After sixty years of working wood you develop your pieces using systems you either designed and developed or you adopt concepts of working as standard practices that make worklife just plain practical. Those that know me and my work know that I developed my mortising guide to guarantee perpendicularity and parallelity twixt inside and outside…

Things come to us in the moment and then we leave it alone for decades and just use it ourselves. I’ve got so many it’s hard to keep up with myself sometimes. Sometimes deep and flawed surfaces in our wood end up on the inside, underside and back of a cabinet and we never touch…

I have written quite substantially about the advantages of owning and using different bench planes. Bench planes are the most significant group of planes we use in our everyday bench work. It’s that wonderful category of a handful of bevel-down planes we hand tool woodworkers rely on for all our general straightening, levelling and otherwise…

In some ways, this closing week was my best week in three months since the attack on me that resulted in a cowardly attacker breaking three of my favourite ribs. It wasn’t just my ribs that were seriously damaged though, other injuries with the broken ribs ultimately and literally brought me down. There hasn’t been…

People open them and leave them to slam, saying they closed the gate but they didn’t close it. I think a well-made gate deserves respect for its maker. This gate, ageing now, has wear and cracks that tell me things that others miss when they pass through it, leaving the gate to slam shut and…

It’s really a superb thing, simplicity. It’s not the same as nor is it anything like minimalism. Valuing simplicity is to dwell and thrive in the humility of being a maker. Politics and social standing dissolve at the workbench and I do it using ordinary tools I bought in poverty and made do until my…

Here’s another one you haven’t seen either. In an emergency, for thicknessing just one thin stick, I set this up in a Black and Decker Workmate years ago and it worked. I thought you’d like it. And the great advantage is that it’s almost an instant setup. Additionally, it offers an infinately adjustable angle-of-presentation so…

A friend nudged me for this post. Reminding me of making my tool chest back in 2013 or so, that was in upstate New York, he spoke of my card scraper setup for thicknessing cockbeading, inlay and such. I thought it would help others so here it is: You might want to make the inlay…

It was the tap-tapping of the tails into the recesses between the pins with the end of a one-inch chisel I remember the most. George had shown me this but did not leave it there. He’d explained Newton’s Third Law that for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction. When…

Toolboxes as actual boxes would once have been more tool chests. The portability of tools from workshop to customer was essential to most makers and indeed to the old men I worked with who spoke of handcarts loaded with wood and their tool chests, stepladders and sawhorses to go to work on a house or…