Paul Sellers

Tools get placed in practical ways that make for easy pickup, instant alignment to task and minimal waste in time. They do everything I ever ask of them and never balk in action. I never abuse them or require anything of them that I don't know they can do. Tools I place wait ready for action. That's the reason I rarely ever put tools away until I'm really done with each of them and that is for the day, half day or two hours. It irritates me when someone says, "So glad to see you work in a mess like us." because that's not the case at all. I don't work like them or every copy the working of others. I'm orderly and disciplined; otherwise I don't work efficiently at all.

Though I may well have apprenticed, and I am grateful for all the men taught me in the days when an apprentice served ten men as part of the teaching and learning experience, 98% of my adopted work ethic, methodology and working techniques came from both my parents and especially my mother who was an artisan herself. She too was structured and organised, and I spent many hours at the sewing table working alongside her.

Most of my tricks, jigs, guides and so on originated with me and though some might have been around elsewhere, I worked all the further to improve the methods and invent new ways of working. |This is the way of the craftsman and the crafting artisan. It wasn't about shunning what was there, it was about improvement so that my version matched my expectations. I stopped using shooting boards when I came up with my vertical clamp-in-a-vise version that vastly improves on what was there with ordinary shooting boards for my type of woodworking. It's both a method and a technique.

No matter which book you read or where you learn of it, my introducing using the router plane for fielding the surfaces of tenons began with my quest to make sure others could get perfect tenons to fit perfect mortise holes. To match that came the vertical mortise guides. Other gurus now use these but give no credit for where they got it. It doesn't altogether matter, but they should give credit, really. There are hundreds of others that go along with my vertical clamp-in-a-vise trimming strategy for end-grain squaring that beats regular shooting boards hands down. What they see as mess is careful placement by choice of kept-out tools I need at the ready for further work. Their mess is often procrastinated tidy up, days and weeks of neglect and not me at all. But they like to think that I give the nod of approval to their lazy neglect. My economy of movement is not their economy of cleanliness and tidiness. That's usually the fruit of an undisciplined work ethic.

Everything out on this benchtop at this point in the development of my project is intentional. I do not put tools and equipment away if they are all current to my use and needed within an hour or less for the next point in my work. If I had done all of my plane work, I would put it in its stowing spot at the righthand end of my workbench. It's not clutter, its practical placement and economy of motion.

The nature of construction work often results in mess and clutter. Four men keep their site clear, as clean as possible and safe and at various points in the day, like my bench, tools get put away, waste is picked up, and the site looks pristine. Today is Friday, though they might or might not work tomorrow, by evening time today the site will express disciplined craftsmen. All four have a remarkable work ethic and high standards of workmanship. I see them every day working away no matter what. When they are finished, I will miss our daily interactions.

I watched on and off from the temporary office window today as Mario laid this concrete and steel driveway-to-footpath drain guttering twixt the four new parking spaces and the road. The level, the string line, the digital readout for precise levelling and the concrete mixer were exchanged in his work for four hours. It was truly structured work at the measured pace only a craftsman used to handwork has and I respected the how of how he worked as much as his well-maintained order and self-discipline throughout. When the super tight string line was taken away the site and sight was perfect.

My tools are now stowed. They are sharp and set ready for four more dovetails that must look equal to this one. I saw Sergi closing down for the evening around 5 PM this Friday evening. I commented on how precious it was to see him close up his day the way they always do. He commented back, "We like to make sure everything is in order so that when we start again, we are ready to go and are not looking round for things before we start work again." An orderly work ethic is everything.

The last few sheets of plasterboard give me a double skinned sound absorbing feature reducing the transfer of noise in both direction whilst in the garage workshop you see here. We then added a third layer of plasterboard with sound insulating soft foam. It's a luxury, I know, but the air training airport two crow miles away make it necessary, but then I do not want my next-door neighbours to hear the tap-tapping of a chisel hammer when they sit out in the garden. No plasterboard on the ceiling above and the insulation is on top of this beneath the sedum roof covering. Nearly there now.

This will be my last workshop--most likely. I'm taking pictures as it comes together because once It's up and closed in the evidence of construction will be mostly hidden. We didn't knock this one together stick-frame fashion as in most times past and for economic self-build speed and reasons. I'm thinking fifty-year lifespan and then another fifty. Maybe the outer cladding will go but not the inner superstructure.

The building base is 200 metres to the front of the house we've been building all the furniture for and there is only a narrow entryway on either side of the house so everything has to be moved by mini diggers and such. You cannot believe how much concrete and brick we have taken out to green-up our footprint but we have persevered.

We didn't build on pads but poured concrete footings dug down two feet and block-built on top of that to ground level. Within this, we packed several inches of concrete-ready hardcore ready for the big pour to come, over a waterproof membrane and then 4" foil-backed insulating foam for heat retention long term. The final layer will be screed, tamped, levelled out and trowelled smooth.

Now comes the superstructure. Maya, the architect suggested twelve inches packed with insulating solid foam inside the six-inch studs followed by a skin of 2" foam inside and then even more sound and heat insulators you can see below. There is one more layer to come and that will be the one-inch wooden cladding.

The inside of the building is now separated by an insulated stud wall, double skinned with plasterboard both sides for sound dampening so that the office stands separated from the workshop studio. My workshop has evolved and in some measure morphed to what I like the most. We need to both film and make at the same time. This morphing was intentional when we started teaching through videography and stopped hosting hands-on classes. I also stopped having other woodworkers working in the same space (except for Hannah who will be back soon), I got rid of my machines and the excess of support equipment that comes with that. I actually make in a space the size of a single-car UK domestic home garage. That averages about 18 feet by 10 feet--it's enough to make any piece of furniture you might need for an average home. The picture here is somewhat deceptive because half of the space is for video work and not my making space per se.

When we are done with the walls, the sound insulation will be such that you can't hear sawing planing and general hammering outside of the building. I will always have a bandsaw, not a big one but one that's more than adequate, for downsizing large or thick sections of wood. My 14" (I downsized that too from a 16") will readily cut through 12 inches of any temperate hardwood I might ever choose to use. By the time all the skins are on, and the insulation fills any gaps, they feel as substantive as solid stone and brick. Stainless-steel anchors, screws and bolts run through different levels be they vertical or horizontal. Maya is the founding architect of Studio 13 Architects who behind this building, and she really has delivered over the past few years.

Today I saw the electric-opening skylights go on top of the three openings in the office. The insulated doors and windows will go in hopefully in the next few days. Being dried in leads to plastering, plumbing and electrical work. Everyone was in on Saturday this weekend and made inroads to keep the show on track. Nothing is ever too much trouble.

We've successfully worked in small spaces for most of my work life though I have had large versions. The big shops were for multiple occupancy by staff, other makers, friends and then for teaching hands-on classes with twenty or so workbenches, tools and machines I no longer need because of not hosting classes. Time does not permit hands-on classes any more, so I can't justify wasting space and the cost of it now.

What does matter and keeps me going is my teaching. I'm not sure if that will ever wane nor my making creatively either. I don't make to sell as in times past and for most of my life. I can also see myself making another prestigious piece or two if my interest is piqued . . . maybe.

And of course, we, for our part, have kept video filming in the occasional quiet spots all too rare but enough to keep you fed with new and ongoing content. This is our latest project for box makers to create different types of dovetails in a single box.

Some Influencers work more silently to say the more. The sway of words gently put lift the spirits in ways and sways that swerve away from the shoutings of the disingenuous who so negate the power of art's reasoning. This post is not directly associated with woodworking so much as the woodworker I am. The union and synchrony of two arts collaborating, bringing the essentials of two lives together, no matter how briefly undertaken, matches the murmuration of Starlings at dusk; no one can walk away from the event and forget what they witnessed. These works of art, the Lost Words, exemplify deep care and concern in too many ways to speak of here. They remind me of my working. The opposition of those who think not much at all and then the support of those who, though often unable to express themselves, know inside their very being that, well, things are going quite badly wrong and speaking out about it is not negative but highly sincere. Reading and looking through these pages made me grateful that caring people put two arts together to speak out more loudly yet without anger and shouting down with the loudest voice. Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane have risen in wings that murmur the sounds and sights we need to hear and see.

