Paul Sellers

I am periodically confronted about my defensiveness of issues. The key in this is to know if you are being unnecessarily defensive or not. Another consideration is whether the person confronting is actually being passively aggressive because our tendency when we are confronted by such a sentence is to say, "No, I am not." In my world, I see nothing wrong with being defensive when someone is offensive or on the offensive or when you really have something worth defending. Defending what's worth defending is a right for any person. People use phrases such as, "Why are you offended?" or worse still, "Why are you so offended, Paul?" Well, all too often it is not that we are so much offended or defensive, thin-skinned and so on at all. They will always take any come-back to deflect their own very culpable and often mindless distraction. It is most likely that the accuser did or said something very thoughtlessly, childishly or dismissively and tossed something out, over their shoulder, and tried to walk away from being responsible for what stupid or thoughtless, mindless thing they said. I write blogs and post content that I seriously think through and dwell on, reread, carefully consider a few times before posting or filming my content, and then I post. Their comment is not at all some innocent thing but a form of passive aggression. A blog post might take me a short time to pull together but a long time to reconsider the content in my personal search for value and truth to my craft, consideration of my audience and much more. My work is not fun in the sense of the real meaning of the word, which is foolishness. I care more about massing on my skills for the remainder of my life so that the art of real woodworking will be perpetuated in future generations. What I do is worth defending to me. This post is 3,500 words. I write it knowing that not everyone will give it a fraction of the time it took me to write it, but that eventually a few hundred thousand woodworkers will.

A unique cluster group of planes arrayed distinctively to provoke the question why?

Though it might appear that way, I’m not always conventional. The methods I use are mine by owning the mastery of hand tools as well as machines. I used both equally from age fifteen until 1995. Because of my established skill and mastery, it's not a boast but a simple reality, I was able to withdraw from being a machinist. After closing down my woodworking schools, I no longer needed nor wanted machines to dominate the space in my shop nor in my life. I extracted myself through the disposal of six machines to the metal scrapyard. Some said i should have passed them on. I wanted to shut them down so that they would never work again in any circumstance. It was cathartic.

Any craft you care to name comes from its incremental evolvement, with each generational iteration adopting the past, but then too adding in the different developments in any given era. Remarkably, until the Industrial Revolution supposedly dragging us out of our Neanderthal past, change was slow. It was in this period that we adopted the term 'progress'. Progress became the manipulation of the majority and the use of that word is used time and time again against those who love working with their hands and using 'primitive' methods that are not nor every were they primitive. They simply matched the speed of our humanity. We worked within our natural limitations and 'did' the work...emphasis on physical 'working' with our bodies and minds wholly engaged in every aspect and task. Movement from within the crafting artisans by those creatives strove for highly economic handwork with no dream of owning machines or a machine shop. They worked according to their own owned speed, working with the established efficiency of their own human body. Within this unique sphere, they discovered themselves in ways that gave them time to think, time for knowing their material and time to master the hand tools they would use forever to move through each project critically aware enough to remain crucially aware all the time. You cannot simply delete time. Any project takes time from us in payment for the privilege of working the raw material. We, the makers, must allow time for the material to yield, to expand our vision, to create something designed to occupy space and to serve its useful purpose in whatever we designed it to be. The hands and eyes move dextrously; through this union of a whole being, every sinew and muscle, every neuron within, we move our material, work our tools, charge our bodies, and the brain decides on every shift in direction. To counter this interdependency of specifically arranged 'coworkers', the brain the hands and the materials, this union comes together in sensing creativity in ways we only dream could happen, and by this basic human ingredient we have developed every form of composition.

It's from the full-orbed machine world that we hear, time and again, the question, "But why would anyone want to do it that way?" Well, why do people run when the bus runs every ten minutes? Because we want to. But we, the hand maker's, volunteer our whole being altruistically into the private world to live out our chosen occupation long term: we have no need to give any account or reason to others, though others often demand it from us quite forcefully and sometimes aggressively. We have no real gain from answering or explaining, nor offering much to that end. Not unless, that is, we no longer look for discussion, refuse argument, but are prepared to speak something that might lead them to reconsider how they are working and then the why of it. You might simply question whether a chop-saw chop cut, that's, of course, minimalist woodworking and maximalist machining, the pushing of a button or squeezing of a trigger, and the pulling of an arm down with minor effort, is a skilled process or whether it simply substituted for developing any skill at all and shows all the more that they evolved into being a skilless machinist.

Our world of encouraging hand making for millions has steadily and progressively impacted the trend and broken the mould of automatism. Within hand-making, we find the antidote to every dilemma we come across. We discovered a lost past that matches a pace our humanity can work beautifully in, that removes unnecessary pressure and favours our wellbeing. Choosing not to mortise holes by machine, nor want to cut the tenon cheeks by anything but our two hands, a saw, a chisel a brace an auger bit, sufficiently equips us. We mastered sharpening of our saws, planes and chisels. An axe parts off the wasted quickly, and so too the drawknife on a shavehorse.

We lift the tool we might have made ourselves and trim off the excess to refine our joints. We rely on our inner power and dynamic to make fit what we make and feel the energy go out from us with sensitivity and measure. Things that don’t exist get made, and things that exist badly or offered in an overpriced way get made, too; that's mostly because high-priced items might be prohibited to the majority. But I, like the conventional things I enjoy, have been evolving too. I take what provides well by its provenness and carry it forward until something better comes along for me to weigh and measure in its value to my hand work. I keep some things that worked and lasted well, knowing that not too much exists in our woodworking world with hand tools that didn't exist two-hundred years ago. My world strives to improve on what was preexistent before it, but not for the sake of selling so much as accepting we are meant to improve within our sphere that which can be improved.

I think of the Ultamatum brace below over the beech version with its short grain weaknesses but then its displacement by the subsequent manufacture of our modern swing (bit brace USA) brace as a perfect example. Each generation of braces took on preexistent problems to solve and thereby improve them. Of course, the development of small, electric motors rendered many hand tools obsolete. But it was not necessarily that they always improved on what existed. Electric-driven equipment makes for greater ease, but along with it increased production demands that then, no surprises here, demanded more production and we ended up being driven by equipment putting us on the production line. Less time to think through other issues and the need to catch what was coming down the line on the conveyor belt of life before it dropped off production because of our slow response.

The Ultamaum brace was made as the ultimate brace. This one is made from solid brass and steel castings that are then infilled with ebony, box or rosewood. Beyond that, braces were made from beech but the beech ones snapped in two because of the short grain under pressure and the Ultimatum solved that issue. But life was short-lived for the Ultimatum because bit braces took advantage of steel parts with no wood beyond the pad and the handle.

I have extended my world of truly hand made furniture into the lives of others seeking out the knowledge through a new form of apprenticing into the future. There is an honesty projected from my lived life using, testing and experiencing a vast range of woodworking hand tools but then a proven reliance on them over the past two decades using 98% hand tools in hundreds of furniture pieces to create every design on my various platforms for training. When people kept telling me of the ease of this or that, pull-stroke Asian saws, a particular plane type costing upwards of £300 to £400 pounds, I had the experience to compare them and, never taking sponsorship or personal freebies, the freedom to give honest thoughts and opinions to those seeking an unbiased and unbought answer. I found that 98% of Asian saws being sold to any unsuspecting customer had impulse-hardened, non-resharpenable teeth, and that alone made them dispose-of-when-dull throwaway tools; people bought into it lock stock and barrel. I was as equally unlikely to buy into this as I was tools that offered no more than a secondhand tool bought on eBay when I knew that within a few hours of work, everyone owning any tool with a cutting edge had no choice but to start the journey into mastering sharpening. I sharpen all of my Western saws in under four minutes and have owned and used my saws for daily use for many decades, some a good century and more old at that, with no repurchasing saws but the occasional saw file. So amongst all other hand tools requiring sharp edges, the main reason hand tools fell into disuse, ridiculous though it might seem, is because people lost the ability to perform simple tasks like sharpening a cutting edge or a series of saw teeth. Buy any secondhand tool online, and it will arrive dulled and way beyond a level that it should have ever gone to (believe me here, do not let sharpening a saw intimidate you.) Secondhand tools usually take only a few minutes to restore their cutting edges. They were never abandoned because they didn't work and work well, but because they dulled, owners were lazy, and they had lost any knowledge about how to sharpen them. But here is another problem: most new tools being sold are not truly sharp or sharp at all, and it's here that we see some measure of success for those who came up with the answer of producing tools with sharp edges. If makers made saws with sharp cutting points or planes with a sharp edge, the old makers who sold planes yet to be honed would become a thing of the past, they would win over new customers simply because the tool arrived sharp.

