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From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

I made my earliest attempt at earning a living through woodworking as a teenager by making canoe paddles. I had a table saw, a Stanley block plane, a palm sander, a small bandsaw, and inspiration. I built a workbench with a particle-board top and fastened a cheap vise to the corner, and also employed one of those Black & Decker Workmate portable benches (still, the Pinnacle of Portable Workholding, in my mind). I had recently taken up canoeing, my brother and I having saved to buy a red plastic 15' Coleman craft for our voyageur adventuring in the local waterways. Problem was, the only paddles available were those ugly plastic-and-aluminum t-handled things you see everywhere, as well as flat and uninspiring...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

I don’t care what style of workbench you’ve got – you can make it better with a few simple tweaks. The recommendations I make in this video will cost you nothing. I do not pump exotic fixtures or elaborate wagon vise mechanisms. Instead, I try to help you think about your bench differently. With a more flexible mindset, you will be able to approach your work with an openness and creativity that task-dedicated fixtures rarely inspire. -Joshua

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

Templates have been in use for a very long time, probably as long as people have been making things, simply because they are the best way to transfer shapes with repeatable accuracy. Wheelwrights used them to lay out curved wheel parts (felloes), coopers for shaping tapered barrel staves, and carpenters for anything from fancy stair trim to porch brackets. Even centuries ago, furniture makers used patterns as I do today: for laying out the shapely curves of a pleasing table leg or case foot, for chair legs, the serpentine curve of a tabletop, and more. An indication of how much patterns were relied upon – and just one of many examples – is in the unique shape of cabriole legs,...

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

In my most recent newsletter email sent out last Friday, I explained that the end of this year has encouraged me into an even deeper reflection than usual about the work done in the past 12 months and what I hope to accomplish in the next 12. I mentioned that there are so many different motivations people have in taking up a handcraft, and I submitted a query. “With all the trinkets of mass production only one-clickTM away, why would a person take up tools to make their own things?” I asked. “Why bother? Why are you going to pick up tools in 2023? And how are you going to fit it into your life?” On Monday morning, Mike and I...

When the time comes around to pore over our authors’ newly submitted rough drafts, I can't help but reflect on the process for past issues of the magazine. It might be because we print the magazine “just” twice per year, or because we invest ourselves so heavily into our authors’ worlds and spend a ton of time with each and every sentence, or because we intentionally don’t recycle content, but every published article sticks out in memory with a funny or compelling story behind it. Some, you might easily guess. For example, spending days hanging out with Roy Underhill for Issue Eight was a riot. We went for lunch one day at his favorite local burrito joint, then strolled to...