Hand Tools

The Complete Guide to Sharpening

Lee, a well-known tool manufacturer, covers the practical and technical information to sharpen tools quickly, efficiently and safely. Descriptive photos, clear line drawings and step-by-step instructions show exactly how to improve the performance and safety of any cutting tool. 255 photos.

The Handplane Book

Woodworkers beware: Garrett Hack has put together a completely irresistible book, beautifully illustrated with color photographs, drawings, diagrams, and everything you would ever want or need to know about the handplane, the ultimate woodworker's tool. Hack covers the history of planes back to Roman times, and explains how to tune and sharpen a handplane, how to use the many different varieties properly, and how to purchase the right kind of plane. In a world where most woodwork is done with machine tools and mechanized wood-shaping devices, The Handplane Book is an ode to the wonders of the beautiful work done with a tool many modern woodworkers have probably forgotten.

Handplanes evoke the romance of an earlier era, when they performed countless woodworking tasks from preparing stock to shaping moldings. In The Handplane Book, aficionado Garrett Hack reveals the rich heritage of this classic tool with a treasure trove of information and history, including detailed guidance on how to buy a plane, tune it up, and use it. Lavishly illustrated with 175 photos and 152 illustrations, Hack engagingly traces the tool's lineage from Roman times to the present, with emphasis on the golden age of handplanes from the late 19th and the early 20th centuries.

Hand Tools: Their Ways and Workings

A longtime woodworker's illustrated guide to the tools of the trade and how to use them. For those who would like to have the benefit of a woodworker's extensive experience with hand tools, this is the book to own. Crammed with practical information, it is the next best thing to looking over a craftsman's shoulder as he works with his tools, asking questions and getting straight answers in plain language, seeing how each tool is held and manipulated to get the best work out of it. From bit brace, chisel, and mallet to saws, specialized planes, drawknife, and spokeshave, Aldren Watson describes in detail the actions of the tools basic to good woodworking. All the procedures are explicitly illustrated with handsome line drawings, and an appendix gives plans and dimensions for making a workbench and other necessary pieces of shop equipment. With 450 b/w illustrations by the author.

Hand Tool Essentials: Refine Your Power Tool Projects with Hand Tool Techniques (Popular Woodworking)

Hand tools (tools that are not powered, such as hammers and chisels) are currently the hot trend in woodworking purchases.

Hand tools require specialized training. Without it, the experience will be disappointing.

Learning to use woodworking hand tools properly makes it easier to understand how power tools work, plus they offer a quieter, safer and more pleasant woodworking experience. This book shows the woodworker how hand tools can be used in tandem with their power tools to produce superior work, improving and enriching their woodworking experience. Readers will learn to use mallets, chisels & gouges, wood- and metal-bodied planes, wood- and metal-bodied spokeshaves, measuring and marking tools, rasps, awls, Eastern and Western handsaws and other hand tool accessories.

Quality Toolbox

The Toolbox Book: A Craftsman's Guide to Tool Chests, Cabinets, and Storage Systems (Craftsman's Guide to)

Winner of the 1996 Stanley Award for best how-to book. "Ideas and inspiration galore".--"Wooden Boat Review". 190 color photos. 100 drawings.

Measure Twice, Cut Once: Simple Steps to Measure, Scale, Draw and Make the Perfect Cut-Every Time. (Popular Woodworking)

Completely revised with updated information on furniture design, measurement/layout tools, the layout process and new tips for preventing and fixing mistakes.

Updated with all-new color drawings and design.

More than simply a workshop math book, this must have resource teaches readers everything they need to know about measuring tools and how to use them properly. Readers will learn basic measuring in relation to human proportions for furniture as well as proportioning systems for attractive, usable and comfortable furniture. The book includes instruction on how to:

• draw sketches and plans
• develop cutting lists
• lay out cuts and cut to the line
• choose which saw for the best cut

And much more!

Homemade Contrivances and How to Make Them: 1001 Labor-Saving Devices for Farm, Garden, Dairy, and Workshop

One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw

In 1999, an editor of the New York Times Magazine approached Witold Rybczynski, the well-known student of architecture and urban design, and asked him to write a short essay on the best and most useful common tool of the past millennium. Rybczynski took the assignment, but when he began to look into the history of the items in his workshop--hammers and saws, levels and planes--he found that almost all of them had pedigrees that extended well into antiquity. Nearly ready to admit defeat, he asked his wife for ideas. Her answer was inspired: "You always need a screwdriver for something."

True enough. And, Rybczynski discovered, the screwdriver is a relative newcomer in humankind's arsenal of gadgetry, an invention of the late European Middle Ages and the only major mechanical device that the Chinese did not independently invent. Leonardo da Vinci got to it early on, of course, as he did so many other things, designing a number of screw-cutting machines with interchangeable gears. Still, it took generations for the screw (and with it the screwdriver and lathe) to come into general use, and it was not until the modern era that such improvements as slotted and socket screws came into being.

Rybczynski's explorations into that lineage, here expanded to book length, are highly entertaining, and sure to engage readers interested in the origins of everyday things. --Gregory McNamee

The Best Tool of the Millennium

The seeds of Rybczynski's elegant and illuminating new book were sown by The New York Times, whose editors asked him to write an essay identifying "the best tool of the millennium." An award-winning author who once built a house using only hand tools, Rybczynski has intimate knowledge of the toolbox -- both its contents and its history -- which serves him beautifully on his quest.

One Good Turn is a story starring Archimedes, who invented the water screw and introduced the helix, and Leonardo, who sketched a machine for carving wood screws. It is a story of mechanical discovery and genius that takes readers from ancient Greece to car design in the age of American industry. Rybczynski writes an ode to the screw, without which there would be no telescope, no microscope -- in short, no enlightenment science. One of our finest cultural and architectural historians, Rybczynski renders a graceful, original, and engaging portrait of the tool that changed the course of civilization.

Antique Trader Tools Price Guide

Gain reliable information from the expert author, whose auction house conducts more than 15 tool auctions annually, and owns the world-record auction of a Plow Plane that sold for $114,000.

Contains more than 700 stunning color photos that serve as a blueprint to the intensely active world of collectible tools.

The very tools that literally helped build a nation are among today's most coveted collectibles. Elegant and ingenious in design, antique hand tools are as beautiful today as they were once essential, and in this skillfully crafted price guide these tools take center stage. This new, full-color edition covers the most popular collectible tool categories from the late 18th century through the middle of the 20th century, including:

• Planes and Saws
• Screwdrivers and Wrenches
• Levels and axes
• Rules and tool chests