Woodwork Handbook is a small independent site. It is run and written by a hobbyist woodworker, not by a trade professional, a shop instructor, or a manufacturer. We think you should know that before you take advice from us, so it is on this page rather than buried.
That is a real limit, and it changes what we do. Because the writing is not backed by decades at a bench, it is backed by sources instead. We would rather look up a torque figure than remember one.
Every guide starts with the question a reader actually typed, not with a topic. We read what is already published on it, find where the existing answers stop short or disagree, and write to that gap. Specifications, dimensions, safety limits and tool capabilities are checked against a source before they are published — never written from memory.
Where a project or technique has been built or tried here, the guide says so. Where it has not, the guide does not imply otherwise. You will not find invented shop stories on this site.
Where a specific claim depends on one of these, the guide cites it in the text. We do not cite a source to decorate a paragraph — only where it is doing work.
Some of what we publish is read by parents and teachers deciding which tools to put in a child's hands. We treat that as the highest-stakes writing on the site.
Age guidance is drawn from published educational and trade-school material, not from our own judgement about what a given child can manage. Where sources disagree, we give the more cautious figure. Where a tool has a manufacturer age or supervision recommendation, that recommendation wins over anything we would otherwise say. And we state supervision requirements explicitly rather than leaving them implied.
None of this replaces the judgement of the adult in the room. You know the child; we do not.
We would rather be corrected than be wrong quietly.
Every guide shows the date it was last updated at the top of the page. If you find an error — a wrong measurement, an out-of-date tool, a safety limit that does not match the manufacturer, a link that has rotted — email team@woodworkhandbook.com. We will check it, fix what is wrong, and update that page's date so you can see it has changed.
Some links on this site are affiliate links. Our full affiliate disclosure is in the privacy policy. An affiliate link never decides what we recommend and never changes what a guide says.