Murmuration is an art form in flight, one of those phenomenal scarcities where starlings in the thousands, hundreds of thousands and sometime even millions, voluntarily rise spontaneously to swell the evening sky with twists and turns en masse without colliding though wing tips touch and in their swirling, unanimously shroud the earth, blot out the descending sun and rise to spread and expand their magnificence in stunning displays of aerial flight and by self-protecting sways confuse birds of prey to prevent them taking even a single one of them. Murmuration, when you stand in its presence, hear and see the wing beats of 500,000 small birds unify in the sky above you, holds within itself the essence of onomatopoeic strength. It sounds like what it is.

I went to the Weston library after the prompting of a murmuration of a friend 5,000 miles away in the USA. My spirits were lifted on the day of my visit. I hope that you too can feel the prompting of a murmuration. I don't generally encourage selling things too much on my blog, but this book should best be owned by others to dip and dive in flights of true inspiration.

Back at the bench this morning, planning the week with everyone first, writing my next book now, now that my autobiography is with my editor, I'm faced with my own murmuration but not with the support and mass of a million wing beats, just the gentle fanning of the flames in the silence of a singular workspace at a lone bench. But the love of making and teaching spurs me on all the more. Murmuration has grown since my first posts on different platforms. I hear we're reaching over a million woodworkers, nearly two million each month now. You have the wings of flight, my friends, so keep striving for your own murmuration!

Sometimes bits split and it's nothing you did. Do you bin all the work to start over or do you repair? On this project, I would have had a major loss in work and wood. I decided on a patch.

It's not always something we did and wood always has some unanticipated idiosyncrasies that cannot be mitigated for. Beech, maple, elm . . .easy-peasy! Mahogany is good 90% of the time, but then there are some fibrous aspects to it, short grain, reverse and spiral grains that, well, they just split off if you even look too long at them.

The weakest points on dovetails are, well, the points of the shallow angles. On this dovetail, the splits went in a highly obvious place.

I cut a similar corresponding shape from a scrap of the same wood. Only the angle needs to match, nearly but not necessarily exactly.

And just a sawn surface will suffice, too.

PVA glue will work well, press firmly with the finger and hold for a few minutes before letting go. Leave it to fully dry, overnight is best.

Saw off the excess once the glue is dried. . .

. . . from both end and face.

Pare down flush as needed.

The finished appearance when done.

In 2021 I published my guide for getting the two bevels on narrow plough plane blades dead on 30-degrees and 25-degress and 90-degress dead across too. You read that post here if you're interested. There is also a video on YT here too. Chisels are different because they always taper from the cutting edge to the handle and chisel makers use different ratios.

If, like so many, you have struggled to get your narrow or thin chisels with a pristine square and accurate angle on the bevel you are the same as almost everyone. I developed this style of honing guide for my narrow plough plane irons described above but this one I developed for thin chisels-it's slightly different, I think it will be the best honing guide for narrow chisels you will ever use bar none. It's also just out as a standalone YT video on my channel here. Please subscribe and Enjoy!

Lots of people struggle to get the same levels of accuracy on narrow chisels and the looks frustrate them. Obviously, it makes very little difference to the chisel's functionality unless it's a long way out. Long term, I will always suggest you develop your freehand skills for sharpening because speed in the zone is important. This guide should take about ten minutes to make, no more and that's because it's quick and simple to make.

Any wood will do, I used a poplar scrap. One piece for the main guide at 6-8" long 1" by 7/8", but that's more just what I had to size rather than critical. The second piece, for the wedge, is 4 1/2" by 1/2" square.

Somewhere near the mid-section, strike a crisp cut line at 30-degree using a sliding bevel with a sharp knife. This line goes across the one-inch face.

The taper on your wedge can be whatever you want but the shallower the wedge the better the retentive friction quality. My wedge starts out 110 long and tapers from 4mmto 10mm before cutting to length later.

Place the chisel and the wedge against your 30-degree knife line and mark the second angle with a pencil. Four of my MHG chisels are the same taper, so one guide will suit all four small chisels I need it for. I have found this method and guide works well up to say 1/2" chisels if you want to alter the sizes of your guide.

Square the extremes of the two lines on the adjacent faces on both sides of the workpiece.

Set a marking gauge to 7/16", shallower than the width of the wedge, and mark a depth line on both sides to cut down to.

Saw down the two angled lines as tightly as you can and then as close to depth lines as possible. These walls need to be dead square as the chisel and wedge will be aligned and pressed firmly to them.

Chisel out the waste, working from both sides and after first removing the bulk of the waste, work down to the final gauge line.

If you have a router plane, then use that to establish the seating level, otherwise straight off the chisel will work fine enough.

Slide the wedge and chisel snugly in the recess.

Take a straightedge and mark the angle, making the wedge short of the bottom as shown.

Saw the angled end of the wedge.

The wedge is wider than the depth of the rebate. Clamp the two in the vise with the top face of the wedge aligned with 30-degree wall and plane to the sole of the holder.

Your holder is ready for use.

How To Use Your Guide + Useful Tips and Options Too

We have a couple of options. You can load the whole holder assembly 'upside down' in the vise, squeezing the wedge and holder in the jaws as shown below...

...or you use the holder to hold the chisel on the surfaces of the diamond honing plates or other abrasive like wet and dry. A 10" flat file usually works provided the chisel steel is not super hard. It's an option to use the vise hold for the whole assembly as shown which allows you to use the flat file to establish the first level of abrading.

I prefer using the diamond plates so I can work through the three grit levels. In my case, they go to 1,200 starting at 250-grit, then 650-. You can polish out with abrasive compound on a wooden strop with no leather and trailing the cutting edge so it doesn't dig in if you want, that can take you up to 10,000 in a heartbeat but on such narrow blades it's really not necessary.

I have diamond surfaced paddles and they work great. The wet-n-dry option of paper abrasive is less durable for long-term use.

Also, I never use the double-bevel or so-called micro- or secondary-bevel method. I use the single macro bevel of near 30-degrees or a macro-camber on wide cutting irons and chisels. However, for those that want a secondary bevel, just load the chisel against the steeper bevel, tighten the wedge and give the chisel edge a couple of rubs on the fine plate only and the result is as show below.

Once you have established the coarse bevel level, you can tap the chisel to send it through an extra fraction for more honing as shown here.

To remove the chisel and wedge, shock them loose by striking the end of the holder a couple of times.

Using the end of a steel rule to press the blade against the bottom of the recess works well.

Inking in the 30-degree angle saves confusion as to which angle is which when installing the chisel.

A cross-pein hammer is advantages for tightening wedges

What I like the most about my craft is the days are laden full with work I want to do. I have put in more days than probably, possibly all of you and I still go willingly to work to make something I've designed, picked out my rough-sawn wood for and do not use a machine or a machine process to make with. Imagine, sixty-one years of six-day weeks making every day from wood. I carry this DNA of designing, engineering and making inside me. It's inside you too, most definitely. It's got a name. Identifying it is essential. Its name is 'calling'.

Our humanity is designed to make in the sense that the word design comes from the word designate. Break it down more, and you will find in there the word de= out or from + sign= derived from. Look too to author as in designing something we wrote into being by design. That's the reason I say that we carry within our DNA the ability to own ideas and develop them into multidimensionality. Only humans can capably do this.

So, following hundreds if not thousands of years of mapping out our ideas in drawn from our knowledge of craft, of growing, harvesting, curing, preserving and cooking, such like this, is indeed, in the deeds that we do, hard-wired to trace our design paths by taking the raw and unprocessed ideas into process mode to process it by the logic of our amazing humanity.

When I'm making, I find myself wrapped in a world of intelligent making, a high-demand world of critical thinking, processing, high-level interacting with the raw I process with my hands and mind. There is no passing wood into the mouth of an insatiable machine. My hands take on the full meaning of making and the felt textures speak volumes in my decisions for cutting and processing with a chisel, a spokeshave and a plane of one kind or another. Because I am born to make all kinds of things using my hands, I chose to do just that and never fought it but wholly volunteered into it.

