Question: Hello Mr Sellers, I began woodworking as a passion two years ago after watching some famous american woodworking shows. This is the reason I first bought (cheap) power tools: a router, a planer and a table saw, to realise my first wooden objects (Picture frames, games, furniture, Christmas tree decoration, boxes…) . I quickly…
“This is my man cave!”, a man says as he peers into my workshop. I make no comment outwardly but inwardly I groan. I don’t suppose keyboards and tech stuff carries that same sense as a workshop with workbenches and vises, tools waiting for use and wood stacked and racked, so I roll with the…
We are often looking for an ideal fit with everything we work with, a one-size-fits-all solution and of course many will espouse this one or that one is the answer to life’s problems, but my stock answer always is this. Life is just like wood, it comes with knots in it. Controversy ebbs and flows around…
Question: Hi Paul, Just wondering whether you could elaborate on your comment, “I wish someone would replicate the #4 with high-spec engineering and wooden handles like they do with some planes being made today. That’s a plane I would go for.”? My initial reaction to this was “they do” (thinking Lie-Nielsen’s #4), but on reflection…
Question: Hello Paul, You have mentioned your love for the #4, but out of all the planes you own (individuals, mind. Not types), which is your favourite? Do you find yourself favouring a particular #4 of yours, even if it’s based on something a little less logical, and a little more sentimental? Though, I think…
…surprised by my answer My friend, Jacob, came to my shop today and said, “Of all of your planes, which is your favourite?” He was looking at the many dozens at different places in my workshop. I said, thoughtfully, and not wanting to just toss something out there, “Well, I have to say, after working…
Essential Woodworking Hand Tools Getting started has become evermore important to more and more people and I think the hand tools I use create a passage into lifestyle woodworking whether you earn your living from it or simply enjoy woodworking. Here’s the thing. Questions about hand tools still come in every day and people are looking…
I wrote the intro for this yesterday and the questions poured in for a few reasons but different questioners and commenters were troubled by the changeover from a pull stroke to a push stroke and even the use of the term I used, “correcting the Zona saw.” Well, there are many considerations here not the least of…
Zona model saws arrive with the blades cutting on the pull stroke, which in western saws is the wrong way around. The pull stroke requires a different approach to sawing because it can sometimes seem as though we are standing on the wrong side of the saw. This is especially so for those of us…
I have been working on this for some time and I am making many assumptions in trying to diagnose the situation. Much of what I have been looking at relates to having lived in the USA and the UK, but people following this particular blog do so for some very specific reasons and I think…