People working with hand tools now tell me (and you) that a premium plane costing £400 + or a saw costing £150 is a better tool and worth the extra just for the finer example of a working model. They will also say such a tool is far superior to the wooden versions of planes or the steel is superior for this or that but my experience tells me harder steels can result in compromise one way or another. "It's got harder steel, weighs in much heavier, is a beefier tool built to last, has at-your-fingertips adjustment through tweakers, gadgets, gizmos, levers, winders and dare to say it, an adjustable frog." You will most likely, like me, never use such an adjustment point but once in a whole-life working lifetime.

In these three planes, all identical in quality, there is no new innovation or inventiveness nor anything that added to the existing functionality of the original design. The plane handles were likely finished better than the 100-year-old originator's invention, but not too sure about that either. Tighter engineering tolerances does not translate into a better model in the hands of we the users. Loose threads spin more readily for take-up and will continue to work after a hundred years of daily use, as I am proving every day.

There are some facts we should all know; the reason metal planes replaced wooden ones was because it took a good half a day and more to make a good quality and saleable wooden bench plane of any size, and the bulk of that work was achieved by pure skill in hand work in both wood and metal. On the other hand, you can assemble about two hundred all metal versions using production line methods in the same time. Pouring molten metal into a few hundred moulds linked by sprues that allowed a pour like this meant the plane soles cost a fraction of those it took to make wooden plane bodies. Let's not talk about plasma cutters and water jets for cutting through plate steel within super-tight tolerances. That's not quite how the whole thing worked out for Stanley Rule and Level back in the late 1800s but it was well on its way. The problem for Stanley's innovative Bailey-pattern and subsequent BedRock version was that woodworkers just did not like the weight of the Stanley planes, and liked even less the way they stuck like molasses to the wood surfaces being planed by comparison to the current wood-to-wood versions now centuries old and still crafted by hand. Stanley thought that they had produced the "better mousetrap", but it took them 50 years to finally prise the wooden plane from the hands of true makers of the day. Furthermore, that only happened because back in the day, machining all aspects of wood was taking over anyway. Woodworking changed over a short period to become only wood machining. Manufacturers wanted skilled and thinking workers, but only to be compliant and to do and think within their framework of allocated work. They knew anyone that thought too much could become their competition in the future. They had to be able to exert total control. They demanded something controllable; they wanted to develop a workforce of mindless drones that they could easily replace on a continuing basis at the first signs of any Luddite raising a head above the parapet. Unfortunately, we now have proponents and owners of premium planes who actually believe that a £400 plane will work that much better than a vintage style wood on wood version and then a vintage Stanley bench plane of any size. Of course, that's not true at all. Both British wooden and so-called premium all metal planes are heavy, clunky and awkward to use. T least at first when it comes to the wooden planes. Wood on wood is near frictionless, unlike heavy cast metal ones, which stick like glue to the wood unless you grease or wax them. Mostly that is because people involved in making hand tools are that rare breed that never actually use or rely on them beyond selling them. They just saw a niche in the market because British Stanley and Record after the 1960s became so sloppy it was shameful and shamed the Sheffield manufacturing with its former reputation for quality tool making, and rightly so. Oh, well!

It was indeed industrialism and the Industrial Revolution that destroyed the then high levels of highly skilled artisanry and craftwork taking place in domestic realms–that's because that became the ultimate goal of the wealthy classes. Factory owners needed to program and own individual independents to become specialised in the minutest of tasks so that speed could increase efficiency at every level in a productive system. And handwork needed to be replaced by machine work at a rapid pace. They coined the term 'progress' back then, but more accurate terms would have been ownership and manic control. Enter Henry Ford with the first known true production line and the famous quote that took life in a funny way, "Any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black," Of course it was a metaphor for a powerfully controlling freak individual, hell-bent on efficiency and his famed black Model T Ford. The quote highlighted his utter drive for production efficiency; black paint was highly durable, dried faster than colour, and so sped up his assembly line. He, as with all industry magnates of the previous centuries and more than ever today, wanted and want absolute control and to perpetuate a readily replaceable labour force and thereby a constant supply of assembly-line assembly workers they can replace should any rebellion arise or someone grow old or sick, not unlike they did the parts being assembled on any production line. And boy, how that translates into today's workforces on every level. Dumb down skill and rely on machinery, and you can control masses and masses of people by cost values, credit debt, high overhead and wars and rumours of wars because the majority of the mass public now choose and buy all things only according to cost. And here we are. Fifteen years ago, on eBay UK, I was buying any Stanley plane you care to want for even as little as £1. Rarely do they go for more than £20-25. No one believes that a secondhand plain and basic non-retrofitted Stanley can work just as equally well as a £400 heavyweight selling under the banner 'premium plane' or whatever, but of course, it can, does, will and always will, with the simplest of sharpening methods and a few tweaks to correct any previous user misuse issues.

The difference between me and others is that when I pick up a tool for fine woodworking, I rarely consider the heft to be of much real value to me. A plane needs to be light and sharp for me.

By industrialising workers, methods of work and technological advances, we now have generations of so-called woodworkers living quite skilllessly from machining wood. In the once common-to-all handwork, through the Industrial Revolution, came the ultimate destruction of small family-owned and family-run businesses which were subjected to being as near as possible to being owned without calling them slaves by the dominant and highly privileged classes. So What's new? It was exacerbated by confusion with what was called the UK's Land Enclosure Movement that forced ordinary working people off common land the result of which corralled them and forced them into work in the rapidly emerging factorial systems so they became factory fodder breaking up family life by pumping family members from five years old on up through factories owned by the rich made richer by highly nefarious occupations including foreign land possession, slavery or whatever. Those richer landowners and squires started renaming crafting artisans as the "Luddites" to show them up as rebellious malcontents whose whole intent was on halting progress. In the mix of all of that, though, they did discover that community-owned endeavours eventually lost the willingness to input and ended up in a take-take-take mode. Overgrazing on free land destroyed things, even when they owned their own land. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.

At woodworking shows, people actually used the same term for me when one or two in the audience suggested I too was "Just a Luddite!" or some kind of "Neanderthal". Or then too that I was keeping people in the dark ages. That wasn’t at all true. In those days, I used machines, but they never displaced my hand tools and my hand skills because all too often, they could not do what my hand tools could do with the same level of expedience and efficiency. My hand tools actually helped me to make my own exodus from being swallowed up as a machinist and machine-only woodworker. Many things I did, cutting dovetails and planing surfaces, were faster than using machines. My hand planing reduces any power sanding by 80-90% and that's because I can go straight to 250- and 350-grit after hand planing and even then, it actually roughens the surface, not smooth it. Better to give ‘key’ to the surface for the finish to hook up to.

Look at the garden gate made with such care. Draw-bore pins, stopped chamfers, mortise and tenons throughout. Wide shoulders to the lock and bottom rails. Tongue and groove panelling, such like that. No one knows that convention made the gate in a time when such things really mattered.

I haven't altogether broken with convention, but what I want to say is that it is important not to merely dismiss past technologies as being somehow archaic and no longer valid just because they might be ancient. Many things generated in our past history and evolution remain unchanged by any kind of improvement process hoped for. That's because those with an open mind refused to throw out whatever was working and working well. It did not negate the search for improvement whee it might be possible. Not at all. Many things have never changed, though, and that's because there often was no need at all to change them.

Another consideration, though: we thinkers often change the intended function of a tool from one specific use and devoted task to use it for an alternative function. We might even dismiss a particular tool for its former specific task because it might no longer have that function. This takes some reasoning, but take a shoulder plane for instance. In my general day to day, I do not use a shoulder plane for planing the shoulders of my tenons, even though I have one on the shelf behind me. No one has yet asked me the question as to why they never see me use it, but I have two good reasons. Back in the pre-plastic, pre-aluminium pre boxed steel section days of the Victorian, when doors were all made from various woods, commercial buildings and rich family homes had massive doors made from hardwoods the shoulders of which could be up to 18" long. Such doors were very much hand made by craftsman woodworkers, relying on hand skills and hand tools. The shoulder planes of that day were developed to refine these ultra-long shoulders on the rails in creating these massive wooden doors. They predate tenoners, large machines that cut the tenons and shoulders both sides, one wide rail or a dozen side by side smaller rails in a single pass, cutterheads both under and over, leaving perfect tenons with dead square shoulders or even coped cuts to match the long grain mouldings they corresponded seamlessly to. On the other hand, that same machine can cut 18” wide rails to leave a tenon with perfect shoulders both sides of the tenon became obsolete by the use of plastics and metal doors. This reality left shoulder planes to gather dust as obsoletes in the day to day of the joiner’s shop. Prior to that, these joints were cut by hand and the shoulder plane was employed for the final square both-ways fit after the tenon saw cut the shoulders. My reference to plastic and metal is because the big entryways to commercial buildings now are rarely if ever wood and more likely boxed metal or plastic construction with the advantage of only minimal consequential expansion and contraction through any change in atmospheric heat and moisture levels.

