It’s pouring with rain this morning but I rode my bike anyway. The forecast seems to me to be rarely very accurate and I am glad that this is something the scientists can only confirm what is mostly taking place and cannot influence future weather more than they think they can predict it. My cycling…
There really is no one measure-fits-all all wood types when it comes to its moisture content. Green wood in the tree at the point of severance from its root can vary between around 30 to 300 per cent depending on the wood or tree type, the location of moisture in the stem and the season…
. . . by their cover. My wood stacks come from long planks that needed straightening for joints before joints could be made. The joints rely on straight edges to two adjacent faces trued first by hand planes and opposite faces sawn parallel by saw and planed smooth too. This has been my way for…
I’m working, planing and thinking or is it the other way around? Attention in two tasks is always an alternating process and never truly bipartisan in that usually the ability to concentrate on two or more high-demand tasks soon obviates deferment one to other in measured exchanges according to priority. I switch between three planes…
Some tools are just plain simple. The very simplest looking of all and the most misunderstood in its complexities is the plate steel card scraper. This single-piece tool is misunderstood just as much by professional woodworkers who rarely ever use them even as long-term woodworkers as it is by those just being introduced to the…
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…
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