I have worked in workshops with massive machine tenoners large enough to cut both sides of the tenon on an 8″ x 12″ beam in one pass and it comes out perfectly parallel with shoulders perfectly square ever time. Truth is that I really detested the whole set up thing and the separation from my…

  Pine, spruce and fir I’ve worked with many different types of pine throughout every one of my 48 years since I picked up my first piece of Russian redwood to carve a boat from. Whereas people generally consider pine (and other such softwoods) second-rate soft wood, or, worse still, junk wood, I consider pine…

Well, these tenons are 8″ long, 7/8″ thick and 11″ wide in oak. These are practical steps for low budget making and without table saws and crosscuts or radial arm saws. It took me 13 minutes per side which is less than 1/2 and hour per tenon. The are accurate to within a very small…

Well, in answer to questions about which saws to buy, which planes I recommend and a few other such questions, I will try to answer them here. I have used old and modern hand tools for almost five decades. Some that I still use I bought as an apprentice somewhere around 1965 from Mr Cheapy…

Here are the before and after… …after reshaping, staining and protective coats and a couple of hours serious clean up and degrunging.   How can it be that a plane functions so much more responsively when it’s clean, refined and lovely to look at? It’s the same with Stanley planes that were made up until…

I bought this Record plane in grungy condition to restore. It’s 50 years old. All plane handles are too small for my hands. I had to reshape it some. I flattened the sole too. Degreasing took a while. I could tell it was an engineer that owned and at not a woodworker but the grease kept most…

It’s raining as I walk home. Cool, Welsh rain. It’s not too heavy, but it’s close rain that wets thoroughly and the earth soaks the drops in quickly. My cheeks and hands are cold and my hand shields my lens in case I see something I want to photograph. The trees are saturated so much…

More on oak I first worked with red oak in the Texas Hill Country back in 1987. At least that was the first time I knew of red oak as distinct from English oak. Whereas I love English and European oaks American red oak is not my favourite wood to work with and it’s not…

Oak trees grow on each of the five continents and cultures at every level have relied on the wood and acorn, the tannic acid and the bark throughout the millennia. Great ships with oak bows and rudders crisscrossed the globe.   Oak leaves have a unique and distinctive leaf shape Massive barns and manorial homes…