Hand cut, hand ploughed, hand grooved a millimetre wide and tapered at that and then every facet surface planed to a smoothness that sanding to 1200 grit would have roughened not smoothed. How can this be? But this it is.

The second good reason for us not needing a shoulder plane in most of today's woodworking is simple to understand; using knifewalls over narrower widths means we get dead square shoulders from a combination square and a sharp knife alone, with no further need of the shoulder plane. Subsequent cuts with saws can be pare-cut with chisels directly to the knifewall we created. Using the knifewall is not new in any way at all, only the naming of it is new. I decided that we needed a new name, a term that identified the outcome of the task. I coined 'knifewall' to that end three decades ago. I felt that the terms used were obsolete and not truly fit for purpose. I didn't think striking knife or marking knife were really ideal terms in the sphere I was using them, which was fine woodworking and furniture making. I decided my using a sharp knife to create a wall across the grain to create shoulders created a neat knife wall in the wood and hence I started to use the more descriptive and identifiable knifewall as the ideal term as the knife cuts through the surface fibres and leaves a clear-cut wall for subsequent cutting to with either a chisel, saw or a plane.

In general woodworking, it is pointless to use a knifewall along or with the grain, the benefit is for crosscut work where otherwise the teeth of the saw tend to rip and pull the fibres, even when the teeth of the saw are shaped to a pinnacle point for crosscutting tasks. No matter how good the steel or how hard, saw teeth deteriorate in sharpness levels stroke on stroke. Crosscut saws have bevels to both the front and back edges of the teeth, culmination in two bevels to the insides of the teeth and each with a pinnacle-point tooth. The very tip of the saw tooth penetrates as the thrust or pull cut deepens to sever the fibres, each side of the saw. The issue for most of us is that our smaller saws are seldom sharpened for crosscut but for rip cut. That's because 95% of our work will be rip cut in joint making. Think cheeks of tenons and dovetail angles. Dovetail shoulders are commonly chopped and pare-cut, so almost not crosscutting there. Shoulders to tenons might often be one eighth the width of our tenon cheeks. That means that a crosscut saw for sawing tenon cheeks would be grossly inefficient. Another point that's not a pun is the size of the teeth on our tenon saws. They ten to be ten points and more to the inch so quite small and small teeth cut smoothly, even across the grain as in shoulders so the same ripcut saw works well across the grain too. No point in having two saws in each size when one will do quite well enough.

In effect, though Western saws are designed to cut efficiently on their thrusting cuts, they also cut more mildly on the reverse stroke too, but the lessened efficiently is because of the pitch at the back of the teeth. You can increase the aggression of the saw teeth by the verticality of the front of the teeth when you file the teeth. Increasing one side, the front, decreases the pitch on the back of the teeth. That's the same with rip cut saws, but a rip-cut saw does not cut on the reverse stroke because the teeth negatively engage the wood.

I realised a few years ago that many of you might be dismissing plywood, thinking mostly that it is some kind of lesser wood. I know in colleges they adopt MDF as a substrate to veneer work because of ease and its relative stability, flatness and so on. I'm not going to advocate that. I'm doubtful of many things when it comes to cheap sheet goods designed for industry and industrial processing. They are mostly being trained for a different world than mine. MDF is near in ugliness to pressed fibreboard, chipboard and OSB. I'd rather not go that route.

I made three of these game boards because otherwise you might lose a table to some other purpose like dinner or a jigsaw puzzle.

Nowadays, I have no problem with good grades of plywood, and I have made several simple and complex projects using plywood through the years. Its greatest value lies in its intrinsic, omnidirectional strength, stability and resistance to the expansion and contraction solid woods must be catered to. For the main part, this plywood is quite solidly 98% actually wood layered in thinner sheets, and remarkably made at that.

Super strong and dimensionally stable, plywood is a remarkable invention, but never go cheap on it.

The main advantage of plywood lies in its singular expanse in sheet form which means economical cutting to smaller sizes are keeping the sheet where large areas can be spanned for rigid bracing against lateral pressures such as skinning the backs of carcasses, drawer bottoms and so on. Anyway, here i am talking about quality birch plywood as a well-proven material to be relied on. Roughly speaking, 3/4" (19mm) plywood in an eight-by-four-foot sheet comes in at £4 a square foot from my supplier here in Oxford. Standard thicknesses are 1/8", 1/4", 3/8", 1/2" and 3/4" and then too the near metric equivalent. All useful sizes, commonly, available in sheet goods. Occasionally, I might consider going for a decorative facing as a veneer finish, but I prefer not to. These thin veneers are microns thick and don't suffer damage well at all.

This tongue is the solid consequence of good ploughing with a plough plane, and I can think of nothing more rewarding by this degree of true hand work. Even if I had a power router or a tablesaw I would still have done the past ten years of work with a basic plough plane I bought for £10

There are times when we are looking for simpler, quick-to-make projects for a speedy outcome in our time-strapped world, but sometimes we want a fast-to-make present. At Christmas, this last year, I made some puzzle-cum-craft boards using only grooves in hardwood and sheets of 1/4" plywood. I wanted something stiff, unwarping and slender–something you could simply slide under a couch, a cabinet or a bed for stowing, with or without the puzzle on, or, when the board was not in use, behind a couch, a chair or a cabinet.

Quality plywood is the must for plywood drawer bottoms if you want the life span to parallel that of the sold wood enclosing it.

This is just to frame several of the issue surrounding making innovatively. My storage bin here can be made to any size you like. Well-fitting grooves for the plywood synchronises all the elements. I'm not sure if it gives a Scandinavian look, but it does leave a more minimalist look simply by the fact that it was minimally made. It's also a waste-free project in that offcuts are a good and free resource and any local cabinet shop will gladly give scraps away for something so small.

A bin tidy takes but a short time. Shape the top of the corners after ploughing the two grooves in a long stem, and then cut each to length as you go. That way you have the long stem to plough plane and grip in the vise.

You may or may not have seen me use plywood tongues within solid oak frames or to add lipping to my shelves. It's not sacrilegious. The plywood I use, quality birch ply from Scandinavia, will more than likely last just as long as solid wood and, anyway, some of the things I do could not be done with solid wood for reasons of weakness, expanse, expansion and contraction in relation to atmospheric moisture levels that constantly change.

Grooves ploughed with a freshly sharpened plane reduces the risk of top-corner tear-out, but not always. I use methods that stop this too, but I must read the grain like text on a page as well.

My latest project relies on long-lasting glue in every way. The layers of plywood are glued with longevity in mind, and I picked sheets we know as WBP. WBP stands for weatherproof and boil proof; this plywood is a high-quality, exterior-grade sheet material manufactured using adhesives designed to withstand extreme moisture and harsh weather conditions without delaminating. It is widely used and accepted throughout the woodworking industry because it offers superior resistance to warping and splitting compared to other plywoods.

Not all plywoods are created equally, and the core values might be quite different from one manufacturer to the other. Here, we see it in the plies being of equal thickness in the five layers and then reduced for a metric size in the lower one.

Both are often sold here in the UK as a measurement of quarter inch. In the above, the core layers remained standard, but the outer skins were reduced to create a thickness for selling the plywood in Europe as a thinner plywood sheet of 6mm.

It's quite a minor difference in the grander scheme of things but looking back now, I think i might make yet one more using 1/8" plywood to feel for the weight difference. I could clip off another 20% of the solid wood by dimension changes too.

Even though we in the UK began transitioning to metric in 1965, it took several decades to fully adopt and establish metrication; we are still not altogether there in that we drive on roads giving distances only in miles and drink beer in pints. Going metric was merely a nod to qualifying to become a member of the EU, I suppose. Perhaps dinosaurs like me perpetuate the old ways, I am not sure. I did go metric in the 1960s and can float seamlessly between the two systems most of the time, certainly no European nor any Brit under the age of fifty can do that.

Overall, my design came together with only minor changes. The chief benefit of prototyping is trialling, making changes at that time or determining by this one that a better design would come in the next one you make. I actually made five of them and all of them came out well enough to use or sell or give as gifts.

