When I joined Fine Woodworking, in 2000, the 25th-anniversary issue (FWW #146) was one of the first I worked on. Now, 25 years later, I’m writing a retrospective article for the magazine’s 50th. I’m proud to have worked on the magazine for half of its history.

Many techniques have stayed the same over the years, but when it comes to the tools we use, quite a lot has changed. The explosion of interest in home-shop woodworking touched off a wave of innovation in tools and supplies, one that is still rolling today. In that sense, we’re the luckiest woodworkers in history.

The early years: Fine Woodworking and Garrett Wade

We have a world of fine hand tools to choose from these days. That wasn’t the case in the early 1970s, when hand planes, handsaws, and chisels tended to be contractor-grade. To find better options at that time, you had to dig into the vintage market.

Luckily for the first readers of FWW, just months earlier another important publication had launched: the Garrett Wade tool catalog.

The Garrett Wade story—Garrett Wade’s founder, Garretson Wade Chinn, was a New York City investment banker who had caught the woodworking bug, like so many others at that time. He was frustrated that he couldn’t find the top-quality hand tools he had used as a kid, and he was sure others were too. So he dropped out of the corporate world and began tracking down sources for hundreds of products, mostly in Europe. His first ad, in a woodworking/DIY magazine, received 5,000 responses, and the first Garrett Wade catalogs went out in mid-1975 for $3 apiece.

Other catalogs enter the marketplace—The Woodcraft catalog had been around since the 1960s, and it grew immensely through the 1970s and 1980s. Rockler was already there too, in the form of a small mail-order business called the Minnesota Woodworkers Supply Co. After the woodworking boom, in 1996 it became the Rockler we all know today.

The first Lee Valley woodworking catalog was assembled in 1978, on Leonard Lee’s kitchen table in Ottawa, Ont. Lee partnered with Garry Chinn in order to get started in Canada, and the Lee Valley catalog business grew rapidly. In 1985 the company added its own manufacturing business, Veritas Tools.

In the late 1990s, all of the big catalogs went online, making fine tools and accessories more accessible than ever.

Innovative jigs and fixtures

By the 1980s, the fine-woodworking movement was fully entrenched, and woodworker-inventors began dreaming up helpful jigs and accessories—aftermarket miter gauges, for example. Here are just a few headline grabbers. All of these items are still available in some form or other, and all are still among the best of their kind.

Router jig cuts dovetails with variable spacing—In 1980, frustrated with cutting dovetails by handsaw and chisel, Ken Grisley built the first infinitely adjustable router jig for dovetailing. He sold the initial 12-in. model, the Leigh TD515, which cut through-dovetails, out of his garage workshop in a British Columbia logging town. Many other excellent models have followed.

Biesemeyer fence ends decades of frustration—Although Ken Biesemeyer developed his first T-square-style rip fence in the late 1970s, the product didn’t really take off until the 1980s. Tired of existing rip fences, which were fussy to adjust and wouldn’t clamp reliably parallel to the blade, Biesemeyer developed the simple, solid, smooth-sliding system we all use today.

By choosing not to defend his patent, Biesemeyer gave his fence concept to the world, and almost every saw manufacturer adopted it. It’s still impossible to beat, with its slick, flat, straight faces attached to both sides of a square steel rail, a solid length of angle iron that slides smoothly on a robust front rail, and the little viewing indicator that glides over an easy-to-read measuring tape. Even SawStop couldn’t avoid adopting Biesemeyer’s elegantly effective fence system.

The amazing Multi-Router is back—In 1987, the JDS Company debuted the Multi-Router, a robust three-axis routing fixture. At $3,000 it wasn’t cheap, considering you also had to supply a heavy-duty router to attach to the back. But the smooth motion, solid hold-downs, and adjustable stops meant that you could make accurate mortises in any size, angle, or orientation. Add simple shopmade slip tenons, and you had an unmatched joinery system. An X-Y-Z routing fixture can do a lot more than mortising, of course, and users reported all sorts of new cuts and capabilities, for custom hardware and much more.

After JDS stopped making the Multi-Router, Woodpeckers bought the rights to it and is now offering the same machine at the same price as ever, with some upgrades.

