling old folding rulers. They were beautiful things with brass corner joints. Some of the scales were made of ivory. Most were boxwood. Naturally, I checked the price tag on one. I don’t remember the price, but I do remember what was scrawled next to it: “French inches.” French inches? What the heck are those?

Before the French invented the metric system (yes, something else to blame the French for) and then formally adopted it in 1799, there were competing systems of measurement that would vary by region. The French pouce (inch) was a little shorter than the inch we use today, about 7 percent shorter.

Until that moment, in my mind there were only the metric and imperial systems. The idea that there were other ways to measure things in the world of furniture was confusing. And so I began to realize that all measurement systems are arbitrary. I eyed my caliper warily and wondered if life might be better if I switched to the metric system, where I could divide anything by 10.

But, as it turned out, archaic measurement systems aren’t arbitrary. As I read more, I discovered the Japanese shaku, an archaic unit of measurement still used today by temple carpenters. The shaku, developed independently of our system, is 11.93" long. The ancient Egyptian foot measures 12.25". And many of the measurements that eventually evolved into the imperial system were based on the human body, such as the cubit – the distance between an average-sized man’s finger and elbow.
And because our furniture is supposed to fit our bodies, it makes sense that our measurement systems should spring from there.

But what about the ancients and their way of working? Would they mock the caliper? Well, it turns out that tiny units are nothing new, either. The Indus Valley civilization (2,600 B.C.) had measurement units that were less than .07". So while we desire to have our measurement systems reflect our bodies, we also need to quantify – measure – anything we can see or feel. Hence, the caliper.

In the end, I’ve concluded that for me, calipers are like another important ancient invention: beer. Both must be used sparingly – or I’ll never get anything done.

I always shoot for tight-fitting joints instead of hitting an arbitrary number on a caliper. I strive for beauty to the eye rather than on-the-nose tenon lengths.

But how do you get there? How do you teach yourself to make furniture without someone looking over your shoulder at the critical first stages of learning the craft? You need an unyielding master who can point out the things you haven’t yet trained your eye to see. You need a master you can someday outgrow or even exceed.

In the modern home workshop that master just might be a dial caliper.

— Christopher Schwarz

Tonight I attempted to make my first serious loaf of bread, and I learned something about woodworking benches.

Now, I don’t like to talk much about my life outside the magazine. It’s fairly dull, I can assure you, and it would be (even more) boring to read about than what’s on the blog now. But here’s an important detail: I’m just as passionate about cooking as I am about woodworking. Both are in my blood – my mother has run or cheffed for several restaurants and catering businesses; plus my father, uncle and grandfather were all woodworkers, carpenters or boatbuilders in their spare time.

This year I’ve been trying to improve my baking skills. And bread – traditional yeast, water, salt and flour – is at the top of my list. So for the last couple days I’ve been working hard in the kitchen – between bouts of editing and writing – and for dinner tonight, I served my first scratch loaf.

It looked beautiful. Smelled perfect. Was crispy on the outside and moist and tender on the inside. But it was not good bread. My poor family choked down one piece each (butter is an excellent lubricant). I stuck it out through three pieces.

I still don’t know what the heck went wrong. I’ve been studying for weeks. I practiced with several quick breaks (foccacia and Irish soda bread – both victories). But the simplest yeast bread is just not in my grasp yet.

So what does this have to do with workbenches? Glad you asked. This perfect loaf reminded me a lot of the workbenches I see in shops all over the country. They are beautiful. They look exactly like what we expect a bench to look like – classic Platonic realism.

But when we try to use them, one of two things happens. We immediately realize the bench’s shortcomings and either try to fix them or we turn our backs on them (and get a refund.) This is exactly like what my daughter Maddy did this evening. She took one bite of my bread, one huge gulp of milk and went back to the flounder.

Or we assume that this is the way all workbenches are. That our frustrations with it are caused by our own lack of skills or knowledge. That perhaps we need to just keep plugging away at it and then we’ll finally get it.

This is me in a nutshell. I ate three pieces of that mass of weird-tasting flour. And I’ve also worked for years with workbenches that have held me back.  

I’m not saying I have all of the answers here – not for bread and not for benches. But I do know that to really make progress on bread, I’m going to have to do what I did to build a better workbench. I’m going to have to look outside of my own experience. I’m going to have to admit that I cannot fix this myself and consult someone who can.