In the same way birds migrate by crossing mighty oceans, deserts and continents so too I follow a call I can scarcely describe. I would that we could all return to our true callings, that vocare that spoke to our inmost being for our trade and working to the days when we knew who we were and what we had to do because the magnetic fields, scents and sights spoke deeply unto deep. Shop work as in vocational training is but a hundred years old and an Americanism that adopted the idea whereas vocation calling is ancient and had both spiritual and physical implications relating to the deep essence of knowing in a deep way what we were to actually do with our lives.

This morning I woke to a live brain and was ready to take on the challenge. Over the days before, I processed design intuitives, patterns worked out to follow that I must volunteer into to ensure the dead-on accuracy of a fully fitted lid. The lid anchor point is unchangeable and non-adjustable.

It's quite hard for me not to find joy even in the difficult things. Whether that is in the actual process or at the final outcome I am never sure. My chemical neurotransmitter feeds on the dopamine to ensure my joy every time, uniting brain and physical sentience every time I work things like this out. Passing it on to you and others heightens my awareness that what I give was also given in my vocational calling.

I love that a mind opens in our working

That we return to our roots of making

Answer the simplicity of dreams to make

and lift the tools by hand to create

what's yet to come from our fingers, fingertips

hand, arm and upper body pressures.

Hand Holds On Bench Planes

I wonder if we truly understand the hold we have on bench planes, the subtle grips, the slips and slides left and right and then the difference between skews and slides and a combination of both in a sliding skew. Because something has a handle doesn't mean we have to use it. I wouldn't look to a carpenter for sound advice, I've seen too many men's vans over the years depicting a viselike bulldogging grip with two fists whole finger-wrapped around the handles and tote to believe they know very much about planing wood. Perhaps it's because there's a cord attached to their version of a plane and to them, shavings come away in tiny chips spit from the so-called power tool in the millions. In the hand tool world, it's a clutch of long and wide ribbons that spill noiselessly to our feet. Two completely different worlds, thankfully.

When George hovered over my woodworking at the workbench, me fifteen years old and a complete novice, he'd nudge my elbow, speak softly or loudly but always with a tone that said, 'Listen and obey' then, depending on my response,"Get a grip!" The firmness in a voice of true authority speaks volumes and my hand hold on my plane searched for the as yet unknown version yet to be revealed. At first, I simply assumed he was saying 'more force' or 'grip harder', but I soon learned after various initiation sessions that he was saying the grip needs adjusting.

George was the gentle giant in my teen years of apprenticing. He was big on teaching and training and never let anything slide when it came to hand tools. In general, we worked in 20 different woods and I learned that each different wood type had its own idiosyncrasies with almost no two being the same. Planing wood meant handling a plane accurately according to task and sentience. No one speaks in these terms and though George didn't either, the unspoken worth of silent words spoken by action spoke volumes; I learned from a cough and an 'um' or the heavy industrial-grade clearing of a throat.

Grip is everything in handling any hand plane, but instruction comes best through an experienced woodworker at the bench. I am talking about a man-maker with decades in his hands at the bench rather than a college graduate teacher who scarcely if ever made for a living. My hand holds may change fifty times in pursuit of a smooth surface. The subtle shifts drive for more than just shoving the plane at the wood. That slightest of skews, a square-on equalling out of balanced pressure to get the fullest width, the lifting of the [lane heel and the lightest circular motion here and there that changes the dynamic majorly with so minimal an effort. Of course, that means far too many to remember and recall in the saddle. I always told my students in hands-on classes to take time to experiment even on their projects. Mostly they were too diffident and especially if the plane strokes they were using worked. Why fix what ain't broke isn't really a good maxim if you want to gain mastery for future use. I recall one time planing a wide board absolutely across the grain at ninety degrees to the long axis of the plank and how many woodworking carpentry and joinery 'experts' told me in comments how very wrong that was. With wood grain, there may well be one right way for that plane stroke, you just have to find out which one will give the result you want. It might be one out of the 50, and I wouldn't limit that number to 50 either. A slice cut is not a skew cut, but there are skewed slice cuts mid-stroke over complex grains that deliver smoothness. I had that in my newest and latest two boxes where you might have thought it would be the curly-grained woods causing an issue when it was the straight-grained elm every time.

Planing the ends of my dovetail pins, smoothness came readily going across the grain rather than with it. Several circular motions planes up my end grain even on small sections. I learned that from George too when I was a boy, and he was only just a man of 25. We tried different techniques and strokes that defied books. Ever noticed how old books rarely if ever spoke of such techniques. They only ever showed rigid hand holds with no versatility. Looking at what I know about woodworking today, I realise how little value they offered to novices

Of course, what's right for met might be right for others, but what is often lacking is experienced makers talking about alternatives. Also, though many experienced makers might have been working wood for years and decades, very few of them, perhaps one percent, will use any hand tools for any significant time in a day. This sad reality holds them back. Would I ever use a power router to rout out for a hinge flap? Of course not. Would I level the nubs of my dovetail pins or tails with a belt sander or power planer, hand held or static? I wouldn't. It gets too complicated and absolutely unnecessary in my world of non mass-making. I have the job done in a heartbeat with a sharp plane and a few choice planing techniques.

Would I use a random orbit sander on my work? Or a belt sander? I have no problem with these two creatures. An RA sander loaded with a newish 280-grit disc will leave the very smoothest finish. The advantages of planing is creating the dead flat and true plane. The RA with a fine grit paper doesn't take the surface down more than a small thou of an inch and so retains the flatness you get from a planed surface. Going through various grits from coarse to fine creates problems on fine work..

I recall the year quite vividly, September 2019, hard to imagine 7 years passing so quickly. I was invited to be the keynote guest speaker at the Men's Sheds Shedfest that's been a growing entity through recent decades and now 900 Men's Sheds host community gatherings to support members in a social enterprise that helps individuals find their space in local communities. I've spoken with many leaders and members through the years, and it's impressive to see how many people volunteer into the wellbeing of others in a wide range of social ways and especially sharing shed space to work alongside one another in small cluster groups.

There are other associations similar to Men's Sheds that may go under other names, but the term 'sheds' is often used in the title and speaks volumes as spaces men like myself like to be in the day-to-day. Many countries have their own version, and it might take a degree of courage to break through your inhibitions. I doubt that you will ever feel unwelcome! Here's a link to get you started.

Retirement is not an easy space to fill for men. One day, they enjoy a certain type of camaraderie and the next they can feel inadequately lost, displaced and eventually, the loneliest person on the planet. When I hosted classes on two continents, I found it remarkable the way men came together with a common cause to learn and work together. In a matter of minutes of not knowing one another the barriers came down and suddenly, they were interacting with comments, jokes, smiles and nods as if they were the best of friends. Many of the men developed substantive friendships that lasted for years. It was a revelation to me that the very unique condition of transparent vulnerability, not knowing about something, could actually become a unifying factor to bring down barriers that leads to uniting people through a common goal to know and learn together.

My reason for this blog post is to encourage anyone who has found themselves isolated and lost to reach out to a Men's Shed somewhere, pay a visit, and join in the common goal to help others as you gain new control of your future. I'm glad I was able to give that talk. It felt wholly good to be there amongst like-minded people.

...and my, does this design of mine deliver punchy simplicity in making the simplest router plane you'll ever make!

My smallest homemade, handmade user-router plane came from a worn-out, worn-down, overused flat file I kept in a worn file box for the day when I needed tool steel for whatever and then the scrap bin of bits of wood. The brass wear plate is not really necessary, in the sense of an essential, as the wood can always be replaced for free if it does wear, but that would take a lifetime, and the plane remade from scraps is free and easy anyway. But I like the idea and the thinness of the extended front edge extension. The spalted beech is an ideal wood of free character, but any wood, even a softwood stud, will work anyway.

This is an ultra-pleasant plane to make and have ready to use; inside an hour or so, I'm almost together with it, but now I have designed and made so many router planes, 30 or more at least; I know exactly where I am going point on point. I downsized the components and used my making methods from the original instructionals we did to pass on to others via my YouTube channel and my blog here.

I know that you can make router planes smaller than this, but, really, why would you? Such smallness gives no value and meets no necessity for 99.9% of furniture-making needs. A narrow-bladed plane like this, 3-4 mm (1/8" - 3/16") offers the most minimal of resistance in the cut.

