. . . depends on your regularity. It’s often a regularity that woodworkers most generally neglect. In fact, tool sharpness reflects who you are. As an apprentice, George said sharply across the bench, “Sharpen up and don’t be lazy!” As an adult, such things are unsaid to you. Or are they? Does not a still …
I remember Mr Cheapy arriving in his blue minivan, and I mean the true Mini minivan–two seats in the front, touching both door windows with your shoulders, and the meter behind being a flat-floored, tin-sided van with no frills, padding or anything else. It was always loaded with tools, many seconds quality with minor defects …
In my other real garage workshop, the one at Sellers’ home, I found myself fighting several issues surrounding systemic dampness permeating everything from the single-skin brick walls to concrete floors with no damp proof membrane, a bad drainage system that simply stopped at ground level and the internal level of the garage floor being at …
“Boy!” Jack Collins shouted from his bench at the far end of the shop. I sprang to a run from a gentle saunter and George’s, “Woohoo!” encouraged me to ‘Go quick‘. “Clean up!” His arm’s wide sweep meant the whole shop needed the shavings swept up, bagged and then burned. I was glad it was …
Below are the only tools I used for making the furniture pieces for Sellers’ Home. I am putting this list in one place with some minor explanations for everyone to consider how my work continues to reach and influence woodworkers around the world. The important thing for me has been to show how an ordinary …
. . . the eclectic gathering. So I considered the making of the recent designs I put together for the Sellers’ home furniture pieces listed below: I thought about the tools it took to make them. By tools, of course, I definitely mean hand tools and not machines though, of course, you can use machines …
Walnut I looked after I planed. Glimpsed first. Stopped. Looked again as if looking back at what caught my eye, stopped me in my tracks. And lifted the wood closer to look inside the pores I’d just opened with my plane’s last stroke to where no man had ever seen before, been before and I …
Door handle, tool handle, handling a workload and even your handle as in the name you go by all link to the human hand with which we grip, hold, seize, snatch and grab. Thimble came from the word thumb and spindle from the word spin. In our work as makers of furniture and woodenware or …
His hands were as big as he was tall “Plates of meat!” the other men called ‘em. They swallowed the plane handle inside those mits and I defied any grain or knot to answer back when he swiped it along the length and breadth of an ugly board of wood, be it oak, walnut, cherry …
Even with experience, it can be difficult to drill holes square to the wood in both directions with a handheld drill no matter the type. In cabinet work, we often rely on holes to be as perpendicular as possible for accuracy, alignment, etc, and even when we do have a drill press it is not …