For workbenches, I started reading and listening to people who seemed on the fringes of modern woodworking. For bread, I’m going to head downtown to a tiny flour-covered bakery in the early morning and start asking questions.

— Christopher Schwarz

It’s about 7:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, and I am severely deprived of caffeine as I follow Thomas Lie-Nielsen through the narrow passages of his tool factory in Warren, Maine. He moves so quickly up and down the steps that I’m always five paces behind, despite my longer legs. Tom flings open a door on the second floor and unwraps his scarf and coat in one fluid motion.

Tom has invited me to attend one of his company’s weekly staff meetings, where he hands out paychecks and talks shop with the employees of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks. I catch up with him a few beats later and he’s already sorting through papers on a desk.

But even before this early morning meeting with all the employees, Tom holds another meeting with a few key employees in this bullpen that serves as the office for him and several other employees. They briefly look over some production numbers, discuss the health of a few machines and then head to the shop floor. The all-employee meeting is held in an area directly behind the Lie-Nielsen showroom where employees heat-treat the blades and assemble the planes before shipping them out.

At this early hour the sky above Warren is dark and so are the halls of the toolworks. But as I step onto the shop floor I squint. My eyes adjust to the bright lights above and then I see it. Something that is completely startling.

No, it’s not the company’s No. 4-1/2 anniversary plane in bronze. It’s the people in the room. There are dozens of them standing around the boxes filled with castings and lever caps and chipbreakers. Tom is moving around the room handing out a stack of paychecks, calling out each person by name and chatting with them briefly.

Within a few moments all of the employees are performing stretching exercises and Tom is sketching out the news of the day. One of the new machines has some bearings that need replacing. The numbers from the West Coast woodworking shows are in. The block plane group has been making its production numbers regularly this week.

The employees clap at the news, except for a group standing near me. It’s the block plane group, and then it dawns on me. I’m just a bit amazed that there could be a group of people who make block planes. In fact, it’s amazing that there are so many people in this world who all build hand tools in this post-handwork, post-industrial country.

I’ve had this feeling before, mind you. A few years ago I toured the Veritas manufacturing facility in Ottawa, Ontario, and was struck dumb at how many people were engaged in building hand tools. I followed Rob Lee around the Veritas plant and warehouse for more than two hours and we still didn’t see it all.

It’s experiences like this that give me real hope for the future of craftsmanship on this continent. In order for woodworking in North America to survive, there needs to be a steady supply of good quality new tools (both with a power cord and without) available to the public. Without those new tools, the craft is destined to become just a quaint sideshow at living history museums and on television.

It’s actually somewhat of a miracle that we still work wood at all. It is, after all, more expensive to build a piece of furniture from scratch (in hours, tools and time) than it is to buy a piece of furniture from a discount furniture outlet. But still we persevere. All of us.

Mark Swanson, Lie-Nielsen’s patternmaker, chatted with me for a moment as the early morning meeting geared up. Then he said: “You better do your stretches, too.”

So I did. And I’m glad to be a part of this.

— Christopher Schwarz

Editor’s Post Script: The reason I was at Lie-Nielsen Toolworks this week was to shoot footage for two new DVDs – one on card scrapers (surprise) and the other on how to use handplanes when building carcase furniture. There is no word on release dates – I guess that depends on how many foul words they have to edit out of my footage. But if you do choose to buy the DVDs, remember that all my proceeds go to benefit the Early American Industries Association, one of my favorite old tool groups.

Since the day I started wearing pants with pockets I've carried a knife. From elementary school in Arkansas to college in Chicago to writing about plane crashes in South Carolina, the only thing that has remained the same has been the presence of a slim blade of steel.

So it should come as no surprise that I carry a knife in my shop apron. What is surprising is how essential it has become to my woodworking, as important as a block plane, combination square or tape measure.

I bought this Swedish shop knife 10 years ago from Lee Valley Tools. I recall that it cost a bit more back then, but perhaps that's because they now sell it with a plastic sheath. That's a shame because the leather sheath is very well made and embossed with geometric patterns – the only decoration on this simple, stout tool.