My waste bins all stacked up. They deserve all the design accolades you might give to any waste paper bin, and I noticed here again, "Two nations divided by a common language." In the comment section of FB, someone said that's a pretty fancy garbage bin, while another said that's a lot of work to put trash in. US says garbage and trash for everything. The UK says waste and rubbish as two catch-alls. I often identify audiences outside the UK by the language they use. Most Europeans and those on other continents learned American English by watching TV. So butter does not have a 'T' pronunciation but a "D" so butter and better are pronounced budder and bedder. This could be how I should interpret European plywood over European plywood made for the UK.

I kept the inside of my wastepaper bins simple but made slight differences. On some I use quarter-inch plywood for the lighter weight I wanted, but on others I added bottom-weight by using three-quarter-inch plywood.

There are special plywoods made for a variety of reasons and application and made to order, no doubt. This 3/4" (19mm) is the densest I have ever encountered, and someone made a tool from it.

At around 51 plies per inch, this birch plywood averages .5mm though actually measure nearer to a two to one ratio.

Additionally, Simpler projects can be simply made. Once the plywood is sized, all I needed after this was to plough the grooves and shape the parts. A saw rasp and a flat file brought several of them together as gifts to use as tidies.

Ploughed grooves and plywood come together very quickly. The doubled groove creates the handle part and keeps everything clean and sharp.

Also, sized differently but made the same way, my wastepaper bins make quite lovely planters. Find a water retentive outer that fits and then takes the plant pot too, and they make a very attractive planter.

If you did do this, then make sure you water carefully. Wood and water don't always do that well, and careless splashes of water long term will harm your work. Best to lift out the plant, water, leave to stand and relocate.

My sons learned to sharpen saws from me. After a few minutes, they understood the essentiality of direct thrusts and certain angles with files into and through the gullets uniting each two teeth. The saw thrust is the uniting factor. With handsaw file-sharpening of any type, you are cutting two teeth or the equivalent of one; as the saw file passes into the gullet, it sharpens both the back of one tooth and, in the same stroke, the front of the other adjacent tooth. Generally, this is good and fine. Sometimes, occasionally, we might micro-adjust an individual tooth that needs extra input because it's uneven or damaged. In such cases, we may only file the back or the front of a particular tooth, just to resize or correct its profile to better align and match the other teeth.

I think that people rarely see early on that sharpness and sharpening in-house is a non-negotiable, but we soon come to realise that without sharp tools the work becomes drudgery. I used to tell students in my classes, "If you are not prepared to sharpen and sharpen even mid-task, you should take up machining." You see, we really can't send a saw to be sharpened if we want to become real woodworkers. Cutting edges don't wear so much to dullness but edge-fracture. It's not a water-washing-over-stone wear out but the fracture of edges minute by minute.

Even really rugged saw plates pitted both sides will give you a good saw if

I called over to my son and asked him to sharpen one of my saws for me. He was fifteen years old at the time. I gave him the file, he looked at the saw teeth and picked up a flat file as well. Pulling the stool out, he positioned himself with the saw held in a saw chock in the vise, and he first topped (jointed USA) the saw teeth very minimally before filing the teeth. The thing is this. I don't need anyone else to sharpen my saw teeth. I have sharpened my various saws, overlapping them here and there because I do use half a dozen different ones. This probably means a saw every two weeks. Since my 61 years of doing this, that's 25 sharpenings in a year, so we're looking at 1500 saw sharpenings, but then I have sharpened saws for the schools I have had too , along with those of friends and such, acquaintances. I'd add as many again, that being the case, so let's settle on 3,000 sessions of saw sharpening. That's around 200 hours. That could be around 2.4 million saw teeth I have sharpened individually.

It was in 1965, towards the end of the year, a dark winter's afternoon with snow gathering outside at a rapid rate, when George tasked me, "Paul, can you sharpen my saws for me, please?" He handed me two saw files. Stubbs.

One of my former workshops. It takes something to pack up and move on. More than a house for me. There have been many moves for this man. I am evolving as I grow into occupying my space here on earth as it is in heaven, `i think.

I pulled up a bench stool, locked the handsaw in the vise and started sharpening his very old and well-seasoned 26" Spear & Jackson handsaw. Apart from my filing steel, the shop was warm and quiet. The machines were all shut down, spindle moulder, tenoner, planers and tablesaws. That was quite usual near the end of day. We swept every nook and cranny because we didn't want to leave anything that would spread a fire. With the foreman gone, everyone picked up a brush and dustpan, a broom and shovel; the shavings were bagged in burlap bags to feed the boiler for heating first thing in the morning when old Jack or Billy, the two elderly bricklayers and labourers well passed their sell-by date, but the boss didn't want to see them without the work they loved. This was a more thorough clean-up, more than a gathering and keeping the floor clear and safe as in the day's maintenance times.

I cut these out of 3/4" pine right in the middle of a class in Texas in front of 20 students because no one could "see" what the difference was between rip- and cross-cut teeth was. This transformed my teaching because they all could physically see the saw file angles from my using a massive, imitation wooden saw file in the gullets, the rolling of the pitch for more or less aggression, things like that.

My eyes searched for the glinting reflections to each tooth. The file strokes, the angle, had to match the previous ones that engaged in the gullets as presets for me to follow. George was not a hard taskmaster, but he did expect thoroughness from me. At that time, I liked the idea that I was doing my bit for George. When he took the saws to cast his critical over them, he declared each one, "Good enough."

Sharpening saws becomes pure therapy in the positive sense of making something barely wrong right. My saws do not dull visibly. My fingers touch the teeth lightly and if they do not prick the skin and hold under the lightest touch then I stop, take the file, touch the teeth with a half-length stroke and three minutes later I am back on task.

George did the same with his other tools from time to time. Planes and chisels, an auger bit now and then. Rarely did I need to go over something again, and in the end I never did. Bill, old Bill, too often asked me to sharpen his saws, admitting that his, "Eyes ain't any good, 'n' more."

My axe is 150 years old. George taught me to use one even at the workbench in furniture making and joinery, along with sharpening. He used it differently though, like a handless drawknife, to shape the bulk of a bevel in long grain, such like that.

Often kindnesses need no words, but we don't realise at the time that a task set might not obviate the intent. In my mid-sixties I realised that George did not need me to sharpen his saws and that I was not doing him a favour but he me. You see, he knew I needed more practice and risked his saws to me to give me the added experience. I did the same with my kids when they were learning, too. Bill, on the other hand, old Bill, needed genuine help. His eyes were shot, along with a steady hand and the feel it takes for the file to cut crisply. I continued to sharpen his saws until his time came to leave.

No, this is not my saw and nor was it one of Georges. I post it to show how badly a saw can be sharpened. Believe it or not, the teeth were sharp and apart from the occasional 'grab', it did saw in an okay way.

This blog post is of course free, but you might want to watch the video we made and join your fellow enthusiasts. Here is the link. If a picture does paint a thousand words, then a video could do more. Enjoy the following:

Hard to imagine so little wood can give back so much. Imagine, four lifetime tools designed and made to last for 150 years of full-time daily use from a few scraps of wood that. If you bought it, the wood might cost no more than £8. Oh! Interesting. You didn't need more than the real power of hand tool woodworking. Not a machine in sight. Imagine.

So you don't own a tablesaw or a so-called power router. If you're like me, you don't want these space hogging screaming banshees anyway. Thriving without them truly improves your self high-demand life. The small cluster above would take me a couple of hours of machine-free woodworking, I get the ideal exercise to renew and maintain my whole body and mind and my happiness is quite complete. No need to make a bunch of jigs, buy in an array of support supplies or rely on dust and chip extraction, wear dust masks, eye and ear protection for any of it and I could listen to a podcast or music as well.

We don't all own a plough plane to plough with, and sometimes we need a precisely made groove, yet we'd rather do it using our own hands and work totally in self-powered ways throughout our days. I have dug out many a recessed channel in wood without a plough plane close to hand.

I know not everyone owns a plough plane and when you need a short length of groove or channel in wood you might not want the cost and trouble of buying one in. I've made this ploughless groove often enough through the years because not all grooves go all the way through for different reasons. Generally, plough planing grooves rely on the groove going all the way through. Take your time and follow the steps, and it will work for you too. Here is the video but hope you'll stiil read through this post. Enjoy!

Using your imagination, use this picture to inspire you. Your hands pick up a quarter-inch chisel. You've sawn the walls with a tenon saw, and all you are doing now is tap, tapping a few chops in between the two kerfs to split-separate the fibres with or along the grain. Keep reading!

Step One:

It's best to set the mortise gauge to the width you want and to mark the parallel lines in the place you need them. This process parts the surface fibres, which is just a good and practical strategy.

If you do not have a mortise gauge, just use a marking gauge, working from both sides of your workpiece.

