Paul Sellers

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.

My sliding doors came together well. With the drawers fitted and tidied up I just have the handles to consider, but probably will not have handles on the doors as such. My first thought was to make my handles, as I often do, but I like the idea of traditional brass pulls and such for this piece.

I think that this piece will be large enough to downsize my significant gathering of hardware I've accumulated and allowed to spread and drift over the years. I bought 20 boxes of vintage 1/2" #4 brass slot head screws for hinging box lids for when I was teaching hands-on classes to 16 students. That was almost ten years ago when I held my final class – who needs 3,000 half-inch brass slot head screws? Now that is just one package of a hundred other sizes of vintage screws where a cross-headed Philips or Posidrive just doesn't cut it on most of my finessing. You see, for the main part, it's the convenience of having my own hardware stock. Invariably, I can walk out there and find a dome headed chrome or brass or steel screw in under a minute or two. It's hard to let the accumulation go, so what do I do? I build a cabinet, replete with common and half-lap dovetails, sliding doors and keep what I deem to be likely needed.

It's about a week's work for me, but with the limiting factors of filming and all the other work we do it takes six by the time I'm done. Buying in the wood ready planed four-square simplifies things and saves time, of course it does, and it's really pleasant. Two woods give me the warmest feeling, pine and mesquite. They are unmistakingly distinctive, and both woods have enriched my life long term like no others. Pine goes back the longest distance. The first piece of the pine scent was in 1962 when I begged a machinist in a wood business for a piece of scrap wood I saw in a waste bin to carve and shape a boat from. He made me really work for that piece, "You can't think that such a fine piece of pine was being thrown away now can you?" and then; "Well, now, how much do you think that piece might be worth?" but of course he was joking, asked me what it was for and wished me luck. Mesquite came back in 1963 when I made my first visit to a Texas woodworker in south Texas. Now that is also a highly distinctive scent and wood. My parting pieces, the culmination of my immersive US experience as a maker, are the two credenza designs for the Cabinet Room of the White House.

Planning for every piece is critical. I learned this as an apprentice when we worked to blueprints most of the time and then, following that, to sketches on cigarette packets and pieces of wood. Cigarette packets back then were made with sliding innards of white card stock. Often, empty packets were kept for drawing out ideas on. All these are valid forms of communication, but it's more important for filming. Putting things in order that have yet to be ordered and structured is the way of crafting in the multidimensional world we live in. My journals keep something of a record of my evolving pieces and then too, now that it must be filmed, a sort of script stepping out my intentions.

My first thought for my current piece was back on or about the beginning of April this year. I made a few notes in my journal and a quick pen sketch as at top. Then I decided on the drawers.

This list typifies my thought processes. It often changes but 98% of the time it's true to plan.

Phasing to isolate stages is important for me. It structures my work and enables me to pass on my goals to those working with mas in filming and editing and such. Filming just about triples my workload because sequences break my thought patterns and activity. It's as important to craft the video work as it is my hand work. Filming must reflect the art of that medium in as much an uncompromising way as much as possible.

Notice the date header in these notes below and then the 'note to self' dated today bottom right. It records a month's passing.

The details become more definitive as I go. I'm always confidence but somehow, right before we start the videoing, I am conscious that any mistake I make is never just a second or third take. Once the cut is made, it cannot be corrected, and a new piece must be made. It's a once a year issue or even less, but I don't like to waste the work of everyone behind the cameras.

I often detail my drawings to stand parallel to my cig packet (I don't smoke) sketches. It brings ever greater clarity to the evolving piece.

I consider the work I do as both reflective and therapeutic, simply because of the nergy I put into but then because the conservation of craft cannot happen in museums and reenactments, such like that. Conservation of crafts will only live and thrive in those who practice the work to produce for themselves or others. It's not about making money and all the more about living the life. Hence, my adopting the term, 'Lifestyle Woodworker' 30 years ago. And then too my graduation from just or only being a professional woodworker to amateur status.

Many of my projects become courses in cabinet making, with everyday other woodworking thrown in for good measure. My work balances out the machinist in us–that couch-potato, tube-watching that's interesting but non-active. My quest for three decades parallels a phrase used in the 1980s and 90s in the USA. "Off the streets and on the creeks." They were trying to get kids out there fishing and taking in the more natural environments our childhoods were so laden with, instead of congregating in the more negative city environments. In my case, it's more an, "Off the couch and less of the slouch." In senior years, it may not always be so easy for many good reasons, I understand that, but anything you can stretch into will be a good thing. Also, there are disabilities too. Other excuses are excuses that postpone the development of skills that will never happen for most.

