A woodworking-tool site that shows its work

Dovetail & Dust is an independent publisher of woodworking-tool reviews and buying guides. We are not a store, we are not owned by a tool brand, and we are not a testing lab. What we are is a small, opinionated site that reads the manuals, compiles the published specs, does the arithmetic, and tells you what the numbers actually mean for a real shop.

Who is Stephen V.?

I'm Stephen, the editor here, and I want to be straight with you about what that means. I'm a genuine woodworking enthusiast — someone who cares a lot about tools and gets a real kick out of comparing them — not a tenured tradesman with a workshop full of test rigs. I read the manuals, compile the published specifications, and do the math. No lab coat.

That framing matters, because a lot of tool sites lean on borrowed authority: vague claims of decades in the trade, or "we tested 40 routers" language that nobody can check. I'd rather earn your trust the boring, honest way — by showing you exactly where every number came from and how every pick was reasoned out.

Why this site exists

Buying a tool should not require an afternoon of cross-referencing manufacturer PDFs, decoding CFM ratings, and guessing whether a price you found on a forum from two years ago still holds. Most of that work is repetitive, arithmetic-heavy, and perfectly suited to being done once, carefully, and written down. That is the job Dovetail & Dust set out to do: take the published information that is already out there, organize it, run the calculations it supports, and turn it into a recommendation you can act on in five minutes.

We cover hand tools, power tools, dust collection, joinery, and shop setup — from a first apartment workshop to a serious fine-furniture bench. Every roundup ranks real, currently sold tools and explains the trade-offs in plain language.

The honesty stance

Here is the part most sites bury: we do not run a testing lab, and we say so. We do not own the tools, we have not run any tool through a controlled bench test, and we will never pretend otherwise. Our on-page scores are editorial judgments built from documented research — published specifications, manufacturer manuals, and owner reviews read at volume — not measurements from a lab we don't have.

That sounds like a limitation, and in one narrow sense it is. But it also means everything we publish is reproducible: you could pull the same spec sheets and reach the same conclusions. If you want the full picture of how we choose, read our methodology, and if you want to know how we keep the lights on, read the affiliate disclosure. Both are written to be read, not skimmed past.

Independent, not a storefront

We earn a commission when you buy through some of our links, at no extra cost to you. That commission never changes a ranking — when the cheaper tool is the smarter buy, we say so plainly. We are a publisher pointing you toward the right product; the actual sale, price, and terms belong to the retailer at checkout.

Getting in touch

Found a factual error, a price that looks off, or a spec we misread? That is exactly the kind of message we want. Head to our contact pageand tell us — corrections are a priority, not an inconvenience. You can also read our editorial policy to see how we handle accuracy and updates.