Step Two:

With a sharp, pointed knife, carefully define the walls of the groove slightly deeper by pulling the knife point into the gauge lines to cut deeper into the fibres. Watch for grain change in direction and counter any straying grain intent on taking you off course. Sometimes you simply need to change direction 180º and go the opposite way. Sometimes you simply lower the angle so the blade rather than the point severs the fibres.

Deepen the gauge lines with a pointed knife, ready for sawing. You could install the guide first if you want to. Often, I do not use any fence, and that is why you don't see me using it here.

Step Three:

I suggest you do this, though I often do not; Superglue a strip of wood right on the gauge line so that saw cuts are with thin the groove area. Three tabs of glue dots sped up with accelerator secures the strip firmly enough to work to with the saw strip in two seconds. . .

. . . But I added one for this article. The simplest and most practical way to attach a one time or temporary fence to guide tools like saws and chisels is to use clamps, but that is not always practical on narrow edges. I usually use superglue with a squirt or two of accelerator. This accelerator sets the glue in under five seconds, and two or three dots will usually be enough.Adding a brief and short burst of accelerator corresponding to the superglue blobs means that, when setting the guide to the workpiece, the set is almost instant, and you are ready to register your tools to it.No margin, just tight to the line, works perfectly well. The saw plate rides to the guide. If the depth is critical, you can clamp a depth guide to the saw plate itself so that the saw stops cutting when the depth guide hits the surface of the long guide you are working to. I probably would just go for a guesstimate depth.

Step Four:

With a mid-sized tenon saw (12" or so), start at the point furthest away from you and saw with short strokes, using the point of the saw inside your gauge line, and moving backwards until all of the teeth engage. With subsequent strokes, lowering the saw as you go, saw down as far as your intended groove depth.

The saw kerf of my tenon saw deepens the walls to depth with a few strokes. My 5mm depth on a short length of ten inches takes only ten strokes, and the end result is a pristine, to-the-line sidewall to any groove.A swift strike splits the glue line right down the middle of the hardened glue, but not usually damaging the wood. Residue is easily chiselled away with no harm to the cutting edge of the tools. Both separated pieces can be used many times over.

Step Five:

With both walls sawn down to depth, use an appropriate sized chisel to develop stop cuts as you might say a mortise. Work bevel down and backwards. This will part the fibres by short split-cuts that can then be removed with jab-cuts to remove the bulk of the waste

We call these chop cuts. Work from the point furthest away from you and come backwards. You will gauge the distance between chops according to your wood type. They all split differently. Even so, 6mm apart is plenty and at those short distances the splits come quickly. By this, we rely on the characteristic, long-grain splitability of grain to split longwise along the grain. The waste wood is easily lifted away with a few jabs with the chisel bevel-down.Here is the fast result of bevel-down jabbing to lift the fibres away and ready for the poor man's router plane (below) to level the field.

Step Six:

A simple hand plane router can be made from any odd scrap of wood and a suitably sized chisel. In my case, the groove is 1/4" and I installed a 3/16" chisel through a tight-walled hole by tapping it into place. With the first strokes in the groove it will usually feel a little jarring, but the jaggedness can be countered by tilting forward to reduce depth of cut. Subsequent cuts at a lower angle remove material smoothly.

Simple solutions help to make woodworking both enjoyable and doable in the zone. This is the original Paul Sellers' Poor Man's Router. Go to this link to watch the simplicity of making and using one. This one I am showing above is a small version. For my blog post, go here. Notice that the bevel of the chisel faces down, not up. It makes a huge difference to the finish. Oh, ignore the groove. It was a scrap.Although this usually delivers a perfect recess, sometimes it might not be as smooth as you want, but the bottom will establish a level you can work with just fine without compromise. It's important to tilt the plane forward in the opening strokes. You can control the depth of cut this way, and it saves incremental shallow setting to speed up the process.

The result is good, and especially in close-grained beech.

My end result is as perfect as it gets, and that's because grain orientation aligns with the stars. The advantage of routing the bottom with a hand router plane like this one is the ability to reorient the plane accordingly.

Tools used:

Mortise or marking gauge

Knife. I use a Stanley 0-10-598 folding pocket knife

A 1/4" and 3/16" bevel-edged chisel

Chisel hammer or mallet

Tenon saw

Design: from the word to designate

I like the demand of design, the process that creates the uncreated from a moment's thought. It's the isolation of high demand. The isolating essential of putting all else outside the creative head-sphere to give myself over to a vision kept yet private as the pictures in various perspectives and profiles form in bytes but only in my mind.

The alignment of real and imaginary lines sweep in strokes to declare proportion relating to space. Sizing is all-critical for a design to fit and be fit. The placement of pencilled dots start a baseline, a perpendicular vertical creates the ninety and alters to maybe, not sure yet, a ninety-five and then a compound complexity takes over at the tops of this as yet unmade post where rails meet, a tenon's formed and fits the mortise and a union in two distinct and direct opposites bring integrity to the union of several parts.

Nothing is square. The lines all taper and the shoulders are all 94.75º. It's a design concept.

My wood, once planks, became scraps kept from the bigger projects and retrieved as offcuts for a day when I might need them or use them. They're small and useless, space-hogging bits all others might chuck, but this week, today, I made some use of them.

I like the singular reality that all things designed are designed only by humans and that those designed things become 98% of our everyday three-dimensional objects designed for our human convenience, control, economy of motion and comfort. A field fence and gate enclose, the gate swings and the catch catches to hold and contain. The ladder lifted suspends two-dozen rungs on two poles and the taper from top to base lightens the weight on the end to be lifted most, yet strength is given to the base a man's life will be suspended and dependent on. And who looks at the gutter and the downspout, the cranked neck connecting on to the other, the sash made light that holds panes of glass that's yet unchanged in two hundred years and can still be made from wood?

Even the rugged reduction of a sapling stem is reduced to create various forms and every aspect of working is designed for the hiuman form to work with and from.

Designs always start with the limitation of space. The space in the hand to hold. The cage and box and drawer to contain. In the initial consideration phase, buildings, paths and roads are sized according to the space and distance allocated. A village designated long ago becomes a town and possibly a city from the long-term consideration and forward planning. That one becomes a city and another not. Mostly it hinges to the possibility of support infrastructure and the amounts of water, rainfall and water collection, geography and terrain. I once lived in a place called Willow City, Texas, population 13 in its entire sixteen-mile stretch. The layout for the city was drawn up and plans to build soon were sorted, but yet to come was the flood that could not be diverted, and the plans were aborted.

The buildings are designed to meet the needs of people, usually in groups large and small. The vast array of building types varies according to the local needs of communities, purpose of the buildings, location and available space. Housing takes the initial priority in providing a place for workers and generations to live close to their work. Work buildings follow and include all forms of manufacturing, services, offices of different types, labs, shops, places for leisure and so on. Most buildings follow the widely accepted tenet of construction design: form follows function. Inside those buildings, we furniture makers and woodworkers become adoptive; the same philosophy of space allocation and space fit within an allocated sphere limits our sizing. For home furnishing, office furniture and such, we recognise a secondary design type called interior design that tries to defy the tenet I speak of yet the work of the designer cannot quite fully defy the tenet I speak of because they must work according to budget, space constraints and more, but then there are those who tend often to defy too much constraint in following the "form follows function" as the only principle of design. The reality in my world is that these two elements, form and function, are spiritually one and the same and therefore defy separation. Form, human form, ultimately determines both shape and purpose whereas purpose defines and determines the ultimate and optimal size, positioning, material composition and so on. In my world, designing and living with furniture, wooden objects and tools, such like that, one cannot live without the other.

Ever wondered about every aspect of the cello or the violin, those scalloped bouts, the 'f' shaped hole, the arching to the front- and back-plates. Think accommodation, weight to strength ratio, sound resonance and vibration, projection and clarity. No part of this section of the cello or the bow is decorative. Even the inlaid purfling has its essential purpose.

Additional to all of this, we then enter the realms of decorative design both in comlimentarianism but then too the serious consideration of symbolism, the influence of diverse cultures, and the complimentariness of aesthetic. Practical needs should never dismiss these elements to design, but practical needs should firstly accept them and ultimately absorb them.

I ask the question and then ask, 'Could you?' I believe that most people could and can if they were to want to and then train for it like I did, have and continue to maintain my body and mind every day for eight hours of my full-time woodworking. Some say I am privileged. I am, but not by accident. This wasn't happenstance, it was a calculated, you see. I didn't want conveyor belt, consumerist production. It was my utter and absolute intention, and I spent a day on it. I'm not 'lucky', as some might say, neither do I indulged myself like an amateur, but I do what I do from my intentional amateur status. Always have and always will. Anyway, no matter, I enjoyed the minutiae of even the most undemanding elements, and when it was done, I told myself it was good.