A revolution in power tools

Responding to the home-shop woodworking boom in the 1980s and ’90s, manufacturers began rolling out an army of compact machines, with lower price tags and smaller footprints than their industrial predecessors. Innovative power tools arrived as well.

The miter saw replaces the radial-arm saw—Debuted by Rockwell in the 1960s, the portable power miter saw changed residential construction. Slowly accepted in woodworking shops in the decades that followed, the miter saw eventually displaced the radial-arm saw, which had been a woodworking staple.

Soon enough, woodworkers were making their finer crosscuts on a new array of table saws, and their rougher ones on miter saws. With a couple of tweaks—a zero-clearance throat plate and an aftermarket blade—a miter saw is also capable of fine crosscuts with zero chipout.

Lunch-box planers bring milling to the masses—Planers became a lot more accessible in the 1980s with the advent of the compact “lunch box” version, debuted first by Ryobi. Like the miter saw, this portable machine was imported from the construction industry. While benchtop models can’t take the whopping 1/8-in. whacks of wood at a pass the way their industrial counterparts can, they leave an excellent surface with minimal snipe on boards up to 12 in. wide—in short, 95 percent of what we all use.

Random-orbit changes the sanding game—Debuting in the 1990s, random-orbit (RO) sanders soon displaced simpler orbital “finish sanders” that removed material much more slowly and tended to leave swirl marks behind. Borrowed from the auto-body industry, RO sanders offered a compound motion of elliptical vibration and slow rotation, creating a random vibration pattern that, when used properly, removed material relatively quickly without leaving obvious swirl marks. These affordable tools made it quicker and easier to achieve a beautiful finish.

Router lift makes table-routing easy—JessEm, a family-owned operation in New Brunswick, Canada, put itself on the woodworking map in 1999 with the first-ever router lift, which grabbed just the motor/body of a router and moved it up and down on robust posts and threaded columns.

With JessEm’s Rout-R-Lift, rather than having to screw a router base to the bottom of a piece of plywood and then reach below to make height adjustments—or remove the router entirely to make bit changes—you could make bit and height changes from above. This made table-routing as convenient as using an industrial shaper, and the router lift helped the router table replace the shaper in most woodworking shops. Combined with a dedicated router motor, the router lift is a lot cheaper than those floor-standing shapers that came before it, and a lot less scary. In addition, router bits are much cheaper than shaper cutters.

Lie-Nielsen vs. Veritas: A win-win for woodworkers

Among the many companies, small and large, that sprang up to supply the growing army of woodworkers with fine hand tools, two stand out, with unmatched combinations of performance and value. And they did it with diametrically opposed approaches.

Lie-Nielsen: Improving on tradition—Tom Lie-Nielsen founded Lie-Nielsen Toolworks in 1981 by reviving vintage Stanley hand-plane designs, improving them, and manufacturing them to a high standard in his machine shop in coastal Maine.

Simply put, Lie-Nielsen planes were better than anything on the market, and soon they were selling as quickly as Lie-Nielsen could make them. The flagship No. 4 has earned a place in the shops of many woodworkers, who are more than willing to pay $300 for a plane that makes perfect shavings in the toughest woods. The same goes for the Lie-Nielsen No. 102 Low-Angle Block Plane, a little gem that every user falls in love with.

Lee Valley–Veritas: Design from the ground up—From the beginning, Veritas designed woodworking tools by building and testing original prototypes, before settling on a design that was different from anything seen before. And those innovative hand tools have garnered scores of awards in FWW for their combination of innovation and value.

Veritas engineers also borrowed cutting-edge technologies from other industries, like the powdered metal used in aircraft landing gear, which Veritas uses in its super-tough PMV-11 chisels and plane blades, or the fiber-impregnated resin that forms the spine of the company’s award-winning handsaws, which sell for half the price of their competitors.

Construction industry gave us cordless tools

By the 1980s, cordless drills with removable batteries were taking over construction job sites. Soon afterward they began showing up in woodshops. The drill was a natural pick for cutting the cord.

A handheld drill needs to go everywhere, and its power needs are relatively modest compared to saws and sanders, for example.

In the 2000s, many of us replaced at least one of our cordless drills with a cordless impact driver, which uses a staccato series of rotational impacts to drive screws almost effortlessly into the toughest woods, without straining your wrist or stripping the screw head.

