The year 2021 left many of us with sad losses in many realms and on every continent, yet the people continued on and were driven by hope throughout for a future yet to unfold. I hope with sincerity that we can continue to support one another as we have through the two pandemic years so …
Fox wedging seems to be touched on as a theory of hidden mortise and tenoning with a concealed mechanical dynamic. How many actually use it probably numbers none or one or two worldwide in any given day. Mostly that is with good reason. In most cases, fox wedging is unusually used. Regular mortise and tenons …
Closing the garage workshop for a few days and a break for Christmas family time is always a point of reflection. I finished up a few things, tidied away, swept the floor and thought about many serious issues surrounding the past year. In a time of such unprecedented extremes, we must all keep hoping for …
I think it is often a difficult time of year for many, especially is this so at the close of long periods of uncertainty, isolation and diversely different pockets of unrest. Current unpredictabilities of unrest defies much of what we have known in our individual cultures. It seems we have all developed a more international …
I spent some time with UK woodworking magazine editor, Nick Gibbs who is co-founder of Quercus, which dedicates its content to articles on working wood by hand. Nick contacted me to see if he could arrange to interview me about my life working wood as a full-time lifelong woodworker. Nick is one of the few …
You are always so supportive of all that we do and we wanted to let you know that news about our new router plane instructional video was one of our most popular ever. When we asked who would be interested in a kit of component metal parts we did get a large enough response to …
Another George story begins with, “What you doing, boy?” as in 1965, aged 15, I crosscut a 4 by 8 with a brand new Canadian Disston (don’t get one) handsaw. The saw seemed constantly to drift out of square despite the squared-across lines I’d carefully placed on the rough-sawn faces of the wood and was …
. . . with a slight tweak here and another tweak there, you might just amaze yourself. I regularly hear from people that they struggle to get their western saws to work smoothly. I have been preparing some saw articles to try to help. Many of you swear by your Japanese pull-stroke saws and say …
This is another time of year that maybe parallels the end of the last one. We did so much work in the face of issues we mostly had never faced before. My hands continued finding work to promote hand working with wood and so many of you followed to gain the skills you might not …
I’d been unloading for about two hours. The truckload of kiln-dried, Russian redwood was some of the most beautiful pine I had ever seen. Sixteen footers of knot-free wood in sections 8″ wide and 3-4″ wide. These sections and lengths were generally too long and heavy for a boy my age and weight to handle …
