If you look at the world map showing outreach in real-time of our teaching and training woodworkers you would see flags dropping by the second onto all the countries of the world as people wake up to hands-on hand tool woodworking on a global level. Ten years ago I had sixteen people in a hands-on …
Being an adequate maker is always enough. It’s a good place to be, I think. Most makers find solace in hard times by working their craft, you know, when they face a sad loss that’s hard to reconcile the sanity in. Crises come often enough for all of us — times when we must realise …
Here’s an experiment for you I think you might like. I have done this over many years, considered it carefully and it’s never failed me yet. I wish that I had done this throughout my life but I have done it enough to know something you might not realise and may have never considered. When …
I thought I might pass something along, something that explains that might interest you as it does me. It’s solid and it’s mostly about a solidity we might not consider and think about. I have often suggested that what people, woodworkers and sellers of planes and plane irons, often talk about is plane chatter, how …
Sharing and together interchange in an exchange without loss of shared space as each absorbs the other in an irreplaceable intimacy at every turn and change of direction where affection remains safe in a joint endeavour to share and care. I look to the ones I share with and togetherness means to gather in a …
Some things are worth considering more deeply simply because of the way we live and what we do in it In my day, nature seems always to blend seamlessly with my making. From making my breakfast, my more recent (since covid) dropping in to a cafe for a cafe coffee and on then to making …
Over the past decade, I have seen woodworkers obsess more and more about flatness in planes, plane irons, chisels, spokeshave cutting irons and others. The obsessioning began in the 1990s, got worse in the 2000s, and left a residue of legalism that makes woodworking more unreal than real. I understand that some men in woodworking …
A man baited me with a question and I didn’t resist. I’d just done a remarkable demonstration of cutting a twin-tailed, two-minute dovetail to a perfect fit for an audience of 200 who cheered and clapped when I’d done. what made it the more remarkable was that the huge show was 98% machine manufacturers and …
Finishing means beginning again. I take wood from stacks and racks, search the small offcuts kept in case for suitable sections that might work for this rail or that stile and soon my rough-sawn stock leans standing by my bench. I begin truing up the first face of each one, the wide face, get rid …
I’ve written so much about my using hand tools in my daily woodworking through the years, as a full-time maker my reasoning is sound. Combining writing with teaching many thousands in my woodworking classes one-on-one (over 6,500 to date) enabled me to better understand the need. I have now taught woodworking in the USA, England, …
