Essential Tool Kit

Flatness. Squareness. Smoothness. No twist. These are words that make cabinetmaker’s happy. Wood, you see, is a capricious material. It doesn’t come in lumps like clay, or billets but to specific sizes like steel. It comes in trees.

When you start using hand tools, you’ll begin to develop a minor obsession with your chisels. Or, ahem, at least I did. There is something about the fact that the chisel is such a personal tool. When you use a chisel for paring work, the steel is literally millimetres from your fingertips.

I need to be honest here. Almost all of my sawing is done on the machines. Now, of course, you can do all your sawing by hand if you want. But in this article we will concern ourselves with the few precision hand saws you’ll need at your bench.

When we think of a woodwork toolkit, we tend to only consider things that will cut. But a significant part of my toolkit, both in terms of size and importance, is a well-chosen selection of precision measuring and marking tools. Tools I can trust to deliver the accuracy I need.