As always, this latest project is intended to both inspire and empower real making and launch everyone into making something scalable and alternative. In past projects we've made so many just encourage tackling real joinery making with hand tools. The more you make, the more confident you become. Joint making along with the support activities of saw sharpening, edge sharpening and even auger bit, and scraper sharpening seem to intimidate anyone in the early days of starting out. Neglect sharpening, and you might as well got to machining wood, where the blades are all sent out to sharpening businesses. We, I, have to sharpen most edges each day at some point depending on use and the wood types we work. I'd rather sharpen one more time in six than go for harder steels that don't save anything of anything.

We have thousands of videos that are all pure teaching and training from my own 60 years of daily woodworking. It's our platform, we own everything there, we take no sponsorship, no money, no free tools or equipment and no free promotion, etc, etc. That keeps or content clean, free to be the real us and thereby as unbiased as possible. I no longer write for other entities unless I choose to, and it's been ten years since I wrote anything other than my blogs and online content...

Videos

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Woodworking Masterclasses

... and we allow everyone to dip in and out at will or according to budget. No penalties anywhere. ~so you can dive in for a month or two and follow whichever series appeals to you the most. The income supports our work as an education provider without the usual support of magazines, sponsorship and so on.

Also, we have a whole website dedicated to new woodworkers which includes machinists who want to convert, adopt and adapt to more comprehensive methods. Here we have a range of courses and so much information it will rock for everyone regardless, even experienced woodworkers tell me that they learned so much.

All Courses | Common Woodworking

Free beginner woodworking courses by Paul Sellers and team. Learn hand-tool skills step by step.

Common Woodworking

Dig through our easy-to-follow woodworkingmasterclasses.com, and you'll discover many a hundred free videos to train, teach, encourage, empower and inspire you. Did you know that all of our instructional and tool-use videos are always free? So much of our energies to produce videos is about apprenticing this emerging long-distance band of followers; things have changed, especially since the COVID pandemic that shocked the world; and in the changes people who would never find an apprenticeship strategy to match their ambitions have come to online content. Our work comes from my 60 years of woodworking and furniture making. I have questioned the sources of information from manufacturers we might well respect, who in general I have found to have quite disingenuous content that's misleading people to buy their products. The terms used appear logical but knowing the terminology and the twists made I get to the core of honesty. At what point does any tool become dull? How can they say, as Spear and Jackson did in the early 90s did, "Lasts five times longer than conventional saws." What did their throwaway, hard-point saws with plastic handles have over those that could be sharpened for two centuries of daily use have? And who had independent testing to say cryogenic steel blades kept their edges twice as long anyway? And what does dull mean anyway? I often sharpen any one of my saws in four minutes. One stroke through one gullet means I didn't wait too long, nor sharpen too soon. Half a stroke for a gent's saw. Did you know a saw needs setting about once a year, and never every time?

All our episodes are about equipping makers to take up their tools and make, and by tools I do not mean machines. Even those who might not be new to woodworking but only use machines, but machines will never equip you for hand tools. We developed our commonwoodworking.com as a training and knowledge-based platform for anyone who wants to investigate hand tools to a deeper level. Discover the reality of real woodworking for yourself. Also, my book is around 500 pages and focusses on the real information you need to really make hand tools work for you. Here's the link for that. My blog now has thousands of articles I have written about woodworking and furniture making. Here is a final link to my furniture gallery if you're interested.

In this latest woodworking masterclass project, I'm making a dovetailed cabinet, but at the outset my fingertips tell me my saw needs a quick touch-up; it takes a five-minute sharpening session, a single pass through each gullet, so I pull out my file, sit and file. From pencil lines to knifewalls and knifewalls to housing dadoes, I make my various joints. Of course, it's been decades since I cut a bad dovetail or housing dado that was loose, but even if I did, it would still be far superior to any other method and that's simply because every component came from my own power. I don't make good joints for the approval of others. I've been done with that since George passed my work in the 1960s. Where I am this morning is starting out on making two sliding doors. Something we have not done to camera before. I've made wooden tracks and formed grooves with plough planes, kept everything within the realms of DIY, but didn't do it to be awkward, I did it because it's instantly doable–a thousand times faster than tracking down tracks and sliders.

Two types of dovetails, common- and half-lap, but both with a twist that you most likely have never seen done before; they both come straight off my gent's saw, no problem. The quietness of handwork separates crafting artisans from the boy's toys. Times have changed and progress seen in machines that chop, rip and plane effortlessly is the dominant and progressive way. But for me, that's all dead and uninspired ease. Like riding the bus instead of cycling, walking or running. There's soul to my work that I wouldn't swap for a gold clock or the speed or ease or anything else. My dovetails are usually as perfect as humanly possible and my housing dadoes top-notch, gap-free and watertight. The mastery of furniture making by hand has been my reward for over six decades, and it has never grown old. People out there, so-called professionals, mostly, never critique but criticise. You wouldn't believe the kind of dumb advice they give me. The good thing now though is that a million people will follow this project over the coming months, and the skills passed on will register with a massive percentage of them. That's all that really matters. These amateurs, usually the better woodworkers for the right reasons, are the future of real woodworking, and they continue to be my inspiration.

