I have made workbenches the way I have to put them into realms of real woodworking for everyone. I am sure some brutes can shove them around their workshops as they work but I can’t, never have. I had my doubts the day we set up two sawhorses, a Black & Decker Workmate and a…

I don’t always find spaces conducive to my creativity. Mostly, I find I don’t so much create them but more end up in them. In my own home, a single noise can distract me from writing and a simple question can often become quite invasive. I have heard and met people who installed a down-the-bottom-of-the-garden…

Today I thought I might share with you how in my day to day I often take 10 edge tools from dull to maximised sharpness levels in somewhere around five minutes max. I do also sharpen tools individually too because, after all, they rarely all dull at once. I know hand on heart that I…

It will surprise many of you that in times past I set up my woodworking designs for machine-only methods that required me to spend 8-10 hours days operating two or three machines hour on hour. The orders kept coming in and I had set up mini production lines for the different products I made. The…

… but in the sending, I can tell that some people don’t understand my efforts. Whereas 99% of people who love hand working have come to understand why I have done what I have over the decades, some have yet to see the implications of working only with machines and then too myriad other distractive…

My mind races some times, most days, tracing a thought, a passage of thinking about the house interior coming along with finished rooms being made ready for me to design the pieces for. A chair, a table, a new rocker design. These things float in and out in the room space I picture in my…

Some words seem strange to me. Perhaps it’s my age. Making seems always to be, well, constructive, a sort of building word. In my world, it’s taking something quite raw and mostly all-natural and reforming it in some way to transform it into something useful and pleasing to look at. Mostly this is without decrying…

After 55 years of manual working my back still holds strong and that is from standing work at a workbench six days a week for 8-10 hours moist days throughout my life. My neck feels just fine and comfortable too, quite as good as ever. If suddenly something went wrong I could hardly complain after…

Of course, pallet wood is not a species, mostly it’s a low-cost shipping and distribution pallet material taken from fast-growing softwood timbers meaning pine, fir, spruce and similar. What is important to logistics companies is its low-cost availability and that it is sustainable and pretty much self-perpetuating. So often I see two camps when softwoods…