White pencil is often recommended for use when laying out parts in walnut. I don’t like the white pencils I have tried. They are too soft and waxy making them draw heavy lines and the lines are hard to remove. Bob Vandyke, the director of the Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking, suggested using red pencil instead. So far I like it much better than the white pencils I have tried. If you are not happy with the white pencils you might want to give the red pencils a try. They are easy to see, hold a point better than the white and are easy to remove.

Keep Your Layout Pencils Sharp

This is an old draftsman’s tool used in the days when part drawings were done by hand. The PC days……………..as in Pre Computer! In fact this type of pencil pointer was sold wherever draftsman’s tools were…

If you have been around many hand planes then I’m sure you have seen a handle/tote that looks like the one above. When I first began seeing these broken totes I just assumed the cause was a dropped plane. As time went on I kept seeing this condition, but began to take note that the planes were almost never broken. How could this be? These early planes were cast from gray iron. This is ordinary iron with little or no alloying materials added. It contains a lot of carbon, in the form of graphite, and is very brittle, as can be seen in this video. The question became, how could all of the broken totes that I have seen occurred without breaking the brittle plane body or the frog? The answer……….they could not! So there had to be another cause, or more likely causes.

Recently two people have come to…