I'm on with the door making today. Sliding doors; a bit of an experiment in some ways, although I made many a dozen over the years. Twist free is always the ultimate goal. Make a twisted door, and the domino effect takes you the long way round to get the good looks and problem free future you want. Usually, it's quicker to trash the door and start over. Nothing you can do will cure a twisted door. You did something wrong, the wood wasn't dried down, the atmosphere is saturated, the one rail had a 1º twist, a stile too, and then quite likely the shoulders weren't even in length front and back and so created pull to one side in the clamps which pulled everything out square, whatever. But there are tricks of the trade. Too long to go into here, but they can get you out of a fix if they have to.

Making the Gauge Stock

Episode three is out on Woodworking Masterclasses if you want to go that route too, but all of the details are below here as well for those who like text and drawings. Here is the link. https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com/dashboard/

The stock of the gauge might seem complicated by sight, but systematic layout and steps for working brings the whole into sharp focus in the process of doing it. Keep the stock square until you've fully chopped the five-sided centre reception hole and bored through with the side hole into it; this receives the threaded insert and its easier to gauge squareness and perpendicularity from right-angled pieces of wood. This way, the layout and making becomes very mechanical.

A piece about 6" (60mm) by 2 5/8" (67mm) by 1" (25.4mm) will make two gauges. Probably a good start too if you don't have enough gauges and you want/need some practice.

Using the grain orientation as shown to guide you, mark a centre mark in pencil.

Square the line across the centre of the workpiece...

...and then onto the adjacent edge.

We need two parallel work lines running either side of the centreline to establish the position of the short flat side in the five sided hole. I find it best to eyeball this from a digital vernier set to 8mm. It's surprisingly accurate.

Make a mark 30mm in from the edge and square it across to the two lines. This designates the fifth, narrow wall of the five-sided hole to cut to.

We use the intersecting of these two points as reference points to register the adjacent 45º aspect of the hole. Using the combination square on 45º, start laying out two of the four sides.

Now use the actual end of the stem to establish the other two positions.

We must transfer cut lines from one side to the opposite face. Go over the pencil lines with a sharp, pointed knife to create the knifewalls you need.

Keep the square registered for each wall as you go, and use the knife to mark the outer corner of the workpiece for each one.

Square this point onto the adjacent edge using a sharp-pointed pencil.

And now the diagonal from this reference point onto the opposite face. Each of the cut lines will be established this way.

In this blog, I am drilling a pilot hole to take the snail of an auger bit but in the video I did not drill out the waste as it is my least favourite method and is not significantly faster, if at all.

Drill a pilot hole with a small twist drill to guide the subsequent larger hole with an auger bit. This will reduce the risk of splitting with the steep cone part of the screw on the auger bit. It's best to mark the centre point on both sides and drill from the two opposite face sides. You will feel the holes align in the drilling.

Boring out the bulk of the waste with an auger bit is optional, but you can use a 5/8" auger bit or a Forstner bit to bore half way or more through from each side. This may or may not make chopping the interior walls easier.

Chiselling into the knifewalls establishes a perfect start point for subsequent chopping with the chisel. Work from both sides to the halfway point to meet in the centre.

Deepen the recess.

In the video, I showed laying out these outer curves before the hole was chopped through. It's up to you and both will work. With the hole cut through and trimmed, lay out the curves on the outer corners according to the drawing.

I used both the plastic circle template and a pair of compasses to establish the radii guidelines.

These are the various radii that work for this marking gauge stock. You can work to these and then alter them to fit your hand as needed or preferred.

Saw off the bulk of the waste first...

...and then refine to the lines further with the saw rasp...

...the flat file refines the surface to a shine.

Ease the corners with the file, evenly. It will look neater and the new tool will feel more comfortable in use.

You must now lay out for boring the hole through the edge. This is the edge with the narrow parallel side 30mm in from the edge.

It's best to drill a pilot hole with a small bit. Make sure that the hole is small enough to take the auger bit threads if boring by brace and bit. This pilot hole is critical, as the conical shape of the auger bit is steep and can split the wood because of its steepness.

This bit size matches the rim of my inserts perfectly. They will vary. The brace with the 7/16" bit takes a single rotation to establish the exact depth I want once the two outer spurs reach the wood surface. It might be different for your inserts, so try out first and choose accordingly. It's good to know that the threads on the auger bit snail control the depth of cut.