It's the crispness of a joint should and a tight-fitting joint I always strive for. No creeping up on it as some dumb advocates say you should. These come straight off the gent's saw because I keep my saws pristinely sharp all the time. I disallow dull tools. They can never give me the precision good joinery relies on. In sharpening any saw, it should never take more than half a file stroke length of filing per gullet. No more, ever.

That's how it is with amateurship, you see, there is nothing you need to prove if you are truly an amateur. The love of it is enough. You volunteer into it altruistically and though reward of satisfaction becomes a payment, you didn't do it for even that because you didn't even need pay nor did you do what you did to that end. You just went out there, on your own (on your tod), picked up a tool from a clustered group of favoured hand tools and made a wastepaper bin from some cherry and some quarter inch plywood and magic begins to happen by such things, just like that.

The cherry wood came from kept scraps. Offcuts. I often keep them for a few weeks, and some are kept for longer because the grain seemed worth the waiting. All you see here came from hand saws and planes, basic chisels, a plough plane and not too much more. In other words, it's all hand tool work. I have to say that because at a glimpse people might think it's all machining. I don't even own one machine that could do any of this.

I know that they don't understand not using the machines, but to be honest, nothing I could have done by machine would have given a better result in quicker time or easier fashion. And, hey, this is just the practise run...the prototype. The wood and plywood were nothing more than short offcuts of scraps I was about to give away to my friends who come twice a week for a bagful of firewood for the stove on their narrow boat on the Thames, a quarter of a mile away from where I'm working.

Two tricks in this one. The sacrificial spruce backer on the outcut stops the cherry for splitting and breaking at that critical corner. There is no question of it. It would. Because the wastepaper bin is tapered, I used taper pieces either side to compensate for the discrepancy so i could hold it in the vise. The masking tape holds them in place while I secure things in the vise.

My shoulders to small tenons are all perfectly cut to dead-on angles using only an ultra-sharp knife, a small but significant vintage Starrett 6" combination square (all of my hand tools have qualified to become vintage now), a vintage sliding bevel that's served me for over sixty years, but it's another sixty years older than that and then too a fine-toothed dovetail saw which I only allow myself to sharpen and have done so on this particular gent's saw along with my other half a dozen saws throughout six decades thus far. Imagine this though, it takes me four minutes to do that, and the same for setting the teeth. In no more than eight minutes, I am back in the saddle and on with the task. It seems I need to do it about every two months per saw, or so. I like too that I don't need a £250 fancy saw with Bubunga handles to achieve first class work. Nothing prissy, exclusive or snobby about ordinary joinery with my own choice of working man's working hand tools here. Facts are facts, I've been selling off anything fancy of late. The tools I don't use just clutter the place and distract my thinking and my work. Usually, that means they were too big, too heavy, too oversized, too clunky.

I sharpen the majority of my saws for a rip cut pattern because 90% of sawing in my work is rip cutting. Think tenon cheeks and dovetails. But finer-toothed saws with a ripcut pattern will crosscut just fine too.

Not much to it, saw sharpening, for me, not these days, nor was it ever. I sharpened my first saw with George looking over my shoulder (laughing) when I was 15 years old. Never was much to it, really, so I am not much given to it when you think about it. I just find my shop stool, the one I made a long time ago now, with my hand tools, the one with the scalloped seat, sit myself down, position my saw at the bench, my body to the work, my hands to the tool and start filing away the slightest dullness. Remember this if you remember nothing else. I learned it with my first saw sharpening over sixty years ago; light cannot shine of a sharp edge. When you are sharpening anything, you are simply filing or abrading off the light that reflects dullness.

It cuts on the push stroke. I will never use a pull stroke saw because 98% of them are throwaway saws that cannot be sharpened and that is as intentional as the safety razor for shaving was back in the late 1800s. The idea Gillette had wasn't to make shaving safer, it was to get you coming back for a packet of five razor blades. Once you lost the skill of sharpening a cut-throat razor, it was too late for change.

Before I know it I'm using the saw and I have the finite crispness that cuts the pristine shoulders and cheeks to perfect levels of sharpness. I move with the action of a locomotive using the locomotive linkage between hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder. My brain and body link and synchronise to perfection, and the saw glides through the cherry effortlessly. What am I feeling in my now living confidence? Well, for decades now, I am not thinking, 'I hope I can get those right.' I'm living the confidence and security of knowing it will be perfect every single time.

Shavings tell a story like words on a page and translate selflessly into all languages no matter what.

I feel the smoothness of the finished cut that leaves no need for chiselling to trim and fit and look good. I've lived a long time now through changed times. Sixty years ago, I knew many men who did such things and got paid less than a £1,000 a year working 45 hours a week to feed and clothe a family of four to six people. My family was eight people. Good old mum and dad; an amazing provision through a team-pair who never knew a day without working and raised me the same way and never knowing a single day without work. I doubt that I know a single so-called carpenter who can or has ever sharpened a saw in their lifetime any more. Funny thing is, though, I have taught and trained many an amateur to do that and know amateurs who do do it with confidence and without hesitation. Doesn't that seem odd to anyone else?

One of my tenon saws. It's a fourteen inch R Groves that hasn't been made for a hundred years now. It was used for the bulk of a hundred years to get that much patina just from a man's sweat-equity. Now, it's aged, like a good wine, to perfection. I still use it every day. The plate is an inch narrower than when it was made. Imagine that.

And here's another funny thing too. I now know more amateur woodworkers who use handsaws and planes, sharp chisels and such than I do so-called professional carpenters and yet, many professional carpenters speak disparagingly of amateur woodworkers. I watched this trend happen, worked with men who were proud to offer their chisels to a belt sander to get a sudden fix to their over-dulled chisels and planes and thought that they had the smarts. Somewhere in the mid-nineties, these men started losing something and within five years they just thought that they knew more and were smarter than the retiring makers when they had lost everything but didn't even know it or recognise it. Along comes the amateur, takes himself off into his shed, her basement, the garage, pulls out their few hand tools and makes a Windsor chair from some riven oak, or a spokeshave they needed to fashion it with.

I plane 98% of my work level, square and smooth with just two very common bench planes. Stanley #4 and #5. I have never had any need for longer planes, and certainly have no need for heavyweight models that are really a waste of muscle power unless you are in resistance training. My everyday eight-hour days at the bench are enough of a workout for this man.

So I spent a good day making a wastepaper bin in my self-proclaimed claiming back of my amateur status, and now shamed by anyone using the term carpenter to describe me. Fact is, I no longer stand for it. It's too loose and meaningless a term and means less than it should. Woodworking is not standing roof trusses and hanging prehung doors in a framed wall or atop it and air-nailing them in place. That's carpentry. When someone, anyone says, "This is Paul. He's a carpenter." I say, "No, I'm not, I'm a woodworker or a furniture maker or joiner or whatever suits me in the minute."

If you don't own a plough plane, you can run a tenon saw along two gauge lines and chisel out the waste in between. I have done this many a time. It's all too easy for the rich of us to assume everyone always has access to power equipment or even just a plough plane if they 'just work hard'.

I have worn the same shirts and jeans in of plain denim, Wrangler jeans bought in the USA and Superdry short-sleeved shirts and not one of them has the white smudges of caulking that seem to be the qualifying badge of merit construction workers wear today. I bought ten pairs of jeans and ten shirts that year. I found what I liked and decided I didn't need to change my work clothes for a different style every day. I'm relaxed without wearing a tie and suit to prissy up for work. Where oh where, and when did we make the distinction of going to work as a fashion model? I understand, wanted to look nice for a celebration. I went to my neighbours' funeral last week. Brian passed away and he was such a nice person. I wore the suit I went to Buckingham Palace with to see the King of England last year. I enjoyed both events because they seemed to me at least to declare success. Brian was 91 and lived an exemplary life. My suit wasn't to strut out in in any way, it was to mark the day of celebration with respect.

I'm less in my comfort zone in a suit and tie but no matter of concern. It's nice now and then, but can't imagine doing this just to got to work.

My wastepaper bin design is complete. It was an idea, really. A mere thought the day before, and then I made it so simply with my usual combination of hand tools; an ordinary cluster if you like. Imagine this, though, I used the all-powerful power tool woodworking of complete human effort without any electricity inserting itself between me and my tasks and nothing I did would have come any the faster or more efficiently using any kind of machine. I needed no protective equipment; no dust extraction and protective headgear. I breathe the same air as my team working alongside me and the music plays in the background, we are all free of dust masks and breathing fresh, clean air, we need no eye protection, hearing protection, such like that, and we continue discussing anything we like as we are working alongside each other.

