Remarkable Things

Remarkable Things

This week I milled my wood from roughsawn oak and some poplar too to make a chest of drawers. Oak is my primary wood and poplar the secondary. The drawer insides don’t need oak, poplar is lighter in weight and for bedroom drawers it will last well enough. I planned out the chest on paper…

Peer Reviews . . .

Peer Reviews . . .

. . . Or Peer Pressures? Some time ago I went to the trouble of creating a short and creative video to show (prove) that taking a couple of simple steps could upgrade an inexpensive but well-made saw to parallel that of premium saws costing six to seven times more. Buying some saws, even from…

A Quick Truing Strategy

A Quick Truing Strategy

With so much of my work being planed and trued by hand I use something of a simple strategy that really works well and especially with the short lengths we generally use in furniture making. Though of course we have long lengths for bedsides, head boards, tabletops and wardrobes but the rails and stiles, frames…

A Good Blade

A Good Blade

In building our latest project in the Sellers’ Home bedroom series I relied on my bandsaw for many of the long and often heavy rip cuts. I expect many of those building the same projects might well decide to do the same. Mostly, this was to do with the type of different and often random…

Essential Woodworking Hand Tools

Essential Woodworking Hand Tools

When I wrote Essential Woodworking Hand Tools it was less about the tools and more about what was missing from books I read and saw through the decades in books often entitled something like ‘The Woodworker’s Bible‘, usually commissioned by publishers known for their educational books, people like that. What mainly was missing was the…

The Lure of Unpredictable . . .

The Lure of Unpredictable . . .

. . . or the lure of a mechanised performance! The most predictable thing about wood is its unpredictability. I would say that that is the case in most natural materials used in most crafts and that is why we have such a predominance of man-made alternative materials; for any type of mass-making the materials…

Yesterday

Yesterday

I’m still grateful for the workshop I work in: it’s the one I close the door on at night and then open at first light. I reach inside for the light switch and light floods what was left the night before. There’s always the certainty of gratitude that so too floods my mind for the…

It Was A Humbling Thing

It Was A Humbling Thing

I don’t follow but two others online. One is a cafe I haven’t been able to go back to because I no longer live near to it and the other is a support for those with a disability. But I clicked on an Instagram account of someone following me and saw something I had not…

Lifestyle

Lifestyle

I have called myself a lifestyle woodworker for a decade on a public level but two when I include talking of it in more isolated pockets as in my woodworking classes and courses. In reality, though, I have practised it for much longer than that it’s just that the term lifestyle really didn’t exist before…

It’s Easy to Think . . .

It’s Easy to Think . . .

. . . that the work is always easy for me as Paul Sellers. It’s not, not at all. The flow seems fine in the reviews I check before videos go out, but getting there takes structure through planning, micro- and macro-adjustment, attitude changes and other such things too many to list. In the making…