I lowered the bed angle (the slope the cutting iron sits at in the plane body) to 44 -45º+- from my original 52º in my original router plane to see what it felt like on so narrow a width of cutting iron. That was just to simplify the angles so I could use a combination square's existing 45º. The steeper angle works well on regular router planes, so I won't change that. With this downsized version, you can barely feel the shavings lifting off as long as you don't take too deep a cut.

Heating the file with a blowtorch to bright orange and leaving it to cool until handleable means you can cut the steel with a hacksaw as easily as mild steel and then file it with a hand file. No need for a mechanical grinder at all. I like to leave evidence of the original tool steel source in the metals used so file teeth, though filed down to evenness, are self-evident. 95% of all the cuts in the steel, the bevel, the notches, etc., came from the hacksaw and were finessed with a flat file. A final rub with wet and dry -400 left the steel feeling soft and pleasant. Aesthetically, the final look I wanted is achieved.

The 1.5 mm brass plate cuts easily with both hacksaw and file. There will be some conflict between the wood's exchanges of moisture levels and the brass remaining true to the original cut size.

I used contact cement to maximise adhesion quality. This will never turn loose, but I also added extra belts and braces by using some screws through the plate.

The hanger bolts are common enough hardware available online via eBay and Amazon, as are the 4mm (M4 by 10mm) by 10mm knurled high-type thumb nuts. Three of the 4mm by 40mm hanger bolts and thumb nuts, plus two 4mm split washers and four 4mm washers takes care of what you buy in as hardware.

The spring or split washer between two ordinary 4mm washers allows mechanical pressure to be applied to the retainer bar, which spans the blade in situ. Instead of cinching both nuts tight, cinch them tight and then turn back a single turn. This then gives enough pressure to keep the cutting iron hard down while at the same time allows for any further adjustment without having to tighten and slacken the retainer bar nuts.

The simplicity of making this hand router plane is the single piece of wood and the two scallops each side where the thumbs provide the push points in using the plane rather than attaching knobs.

The slight discrepancy between wood and brass wear place is of no material consequence, but consider making the brass plate 1 mm undersize, and it will never show.

The retainer bar is 68 mm (2 1/2") long by 20 mm (3/4") wide and 3 mm (1/8") thick.

The two 4 mm holes in the retainer bar are bored on 50 mm (2") centres.

The blade recess is a millimeter less than the thickness of the blade, so pressure on the back of the blade from the retainer bar holds the blade firmly to depth.

If you like the idea of measured increment marks, measure the teeth of the file. Often, as in my case here, the teeth will be at metric increments. I know that it seems odd, but I live in both imperial and metric measuring and use both all the time and at the same time. Measuring my half inch and dividing the number of teeth showed that a single full revolution deepened the cut by a fraction I could relate to my work. Because the bed angle is near enough 45º, a full revolution of the depth adjuster deepened the pass by a fixed amount, and I could set the depth according to the teeth on the file. A full revolution deepened the cut by half a millimeter. I mark the adjuster with a Sharpie to see exactly where the turn starts and ends.

It may not be obvious, but the two notches allow for deeper housing dadoes. Also, you can flip the knurled thumb nut, which gives you from minus zero on through whatever depth you need.

You can still support our work by buying our full-size hand router plane kit which provides all the hardware here.

I will post on another couple of hand router planes I have made that you will also love to make and own soon.

And I am talking about what woodworkers new to woodworking don't know starting out.

I'm not really a hand tool enthusiast, but an enthusiastic maker that works primarily with the hand tools he's worked with for over sixty years and has no plans to change a thing. Why? Because Paul Sellers is good at using them and is considered something of an expert. What many do not know is that I'm just as experienced and competent a machinist as I am with hand tools. I once used machines in my day-to-day business ventures and developed production lines I enjoyed too; these businesses were on a one- or two- to five-man scale. Nothing massive or factorial, just common sense. More important though, and so worth noting and comparing: after my sixty-one years of daily hand tool woodworking, I learn something new about the hand tools, the work methods, and techniques every day. Much more than that, the reality of my working with hand tools means that I know the depth and breadth of the woods I work with far more because of the handwork. You simply cannot get this by machining wood. It doesn't happen because it can't. No one gets the kind of information I speak of as long as a machine is processing the wood in your stead. Once you understand that, you understand you will need to start on the learning journey. You simply cannot gain the diverse experiences from machining wood, and neither can you read about it or look at pictures or videos, etc., to gain such experience. Only hand tool woodworking delivers the goods, and this usually gets dismissed by those from all other camps.

I am never trying to be divisive when I say things like this. The issue for me is anyone drawing a comparison, thinking machining is the same thing, only a more advanced way, when they, in 98% of cases, never actually mastered any one of the hand tools or techniques hand tool woodworkers use. It might not take a lifetime to glean the information I speak of, but it does take repeated working of all the different types of tools and woods because within every tool and every species there are remarkable differences where the wood or the tools affect one another very differently. This exchange means that we , the hand tool woodworkers, engage with our work in radically diverse ways. We rely on what we feel when we plane and saw and chisel. Passing your wood into the jaws of a thickness planer takes zero sensing of any kind. The power feed pulls the wood in and pushes it out for the machinist to catch. Nothing sentient about it. For us, the hand tool worker, woods change within any given distance. You can never gain such intimate detail of character and workability by simply feeding the wood into a cutter head of any type. So there you are. That's the reality that is rarely, if ever, really considered by machine-only makers and advocates. Simply put, you never know the wood by simply pushing it into a machine or pushing the handheld machine types into the wood, and it's this distinction that makes the difference between a machinist and a hand tools maker.

But you see, we want and focus on developing this sentience in our work life. We don't want substitutes for skill; nothing that stands in our stead. We even want the unpredictability of it, like the challenge, and then too the risk of it, and the call to mastery. Without this, woodworking is dull and predictably boring. There is almost nothing to consider without the sensing of the wood through the hand tools we use. Additionally, there are still so many things to consider with the cutting edges delivering information as we work with hand tools. Even in the end results, though they might look identical, possibly, are intrinsically incomparable.

And on another tack. Using terms like scary-sharp was a more attention grabbing strapline (tagline USA), like a fun piece of trivia; the man coining the term achieved no more than the ancients had done for centuries before, and salesmen selling equipment use it all the time because it grabs the mind. If tools are not essentially surgically sharp, you might as well just go and use machines where the blades are traded out and sent off for resharpening the carbide tips and cutters. What was accepted for the previous few hundred years still proves the same for us today. In an age when almost everyone has no knowledge of how to sharpen anything, developing a sharp edge to a knife can certainly put you on a pedestal; it was nothing more than a substitute distractional term to entertain. It's the same with micro-bevels and such. They're mostly just cute terms and something to say. Any bevel between 25-30 or even 35º cuts well, and you'll scarcely, if ever, tell the difference with one or two bevels up against one another. Also, I vary my cutting edges for different tasks, and I never ever grind my chisels on any kind of mechanical grinding wheel. The no-grind method of old is the fastest and unfussy methods for non-commercial methods, such as we need at the bench in a few seconds, and it delivers exactly the same level of sharpness and cutting ability.

Did you know that despite my still learning about my hand tools and such, the half a dozen machines used predominantly in woodworking take no more than an hour per machine to learn just about everything you need to know about machining wood? And that most of your time will then be spent considering how you must use them as safely as possible. After that, you become a jig and guide maker for each project. Is that really the woodworking you wanted when you started out? For some, that will be the case, and then there are the others. Those who want the high demand of woodworking mastery

I was introduced to a man in a cafe recently. The wife, who I knew, introduced her husband as "a woodworker too." It soon became apparent that he was disdainful about anything unmachined and described himself as a "biscuit addict and a domino fan!" There was an immediate cut-off with glazed-over eyes at the mention of hand tools. I try not to waste my energy on such and switch topics as best I can. Their blindness is not my concern. To do what I do the way that I do it, you have to want it wholeheartedly. You must volunteer into it. There is no substitute, and without that, you will never do it and thereby know any of the gain of it. Running a marathon is never done by bus, and whitewater kayaking demands total concentration. There is no distancing yourself from the cutting edges of hand tools to cut the pins to fit the tails and the mortise to the mortise hole.