I use tools I made in the everyday of my woodworking. A mallet or a hand router plane, a round-both-ways plane and such. These are the special tools I rely on all the time now, but not just because I made them so much as I made them to suit me.

In the north-west of England, I might have said to my mates, "I'm dead chuffed with that!" My wastepaper bin is standing on my bench with the tools around it, a few shavings nestling above my and around and in my hand tools. This is a work of art. What I am looking at and living in is art in action. It's as pleasing to me today, aged 76 as it was back in 1963 when I first encountered shavings and sawdust from my tenon saw and bench plane.

The isolation of my early handwork prepared me for the hard slog going against the ever-advancing tide of machining wood that almost rendered craftwork dead. You might not know this fact as the reality of the day, but handwork in professional realms was actually gone and in amateur realms it was hanging on by a shaving. In magazines and colleges, the demise took a mere decade to disappear, but they kept a token nod to the past by offering a 5%. Today, that's no longer demise, but real future for the real woodworking we almost lost. My work reestablishing hand methods enabled me to meet the unknown need of future. We paved the way for others, and though it certainly wasn't without great cost in time, financial expense, and so on Other costs were incurred; I spent months travelling away even to other continents, leaving my home and family. Today, we have recharged the world of woodworking with hand methods that defy the world of plugged in only woodworking. Did you know that we own Unpluggedshop.com? Worth mentioning, I think. It's enabled hundreds of other bloggers to put their name out there.

Finding the right bench height for you had been lost to stupidity because so-called experts gave the wrong information to establish it. They said you needed to "bear down on the work from above and overhead" to get the plane to work. You didn't! I gave all the answers and tested my theories through 6,500 students in hands-on classes––my theory has now worked for hundreds of thousands of woodworkers to date.

I have to say something here, though. There is this strange belief in the saying that "you get what you pay for." and i question how many are just paying through the nose far too highly, hence my last blog post speaking about the Democratising Workbench Logic post. What we want and what we need are often two very different things. I want a workbench to work and to actually work well as soon as possible because I want to hold, support and work my wood solidly using hand tools and hand tool methods and not only as an assembly point for machined wood parts. If I don't have one, I just make one, and I go the most efficient route to making certain I can make and make quickly. A workbench with a good vise is both the third hand and the anchor to which my worklife is so far irrevocably hinged. My workbenches, I have made about fifty of them for students in my hands-on classes through the years, have stood firm in the face of fancy and overkill status pieces depicting something intended to be more symbolic or to give some kind of validation to the woodworker. I have used a couple of these fancier workbenches and have found them somewhat lacking because of their clunkiness. None of them were a match for my basic bench. Believe me, twenty studs gets you there and a couple of good days sweat-equity means you will be in a machine-free woodworking saddle.

This picture is dynamic i9n terms of the whole body being engaged with visible muscle and sinew synchronised in action that exposes the power of real and active woodworking. What's the difference between this and most woodworking pictures? It's not posed, whereas the other pictures will be halted and waited on by necessity.

Other things strike me as democratising too. My theory of working with ten hand tools and three woodworking joints to make almost anything from wood is a truism. In the last ten years, I have built well over a hundred full furniture pieces without machining beyond a bandsaw for resizing. My long-term plan is to never touch a power router again. It's foolish to call it a power tool anyway you look at it. 98% of users use it to mould their stock with classic moulds and rounded corners. The rest of their time is making jigs and more jigs. By using bench planes, I eliminate 85% of all sanding because to sand would be to sand rough and not sand smooth. That's a new way of looking at things, isn't it?

My benches do not have any holes in them and I do not use dogs. The bench stop, that's the metal rectangle in the bottom left of the picture, is one I installed and never used. In practical terms, the clamp in the vise deals with any and all securement if it does not work in the vise. Totally practical and efficient. Again, real woodworking by a woodworker constantly in the saddle.

Hard to imagine the flack I got stating that Aldi chisels back in 2010 were as good as it gets, but I did, and that's because I took the risk. Sixteen years on, I have yet to find and use a chisel that exceeded the quality of my then four-piece set. In fact, they were so good, I bought another set to resize for the in-between sizes I felt were missing like 3/16", 5/16" and 5/8". Of course, being at that time in the EU, the chisels were all metric so 6mm, 10mm, 12mm, 19mm and 25mm. Would I ever pay £100 for a single piece of any kind of chisel? Most likely not. A fancier and more expensive chisel will not make you anya better woodworker. Restoring or reshaping and reworking a chisel probably will, though. The self disci-line of doing such things is never a waste of your time, and you learn so much doing things like that. When I paid £10 for four chisels that I still use every day, I see no reason to spend over £400 for a set that does no more. And then there is this The chisels I bought from Aldi are made with highly substantive tangs that will never turn loose, bolsters that totally and firmly absorb and support every type of work, and they have indestructible hornbeam handles no other wood can beat. I cannot understand anyone using beech or ash, bubinga and so on.

It can be a difficult for any new woodworker reading material saying you need this or that chisel for this or that task. In my 61 years of woodworking, I have only ever relied on a basic bevel-edged chisel. Mortise chisels were made for deep mortises in the days when a man would stand at a bench and make mortises for doors all day long. Who does that any more? When you have half a dozen deep mortises to cut, a basic bevel edged chisel works just fine.

So why speak of what you can no longer buy? Well, they did stock them for several years. But I have also run MHG chisels that are made in Germany. These chisels have also proven to be excellent value for money and whereas they offer some of their chisels with hornbeam handles, they also offer more finely polished versions with ash handles. In my view, hornbeam beats ash hands down. Several years ago, I bought their six-piece chisel set because they had everything I wanted in a chisel. I have also used all of these in the everyday of my life and cannot fault them. What is great is that they also offer 2mm and 4mm sizes. These are lifetime chisels, they take a keen edge and hold their edges too. A boxed set of six pieces, sizes 6, 10, 12, 16, 20, and 26mm costs £99, and you can add in the 2mm and 4mm along with other sizes if you want to. These cost only £10 or so and are very hand chisels for several tasks.

I have been accumulating a variety of chisels throughout my lifetime of woodworking. Which of these do I use now. None of the ones pictured. I rely on a simple set of half a dozen bevel edged chisels. I can recommend MHG's set for their excellent quality, taking a keen edge and edge retention. I have tested them for ten years and they have never failed me. For around £100 you will get a good set (six in a box) of lifetime chisels with hornbeam handles.

Deep or shallow, hardwood or softwood, my chosen chisels have yet to fail me. My nudge back in the day meant Aldi sold out in every one of their stores here in the UK. Unfortunately, they had to stop stocking them. So why do I say what I say? Well, the sellers of hand tools go to much trouble reasoning out why you need a set of chisels for this kind of work and then another type for that. 98% of them you just do not need, no matter the work, the shape or the size of it. The men I worked under as a boy apprentice through to a journeyman, two different companies, seven years in all, had a half dozen bevel edged chisels on the benchtop, never pulled out a massive mortise chisel for the deeper pockets, never used square edged firmer or registered-pattern chisels, and they got along day in and day out throughout those years just fine no matter the task nor the wood. These men democratised in their day in the same way I do now. The cost of my working chisels over a hundred years come to 00.oo2083333333r of a penny or cent a day.

This is my democratised, nuts and bolts workbench that surpasses the expectation of any woodworker and furniture maker. You can see it being built in my back garden when I lived in the UK's North Wales. I add various components to customise it for functionality. But for £70 you can be working at it in just a few days, no more than three, I'd say

I started selling my excess of hand tools to put the now unused back in circulation. These were the ones I used in my hands-on classes, and then those you just can't pass up. I posted a very nice Stanley #4 1/2 on eBay for £25 and had no takers. I was surprised but hey ho. I did at one time go to the wider #4 1/2 and #5 1/2 planes. I realised that people were copying what I did, and that for 90% of those new to woodworking, these were too bulky and prohibitively heavy for them. Even before that, though, I found myself reaching for my #4 Stanley almost every time. That small width difference of a mere 5/16" makes a big difference in both weight and sharpening to a man working full-time and making 98% by hand only. I'm a machineless woodworker, aside from a single bandsaw. A #4 weighs in at 3.68 lbs pounds and a #4 1/2 at 4.8; that makes the latter about the same as a Lie Nielsen #4 BedRock, that's not so small an increase, and it would make a huge difference, and especially to those not used to upper-body work for long periods.

An MHG 1" chisel honed to perfection removes the arris as a leading edge for the tenon into the mortise hole. Keep it real, keep it simple and keep it low cost using a tool made for working people to get the action they truly need.