Its details of the Erik Frost knife are what set it apart. The tang extends all the way through the birch handle, ending with a small black nub at the butt. And the knife is laminated from both mild and hardened high-carbon steel. The construction and materials allow you to strike this knife with a mallet or hammer and never worry about the handle splitting or the 2"-long blade deforming.

No other tool I own splits drawbore pins as well as this knife as a result of its toughness.

I sharpen the knife constantly. It takes a fine edge and is the tool I use to shape the ends of drawbore pins, to chamfer a through-tenon, to taper a wedge before it gets knocked home. I use it as a scraper, holding it vertically on the work with two hands – one hand on the stock and one at the tip of the knife.

The act of sharpening a knife is not precious, like a plane iron or chisel. I use a diamond hone from DMT that looks a bit like a butterfly knife itself. Occasionally I'll stone it with a fine-grit stone, but I actually like the knife to have a little tooth to it.

I sanded the handle smooth several years ago as the wood began to look beat up. And now, as I examine it this afternoon, I can see clearly the marks of hundreds of jobs on the yellowed surface. Despite the fact that birch has a closed grain, the handle is impregnated with grit through-and-through. There's a dab of epoxy in the shape of a fingerprint on one side. Small dents and creases are everywhere.

It's like looking closely at your face in the mirror one day and finally seeing that it's not the same face that started back at you at 16. The handle could probably use another sanding, like my face could probably use some dermabrasion (were I a pretty boy).

But no, I think it's just fine as it is.

– Christopher Schwarz

For a nearly vanished religious sect that peaked in the 19th century, the Shakers have an astonishing grip on the modern imagination.

In the woodworking world, Shaker furniture always ranks in the top three most popular furniture styles (the other two are Arts & Crafts and country – whatever the heck that is). And in furniture stores, they’ll label almost anything “Shaker” to sell it.

Personally, I always had a respect for the Shaker’s design aesthetic, but I didn’t have much of an appreciation for the lifestyle of the brothers and sisters who produced this extraordinary work.

After all, it was a celibate, highly regimented and (generally) alcohol-free subculture. And let’s just say that most career journalists are the anti-Shakers.

But during Christmas I visited the Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill outside Harrodsburg, Ky., and the scales fell from my eyes in a single twirling, pounding full-throated moment.

Late in the afternoon of my visit, I attended a demonstration of traditional Shaker hymns performed in the Centre Family Dwelling, an imposing and impressive edifice to communal life.

I sat on a low bench in the dining area while a lone woman dressed in traditional Shaker garb performed an a cappella selection of hymns. Surprisingly, not all of the hymns were about Christmas; most of them were about the act of work.

And during the hymn about sweeping (yes, sweeping) the performer twirled as she sang, and her feet pounded the wooden floor of the hall in perfect time as the only percussion to her rousing chorus.

As her voice reflected off the high mullioned windows her pounding two-step reverberated through my feet, I could finally catch a glimpse of what attracted thousands of people to Shaker life in the 18th and 19th centuries.

For the disillusioned and disaffected of any era, such a display of vigor and beauty would surely be intoxicating. It was for me.

Celebrating the act of menial work, finding joy in something as mundane as sweeping, finally opened my eyes to Shaker life.

For what we do in our workshops each weekend is similar to what the Shakers strove for every moment of each day. Home woodworkers take an activity that was seen as a hard way of making a living and have turned it into a source of immense joy. We find satisfaction in fitting a door, planing a board, tweaking an assembly.

Many of us relish sharpening our tools or tuning up our machines to perform the work with more precision. We lavish attention on our workshops to make them tidy and efficient.

Imagine if we brought that same level of care and joy to every activity, even the ones outside the confines of our workshops? This was the thought going through my head last weekend as I hummed a tune and swept my shop, my footfalls tapping in perfect time.

— Christopher Schwarz, from our introduction to our special issue on building Shaker furniture.

I quite enjoy looking at other woodworkers' work, but nothing makes me spit out my coffee faster than reading that a certain project took 300, 600 or even 900 hours of work. It makes me wonder: Are they boasting, admitting their shame or just stating fact?  

If I worked for 600 hours on a single project I would probably be fired (and also be ready to check into a mental hospital). I mean, 600 hours is 15 straight weeks of eight-hour days. To be sure, there are some projects (anything with large amounts of marquetry) that could suck up the hours based on the sheer number of parts. But the projects I'm bemused by generally are quite nice, but not overwhelming in complexity. What I have found from examining work like this is that they are overwhelming in perfection.

