This is the first nine-day foundational of the year and I wonder of it’s a sign of change as I look at the demographics. It’s rare but this class is all male and the average age has dropped from the mid early 50’s to around the mid 30’s. It’s a low-maintenance class and for the…

As  bit of a follow up to last night’s blog post I thought I should add some thoughts. There is a general assumption by many that the whole world has access to what some countries have available to them. For instance today I could most like buy 50 #4 smoothing planes from eBay for under…

Thicker Irons May Not Always Be Actually Fit For Purpose Florian from Vienna is in the Nine-day Foundational Woodworking Class this week here at Penrhyn Castle. He was struggling with his personal plane and asked me to look at it. It was a Stanley #4 plane he had decided to make an upgrade to by…

Making a Woodworking Mallet by Hand Part 3 is on YouTube so I hope that you enjoy the work we did to bring this series about. It’s training we’ve taken from the free subscription section of our woodworkingmasterclasses.com series and it’s training woodworkers all around the world to apprehend life-sustaining skills for a lifetime and…

People often ask me to recommend a burnisher they can buy for forming the turned edge to a scraper. When I suggest just using the back of a chisel or a nail set they seem either unbelieving on the one hand or disappointed on the other. Most often they want a brand, a one-size-fits all…

I went to the shop tonight just to check on a couple of things, change out a flickering fluorescent and deliver a couple of things and I remembered someone asking about my mobile workbenches that work as auxiliary benches to support the different aspects of my work. One of the last minute jobs tonight was…

I’m used to working from big benches, not massive ones, just long ones and ones that are 3-feet across. In my beginnings at school they were silly little things but when I went to work, on the first day, I was given the corner of a long bench with a very old Record vise. Of…

This is a Spanish translation of Paul’s post Sharpening Is Mostly An Abrasive Issue from 16 December 2014. Thank you Carlos! traducción del inglés por Carlos J. Collazo  El título de esta entrada parece ser casi una contradicción. Lo afilado y la abrasión. ¿Como es que funciona eso? Afilar la mayoría de las herramientas cortantes y…

There’s something about making your own tools, even when you buy the parts from say Lee Valley Veritas or some other resource provider because you’re a woodworker and not a metal worker—not quite yet! Knives and mallets, peeled from a chunk of wood become really special to you. It’s far from second rate to be…