The rim of the insert fits neatly.

Now step drill down through the same centrepoint with an appropriate sized bit that allows the threads of the insert to bite into the wall of the hole. In my case, it is 5/16".

I use wax polish to lubricate the threads of my insert. This makes inserting smoother with less resistance.

The Allen key (hex-wrench USA) sends the insert home and seats the rim nicely level.

The knurled screw is threaded in almost all the way.

I cut a 1/4" (6mm) bolt shank to sit between the end of the screw and the brass in the stem. This distributes the pressure evenly on the brass plate.

By drilling a recess 3/16" (4mm) deep, and placing the steel insert into the recess, I can file the faces of the steel.

The knurled screw seats nicely near to the stock, with enough space to lock the stem to the stock.

I applied two coats of hard wax oil finish after light sanding to 240-grit.

The end result is so pleasing. Now I am working on an adjustable mortise gauge version, so I will let you know.

...from the IRS or HMRC

But it is about creating a step-down in the corner of wood to receive pictures, glass and a back panel or a door panel or a door into it. I cut all of mine by hand with a rebate or rabbet or a fillister or a filletster plane in my day to day. Anyway, the video on a few different planes used to make or refine rebates is out on my YT channel below. Give me a click and join there if you like it. I'm sure you will!

Making the Gauge Stem

A sharp plough plane can tackle this groove making in twenty to thirty or so strokes. But you might not have such a tool. Here's a link to a short blog and a video on creating a groove without owing or relying on a plough plane or machine.

The steps to making are not complicated. Instead of making the five sided configuration of the gauge stem, we begin with the square edge of the stem material. I recommend making two or four stems from a 21" (53.4cm) length of a hardwood like beech, 2 9/16" (65mm) by 1 3/16" (30mm). The stems will end up around 3/4" (19mm) by 3/4" (19mm) by the size you want. Most marking gauges are between 8" (203mm)and 10" (254mm) long. In my case, I have settled on 9 3/8" (238mm).

Plane your stem wood to the finished parallel width of 1 3/16" (30mm). The edge you are about to plough the groove into should be dead square, as all of the subsequent layout tools will be registered to this edge and the faces either side.

The brass I will be inserting into this groove is 1/4" (6.35mm) by 3/16" (4.76mm). I set my plough plane with a 1/4" (6.35mm) wide cutter and the depth stop on the side of the plane to bottom out at what in the US we'd call a strong 3/16"(4.76mm), meaning slightly more but immeasurably so or unnecessary to be measured. The groove is centred in the edge.

Tips:

1: I often use a mortise gauge to delineate the parallel lines the plough plane is set to. This cuts the surface fibres and minimises the risk of surface tearing.

2: Run a sharp, pointed knife into the gauge lines to send the sidewalls a little deeper.

3: Consider sawing down the two sidewalls of the groove.

4: If you are making more than one gauge from longer and larger stock, run the plough plane on the opposite edge before you do any cutting to width or length.

With the ploughed groove done, you can now lay out for the 45ºbevel each side of the groove.

Working from the brass strip recess corners on the end grain, work around the end with your combination gauge, using these two reference points where the lines intersect on the edges as show.

Use the combination square set to the bottom corner of your end grain angle intersection. This is quick, efficient and delineates everything clearly. This gives you the cut line to saw to.

Saw down the line all the way. I leave my line in and make my stem a little fat. I am making my two gauges here.

I use my finger (I call it my finger gauge) against the corner of the stem wood to run two lines on adjacent faces to guide my sawing.

Saw down, and it is best to work from each face to ensure you are working to both lines close in and accurately.

Plane the saw work to the two lines, striving for good 45º bevels by checking with the combination square as you go.

You can either plane or saw down the adjacent angles to the lines. In the video, I show planing the wood in a clamp held securely in the vise for planing.

Adjacent faces should always be square to one another. Take your time and work to that end. You will be thankful when you come to chop your hole through.

Keep checking for square.

Plane up as you go.

Check for consistent parallelity both ways.

Preparing for the diagonal positioning of the pin so it goes as near as possible corner to corner. I should say that this is not essential at all, being off even by a few millimetres makes little if any difference to functionality, but it is always good to have a goal to shoot for.

I like my pins close to the end, and a half inch (12mm) works fine for most work. That said, I have one gauge that's just 3/16" (4.76mm) from the end. Very useful for hinge layout and guide lines in rebated recesses.

I use an awl to give me a start point on both opposite corners and drill from both sides, meeting then in the mid-section which lines up the hole if there is any minor discrepancy.