Getting others off the conveyor belt to adapt, adopt, and end up as truly skilled makers is and will be the ultimate measure of my objective and success. If anyone intersperses their day with the use of machines, I am fine with it, I do not mind at all. I think machines are handy pieces of commercial equipment, but 98% of new and even seasoned woodworkers around the world will never own even a single machine. Think high-rise dwelling, inner-city complexes, social housing piled one on top of the other, and then, simply, the poorer majority of the world. My woodworking style embraces the demanding work of hand tools for a dozen good reasons I am always ready to give. What about better physical and mental health, developing patience and fortitude, mastery in skilled workmanship? There is, of course, much more to it than any of that. How about fulfillment and satisfaction, sharing your space with your young children, an apprentice you are helping to shape, and giving others the hand tools you are using to do their own work with...'off the devices, wood in the vises.'

My being good with hand tools is not in question, and neither are many of the operations I perform any faster using all machine methods. The only way to really test this is to run everything in parallel, which I don't have time to do. Fact is, machine methods might even be slower, more dangerous, more isolating, and then just plain dull and boring. In my view, most people can gain mastery in hand tool woodworking within a year or two. I have found that a 14" bandsaw makes the heavy cuts in hardwoods like oak easier and less tedious. It's there in the background, taking its small footprint. Not compromising; nice!

I've seen pegboard backdrops and kitchen-style surrounds for a number of years, but an open benchtop with lidless tills and wells works best for instancy in the zone. That's because I do believe lidded boxes and tills and drawers are very practical for storing things like tools and equipment at the end of a tidy-up, but storing them after each use is mostly inefficient and wasted time. Clutter is only clutter if the person working is careless, and by that I mean that they

care less than they should in how and where they place their tools as repetitive work takes place. My tools might look disorderly, and I occasionally need to make a quick eye-scan for one or the other covered by another at different points in the day; generally, my hand goes right to the one I need in the moment. Mostly it's about knowing it is already out, so if and when I know I will need that drill bit or awl again in an hour or so, it's out there in the well or on the benchtop where I last left it.

My mentoring craftsman, George, never moved too far from his place at the vise. 95% of his tools were within arm's reach despite the size of project we were jointly working on. Looking back now, sixty years since, my tools and support equipment, sharpening stones, strops, dustpan and brush, and suchlike have followed the same patterns. There is no AI or device nudging things this way and that; order comes from the practice of working. Both George and I were thankfully right-handed, which meant all of the tools we used were placed in the midsection of our two-sided bench to each of our right sides or directly in front of us when we put them down to take up another. Hence, the vise is always placed to the left front corner of the bench for right-handers.

I have discussed the silliness of placing bench planes on their side often enough over the decades. It still surprises me how much pushback I get, even though it is such a mindless preoccupation with no value to anything at all. I never saw any of the craftsmen I worked with professionally throughout my life lay any of their bench planes on their sides, only schoolchildren and their teachers establishing rules to stop them from continually clunking them down on other metal tools like squares, chisels, and saws.

After any planing task, George, the craftsman who mentored me for six years, slipped his plane onto the benchtop or into the well in a quick and slick move, leaving the plane upright and full-sailed, ready for the next plane strokes. He himself moved from plane to saw to chisel seamlessly. The bench planes were never clunked down, bumped, or knocked and certainly never laid on their sides. I soon knew that any careless placing of the plane, knocking, bumping, and even slight nudging at the end of use resets the plane negatively, but more than that, I was taught by actions that tools always deserve our respect—I never once in six years of apprenticing saw any of my mentoring craftsmen mistreat or misuse any hand tool, ever. Remember, these men were in their sixties and had bought their tools as I did when they were in their mid to early teens. They expected their hand tools to outlast their work life and often handed them down to their sons. I don't refer to my hand tools as "old friends". Not really. There is a much deeper reality to them in my world, and no title exists. But I do look at the ones that served me through difficult times and over long periods, the ones I bought as a boy starting out, the ones that truly cost me almost everything differently than I ever would any other piece of equipment. Learning to work alongside men of real substance was a godsend for me. Their patience and kindness worked almost every time, but a quick rebuke and more soon set me to do rightly by them when I needed it.

The art and craft of work is in all ways about working in and creating order. Without this intent, things quickly fall into chaos, and this then leads to our becoming inefficient, awkward, and usually less productive. Because of the created confusion, our minds become equally cluttered and confused too, I have worked with chaotic individuals, and it's hard work. Order is critical to our well-being. Knowing where every tool we are working with in our sphere streamlines our working. Having said that, I do not want to spend time reorganising my benchtop more than a couple of times in a half a day. There is something about my personal unorthodoxy that generally works for me. Repeat operations almost always require the same tools, especially those with the small and smaller items. On my benchtop my planes have one stow area to my right hand, as do my tenon saws. Lesser used planes, awkward braces, plough planes, and filletsters have their place on the shelves or the narrow bench behind me unless needed repeatedly. I am right-handed but use tools with both. The placement of tools for an idle period of non-use means placing them always with my right hand and always to my right for quick and easy placement ready for ultimate retrieval. Over long periods, our humanness chooses all paths of least resistance, and this is evolutionary.

When others see my workbench loaded, they often comment that my mess is just like theirs. It's very doubtful that it is so I usually say something like, "It's not." My space is rarely ever a match to their mess. Only laziness allows squalor and unkemptness, dirt buildup, and such like that. In periods of transition, we do often allow a degree of disorder, and that is usually because we do not have a place structured to take everything. My transitioning to my new workshop in two months will by necessity be less structured because we have needed to downsize space for a season. But the daily use tools are exactly as they were in my previous workshop over about ten years. I have evolved to use the hand tools I will not change from in the next ten years of woodworking. If I have not adopted but one or two hand tools in sixty years and I have produced hundreds, even thousands of pieces using 95% hand tools, what needs to change?

My advice to anyone new to handwork with hand tools is to persevere. After I had made ten dovetails in my mid-teens, I never cut a really bad dovetail nor a mortise and tenon resulting in a twisted door or a loose fit. This might well be the same for you, but equally so, it might take a little more. I don't know, but the speed of my performance has become the gift of mastery to me.

I suppose the contrast between machining pieces and those hand tools, as shown on the bench I work from, is the expansive spread of machines. My hope is that those young enough to experience the use of hand tools and eventual mastery will continue the tradition without being traditionalists. My perpetuating these skills is not for nostalgia or a refusal to move with the times. It's just plain practical, enjoyable, and satisfying to know I made them and not a machine.

Twenty days in, the foundation work undergirds any future building work we care to do. Fifteen days of full-time work for two and three men have passed quickly and productively. We've used the same Lithuanian builders over the last six years. as we kept altering the house to suit our emerging designs with a positive backdrop of walls and space. Sixty or so new pieces later, five years of daily work, my house is full of specifically designed pieces to exactly fit or suit my home; additionally, we've continued to train new woodworkers all around the world. It's my belief that we all have a vocational calling, but only a fraction of a percent actually find it let alone even know if such a thing might exist in the world or specifically for them. Go back 150 years, and a young person might well be asked what they feel their vocational calling would be. I doubt anyone hears of such a thing today.

Now that I am old, I reflect on this as a point of interest. What starts out as a game and an app on various devices for children ultimately steers them towards some kind of long term interest and possibly work, but is that the vocational calling i am speaking of and do vocational callings truly exist in most cultures today? I mean, can anyone realistically find rewarding work working with their hands as I have? In my sixty-odd years of daily woodworking, I have yet to see my chosen craft calling leave me bored. On the contrary, every aspect of handwork in woodwork has sparked my interest. The end result of my work is the training of others. It's not that I want to be a tutor, teacher, or trainer; more that I must see my craft lived out in the lives of others. Why? Because I believe that the only true conservation of craft is in the physical doing of it, and people that feel they, like me, have to do it, not just read about it or watch it. Woodworking is not a museum entertainment but more the cultural working out of it in our lives as working people.

Talking to the two men working on my new workshop, watching them work, digging deep for the foundation, skilfully operate all of their equipment, and suchlike, I know that they are just like me. The wall plate is aligned as perfectly as my mortise and tenons, and the blocks and thermal block layer leveled guarantee the green roof will be spread on steel beams and capably support the added weight of six inches of growing medium. Of course, the foundational work takes time, and little happens above ground until this is in, inspected by building control, and so on. We sat and talked about their work, and I realised that, just like me, these two men lived for the importance their work brought to their lives.

