My corner desk is completely finished with all the protective coats needed to keep it smooth through the decades ahead. This spalted beech came from a friend who sold it knowing he would never be able to use it. I’ve had it now for four years and confess I had no way of knowing what…
I think planing wood is quite a troublesome and complex aspect of our working of wood but the good thing is that for every fibre-tearing, grain-ripping stroke of negative pain there are a hundred and many more really good ones. One thing that’s certain is the unpredictability of wood when it comes to planing with…
Honest questions deserve honest answers. It’s when questions are partly or wholly disingenuous and thereby baited that they raise flags and cause agitation. Thankfully I only get one in a hundred that provoke the worst in me. The wonderful thing about genuine questions is that they often bring out the greater reflectiveness in me. That…
I am sometimes told by this owner of a bevel-up plane or that owner of a bevel-downer, the york-pitch advocate and the scraper plane expert that this or that plane takes care of this and that grain, wood type and so it goes. There are moderate differences between planes but the range of plane type…
In my choice of individuality, I mostly engage in lone woodworking. There aren’t too many of us out there but for most of my life it wasn’t lone but shared space and I worked alongside others capably working and making a living from hand made furniture, many of whom I trained for a good niumber…
Until you do it you won’t understand and it won’t be because you don’t want to understand or even accept it, it’s because you simply can’t. It’s not unlike using a chisel sharpened to say 250-grit for years on the old India Stones and then being given a chisel sharpened through a series of abrasives…
…sometimes. We are all entitled to them but are we really? As we should have learned from my introducing a screw to a dovetail joint hidden beneath a tabletop never to be seen in an oak piece I made. A gazillion comments showed hundreds of erroneous opinions that have been passed down for decades via…
I developed this strategy to give me repeat cuts from a single guide and I can slide up or down the guide to give me different sizes of dovetails within fractions of a millimetre if I want an alternative size from as little as half a millimetre on half pins with 1 mm on full…
I left early Thursday morning for my two-and-a-half-hour car drive to Cambridge. I’d filled up with petrol the day before and was ready for the drag to my destination. Halfway there you hit a place called Milton Keynes where every half mile or so you hit a roundabout (circle USA), either side of that the…
It’s Katrina (Paul’s daughter in law). Paul is making all the furniture for his Oxfordshire home. The next area he will be making furniture for is not a room, but a little mezzanine on the landing in the upstairs hall. It’s not a large space but just big enough for a home office. A space…