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On the first day of my woodworking classes at Dictum GmbH in Bavaria in June, I began with a confession. “I’m afraid that after three years, my German language skills are still crap,” I told the [...]

On the final day of a workbench class, the students either assemble all their benches or pack up the parts in their cars to assemble things at home. Assembly is easy. I usually do it by myself, [...]

When I build a workbench in the old style, the rules for joinery change a bit for me. The strength of the bench comes from the top – not the base. And the amount of contact surface between all [...]

When you build a workbench with an impressively thick top, one of the challenges is cutting it to its finished length. Unless you have an insane circular saw from Mafell. Yup. The chain mortiser [...]

My least-favorite joint to cut by hand is – hands down – a deep mortise. But when you build a French-style workbench, you need to make about a dozen of them. And if you do it by hand, you are …

  Is underway.   i started with some old, nail-sick, UGLY beams from a garage that fell down, old age.    enough for four legs and some other [...]

During the last few years, I’ve been using giant 6×6 softwood timbers to build workbenches for classes and customers. These big hunks look old school and make the construction process quick [...]

I’ve drawbored hundreds and hundreds of joints since 1999, mostly on workbenches I’ve built for myself or with students. That doesn’t mean I know jack buddy about drawboring, as last weekend [...]

Assembling workbenches in the old-school manner is a nail-biter. If the drawbores are too close together, then you drive the peg in and nothing happens. The tenon isn’t pulled into the mortise. [...]

After three days of work, we are going to start assembling the workbenches we are building at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking tomorrow and are coming to a familiar fork in the road. Should [...]

Talking about the motivation for building a French-style handwork bench using lots of power tools is always a discussion that feels like a hall of mirrors. Many of the 16 students in my workbench [...]

When it comes to building furniture in my shop at home, I have zero desire for industrial-grade machinery. But when I need to get a class of students at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking to [...]