With so much of my work being planed and trued by hand I use something of a simple strategy that really works well and especially with the short lengths we generally use in furniture making. Though of course we have long lengths for bedsides, head boards, tabletops and wardrobes but the rails and stiles, frames…

In building our latest project in the Sellers’ Home bedroom series I relied on my bandsaw for many of the long and often heavy rip cuts. I expect many of those building the same projects might well decide to do the same. Mostly, this was to do with the type of different and often random…

When I wrote Essential Woodworking Hand Tools it was less about the tools and more about what was missing from books I read and saw through the decades in books often entitled something like ‘The Woodworker’s Bible‘, usually commissioned by publishers known for their educational books, people like that. What mainly was missing was the…

. . . or the lure of a mechanised performance! The most predictable thing about wood is its unpredictability. I would say that that is the case in most natural materials used in most crafts and that is why we have such a predominance of man-made alternative materials; for any type of mass-making the materials…

I’m still grateful for the workshop I work in: it’s the one I close the door on at night and then open at first light. I reach inside for the light switch and light floods what was left the night before. There’s always the certainty of gratitude that so too floods my mind for the…

I don’t follow but two others online. One is a cafe I haven’t been able to go back to because I no longer live near to it and the other is a support for those with a disability. But I clicked on an Instagram account of someone following me and saw something I had not…

I have called myself a lifestyle woodworker for a decade on a public level but two when I include talking of it in more isolated pockets as in my woodworking classes and courses. In reality, though, I have practised it for much longer than that it’s just that the term lifestyle really didn’t exist before…

. . . that the work is always easy for me as Paul Sellers. It’s not, not at all. The flow seems fine in the reviews I check before videos go out, but getting there takes structure through planning, micro- and macro-adjustment, attitude changes and other such things too many to list. In the making…

It looks excessive and might be for some but it’s not in the life of a productive maker. Woodworking with hand tools in the life of a productive worker must be strategised throughout. Strategic planing soon becomes a way of life when you are a full-time maker but anyone can adopt the practice to make…

I looked for a second Stanley 60 1/2 block plane of the old style but didn’t want to pay the price they were going for. In the end, I bought two, a secondhand one for £39 and then a new one for £50. The new one was so very disappointing and I’ll go through the…