This is the part where you can start calling me a hack.

When I build, I log my hours of shoptime on my cutlist. I don't log the time I wait for glue to dry overnight or time waiting for lacquer to set up – just the time I'm in the shop and putting tool to wood. And building for the magazine slows me down – I have to stop and take lots of photos regularly (about half of the photos I take get thrown out for space considerations). So I know what I spend on a table when it comes to time.

For example, the table on the cover of issue No. 2 took me about 20 hours to build the first time. The second and third tables took me 17 hours each, and each table has a hand-cut dovetailed drawer. The Creole Table is shaping up to be a 20-hour project, too.

Part of my time savings is due to the fact that I don't fuss over interior surfaces. All of the interior parts will get trued by a jointer plane (this speeds assembly) but they'll never see a smoothing plane or scraper or sandpaper. I speed the fitting of mortise-and-tenon joints by always undercutting the tenon shoulders so they'll close tight the first time.

And I never do anything until I absolutely have to. I don't assemble a joint until it's do-or-die assembly time. Assembling and disassembling will slow you down and sometimes increase the chance that you'll damage a part. I don't break down a tool setup until I have to (this saves tons of shop time). And I keep many tools set up to do one thing only. My jointer plane is never set up as an oversized smoothing plane – it's always set up like a jointer plane. I don't use my powered jointer for rabbeting or bevels or other things that I have tools for. The powered jointer trues the faces and edges. Period.

Having a complete set of tools helps, obviously. And beginners are going to struggle and spend a lot of time setting and changing tools because of their financial and tool limitations. I understand that and empathize – I was there myself.

The point I'm trying to make is that you shouldn't feel like a hack if you don't spend eleventy-billion hours on a project. You shouldn't feel bad if there's tear-out on the underside of a shelf. The pets and insectoid pests in your home don't much care when they spot it. If you get pleasure from treating every surface like it's a show surface, that's fine; woodworking is more of a hobby than a profession for most. But know that there is also great virtue in getting things done so they can be used and enjoyed.

— Christopher Schwarz

Every evening I have a glass of red wine or two with dinner, clean up the dishes and then run a 5K – on Saturdays and Sundays I run a 10K. The running part keeps me fit, and the wine beforehand keeps it interesting.

Tonight as I was running past the neighborhood pool I picked up a partner, an aged golden Labrador that had been sniffing around the bushes in a gully. When the dog joined my pace I was a bit surprised; he was clearly struggling against some stiff joints. The dog pressed forward and we traded leads, back and forth. After a minute or so three kids came sprinting out of a house, each flying a French blue bedsheet behind and all of them calling the dog's name.

I looked down into the dog's dark eyes as it struggled to keep up with me, torn by the call of the children rushing behind him. And I saw myself not six weeks ago at the WoodWorks show in Ontario, Calif.

I was giving a drawboring demonstration on Saturday afternoon to a small crowd at the show and was pounding a rived peg through my dowel plate. The bench I was using didn't have any dog holes, so I had found (quite oddly, in retrospect) a band saw riser block and was using that to support the dowel plate during the pounding part of the demo.

Wham. The riser block jumped. Wham. I squashed my thumb with the hammer. I bled quite a bit but kept working. One audience member came up unbidden to patch my finger (some woodworkers always carry bandages).

After a couple more sentences, my vision started to turn off, like closing the aperture on a camera lens. I struggled mightily to keep talking about drawboring. My body had other ideas. I sat down and gave up. Everything went black.

In retrospect, it shouldn't have surprised me. I had been working for three weeks without a day off. I had flown to California on little sleep. I'd only had time to eat some oatmeal that morning. No lunch.

Still, the paramedics came. A Snickers bar and glucose tablet in the first aid station fixed me up pretty good. A big Mexican meal and long night's sleep did the rest. But the whole odd experience changed my view of the world and woodworking a bit. I've always been prone to build things solidly. But after that experience in February, I've been diving even deeper into the world of juggernaut joinery. I mean, I'm only going to be here for so long. What I build should last longer.