It's not obvious, but my pin stock is behind the drill bit, and you can just see it either side of the twist drill. This undersized drill hole means that the steel pin will have plenty of friction retention to hold the pin.

You really want your pin to be perpendicular to the stem on both sides, so drill as carefully as you can; otherwise the gauge will not be usable close to the stock, which we often need.

File your pin to a four-sided point. The corners of this point will enlarge the hole to a perfect friction fit that holds perfectly well.

Cut your pin to around 1 3/4" long. That's plenty of length, and you can always change the length if you want a shorter pin.

Insert the pin into your drill driver and send it into the existing hole. It will follow the path of least resistance and yet retain good retention in use.

To remove the pin, insert it back into the drill driver and rotate either way, pulling firmly as it rotates, or use pliers and rotate as you pull.

With the bit secure in the drill driver, file the point to a cone or chisel point. Both work, but the cone point needs no aligning with the stem and stock. For the cone point, rotate the drill and move the file into the cone as it rotates.

I used a 650-grit diamond file to refine the filing further, rotating the pin in the drill and applying firm and consistent pressure and. . .

. . . then did the same using 1500 grit abrasive, using a backer block for support and resistance.

Tap the brass strip into the groove evenly along the length. When done, ensure it is seated evenly by clamping in the vise.

Starting 5/8" (16 mm) in from both ends, mark the position of the screw holes centred in the strip and then dived the remaining distance between these two points by three to give three equal divisions and four screw points to drill out.

Pop on the cross-hair lines with a centre punch. This gives a non-slip start dimple for the drill bit.

I used two bit sizes. A smaller one to drill though both the brass and into the wood. That leaves wood in the wall of the hole for the crew threads to self-tap into. Then I drilled a hole through the brass, only to take the hole shank of the crew. Take care that the twist drill in action does not pull the drill in and drill out the wood.

The 2nd drill size should take the screw shank but do not drill into the wood.

Countersink the holes to take the screw head. Check for sizing. The screw should be flush or slightly recessed; otherwise the stock will snag in use.

Set the screws. I used vintage flat-head brass screws sized 1/2" (12mm) #4s. A #4 screw is about 3mm in diameter. The link below takes you to part three of the three-part series.

Making the Paul Sellers' Marking Gauge Part III

My Mondays all start the same way, pretty much, anyway. The week's wholly brand new and untouched, unsullied and bright for me to invest life into. I open my workshop door, hold back for a whole second, maybe two, and glimpse into the darkness; it's a personal thing, waiting for the light from the doorway, the way it floods in to my future, contrasts in the focal point of my bench, and sets my brain's recall of what I left in wait. Every past event of work is recorded within my four walls. There is no influence from elsewhere here. What exists there, currently unmoving, reaches into my future; I am about to link past to present and future. Isn't that ordinarily unique!

The light switch breaks into the darkness, brings the floodlight to even out the pockets of contrast in dark against light, even the darkest corners reveal the currency of brightness. The leaning wood, stacks brightly too, as if reflecting the brilliance of wood.

The stacks take up occupation here and there, isolated pockets in my processing modes. It's organised but may not look it, to others, highly and systematically organised. There's no symmetry to much of it. Not really.

I cut my last dovetail on Saturday evening before retiring. It was around 5 PM, I think. Sealing every aspect of the carcass by that finalising glue up brought an indescribable peace most will never understand. With six joints anchoring the wood to an immovable point, I know at this minute, that wood can no longer ever move from its flatness.

Had I left it through the Sunday until this morning, the chances are the wood would have moved, and I would have needed to use all my efforts to get the joints back in. Better, had I not glued, to leave the joinery together and dry than to leave the flat wood to move and distort. Joinery brings harmony because the root word of joinery is harmos, from which we derive the word harmony. Hence, "What God hath joined together let no man separate." Strange comparison, but nonetheless.

Walking to the bench, my head turns on its axis as if without my thought on anything to take in the influence everything plays out as if actors on a stage. With every turn, I remember the former steps from two or three days past. The wood prepped for the doors over there, the wood for the drawers nearby too. The shavings on the floor, the chips and blocks on the bench, remnants from dovetails, rebates, fitting this and that remain to form shadows contrasting the negative of waste at one point and then the cabinet held by the positive of unionised parts now married irrevocably.

The scents of pine translates me back in time, as it does faithfully every time, to 1965, that first of my apprenticeship when I walked into the workshop of my apprenticeship for the first time. It's this kind of faithfulness that reminds me of my irrevocable calling to become a woodworker: my anchor never faltered and this, this alone, always held me in the hard times when bills were due, and I had no clue where the income would come from, when people elsewhere said I couldn't make it, wouldn't make it, but I did, I have, and I always did.

