It takes about half an hour to reshape a chisel handle of the type I have been using for the past years. The ones I am using and changing here I have only been using for about a year but they are identical to my twelve-year-old Aldi chisels you seem unable to buy any more; …
I often wonder where reinventing your life came from but I do get that sometimes, maybe often, we have to walk away from a past, past concepts and look to a future we might not be able to wholly predict. There is a singular anchor in my life that still holds firm after almost 60 …
We are approaching the uniquely special day when we Brits will celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee year as our reigning monarch of Great Britain. Her faithfulness has never been challenged though not everyone agrees with royalty and all that pertains to it. For me, it is the acknowledgment of stick-with-it-ness: a made-up mind that gets you …
I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next. The case with all of its neat dovetails and a fixed divider between the drawer enclosure and the upper space was made, doors were hung, and the single drawer made and fitted. I’d thought consistently about hardware, door pulls, catches, bolts and such for some time; …
eBay is a bit like Marmite, you either love it or hate it, or so it seems. It seems such a small thing to buy a simple sliding bolt for a cabinet or the exact hinges you to hang your doors on. Then there are those now quite unique countersunk head brass screws that cost …
I often wonder why we sometimes think the way we do. I’ve mentioned this somewhere before and should mention it again. In a class some years ago in the USA, an exasperated man said, “I’m an intelligent being, I have an advanced degree and I am a problem solver heading up a team in IT …
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 …
