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From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

From the M&T Daily Dispatch 

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