It’s hard to say when I started to see certain differences in my world of woodworking from that of others. I think mostly it began in the USA. before I migrated I only knew of what I saw in woodworking magazines, in my own rather isolated world of making where there seemed to be a …
It shouldn’t surprise me how often I see someone check an internal corner for square using a basic 12″ square or worse still a speed square, but it’s not something to rely on most of the time. Even carpenters do it and whereas today they think it’s a good and positive test, in the past, …
Taking twist, cup and bow out of rough-sawn stock and making it flat is a simple enough machining process provided you own the machine/s, the extraction system and the place to permanently house everything indoors. To tackle it correctly you need either two planers or a combination under and over surface and thickness planer. These …
I don’t think that we should ever lose sight of some basic but very interesting realities with regard to the craft of hand-making furniture and other woodwork. How often do we fail to understand that the joints we use today have been with us for centuries and that despite interesting developments in technologies no new …
It’s a fallacy to think that we can constrain wood indefinitely by weighting during drying but it is done in the industry. Sticker the boards and beams to allow air or steam circulation between the layers and the weight keeps the boards from over distorting. The wood comes out relatively dry and remains stickered and …
‘The taming of the skew’ was once the title of an article or two written by a famed woodturner of the day three-plus decades ago. It related to his explanation of working with the skew chisel in woodturning. This man’s experience was from working as a full-time woodturner turning handles and knobs by hand and …
It’s Katrina (Paul’s daughter in law). The builders have just finished a pretty extensive remodel, including loft conversion, of the upstairs of Sellers Home, Paul’s home in Oxfordshire, UK. Paul has been making all the furniture for his house and he is about to do the same for the bedrooms. You can watch along on …
There was never any doubt in my mind as to the respect our Queen Elizabeth II had for her people. In these past ten days of mourning I have seen that respect reflected back to her in the faces of the people she served so loyally. Respect takes many forms. The root of the word …
Woven throughout woodworking there are the rights and wrongs to the way we work wood that defy being written down and yet the information would be very helpful. Read any book on woodworking and no one wrote about the direction of the grain when cutting dovetails. It’s a foregone conclusion that they go at the …