So here I am, seeing and knowing faithfulness in that when a man is 'called' and favours the calling with diligence and perseverance, when he's made up his mind, he will become what he believed he was called to be and not what others said in the silliness of saying you can be anything you want to be but something so much deeper and meaningful. Such is the realness of an irrevocable calling for those who seek, listen, and become. It's now sixty-one years of daily woodworking six days a week with two weeks off a year on average and with no regrets.

It's already a brilliant week, and it's only 8.45, Monday 20th April 2026.

I have made dovetails in pine literally thousands of times and that is in thousands of dovetailed boxes, drawers for cabinets and cabinets themselves; I think I understand every type of dovetailing there is, but equally important is to understand the many types of woods we use for these projects because they all react differently to the processes of creating them. In my hands-on class workshops, I have taught 6,500 students alone to cut dovetails on their projects. In most of those cases, we mostly used pine. My Shaker-style candle box came about in 1986, so 40 years ago to date. In the

USA we used the softer Eastern white pine, but here in the UK we used Scots (European Redwood Pine). The Eastern White pine is very evenly textured, with only minimal difference between the hard and soft aspects of the growth rings. It pares like butter and barely resists planing. Scots Pine on the other hand, and by comparison, is tenacious, highly resinous and variable in density between the hard and soft aspects of the growth rings. This species is more knotty than its North American counterpart, too. Mostly it's the density of grain that counts the most for those of us working it with hand tools like planes saws and chisels. Measuring the density in wood using the Janka hardness test means pressing a half-inch steel ball bearing into the wood to half its diameter and measuring the amount of pressure it takes to do it. In Eastern White Pine, the Janka hardness test reveals 380 lb

f. In Scots or European Redwood Pine, the pressure measured is 540 lbf.

Offering a dovetail saw to Scots pine and then to EWP (Eastern White Pine) is a night and day difference. The teeth of a well sharpened saw in half-inch EWP will go an inch in a single push, but in Scots pine the saw will take several strokes. In all of this i am saying that when working with softwoods and using hand tools we must learn about the differences in the fibres, the wood's density, the differences in growth rings that affect our tool use and much more.

I thought discussing this set of basic dovetails would be a good starting point all round because it is so tangible. I cut my first dovetails in Scots pine. Since then, I have cut many a thousand dovetails using no more than a dovetail saw, some chisels, a knife a square and a mallet. Different softwoods all work differently. I would never choose spruce or Douglass fir, larch or some of the other softwoods for a box needing good looks and resilience. I'll take it from here into the practicalities of woodworking now.

My laying out my dovetails, tracing around them for recesses and the pins, never comes from a knife and always from a super sharp pencil. Why is that? Well, I am specifically talking about working in one of the softwoods here. In my teaching, much of the work is in hardwoods and in hardwoods, I always trace the outline of my dovetails with a sharp pointed knife and reach tight into the corners. This does not work too well at all on Scots pine. If I did that, the joint would be too tight, and it is unlikely that the paired parts of the joint would go together favourably at all. The chances are they would not seat fully down into the pin or tail recesses if I used a knife to delineate the outline in the same way I would in denser grained hardwoods like oak, cherry or walnut and so on.

The nature and characteristic properties of certain woods determines the best way to work them. My use of a pencil to lay out the dovetails will always be pencil, and I should say here that I would never cut the pins first rather than the dovetails. Frankly, it's just backwards to do it that way, and for a couple of good reasons I won't go into here. Laying out dovetails in pencil shows up well on almost any but the darkest woods. That takes out the guess work and makes sawing exactly to the angled lines easy. Generally, that is nothing new. Most people use pencils for the dovetail outline. The question is more raised when I use my knife on some work and pencil on pine. Let me talk you through the reasoning now.

I do sharpen my pencil to a really fine point. Even so, marking around the dovetails rarely gets absolutely tight into the corners as a knife always does. The margin is barely discernible; a paper thickness would be an exaggeration, but it is there. The dovetails shown here were repeated at the other end for the two top corners of my cabinet. When I cut the tail recesses and pressed the tails into the tail recesses, tapped them with the side of my hand, the recesses started to receive the tails in a dry fit. I then made a fist to tense my support muscle, developed over 60 years, and 90º of the tailpiece entered into the recess piece with a few bumps with the side of my fist. Two or three further taps with my chisel hammer drove them fully home, and all the shoulders were seated to the bottom of the recesses. There were no gaps to be seen. This is the point that needs a little explaining, so here we go.

