We made it in five hours, hit London and, as always for London, started running ahead of myself to try to catch the pace. We had a safe passage all the way from the beautiful Snowdonia mountains to the epicentre of woodworking commerce and had no problems with traffic hardly at all. Unloading at Alexandra…
I’m looking forward to the Alexandra Palace Get Woodworking Live Show even though I have been to too many woodworking shows to count. I usually find something new to pique my interest and raise my bemusement levels, but generally what’s usually offered as new is a change in the color of the plastic handles and…
I think of my workspace as a creative place in which I spend a great deal of if not all of my time. It’s not comfort I in any way crave so much as a place to create, which to my mind is seldom comfortable. Design and developing designs from two-dimensional images to three-dimensional reality…
John worked last week helping to prepare for the woodworking show. Much to do still, but we’ve made much progress and we are about ready to load up the gear. Though we work hard, apprenticing is not at all about physical work only. So many aspects of woodworking and training have fallen by the wayside…
My workspace is different than my workplace. It’s where I occupy and work, that’s true, but my workspace is the environment where my tools and bench and tool cupboards and tool chests rest. My life revolves around this space and I live a great deal of my life immersed in it. You see, it isn’t so much…
Just to show my point on the different standards between two planes. The image right is the Stanley Sweetheart plane handle. The hard, unresolved line that leaves a flat face connectingto the ill-sized radius reflects an ethic that came as a result of mass manufactured equipment needed to supply WW II. Remember the contrast of…
I’ve never been in two workshops that are the same. The reason partly is that we all have different preferences and different ways of working. Mine is different in some ways and yet harkens back to a more traditional past: Why? Because I’m more a traditional hand toolist rather than a machinist. Most machine-only woodworkers…
Don’t you love the way wood works? Below is another flea-market find that’s slightly surface pitted. It’s an old Marples from the pre Irwin days when the Marples clan were still involved. They are still readily found here in the UK and can be had for no more than a £1. Most often less. For…
You know it’s true. I find many overseas makers now produce finer tools than we do in England. It really began to happen in the post war era when the real austerity of the war years changed the quality of hand tools in Britain forever. Here is an example of what I mean. I took…
It could possibly have been a bad apple, but another plane I considered for a review turned out to be substandard. For some time I have heard about the new Sweetheart line coming in from the Stanley stable. I got excited when in a magazine the press release stated that Stanley of Sheffield had brought…
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