Would you rather be sharpening your tools or using them?  Gladstone bets you’d prefer using their marking knife rather than sharpening it, so they gave it a ceramic blade that never needs to be sharpened. Gladstone makes their marking knives in the USA using a material called Ceremax 80 ̵...

Grabbing and holding small components with tweezers is hard enough in good light, but if you’re working in a poorly lit and confined space don’t worry about grabbing the flashlight — grab a pair of illuminated tweezers instead. Push the on/off switch on General’s Illuminated ...

Simple hardware like the right-sized knobs can be difficult to find when you need them, and you can pay a whole lot more that you’d think proper once you do.  Snap-Lock knobs are a cheap and versatile solution.  They allow you to assemble your own custom knobs using the nut or bolt of your c...

Once you see Festool’s new parallel guide system, you may start to question whether you really need your table saw.  The system works in conjunction with their guide rail to give you consistent rip cuts. The guide has a pair of stops that hold the edge of the material parallel to the rip guid...

Adjustable and accurate don’t have to be mutually exclusive when you talk about squares.  This adjustable-angle T-square from Bridge City Tool Works gives you both an accurate 90° angle and an adjustable angle in one beautiful and expensive package. Use the AS-24 just like any other fixed-an...

The edge of regular sanding discs can dig into your prized work, but New Wave sanding discs have wavy edges that curl over the side of the sanding pad, so the edge doesn’t come in contact with the workpiece. The high-quality sanding discs are constructed from flexible C-weight paper with a loo...

The selection of engineered building materials available to contractors and the general public gets bigger and better every year — there’s melamine, plywood, Baltic birch plywood, chipboard, MDO, MDF, particle board, phenolic, and more.  One of the relative newcomers, phenolic-faced ply...

Woodworkers have brass setup bars for precision setup — machinists have gauge blocks.  You stack a series of gauge blocks to match the desired measurement, for accurately checking and setting measurements and calibrating instruments. Precision-milled from super-hard carbide steel, each of the...

As the snow starts to melt, you notice that the snowplow driver took some liberty guessing where the road ended and your yard began.  Don’t be too hard on him — it’s pretty tough to tell at 2 in the morning.  Next time give him a break and mark your driveway or curb with a lighte...

Unless you like flirting with danger, you probably don’t want to rip thin strips against your table saw fence. The correct way is to cut the strips on the opposite side of the blade, leaving the meat of the wood between the fence and the blade, but doing it this way you have to recalculate the...