And though I see myself erring on the side of caution in joinery, I've also felt unabashed to try new and wilder techniques of making the joints – plus inlay, working on my turning and trying a few curved forms from some Creole furniture that would have given me pause in January. I feel a bit reckless on that score.

And that's what I saw in that dog's eyes this evening. He was over his head in racing me, but he poured it on nonetheless and pushed me to sprint faster and faster. But then when his owners called him, he looked up at me.

"Go home," I said. And the animal thought better of the race. He ended his struggle and faded back into the arms and waiting sheets of the laughing children. And I headed home to finish up some through-tenons and sharpen up the cutter in a 5/8" beading plane that had been giving me some real trouble. With any luck I'll be able to maintain this view of the craft and world around me – it's just the right balance of recklessness and caution.

—Christopher Schwarz

One of my favorite movies as a teen-ager had a scene where a 1940s-era G-man goes to a mystic for help in becoming a superhero. The G-man shows the mystic – named Sombra – a photo of a caped hero and asks for a magic word to become like him.

Without hesitation, Sombra says: "I suggest you dye your underwear and learn to live within your limitations." And that, dear reader, is exactly how I felt late last week as I was finishing up the first prototype for the next issue of Woodworking Magazine.

The project is a classic American trestle table with traditional joinery. And despite the fact that there was nothing "new" about any aspect of this project, it kicked my butt up one side of the shop and down the other. Fitting the through-tenons in the base took more fussing and fitting than was acceptable, and I still had to patch one side of a joint despite a careful fit. The breadboard ends on the top fit perfectly when dry-fit, but after they were pegged, they each moved off the shoulder line enough that I disassembled the whole end and started over.

Those mistakes seemed unavoidable. And then there were the ones where I was overcome by hubris – the worst shop mistakes possible. I got a little cocky when I drawbored the center of one breadboard in an effort to get a seamless joint line. After all my success at drawboring the base (made of Southern yellow pine) I used the same heavy offset in the black cherry top.

That's when the entire breadboard end piece exploded in my hands (I, however, had made an extra breadboard for test cuts, which saved me).

And when I completed the two-board top using some locally cut 18"-wide boards that had been drying in my basement, I used a smoothing plane alone to finish the top. No sandpaper. It looked good until I put the first coat of varnish on. Groan. Out with the sandpaper to blend the toolmarks and remove some localized tear-out.

The point here is that even the simplest operations can be a challenge when you change one fact. In this project, it was the scale of everything. It's one thing to fit a cabinet-scale wedged through-tenon. It's quite another when the tenon is 1" thick, 3-1/2" wide and 3" long. Same goes with the breadboard and the top itself. Fitting a tenon's shoulder that's 3" across is easy compared to a breadboard shoulder that's 30" across. There is a lot less room for error.

But with the table complete, I took stock of the project and have concluded that this trestle table and its joinery are an outstanding lesson in traditional joints. It teaches one of the most important and forgotten joinery techniques around – wedging. I've wedged hundreds of through-tenons, but that's because I've been deeply into chairmaking for a couple years now, and a single chair can have 25 to 30 wedged joints (depending on how nuts you are; I am fairly nuts).

And now that the first table is complete, I know exactly how to modify our stock techniques to make assembly really easy.

Or maybe I should just go to Kroger tonight and get some black vegetable dye for my underwear. It could be the hubris talking.

— Christopher Schwarz

CHICAGO – After about 60 seconds I'm certain that this feels a bit like a drug deal. I was told to show up at a hardware store on a certain date and at a certain time to see "some amazing stuff" by Slav Jelesijevich, a Chicago-area tool seller who specializes in files, rasps and old tools that are "new in the box" (also called NIB). I'm there a few minutes early and so I poke around the store. It's a very old hardware store with a full selection of tools, but not something you would drive five hours for.

Then Slav shows up and he scoots me toward the back of the store. There's a keypad on a locked door that he has the code to (the store owners trust him implicitly). A few seconds later we are definitely down the legendary rabbit hole. The public area of the hardware store is small compared to the cavern behind and below it. And every square inch is filled with shelves that are stuffed with boxes. Old boxes. Old boxes with old tools in them that have never been used.

There was an entire aisle of rasps and files that no one makes anymore. These were beautiful, precision instruments, each wrapped in brown paper and neatly boxed and stacked on the shelves. There were easily thousands of rasps.