Almost all woods have different levels of compressibility and consolidation of fibres. Oak, because of its variable grain density, will compress more than say maple or cherry, which both have even texture throughout the growth rings including even the sapwood. In oak, half of the growth rings have more open pores. In many cases, buildings for instance, the oaks' ability to flex, stretch and compress make it ideal for resistance and resilience under the pressures a building must withstand in its day to day as a structure. The softness of pine compresses within itself in a different way and when we start working with pine we realise the many differences not only between softwood species but within the species itself. This changes markedly, and especially the area surrounding and expanding from the knots rooted into the stem. Scots pine variables usually occur according to these levels of resin. Some pieces and sections will have higher levels than others, even just a few inches away within the length of a board. As soon as my saw teeth touch the wood, I immediately know the density and the friction levels caused by resin throughout the fibres my saw will work into.

Dovetailing is a perfect way to understand and absorb the knowledge and workability of any wood as a woodworking species. Scots pine necessitates that I saw tight to my pencil lines, even though they will be that paper-thin distance to each side of the dovetail I determined the position of the recess walls by.

Had I used my usual sharp-pointed knife to establish the angled cut lines to saw to, and cut to those knife lines exactly, as I might in hardwoods, I know that the dovetails would never go together straight off the saw. I will only in the rarest of cases ever pare cut any dovetail part to improve a saw cut. My dovetails always come straight from the saw itself. This then delivers the optimal fit. Unquestionably, this is absolutely the best way to leave the mating surfaces for both tails and pins.

So, why would the tails not go together?

Two things, really. The recesses would indeed be too tight, even though theoretically one part is only occupying the physical exactness of the would be occupying part. But mostly it's two things occurring at the same time. Within seconds of applying glue, wood begins its inevitable surface swelling, which then in turn shrinks the available space between the pins and the dovetails. We generally apply glue to all meeting surfaces because that lubricates the joint and allows us to seat our joints. Glue starvation can lead to what we call joint freeze. The surface friction between the mating parts prevents any movement; applying force of any kind can then break the wood in various ways and ruin our work. The second negative influence is the friction between surfaces. Even if the puzzle pieces are an exact match in terms of size and angles, as the parts come together, the surfaces between the mating joint types become progressively tighter the closer and deeper it gets to the final point of seating. A dry fit in pine like Scots pine, with its very high resin content, markedly increases the friction levels. Most other woods, as in hardwoods especially, do not have this 'resin-stick'.

Other softwoods such as spruce and Douglass fir act differently. Still soft in terms of density, the surface fibres are fractious and though not the same as Scots pine, they cause a 'sticking' point as the joints come together. Again, the glue expands the surface fibres by swelling them. This means that gluing up in any case necessitates our moving systematically and efficiently.

Finally, always remember that wood that's swollen by the glue itself rarely shrinks back between and away from the mating surfaces, and that is because it can't. What am I saying? Wood in the solid always expands and contracts according to the intake and release of moisture in the woods' fibre. What causes this is the atmospheric moisture content surrounding the wood. At any given point, these levels change according to the environment. General humidity to a geographic area is one thing, but within the confiners of a workshop, a home or an office is ever-changing unless you live in the desert areas or frozen climes. When we swell our wood through gluing, the mated faces are bonded to one another and this bonding does not turn loose.

Another finally: You may well buy in your wood at the same time and think each piece you bought to make from has the same moisture levels or that your existing stock you added to will be okay to get stuck in on joinery. A moisture meter is invaluably here. You want the readings to be the same when it comes to wider dovetailing. If you make your dovetails with woods at different levels, though both may well shrink, it's more likely that the one with the higher level will shrink the more and this will inevitably end up with a split somewhere.

If your wood is ready, make your dovetails and whatever other joinery you have and unite them, even if you are not ready to glue up. The retentive value of being so held will serve to maintain the flatness of your boards until you are ready for actually gluing up. Not doing this usually results in cupped boards, making it difficult to get the joint together. Also, changes in the sizes of both pins and dovetails can expand and contract because of the open exposure of the wood. This is the case even over short periods but especially over an overnight period.

These next three blog posts will show you how to make my marking gauge. It's in three parts because the video series is in three episodes too, so these upcoming posts work in tandem with the videos. Here will be the link to Episode I which comes out on April 15, 2026 at 5 PM UK time.

