Heartwood: Woodworking by Rob Porcaro

At this point in building the machine part of your shop, you would have a thickness planer, a router with key accessories, a router table built or bought, a power drill, and a table saw. What comes next is, I feel, a close call. I suggest a bandsaw. With good quality, size, and blades, it […]

The third machine to buy as you are getting into woodworking and making a shop: the table saw. Clean, accurate, straight cuts along the length of grain, as well as dead-on cross cuts are required for most projects. Angled cuts at 45°, or any angle, are common.  Hand cutting cannot match the speed and accuracy […]

Machine tool number two that I suggest to bring on as you get into woodworking: the router.  To repeat: yes, of course, high quality woodworking can be done without any machine at all, as it has been for hundreds of years. Yet machines do add many advantages of labor, time, fast accuracy, and production.  Routers […]

Having recently been visited by a starting woodworker for some discussion and tips, this topic quickly rose. This moved me to write, so here we go.  You do not absolutely need any machines/power tools. Look in a museum, online, or in a book at some 300 year-old amazing furniture. No electric machines. Though surely one […]

I think it would be good to review and make sense of this handy device that was pictured and cited in the previous post. As you can see from the photo above, this is simply a glue-up of three pieces of flat sawn red oak on a base of plywood. It is 11/16” thick, and […]

I have accumulated attachments for several handy items on the wall just behind the right side of my workbench. This allows for quick grabs and returns of very frequently used helpers. Here they are, left to right, top to bottom: 1. The shop-made tool oiler. I wrote about making this in a 3/29/2009 post: https://www.rpwoodwork.com/blog/2009/03/09/shopmade-tool-oiler/ […]

At this point, I switch from the sharpening station to my scraper set up that I have described in a recent previous post. That rig has been working for around 40 years and still going strong.  It pays off to first use your burnisher (you can read about what I use from a few posts […]

We well start from the beginning.  The edge is made flat, straight, and very smooth at 90°. This can be filed first, though I generally find this unnecessary because all can be readily done with sharpening stones. If you prefer, use a smooth mill file and a piece of wood to hold it square to […]

Now let us consider tuning up the hand scraper. Despite what you may have heard, read, or viewed, this is not a difficult task. What makes some demonstrations and discussions confusing is not presenting a simple understanding of exactly what you need to do with the scraper steel. Most demos do not clearly state what […]

Here are the dozen hand-blade scrapers that I use. In upcoming posts, I will discuss usages, techniques, and how to sharpen them.  These are all steel in the hardness range of Rc 48 – 52. Most are Lee Valley. Lie-Nielsen and Bahco are similarly very good. Thickness dimensions are inches/mm. Top photo, left column, top […]

I wrote about this tool a few years ago, having used it for many more years. It is used for scraper sharpening but it is derived from a saw sharpening device detailed in the book: Tage Frid Teaches Woodworking, Book 1, 1979, page 16. My design is significantly different and used entirely differently.  This holder […]

I enjoyed some instruction classes in the mid-1980s by the late, great Tage Frid at the old Woodcraft store at 313 Montvale Avenue in Woburn, Massachusetts.  That store then was still the only Woodcraft, having moved north from Boston in 1968. Woodcraft started as a one-room shop in Boston’s North End in 1928 and later […]

A burnisher to sharpen scrapers is widely available from many manufacturers in several variations. What works very well for me is one that I developed. As far as I know, this is unique. The rod was made of carbide in sub-micron grain size at my request by Innovative Carbide Inc. in Pennsylvania. The hardness of […]

The previous series of posts showed and explained four ways to secure wood at the workbench to facilitate work. And there are at least a dozen more ways. It should be convenient to set up, work on, and take down.   This key factor has been important since the first time you ever worked on […]

Continuing from the last two posts, let’s now look at gripping an even longer piece of wood by the front vice and extending it to the right, even fully across the length of the bench. We will use a griper easily installed into the tail vice. The tail vise will hold a T-track set into […]