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…

. . . no one should be without. And it was you who said it, not me! But I somehow can’t help but agree. In ages past the things craftsmen did as a rule were written down but were passed down through the ages. We are still gaining from what was developed as an art…

I cycle along the cycle paths surrounding town, houses one side, fields the other. Each contradicts the other for a few miles – fast cars towards me on my left and pedestrians on my right. In a year or two the fields I have known will soon be a thousand new houses. I take a…

A few weeks ago I posted a blog on the pieces I had made over the last two years. So other woodworkers, you know, the professional ones, the ones who say you cannot make a living working with your hands using hand tools and just a bandsaw, could see what can be done if you…

There are not many craft and woodworking shows I visit that surprise me with gifted makers. By that, I don’t mean gimmicky presenters with a gift for quickspeak but more the ordinary artisans who actually capably make with skilled hands and deft fingers in different crafts. At the Henley Country Craft Show at Stonor last…

My vertical vise-held, end-grain planing guide for planing the ends of wood dead square with ease works better than a shooting board especially if you have lots to do. Why do I say that? Because I have used a regular shooting board for almost six decades and at best they are really quite awkward, hog…