What’s saddest of all is what I said about new woodworkers picking up the saw. There is something thats true about all of us when we start any creative craft. We tend to think buying something less expensive will match our amateur-status skill level and that “it will do until we find out of we …
This week I picked up a brand new gent’s saw straight from the pack made by the famous German tool makers Two Cherries. I noticed the unusual tooth shape, which strangely resembled the edge of a tin can when we used to open it with a multipurpose survival knife. I wondered how it would work …
I so enjoy designing and building pieces and, as I always have, it’s predictable that I always will. Whereas I always got a buzz from people choosing me to design pieces for their home or their office, and then of course making them too, I now have something even more special in my work. It’s …
In my youth and from my background, Father’s day was never featured and really, I don’t remember any hint of it in the culture of my time. Perhaps that was a northern thing, perhaps the great divide between the haves and the have nots, the North and the South, the then Working classes and the …
My basic view of the smaller planes called block planes is that they might occasionally prove handy but they have only limited real value in terms of general woodworking use unless you are working on smaller work at say finer levels where larger planes may perhaps be a little cumbersome or for some other specialist …
I am almost through the series on making a beautiful stepladder. What makes a stepladder beautiful? It’s beautiful because I made it with my own hands, my own power, my own strength, my own mind. It’s beautiful because it’s simple to look at. It’s simple because it’s functional and it’s beautiful because I see form …
A chisel’s cutting edge doesn’t so much wear away only but fracture out of sharpness. It’s funny that we think of it as wearing to dullness in the way river rock is rounded by river run and beach pebbles and stones by tidal washes when in my experience, looking at the edge and magnifying it, the …
I have used snap-to-line templates for my work for a number of years now and no other method of making templates comes close. They are accurate and long lasting too. We made a quick video to help you understand the techniques and I am sure you will enjoy this. Here is the video for my …
…but What the Wood Does to the Boy! On Saturday morning Hannah completed another box. I thought it was perfect. She didn’t. Not until it was done that is. Then she liked what she’d done. What makes the box as near perfect as possible in my consideration of the whole in not so much the …
Mostly my working wood and my enjoyment of it still is the area surrounding joinery, followed quite quickly by design and conceptualising something yet to be made. Generally, all designs are governed in great measure by the wood type, colour, grain configuration and wood strength. Wood density, flex, brittleness, porosity and other such wood characters …
