Let’s not let these tools go to waste. They’re workhorses with lots of good work left to do. We’ve already been getting great feedback about our latest course, Back to the Bench. I can tell this material was long overdue.
-Joshua
In this new video, Mike walks through some basic saw troubleshooting. You don’t have to be an expert to get your saw working more smoothly – all you need is to pay attention and to apply a few basic adjustments. Or hit it with a hammer.
Over on the YouTube channel, we’ve put up the first installment of our new “Get to Work” video series where we show you the ins and outs of cleaning up and using antique hand tools. In this video, Joshua walks through selecting, repairing, and cleaning up a wooden-bodied handplane. Sometimes you come across a beat-up old plane in a box at a flea market or antique store and you wonder if it can be saved – this video will help answer that question. These tools are meant to be used, not to decorate the walls of restaurants. Let’s get them back in service.
-Mike
Imagine woodworking with no boundaries.
Imagine having all the tools you need at your fingertips with a gesture.
Imagine being able to transcend the struggles of difficult grain, dull tools, sticky glue, and a deficient skillset.
Today we are announcing the next chapter in woodworking.
The future is going to be beyond anything that we can imagine.
-Mike
Now that we’ve covered the shop and benches in our video series, we’re moving into tools. This time, Mike discusses the use of the fore plane (as well as his scrub plane). These planes are our workhorses – at least 75% of our planing is handled by these guys. If you don’t have a heavily cambered plane with a wide-open mouth, you’re not going to be able to work with any efficiency. You need one of these planes.
The above video is part two of our “Setting Up Shop” series. These are nothing fancy – basically just turn the camera on and blather, but sometimes informal clips like these prove to be some of the most useful resources when you’re just starting out. In this video, I discuss the three types of workbenches in our shop: The 12' English joiner’s bench, the low “Roman” bench, and my 6' travel bench. I cover the overall construction considerations, the dimensions, and workholding. In my opinion, the simpler and stouter a bench is, the better.
– Joshua
Mike and I just posted a new installment of our YouTube series: “Ask M&T”. In this video, we cover one of the most frequent questions we get online or at shows: What is a fore plane? Mike recounts his early struggles with hand tools using a little block plane to remove bulk material and eventually realized he was using the wrong tool for the job. What he needed was the coarse roughing tool called a fore plane. In this video, we explain why we believe this tool is absolutely essential for every hand-tool woodworker. We then touch on the history of the terms “fore” plane, “jack” plane, and “scrub” plane and explain our preference for the wooden version. There...
My oldest boy, Eden, loves experimental archaeology. After the occasional primitive technology video binge, he heads outside to living it out in our woods. Ever since Mike and I started making videos for M&T, Eden’s been asking to make his own instructional videos. A month or so ago, we had a spur of the moment inspiration and Eden demonstrated how he’s been making his own bow and arrows with stone tools he shaped himself. This video is no joke. I had no part in this at all except filming. I actually didn’t even know he was getting this involved in this stuff. It’s pretty neat to see an eight-year-old come up with this stuff on his own. I also adore...
Roy Underhill's books, I believe, are vastly underrated. It seems that every page contains not only loads of useful information about hand-tool woodworking, but historical context, interesting anecdotes, folklore, and typical Roy hilarity. Really, stuff that you can't find anywhere else. Paging through one of his books (The Woodwright's Companion) recently, I stumbled upon a short chapter about whetstones. The popular opinion of today is that we need a wide array of dead-flat, precisely-graded sharpening stones in order to keep our tools sharp and usable, but this isn't the case historically. Roy mentions that in many old towns in Europe, the stone step of the stairway of a certain house was often discovered incidentally to be a good whetstone, and...
The thermometer read 1F when I started the car before dawn, and the wind had been rattling the house all night. These minor details didn’t matter one bit, however, as today was the annual Grand Re-Opening of the Liberty Tool Company in Liberty, Maine. Tool pilgrims from all over flock to this place for its reliably well-stocked supply of hand tools, from the common to the esoteric. And every year, after a long winter’s slumber and limited hours, the store re-opens with all-new inventory of picked and reasonably-priced antique goodies. Incredibly, neither Joshua nor I had ever ventured down for this event, but today would change that. Each of us roused our respective eldest boys out of bed (this is...