As battery power and capacity have improved, the industry has cut the cord on piles of other power tools. Trim routers and track saws are two new favorites. Without a cord trailing behind them, dragging and snagging on whatever it can, these tools leave you free to focus on making a safe, smooth cut.

SawStop forces change

In 1999, woodworker, physicist, and patent attorney Steve Gass invented an incredible cartridge device that stops a table-saw blade just milliseconds after it touches fingers or any other body part. That’s fast enough to limit the worst cut to a tiny nick, treatable with a single adhesive bandage. No one saw it coming, and it changed woodworking forever.

Gass’s original intent was to license the device to all of the major saw manufacturers, but that hit a bunch of snags—probably inevitable in retrospect. For one, table-saw manufacturers weren’t sure the device would work in real-world situations for decades to come. Secondly, it would require that their existing saws be significantly redesigned to build in pivoting trunnions that would allow the blade to swing downward and drop below the table when the cartridge was triggered. And each company would have to rebuild every saw in its line to avoid legal liability for any unaltered models it continued to sell.

So Gass decided to build the new table saws himself. The first SawStop cabinet saw debuted in 2004 and was the biggest news to hit the industry in decades. Gass followed it up with a range of smaller, more affordable models, all of which were just as successful as the first.

Gass designed every part of his saws to perform as well as his blade-braking cartridges, and they now dominate table-saw sales in the woodworking world. There are even portable models for job-site use and for those working wood in very small spaces.

Industry responds with riving knives—While the other saw manufacturers were either unwilling or unable to incorporate the SawStop technology in their own machines, they responded by backing a ruling from the Consumer Product Safety Commission for a safety upgrade that is arguably just as important.

Mandated in Europe long before it was required here in North America, the riving knife is a table-saw splitter that puts the traditional U.S. version to shame. Instead of sitting high above the blade, in a static position, it rises, falls, and pivots with the blade. Better yet, riving knives are available in a low-profile version that sits just below the apex of the blade, so it can stay on the saw for nonthrough cuts and every other type of cut except dadoes.

That means it is always there to do it’s all-important job—to sit in the blade kerf and prevent kickback. Contrast that with old-school splitters, which had to be removed for nonthrough cuts and were therefore usually discarded altogether, leading to many thousands of completely preventable, often catastrophic, table-saw accidents.

Riving knives were mandated on all new saws sold from 2012 on, instantly making woodworking safer. When you consider the fact that most hand-to-blade contact is caused by kickback, you’ll understand how critical that riving knife mandate was.

Getting serious about dust collection

In 2002, wood dust went from being a nuisance to an official health risk. That’s when the U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health put wood dust on its list of “known carcinogens,” linking it to a variety of nose, throat, and lung cancers. Awareness was also growing about wood species that can trigger an allergic response in some people—dangerous for some and annoying for others. Worse, people can become sensitized to certain woods even if they weren’t allergic to them to start with.

The woodworking industry responded with a range of helpful products and a better sense of how to keep fine dust out of workshop air. The first step is collecting it at the source, wherever you can, using a full-size dust collector for machines and a shop vacuum for power tools. The industry made this easier by incorporating exhaust ports into more machines, from table saws to disk sanders.

The second line of defense is much better filtration on the back end. Out are the old permeable bags that captured chips but not the most dangerous dust. In are HEPA-level filters that capture the fine powder that hangs the longest in the air and penetrates deepest into lungs.

Modern game-changers

While innovation has slowed a bit over the past 10 or 20 years, reflecting the fact that most of the needs of modern woodworkers were addressed during the first 30 years of the boom, breakthroughs continue to emerge, some small and incremental, but others almost as big as the first SawStop.

Festool Domino makes joinery quick and simple—In some ways, Festool might be the most innovative tool manufacturer of all. Its multichuck cordless drills are still the best out there, as are its Rotex sander, its track saws, and its impressive array of dust extractors (shop vacuums).

Festool carved out a huge niche in the market by engineering handheld power tools at the same price level where other companies were engineering new woodworking machines. Most of these found their way into the hands of high-end construction contractors, but the smaller world of woodworking received them gratefully as well. The tools are expensive, but they quickly earn their keep for woodworking pros and prolific hobbyists.