So the walls are going up as I type. By the time the cladding and heat and sound insulation are in place, the walls will be 11" thick. The concrete and block foundation footings started two feet down, and then the concrete and the underfloor insulation finalise the level. The mounds of soil and gravel, old concrete footpaths, patio, etc., have filled the massive grab truck five times so far.

In my temporary workshop, the house kitchen, we have succeeded in filming several episodes without a glitch, though things are a bit tight. This planning work followed the architect who designed the building to comply with local planning authorities and then, too, our neighbours, who are ever important to us as neighbours and friends. I have been making my dovetail sampler box, and it's gone quite well. I finished the prototype ahead of the filmed version, which came out just fine, although I never take as much time with the prototypes. I never have the WPS I identified and spoke of in my last post. I suppose I feel confident, and my confidence comes from six decades of daily woodworking, writing, and always drawing too.

So many tricks and tips for dovetailing your corner joints, but seldom do you hear, "Get it straight off the saw," as it was said to me. This has been my way for six decades to date, ever since I heard George, my apprenticing mentor, say the same words. This mantra stayed with me, and the only time a pare cut action from a chisel edge comes is when I did indeed miscut slightly with the saw; a very great rarity and not normal at all. And as it was with George, don't put off establishing skill and ability as early as possible in your work. You do not get there by procrastination. Overcoming white-paper syndrome (WPS)* is critical to fine woodworking.

Saw-cut dovetails should be or become your default position; that's positioning of hand-eye-body cooperation and coordination. Anything else is just a poor substitute. Other wise gurus will say, "Use blue masking tape" or, as in a Fine Woodworking article some years back, "Pare cut in increments until you reach the final fit," and then, "Creep up on the line and always use a knife and never a pencil." I say go for the cut line with the saw and only touch the surface with a chisel if you did mistakenly miss the exact angle and slightly miscut accidentally somewhere in the mix. Creeping around tails and pins, creating a super-smooth surface with a chisel generally creates other problems, including a poorer fit. Can mating surfaces be just too smooth for a good glue key of mating faces? Well, of course they can. Many times have I seen glass-smooth meeting surfaces in other situations, edge-gluing, for instance, part with a surprising 'pop' because of smoothness, and then too wood itself can be the keying problem.

My current two projects are to be samplers, examples of different dovetailing. Each corner of the project and each side to the box is a different wood type; common, half-lap, and hounds-tooth will fix the corners in permanence. The challenges vary by the number of tails, so what am I hoping to achieve? Well, the box is of secondary importance. It's the carrier through which we will learn differences in a single project with multiple considerations and challenges. Which wood compresses, and by how much? Will it swell back in the glue-up, or is it fixed for eternity? These things are experienced only through handwork and hand cutting into the wood. A machinist never learns of such things by machining their stock, and reading of compressibility never conveys the sentient value of handwork. At the end of the course, I will own two boxes, and so will you if you follow the exemplar.

So the video series intentionally and realistically bridges the gaps we encounter when considering one dovetail type over another and encourages the work of trialing you might never find in regular furniture making. You must intentionally defy the norms we know as equal and balanced. It's stickily abnormal. Defying that which would normally be a composition and complementarity. At this point, we should see that the purpose is not the finished box nor the appearance of it and in it, but the experience of making differently for the gain of knowing. There's a vision in it, an outcome resulting in relational knowing, and by the knowing comes the experiential understanding of deep knowledge you can attain no other way. The corners of my boxes, in their dynamism, come from making the different dovetails of each type in very different woods and quite readily in a single simple project. Not everyone can experience this the way I have through six decades of near daily making so many dovetails. Who do you know that has made over a hundred thousand dovetails since they made their first one?

And the wonderful thing about such mechanical joints, a dovetail joint is a mechanical joint, is the holding power they have to stay together before the third component and swelling power of glue, which ultimately expands the surface fibres into the joint via every married surface. Water-based glues enter the surface fibres on contact, swelling the fibres on adjacent pieces into one another. These fibrous surfaces occur more distinctly and profusely with sawn surfaces, whereas pare cut surfaces leave almost no fibre.

I drew out my dovetails full size in my workbench notebook. This is always important to me. It makes me think, and thereby consider possible mistakes by reaching into a future yet to be. Drawing also makes you look and see. This key to planning should never be skipped. It becomes an anchor point for every designer and crafting artisan to return to at pivotal junctions in the progress of work.

Anyway, including all of the trade secrets I know of in this series of upcoming videos has made it a good day and week for me. Hopefully you can join me on the journey towards future craftsmanship.

*White paper syndrome occurs mainly at the opening of a blank page where text or drawing intimidates our placing of lines and words for fear of 'messing up.' This psychological block is characterized by a paralyzing anxiety when facing an empty workspace, canvas, or document. Often stemming from perfectionism, fear of failure, and an overwhelming self-doubt in our ability to start something of value from scratch. Symptoms include procrastination, staring blankly, and avoidant behavior leading to deepening levels of stress and pronounced agitation. It frequently flares up during periods of high stress, fatigue or when high-stakes deadlines are looming.

...Inside and Out

Things are tight, but we have continued filming these past weeks, and it's working fine. My love of woodworking has never faltered in sixty years and is still thriving despite the disruptions that come with moves of this magnitude. What makes it work is the team spirit and support behind the scenes that others never see. We have filmed five sessions, and this week I began the latest project for woodworking masterclasses.

In the not-so-distant background, the mini backhoe has cleared a mountain of patio and concrete walkways to return the earth to its rightful condition where grass can grow again when the building is up. This building will have a green roof across the whole, so effectively the footprint of the building and surroundings will be as it was before houses were ever built.

My upcoming blogs will be instructional. My router plane how-tos, and instructionals have been popular and continue to be so, but DIY in making your own is always at the forefront of my teaching and you learning. These router planes are the ones I enjoy behind the scenes. Mostly on some of my more private projects that don't make blogs or videos. Gifts for family and friends, that sort of thing, but then my private artwork that may one day be published for different purposes. My hand drawings will one day be a book of both art, writing, poetry, and instructionals. Time permitting.

Anyway, I enjoy dipping in and out to watch my friends excavating my future home workshop. Life is not so easy removing a mountain of concrete, gravel, and soil through a narrow 3-foot gateway for the grab truck 200 metres away, but they have just about done with that, and now it's about construction.

These mini diggers and haulers are just amazing. My imagination takes me along a path of attaching a mini, mini digger with a cutting edge to the bucket to create my mortises.

My rendition of a mini backhoe mortiser.

The depth of the footings is to take the steel beams that carry the soil for my green roof. This gives both insulation and effective cooling. Landscaping and trees will follow on

....Always Becomes More

And thereby it leaves you with more to work with too. I write poetry and draw quick sketches and more detailed drawings for good reason. Poetry distills everything down to the essentials and gets rid of the excesses. My sketches capture moments that mean something. Seeing them later—days, weeks, months, and even decades later—can transport me back to the nanosecond when I felt it to be important to capture the thought, the feeling. My recording in the moment, be it my poem or sketch, restores the whole of any event in full colour and detail. It's a remarkable archive of critical events.

I think I still own over a hundred chisels, despite getting rid of most of them. Accumulation is the pit of consumerism for some, but much of my mass came from need. Hosting 15-20 students in hands-on workshops for a day a week and even a month-long workshop meant an accumulation of tools. But that wasn't always the excuse. I gained from other's throwaways in the excesses of consumerism and wealth. In recent weeks I've filled four skips with my own excesses and the excesses of others.

Most woodworkers would have loved skip-diving my skipfuls, but time, safety, and such didn't permit. We chose skip owners that genuinely recycle, upcycle, or whatever. I have been downsizing, refining, defining, and redefining my life and work progressively through many years. Hand tool woodworking has been an intended personal evolution that gives me the ideal levels and methods of productivity and efficiency I strive for. My goal is to have my preference parallel my work ethic and to always be in a body and mind maintenance mode, always.