My making marking gauges came from realising that I only used the combination gauges for mortising and had always picked up the clunkier vintage versions of marking and mortise gauges because, well, they were what I had and what was available. It was when I picked up the Stanley 5061 a few decades ago, held it and used it, that I realised it was the better tool than any UK models I had ever used. Later, I came across a brand new one, that was in 2011, for just £4, and I wondered why all other marking gauges had not been ditched. It's one of those tools that you wonder why it took so long to come, but then realised it was the scarcity to see one, let alone use one. That led me to make my own better version with a few of my own improvements. Stanley's catty-corner presentation relied on a plastic insert to absorb pressure as a pressure point to the corner of the stem, to distribute the pressure from the nylon thumbscrew. I didn't want either piece of polypropylene even though the stuff lasts well enough, I decided on a metal insert against which I could apply a metal thumbscrew without crushing the delicate corner. This meant ploughing a groove to recess a brass or steel strip into. I also had no way of producing a nylon thumbscrew, even though it could be done with a 3D printer these days. Even so, the thought of going for plastic, buying in a 3D printer seemed to be the antithesis of all that I advocate. Additionally, I found that combination gauges are a good option starting out, you will quickly need that mortise gauge for a marking gauge in a few minutes. Also, rarely do I need one gauge of whatever kind at a time on any given project; it's not unusual for me to have three to five gauges on the go at one time. This week I had two for mortising and three for marking.

My choice of wood is close-grained, more non-compressing beech. It has just the right amount of resistance under pressure and also wears well. Would I add a wear plate in brass for better wear resistance? No. My wood is almost always planed level and smooth before it comes to using marking gauges, so the wear is not really a factor for me. Another issue is compression value. Unlike woods with contrasting growth rings, oak, for instance, where one aspect is soft and the other hard, beech is absolutely consistent throughout, making it resilient first but then delightful to work with hand tools too.

Making my gauge is not complicated with hand tools. I suggest that you might make two or three at the same time. You can work longer pieces of wood more readily and cut down the make-time to perhaps get three for the time of making two.

The Stem

Each gauge ends up with a stem of 3/4" (19mm) by 3/4" (19mm) 10" (254mm) long, but that is not the size we start with, so resist cutting until you've read the blog post that follows or watched the video. We need a section roughly 1 3/16" (30mm) wide by a couple of inches. That's because the only way to plough the groove with any kind of accuracy and control using a plough plane is with a square edge. The added width facilitates clamping in the vise while we plough. We plough the groove centred in the narrower edge. Planing the wood to size means we can use faces and edges as registration faces for the marking gauges, square and plough plane to sit against.

The Stock

Again, the actual size of the stock is 2 3/8" (60mm) long by 2 1/2" (64mm) wide by 1" (25mm) thick, but I suggest you start out with something that will perhaps give you two or three stocks and even if just making one, it is easier to hold in the vise for truing if it is longer. A 10" length works.

BEFORE YOU DIVE IN

You might think to get ahead and do the shaping from the details here, but I suggest you wait until you've watched the video (it is a paid video, and optional, but recommended), as transferring the knife walls to the opposite side are not as easy as you might think.

The Tools

Pencil

Compasses

Circle Template

Bench plane: #4

Combination square

Knife

Tenon saw: small to medium (maybe 10–12" (254mm to 305mm)

Chisels

Chisel hammer (or mallet)

Steel hammer (maybe optional) but I wouldn't use a chisel hammer to use the centre punch.

Centre punch

Drill of some kind

7/16" (11mm) drill or auger bit (I used a brace and bit for this size, but a Forster bit works well too). Remember too that this bit is to match my insert rim size, which can be different to your inserts.

5/16" (8mm) bit

3mm twist drill bit

Saw rasp

Flat file

Plough plane (can be optional). See my blog post on ploughless ploughing or my video on No Plough Ploughing Grooves.

Screwdriver flat head

For metal working, you will need a metal-cutting hacksaw.

The Metal

The brass strip measures 6mm (1/4") by 3mm (1/8") thick and 254mm (10") long. Look for brass flat stock on your favourite supplies platform. I have bought mine from both eBay and Amazon.

For the pin, I have used both 2mm and 3mm piano wire with equally good success. You can buy from most modelling suppliers but also from eBay and Amazon. This steel is hard enough for wear resistance yet can be worked with a regular flat file to round and shape the point. You only need a 2" (50mm) piece, but most likely it will come in a specific length.

The Other Hardware

I bought in half a dozen metal inserts for £5 a bag delivered to my door. The size is for a 6mm threaded screw. These inserts have self-tapping threads on the outside that work to bite and self-thread into the walls of a 5/16" (8mm) hole. They have a slight rim that fits nicely into a 7/16" (11mm)shallow recess I bored with a brace and bit just fine with a single rotation once the spurs touched the surface and the screw thread bites.

To secure the brass pressure strip adequately and at even pressure, I use four #4 1/2" (4mm by 12mm long) brass countersunk screws.

The threaded hardware will be a matter of choice and couldn't be easier. My thread size is 6mm by 30mm from Amazon. Look for 6mm by 30mm knurled thumbscrews. I used stainless steel, but here you can go for other options too.

Parts to the gauge

A Stock

B Stem

C Pin

D Knurled Thumbscrew 6mm by 30mm

E Brass pressure strip