I'm headed back to the Center For Furniture Craftsmanship for my 22nd year — hopefully not my last — for one of my favorite and most useful classes. 

PRECISION WITH HAND TOOLS is a class to ramp up your hand tool skills — smoothing surfaces, jointing edges, fitting joints, cutting beads and curves. Only we’ll link those tasks to the reality of building a fun little table with lots of design possibilities. The Fun-O-Meter is going to be pegged.

We’ll use machines lightly where they work best — bandsawing legs and cutting mating mortises and tenons — but otherwise work by hand through a range of typical tasks hand tools do best: flattening, truing, shaping, and smoothing surfaces to a polish. We’ll talk about ways to integrate hand tools in your process, sharpening, tuning, and lots about design and detail.  Our tables will be small, but they are an ideal project to hone some hand tool skills and try out some new design ideas.