I have grown, developed, and evolved over a long period to determine clearly what I want from my day in work life now, and that came through my reversing some of my early decisions to establish what I feel is absolutely best and essential for my output. Over the last two decades and more, I have steadily and progressively taken myself off the manufacturing machinist's conveyor belt others generally speaking determine as the only way to make. I only own a 14" bandsaw now, and that's mainly to make my deep cuts in dense and hard-grained woods. One by one, I disconnected myself from my dependency on them, but not only that, my dependency on the excess of space and the excess of a building to house them; they've all gone to the scrapyard. I'm totally at home with solely relying on hand tools for 98% of my work. I suppose what I am saying is, 'Yes, I feel I have come home!'

But then not quite. In the last two decades, those that follow me know I left an 80-foot by 40-foot workshop and training school for woodworkers on another continent to a timber framing entity of larger proportions here in the UK and then on into a 400 room castle in North Wales, where I switched life from one continent to another. From there I went to a temporary shared space for three years here in Oxfordshire and six years ago into my own owned 3,500 square-foot space on two levels. Still not quite there, knowing all of these stages were mere stepping stones, this is the latest iteration of the shop I am currently in. What's remarkable is this alone: in all of the places I have worked over these two decades, my personal workspace, the one I make in and deliver the goods in, has always been the single-car garage space size you have seen me in in the day-to-day of my life. You see, my dream has never been 'the ultimate machine shop,' with my life tied to machine cuts for everything, quite the reverse. Having owned that too, at one time or another and for good reasons, I am out! I, personally, found machining to be more of a soulless experience, and the more you do use them, the longer hours and days and weeks you spend at it, the more soullessly dependent you become.

There are many dumb sayings we put up with, but mindless unsmart things are adopted by most as if they thought them up and they are their own; inevitably they say things like, "Never say never!" But people waste good words on trivia all the time, don't they? I would like to give credit for my good health to the life choices I've made by necessity throughout my life; woodworking with hand tools has been the mainstay of keeping myself extra fit and in good health. This is a free resource with no gym fees, excessive gear wear for image, and wear and tear on my body, which for me and others would be pure wasted time. There is more to my real woodworking than standing, pushing wood into a series of different machines, dropping a chop saw blade to crosscut my wood, and such. I therefore say, I am never going back to using machines for every cut made. Our bodies and minds need more high demand than we realise and not merely prodding into action now and then. Machining wood is mostly about ease and speed with no more need for a disciplined body and mind. That's why we like them, admire them, and call them "power tools."

So-called healthy exercise in a gym would never cut it for me. That gained muscle type from gym work is mostly additional weight and rather unusable in a true handwork environment like mine. With machining firmly gone from my life (and maybe a hundred thousand others snatched off of the conveyor belt), I doubt I will ever go back, and that's because I feel so very good. But I will add the caveat here: I understand that there are good and excellent reasons for people to use and rely on machines to work their wood in amateur realms. Circumstances are different for everyone, and no one should feel at all judged by me if they work their wood the way they want to. A machine of one type or another can be an answer to a disability. That said, it shouldn't substitute for developing true skill, good health, and physical ability with handwork. I simply provide answers for the majority of amateur woodworkers who want to gain skills and who would or could never own or facilitate machines in a dedicated shop that that always takes. I know that machining wood is not the same as hand tool woodworking in any way; it just is not even the flip side of the same coin, and that's in outcome, shape, or form. To keep good physical and mental health, we must make our minds and bodies work and all the more into our older years. That said, you younger versions of us should not wait until you are in your fifties, thinking you are smarter than we are.

A Change Takes Place

You may think that you are seeing what's been my backdrop of shelves and tools in my long-term workshop for the last decade. In some ways it is and in others it is not. We had to rework the scenario for continuity in our work. My evolved space in the recent years is what I work with and definitely do not want to change. Currently, my workshop has been reconstructed in my personal Sellers' home kitchen. This week we finished the move from my big space and downsized to a garage, plus the kitchen island became the mid-shot wide camera. We sold the building we bought eight years ago to a neighbour who needed more space for his engineering business, and that meant scrupulously determining what we really needed going forward. Four skipfuls later, here I am in my space with every tool and box of things important placed exactly as before but with a half-inch difference here and there to make it fit. You see, my evolved space is my devolved space. It's the space I govern my work from, the one I feel is most fit for purpose ever.

Of course, transition is always the hardest place to be in. In an ideal world this stopping off place would be unnecessary, but, well, the new owner of my old place needed the move ASAP, and the builders of my new space couldn't start until this week. Meanwhile, we had our architect give us plans to make it work for the planning application, building regulations, and such. That took a few months. We were not idle. Engineers reports had to be made, along with surveyors and such, but then we had our neighbours to consider too. We would be running our business from a domestic property with a studio workshop at the rear of our garden. Everyone, including the local planning office, was ultra positive about our endeavour. Our edit suite office management is currently operating from what was the living room, and it's tight but not too tight. In a few short weeks we will be in the new building, which, for my side of things, is the dead size of my garage space. I want and need no more. Why? Because I want what the majority of my survey told me the 'you' at home had. We, the majority of woodworkers worldwide, are not commercial makers, but we are just as, if not more, serious about what and how we make in wood.

With the builders starting this week, various pockets of demolition take place and some restructuring, but the ultimate goal is to wholly house our future work in the garden at the Sellers' home house forever. The planning has brought the results of several years of forethought, reasoning, and plotting out for realness. I cleared the space at the end of the garden for work to commence unhindered. Demolition is often necessary for future building. I've demolished many things past to start over and from the ground up too. That includes life in Texas and returning to life in the UK. My ways may not be like yours, but I do know that life takes determination and fortitude. In the last three days, I demolished a shed I built five years ago and rebuilt an alternative storage space from what I dismantled to reuse. I still need storage space for my lawnmower, wheelbarrow, and garden tools, and what I am putting back together will work better for now at least anyway.

Anyway, my endeavour for fewer words being more punchy failed me again here.

I posted a picture on my FB recently showing two draw bore pins slightly protruding from the end cap of a breadboard end tabletop. I was surprised that so many confidently identified and asserted these two end-grain protrusions as our now commonly used wood plugs, and then that these plugs were hiding screwheads. They then identified the tenon haunch of the tenon that was visible as a short tenon where the plugs made no sense because they didn't reach the tenon anyway and would serve no purpose. Of course, even though I mention that the table is over a hundred years old and made from solid wood. It shows that culturally, people thinking from the new era assumed that the slightly protruding circles were indeed wood plugs of the type used in modern-day woodworking to hide screwheads and not the anchor points to fix tenons in place in mortises. They also never knew that, on the 90º corners on some frames, we use a short aspect to the tenon called a haunch that enables us to fully enclose a tenon within the mortise on all four sides and that, if grooved to receive a panel, the haunch part to the tenon fills the groove gap left by ploughing. The assumption by these woodworker types was that the screws were anchoring the tabletop to the legs or apron below, and so commented from their ignorance rather than any woodworking knowledge; assumptions can do that. This is the kind of confidence that gives the impression of being knowledgeable, but the problem is that others assume that they are right.

I assumed ignorance, of course I did, but telling someone they are ignorant is to state it wrongly, even if that is what they are. If we say of ourselves that we are or were ignorant of something, then that's okay. If someone states you are or were ignorant, that's usually different, very different. It might be accurate, and it might at the same time be a rude thing to say depending on our culture

Culture defines us in many ways because culture is the educating factor that enables us to function within particular cohorts of society. Cultural differences and diversity can make us ignorant, as can our personal assumptions. Returning to my UK living, I regularly hear British people say, "Well, you know what Americans are like." Before I lived and worked in the USA, I might have agreed, but having lived in that culture, amongst such a wonderful people, I realise how prejudiced Brits in general can be.