There was an aisle of hammers that haven't been sold new for 20 to 30 years – still with the tags on them and waiting to strike their first nail. Perfect wooden handled screwdrivers that beat the quality of the stuff you find today. Shelves of specialty drill bits. An entire wall of Brown & Sharpe stuff. Metal Kennedy boxes. Two aisles of clamps.

This is where I got a little dizzy.

But it wasn't just hand tools. They had power tools that aren't made anymore that were still in the original boxes, waiting for a sale. Rockwell 14" band saws with cast iron wheels that weighed as much as a car's wheel. Unisaws with 1-1/2 hp motors. An enormous 14" table saw (5 hp, single phase). And the hand power tools were equally impressive. There were routers and trimmers and miter saws and drills that have disappeared from the planet. Beautiful stuff. Like a museum, only you could buy it.

A lot of the stuff is what collectors call "new old stock" or NOS for short. This hardware store has been in business for more than 75 years, and so stuff tended to accumulate. And the previous generation that ran the store had seen fit to buy up a lot of hardware surplus from World War II. On a shelf in one of the offices was a pair of lineman's pliers stamped "Made in Occupied Japan." And when one employee passed away they found an amazing stash of old tool catalogs he had kept during his long career. Those catalogs are a gold mine of information on the tool business.

There was one small price for my tour: That I not disclose the name of the store.

I know, I know you feel cheated. But this small hardware business couldn't handle phone calls from all over the country from people looking for oddball stuff. But if there's something you're looking for, I definitely recommend you give Slav a call (312-455-0430). He knows his way around the store and is very fair with his pricing. And if you're a really good customer, maybe someday you'll get offered a tour of one of the hardware stores he frequents.

— Christopher Schwarz

LAS VEGAS – Wandering around our last day at AWFS – a tool-lover's heaven – you might think I'm a little misty-eyed. But instead, I'm actually a little mad.

After nine years of these shows you start to see patterns emerge – things that lie beneath the surface that are both frustrating and impossible to fix. The first is what I call "photocopying," and it's something that has happened for centuries. This is when manufacturers make a tool that merely looks like the tool they copied. But, like a photocopy, it looks like the original but with the details smudged or missing.

Let me use chisels as an example, though the phenomenon applies to power tools just as well. Garden-variety bevel-edge chisels should be an easy thing to get right. After all, they are simply steel in a stick, right? Apparently not. If you pick up a bevel-edge chisel today, chances are that the bevels on the long sides of the blade will end in a chunky flat area. This chunky flat renders the tool worthless for its intended purpose, which is to sneak the tool into narrow corners (think: dovetails). Pick up a quality antique bevel-edge chisel from the late 19th or early 20th century and you'll typically find the side bevels ground almost all the way down to the backside (sometimes called the face) of the tool.

So I see a lot of photocopying, especially when a new manufacturer comes into the market. It seems they don't fully understand what's important about a tool and just make one that kinda looks like the ones others make. And beginning woodworkers buy them because they don't know what's important, either. And then they get frustrated because the tool doesn't do what it's supposed to do.

The other phenomenon is what I call the "box dot." And this is the consumers' fault. We tend to favor tools that have more features – more bulleted items on the box that extol everything the product does: It slices, dices and alerts you when rabid monkeys are in your neighborhood.

This human tendency will box manufacturers (even the very best ones) into adding features to their products to compete. Do you need all these features? Will you use them regularly? Do you even know if they're important? Again, beginning woodworkers don't know what's important and so I see them pick the tool with more features (even if it costs more) because they "might need that feature someday."

Again, an example: Fancy miter gauges. There are some excellent aftermarket miter gauges out there that will make a perfect dodecahedron every time. How many dodecahedrons have you made this year (or this lifetime)? What most of us need is a miter gauge that makes perfect 90° cuts and will handle a 30" table leg or perhaps 48" in a pinch. But we really like the ones that you can set at any angle perfectly (mine does – so I'm guilty). And if one brand of gauge is missing this feature, it might suffer in the marketplace.

So tonight we go out for our final dinner in Vegas. And as I'm toasting the end of an interesting week, I'll also be thinking hard about what can be done to improve the way we choose tools.

— Christopher Schwarz