A few years ago I cut one dovetail joint a day for ninety days. Pine, because it’s cheap and it cuts easy. The first ones took me an hour. By the end I was down to fifteen or twenty minutes, laying one out and cutting it without thinking much about it. I stacked them on…
My grandmother taught me to drive on the dirt roads of East Texas, in an old International Scout, threading between trees and stumps and ditches on trails that barely counted as roads. Her theory was simple. If I could keep that Scout out of a ditch on a rutted trail, avoiding cars on the interstate…
The most common thing I hear at the Joinery isn’t about a tool. It’s some version of “I don’t know what to build,” and close behind it, “even if I knew, I couldn’t design it.” People say it like it’s the wall between them and the shop. For years I’d answer by pointing them at…
In a lot of organizations right now there’s a quiet double standard about AI. Using it to write code is fine. Encouraged, even. Using it to write a song, make an image, or punch up a piece of copy is treated as something closer to cheating. Same tool, two verdicts. I’m not a software engineer…
This week on The Joiner’s Bench, Alex and I get into something every woodworker runs into eventually — falling out of the habit, and all the little friction points that keep you off the bench. We talk through the usual excuses (the couch is comfortable, I don’t know what to make, I don’t have the…
There’s a guy in every woodworking shop who thinks the power planer is cheating. Sometimes he’s quiet about it. Sometimes he’s got opinions. Either way the argument is old — older than me, and I’m fifty-six. It just keeps changing tools. I run a planer. I also keep hand planes, and a block plane in…
After a few months off, Steven and Alex are back—and committing to every two weeks. This episode opens with what’s on their benches: Alex’s discovery of green-wood carving with a freshly fallen cedar, Steven’s big spring of selling the family home and moving closer to the shop, and the major relayout of The Joinery. They…
Every night I sit in my living room and look across at a whiskey cabinet I built. People who come over tell me it’s beautiful, and I think it is too. It’s a dovetailed case, and somewhere up on top I pared out the wrong side of a tail and left a gap. It sits…
I run a woodworking studio and I haven’t built anything for myself in about three years. Not nothing. I teach, so I’m pushing wood through a saw most weeks. We built benches and storage and assembly tables when we reshuffled the layout last spring. I’m in that building five or six days a week. But…