Among all of Festool’s innovative products, the Domino joinery system is the most revolutionary. As I reported in early 2007 (Tools and Materials, FWW #190), the first Domino DF 500 was one of those true game-changers. The handheld power tool looks and works like a biscuit joiner, but the oscillating bit makes deep mortises instead of shallow slots. There are multiple bit sizes, and the oscillation can be set wider or narrower for different tenon widths. Team that up with the precise slip tenons Festool offers, and you have a complete joinery system that can assemble all of the parts of a table, for example, in less than one hour—and, as a bonus, slot the rails for tabletop clips.

Segmented cutterheads change milling—Byrd Tool invented the first Shelix cutterhead in 1979, but it took a couple of decades for it to migrate into smaller woodworking machines. Once it did, there was no going back.

Instead of the straight, steel knives on traditional planers and jointers, the Byrd Tool cutterhead had small carbide teeth arrayed in a helical pattern. The name “Shelix” came from the fact that the edge of each little insert cutter was ground to a curve to match that same helix, meaning the cutterhead sheared the wood away instead of hitting it head-on like a straight knife. The cutting action was also continuous, which made these cutterheads much quieter as well. The cutters were carbide, able to hold their edges 20 times longer than steel. And they were four-sided, so they could simply be rotated when they did eventually become dull. That made cutter changes much easier than they were with the old knives, which got nicked and dull so much more quickly to begin with.

Later, the industry realized that the edges of the teeth didn’t need to be curved to get most of the benefits of a segmented cutterhead, and it introduced a variety of heads with similar small, carbide cutters that simply can be rotated to present a fresh edge to the work. They aren’t curved for true shear cutting, but they produce similarly tearout-free cuts.

A variety of manufacturers now offer segmented heads on their jointers and planers, and replacement versions are available from Byrd and others for almost every existing machine out there, large and small.

Innovations keep rolling in

Although most tool manufacturing happens in Asia these days, there are a number of companies in North America and Europe that have kept design and manufacturing at home in order to stay on the cutting edge. Festool, Woodpeckers, JessEm, and PantoRouter are just a few examples.

The PantoRouter story—Individual inventors, without the deep pockets of the big tool companies, can still come up with a big hit from time to time—something that someone else somehow hasn’t thought of before.

The PantoRouter is one of those successes. After being invented in Canada by Matthias Wandel, who featured it on his popular YouTube channel, Kuldeep Singh of Kyoto, Japan, built a more robust and accurate version. Then Mac Sheldon of Oregon City, Ore., dedicated himself to manufacturing and marketing a commercial version, complete with a host of clever joinery templates.

The PantoRouter harnesses the pantograph principle, used to reproduce drawings at various scales, to make matching mortises and tenons. The ingenious tapered templates allow you to adjust the tenon size in tiny increments for a perfect fit right off the machine. Dial in one set of joints, and a pile of others can be machined in minutes.

Digital fabrication comes of age

Not all of us want to turn our work over to a computer, but for those who embrace digital tools, computer numerical control (CNC) has ushered in brand-new ways of working wood. Large, table-mounted CNC routing systems are used mostly by woodworking pros and cabinetry manufacturers, but entry-level systems are more affordable and user-friendly than ever. And we now have a handheld CNC router, made by Shaper Tools.

Digital fabrication is not limited to CNCs. Using a tiny stream of molten plastic—row after row, layer after layer—3D printers create precisely sized objects. If you can design a solid object on a computer, a 3D printer likely can build it. Today’s entry-level models, like the A1 from Bambu Labs ($490), are better and more affordable than ever.

I know a number of hobbyists and pros who use 3D printers to create all of their routing templates, for mortising and much more. These can be much more complex and customized than you could otherwise construct, and precision is guaranteed. Clamping fences can be built in, or screw holes added for attaching wood fences.

The woodworking renaissance of the past 50 years has driven a surge in innovation. While many of the techniques we use haven’t changed, our tools keep getting better, making fine woodworking more accessible than ever. The innovations presented here are just a small sample of the bounty at our disposal. I hope this article makes you feel grateful to be a modern woodworker, with so many amazing tools at your disposal. But always remember that tools exist to help you make things. So go ahead and do that: Make something today.

—Asa Christiana lives in Portland, Ore., where he serves as FWW’s editor at large.