Even living in cultures that once held common knowledge in things like woodworking may well have changed. The majority of woodworkers have never and will never use a draw-bore pin to pull up the shoulders of a tenon to the mortise, to ultimately drive in a the wooden peg for its final destiny in holding the two parts of the joint together in its permanent "marriage." It's also a truism that neither will they ever develop the pegs, pins, trunnels, or treenails with drawknives or spokeshaves. Methods of construction have changed with new technologies, and thereby culture, by its very definition, is perpetually evolving, and this in turn makes culture fluid in its changeableness. New words in woodworking have replaced things like mortise and tenons and dowels. Think 'biscuit' and 'domino.' These two words had entirely different meanings but were adopted because the developers of the technology lacked any imagination to come up with a meaningful and appropriate term. Calling a compressed and dried-down oval piece of wood a biscuit doesn't make an edible treat. You see, a wooden peg by the name of "tree nail", or in the vernacular of the local dialect in the day, "trunnel," pegged it, if you'll allow the pun. Recounting a story of a plane journey, the English stewardess (now flight attendant) asked the American travelers whether they would like some squash and biscuits. The Americans gave a funny look. In English, squash is a concentrated fruit juice with added water to taste, and a biscuit is a cookie. To the Americans, squash is a vegetable, and a biscuit is similar in looks and size to scone but not as sweet as a scone.

There is, of course, no real need for draw-bore methods of construction these days because we have no need for them. Today we have woodworking clamps, or cramps, to pull up our joints. I once clamped a floor with a 40-foot span with extension pipes made from threaded steel pipes using a pipe clamp head and shoe. Clamps became all the more ubiquitous because of the threaded screw and thereby relatively inexpensive. We all own a half a dozen clamps of different types. And we no longer boil up animal hides and bones to make glue from either. PVA works great and has a long shelf life. So some words are adopted, and others become archaic to the point of oblivion. No child in any school in the world will know what a draw-bore pin is and 99.9% will never know that a mortise and tenon joint in wood even existed by the turn of the century, if they even do now.

The confusion from my pub tabletop came from one thing appearing like another. In our modern woodworking culture, we generally hide our power-driven, crossheaded, ugly screw heads with wooden plugs and align the grain to match the long axis of the grain of the main body of wood because we want the grain to correspond to it and we also want to hide our use of screws. Done right, by using a carefully matched plug cutter to hole size, tone in the wood, and then grain selection of the plug wood too, the plug itself can 98% disappear.

So I did use the word ignorant. Told someone that they were indeed ignorant but in no way saying that they were ignorant people even though they followed on to make assumptions that led me to believe that they were. The image posted was clear to me because I knew how the joint went together, the history of it and of course my own use of it in my work. Indeed, I teach these things throughout my videos and designs. Referring to the obviously end-grain circles as plugs didn't make them plugs. Instead of looking and looking again, they immediately jumped on the word 'plug.' When they went on and said that the table makers should have aligned the grain so that the plug expanded at the same rate as the long grain of the body wood, I did wonder what planet they were living on. What source and which book had they read to make such a confident statement? Many gurus seem to me at least to be more and more silly. A 10mm (3/8") plug cut from dry wood and inserted into dry wood by a 2º taper will never face any contradiction by grain orientation even if fully immersed into the sea for life.

Anyway, we are all ignorant of many things, and we get along by certain levels of tolerance.

For the last eight years, Hannah has worked alongside Paul as his mentee. As we move, she has cleared her things from the workshop, but there are two pieces she has no room for and would much rather see go to someone who will love them than put into storage. Paul offered to share them here.

For the background to the move, and for the workbenches Paul is also letting go, see his post here.

Both pieces are entirely hand made, using hand tools for around 98% of the work.

Craftsman-style rocking chair in oak, £300

Hannah's Craftsman-style rocking chair in oak. She is asking £300, though Paul reckons it is worth at least double that.

Sofa table, £300

A sofa table of Hannah's own original design, again beautifully made. It really has to be worth £2,000, but with no space to keep it she would rather you grabbed a bargain at £300.

How to buy a piece

I have four hand-made workbenches that have served their purpose, and they need to find new homes in the next few days. Over the years I have given away a dozen benches, along with tools and equipment, to organisations supporting people with different abilities and disabilities and with other health and wellbeing needs. Those were the benches from my hands-on classes. Like the airlines, though, I can only carry so much excess baggage, and these four must now go.

Here is what is available.

The two "video" benches, £300 each

Two of these are the benches I built to film the bench-building series in my garage workshop (they were both built at this time, but we don't recall which one was actually built on camera), so they carry a little fame with them. Both are little used, and both have excellent, barely-worn Eclipse 9" quick-release vises fully installed and ready for work.

They are very similar in size: about 5' 4" long (give or take an inch), 3' 2" high and 27" deep. One of the two has a tool stow that adds 7" to the width. Both are made from good-quality kiln-dried construction studs, and they are robustly strong and weighty enough for any kind of woodworking you care to name.

The New Legacy bench, £300

This one comes from my New Legacy School of Woodworking. It is 5' 6" long, 23½" deep and 38" high, and it is very robustly built to last a lifetime of woodworking.

The roof-timber bench, £300

This last one has a different story. While the first three benches here were made by my own hands, this one was made by John, whom many of you will know. It is built from the Scots Pine joists and beams taken out of my own house when the builders put an extra room into the loft. It departs a little from my usual English joiner's workbench: the stock is heavier, there are twin tenons on the cross rails, mortise and tenon throughout, and a dovetailed drawer. It is exceptionally well made. It measures 5' 4¾" long, 26½" deep and a little taller at 38¾" high.

It is well worth £1,000, but I will settle for the first £300.

Add a set of hand tools, £150

I can also supply a set of hand tools, well suited to anyone pursuing hand-tool woodworking, to go with any of the benches. The set is well-used but highly functional, freshly sharpened and ready to go to work. For £150 it comprises:

• Two handsaws
• #4 and #5 bench planes
• Combination square
• Coping saw
• Dovetail saw
• Tenon saw
• Layout knife
• #78 router plane
• #80 scraper
• Set of chisels
• Chisel hammer
• Sliding bevel
• Dovetail template

How to buy one

I found a handful of pictures from thirty years ago. The drawings were still there. A mid-sized chest made from mesquite with some accents in walnut. The pictures had faded a little but were representative of my early designs back in the 1990s. I enjoyed the memory of making them, yes, but what I enjoyed the more was driving my 1951, one-ton flatbed Dodge truck onto the million acres of land to harvest the mesquite trees in a wilderness only a handful of people might ever know. I could drive that land all day and never meet a soul nor be seen by one.

My work as a furniture maker through the decades has taught me patience. At fifteen miles an hour in the desert amongst the yuccas and prickly pears, the dry heat, and the uniqueness of Texas living 30 miles from the nearest gas station and shop, it took me two hours of solid driving to reach the oasis of mesquites that thrived in an isolated cluster of a thousand trees. The frond-like leaves hung with the long mesquite pods as I pulled up to harvest. 41º with no breeze for cooling my sweat, and my body felt like an invisible brick wall, and I knew very clearly of the dangers of being where I was in such isolation. No cell phones, and no one knew where I was. I lived for days like this, felt nourished by the unpretentiousness of it. I related to the sense of belonging to nature. It was a selfish element that paralleled my younger days of solo rock climbing, free-climbing the rock faces of my youth and early twenties.

The places I spent the day in meant caution at every turn I made. The wildlife of poisonous snakes, spiders, and scorpions mostly lay hidden beneath shaded rocks, but not always. The snakes needed heat to warm the blood, and some could move at great speed. Truth was, I'd rather have the snakes of the desert than the snakes I once knew living in the big city of my youth, Manchester. Coyotes and javelinas might surprise you with sudden noise and screaming squeals when you least expect them, but they would never really bother you, but a wild boar and the odd scream of a mountain lion needed great caution. You watched the herds of longhorns in the distance or a group of whitetail deer who seemed ever cautious of possible danger. I liked these warners too—ears pricked up, tails flicking, heads turned all at the same time. And all this for a couple of trees. But was it really? Pitching yourself against dangers for a prize of raw wood has given me memories I would never regret. My two Echo chainsaws were something of a safeguard as well as a danger. But I was once awakened to a danger I had not realised. I'd placed my running chainsaw down to tug at some branches and free the stem, and when I went back to it, the largish rattlesnake had cosied up to it for the warmth and the vibration of it.

The prize of a finished design is always a fond memory. The above chests came from my earlier harvesting days. I held onto the wood for four years before I made these pieces. Driving through the four gravel river bottoms with two mesquite logs just as the sun was setting is tied up in fond memories and the two chests. They were both delivered with one in a corporate office entryway in Houston now, and the other in someone's home, if they are still there.