Hannah has been working with me since December for a day or two a week and then working in the classes we have too. She has just finished the construction of her home workbench, which she started two weeks ago. This one flows my latest pattern and dismantles for her to transport it as she …
Of course you can’t uncare because ‘uncare’ is not a verb, and generally we use ‘uncaring’ as the typical adjective. But I used uncare to encourage you to think about something that has increasingly troubled me and it ties in I think with the loss of crafts posts I posted on recently. Uncraftsmanship is not …
Your responses to the last blog came as no surprise. As people accept the ever more mundane of mass making, skills automatically become dumbed down. Manufacturers that once had loyalty on a more local level have gradually sold out and what we thought was still being made domestically by local skills was hidden behind bland …
I listened to a BBC Radio 4 programme with a presenter named Jenny Murray talking about 17 crafts on the ‘Red Endangered List’, where certain crafts are in danger of disappearing. Of course we have seen crafts disappear because there was no use for them anymore. John Seymour wrote a book about the Forgotten Crafts …
An abandoned wardrobe lay bereft of its doors on a burn pile and I tugged on it to lift one end from the pallets below as if the pallets deserved to be there but the massive wardrobe didn’t. It was pine, only pine! I remember hearing the man say. But I tugged on it anyway, …
I once found a mid 19th Century Henry Disston handsaw being sold on eBay and bought it. `it’s a lovely saw and my favourite of all. It’s nott a common item and few will own this one particular type. It’s very lovely. My Disston is possessed and owned by me. It’s actually a small saw …
In the last month I taught workshops in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Israel, filmed a new multipart series that fully updates my most current version on building my home woodworking workbench, taught a nine-day workshop here in the UK (just completed) and indeed kept up with the day to day of keeping all of the …
One or two of you have suggested I consider looking at some different makers of the age, those who are investing time and effort to develop new handsaws. Thank you for your input. Well, I do like what you suggested and the saws do look nice and well made so, great, maybe something is yet …
I bought a panel saw on eBay just recently. The plate steel it’s made from is quite thin for a western saw, but it’s thin on two counts; through maker design first, and then long-term wear. And it’s plate tapers too, like the more modern taper-ground saws of the 1900s, but this one tapers by …
In a fix recently a small toothed dovetail saw needed setting before I could use it and I had no access to the usual nail punch (set USA) I use. I looked high and low for an alternative possibility but found nothing remotely suitable until I found a 2″ long wood screw. Perhaps, I thought …