You do not need weight, but you do need sharp!

The Stanley #4 is a light in weight in some measure, but it's no lightweight in performance in any way. The fact is this: this plane, not the BedRock version but the Leonard Bailey common-or-garden one, is not just iconic but the most perfectly designed of all all-metal versions through the last century and a half bar none, and that's for a wide range of tasks. Beefier bulldogs might like to persuade you otherwise but that's the difference between riding an Arabian stallion where you can twist, turn and flip to task in a heartbeat as opposed to plodding along on a heavy draft like a Belgian draft or a Clydesdale. A kayak can flip, roll, twist, twitch and switch on a sixpence or a nickel, but an oil tanker might take a good half day or more to even stop, let alone turn end for end. So even within the same overall size, the copycat BedRockists of our new era, new generation bench planes made by plane makers now makes even a #4 size heavy-metal plane prohibitive and of little if any intrinsic value. So I weighed three modern-day versions made by so-called premium makers and compared them to my now 61-year-old Stanley, the current one I have been using every single day over my ten-hour day days, and the weight difference between an average of these and my basic, non-retrofitted #4 Stanley makes them quite, well, sluggish. You see, metal soles on wood do stick more than their wooden counterparts, enough to feel about ten times heavier. The heavyweights make that feel like twenty times heavier, I can tell you, and that is what makes them less versatile.

Currently, working my two planes side by side through the decades, and despite the fact that I don't grind the bevels using any grinding machine, two plane iron lasts me for about 6 years. Here I show the point at which you must abandon one.

Another issue that is never mentioned, so I will do it here because makers never do and owners don't even know it: The advantage makers and users extol is that you can adjust the mouth opening without removing the cutting iron assembly as they say you must do with a Bailey-pattern frog in the common Stanley's, but you actually don't. . .read my book Essential Woodworking Hand Tools. 1. You rarely if ever need to adjust the throat opening on a bench plane. I never alter this setting, and that's because with a sharp and well set plane you DO NOT NEED TO. 2. If you do that on a Bailey pattern, you do not alter the cutting depth. Now on a BedRock pattern plane, when you are advantaged by not having to remove the cutting iron assembly, you are then majorly disadvantaged because the depth of cut is changed, and you have no idea by how much. So, for around £20 you can buy a secondhand Stanley #4, spend an hour fettling it and bringing it out of hibernation because it went dull, and you have a lifetime plane. And think about this; if I have used my #4 every single day for 61 years, gone through six cutting irons yet I don't grind them of grinding wheels, how long would it last you using it for a couple of hours a week?

In functionality, there is no difference between the three heavier planes and there is no maker offers a new and innovative invention on any of them to improve innovatively. That says a lot and speaks very positively of Leonard Bailey, who developed the whole of the bench plane bodies for Stanley stable back in the late 1860s, doesn't it. In 150 years since Leonard Bailey had the concept, no one has changed a thing. Imagine!

The three heavyweight BedRock #4's averaged 4.7lbs, whereas the Stanley comes in at 3.6lbs. That's what I call refinement with the user in mind. Nothing prissy about a plane that works for a man like me for six decades of daily making with hand tools, I'd say. These makers could learn a thing or two about listening to their customers rather than telling them what they need. It mightn't seem much but believe me, those heavyweights would translate into many a dozen tons over a 61 year daily-use span of someone like me.

My initial concern is prohibition. As a new woodworker starting out would I want to spend £400 on one tool that only planes wood after I have learned to sharpen and set the tool up. For a new woodworker starting out, it is but a temporary benefit to buy a plane that might be ready to go out of the box. Within an hour, they must resharpen and set the tool, and therein lies the issue. Why not just put your boots on and get in the saddle straight off at one twentieth of the cost. A Stanley number 4 will cost no more than £20.

So there it is, my faithful friend. We shake hands with poise and class every day and all day whenever we meet and get to work. We work as a perfectly balanced team, you see. How clever is that! We've settled many a twisted stick stem and board together.

And then I see some of the dumb things elsewhere too. Imagine anyone, people woodworking, spending upwards of £150 for what is no more than what we once called a "toffee hammer", 4 ounces of metal that is. The supportive comments matched the weight of the hammers I looked at. My best shot is the pretension of it all. One author started out saying, "You really don't need one of these..." and the pretension all went downhill from there. I use a couple of cross-pein hammers in my day to day, A 12 ounce Warrington version by Stanley gets me there on all types of plane iron adjustment, including tightening wedges and shocking them loose in wooden or metal planes. My 12 ounce drives panel pins and metal parts. And then there is my 6 ounce "toffee hammer" made by Stanley here in Sheffield.

Wood on wood works remarkably well, and you would be stunned if someone gave a wooden plane, freshly sharpened, to true up even a wide board of oak, maple or walnut. It took Stanley Rule and Level 50 years to persuade the ancients to switch to metal-soled planes, and that wasn't because they refused progress, but because the metal planes stuck like glue to the wood by comparison with the wooden planes they were used.

These hammers are clearly winners for me. Nothing wrong with using a steel hammer to set your plane irons with or adjusting wooden plane iron depths on moulding planes either. The wide face of the hammer head has nothing prissy about it, and the cross pein fits in to the tight corners right where you need it. Oh, and did you know that the cross pein enables you to drive 1/2" pins between your forefinger and thumb no problem?

Here you have the reality of a tool in use. The cross pein is perfect for starting tiny pins between the thumb and forefinger and then seating it with the bell side.

The cross-pein Warrington in different sizes is available as a vintage version secondhand on eBay. This remarkable cast steel hammer is a lifetime tool, and I have three sizes that I have used throughout my daily work life.

My 6 ounce Warrington still drives pins but also helps to set and align plane irons in wood-bodied or cast metal planes. I perfect synchrony without any compromise. But then a heavier version does the same. I have three weights of Warrington hammers 6, 10 and 12 ounce.

For adjusting all of my planes, moulding planes, cast metal and wood versions and so on, I use this 6 ounce Stanley Warrington hammer. I bought this one new in 1965.

This is my basic made-in-the-garden English Joiner's Workbench. Made from very common construction grade softwood, but there is nothing soft about this workbench. Thirty-five years ago, some people kinda dissed the idea. "Not heavy enough.", "Wouldn't last.", "Will move all over the place under the forces of sawing and planing." Balderdash! They were simply looking for fault. I doubt that many put more duress on a workbench with hand tools than I do. It's a gutsy little bench and I refined it to be made by any Newby woodworking starting out in their back garden with only hand tools, That's who I am!

I made and started to use my plywood workbench in 2019. My first Paul Sellers workbench video came together in 2012 and went out in 2013. I think some people saw it as an interim workbench until they could attain the status symbol of something to match their as yet to be established skill levels. The reality became obvious: you cannot achieve any more or even as much as you can with any other workbench, and especially one without a quick release, Record-type vise like those that I use and advocate for. Nothing else comes close to the speed and the clamping power.

And then there are those who look for other problems. Birch plywood is not cheap, but it is good value for money. Someone commented on the prohibitive price of good plywood. Here's my response: £250 pounds for the two sheets of the top quality birch plywood it takes is not prohibitive if you amortise the cost of a bench that will last a hundred years of full-time use. Let me see, even if I just divide it by a hundred that’s £2.50 a year so 5 pence or so a week so let’s reduce the life span to 25% of my estimated 100 years (and it will likely last 300 in a dry and well-kept workshop), even so, we come out at 20 pence. Come on now. A single coffee now costs over £3 per day. Let’s put this in proper perspective here.

Thankfully, my articles have never been sensational, even though some things I have done have caused quite a sensation through the years. Imagine, my eleven-part series making a softwood workbench grossed 5M views to date. And get this, the reviews were so good that 98% found that the bench would do everything they ever wanted to do and stayed with that one alone. You see, my work is not about sensational woodworking, but the nuts and bolts of what it really takes to become a real woodworker. Cut out the quest for being validated by owning a machine shop with half a dozen machines, dust extraction equipment and the 'etc' of it, and suddenly, you start mastering the skills of real woodworking. No one really needs anything bigger than my five footer, and I have never used a tail vise in my life. "Don't know what you've missed, Paul" Well, I don't use any kinds of bench dogs or holdfasts either. My woodworking life as a maker of fine furniture and every kind of joinery has been highly successful without any of this stuff. You don't need it, either.

The Paul Sellers workbench is perfect for training anyone to start out woodworking with hand tools only. Use it as a personal training exercise where you can master your introductory skills in developing something you might just use for decades to come. . . Both the workbench and the tools.

The softwood bench has been great. I've actually used one for 61 years as the benches I worked on as an apprentice, the ones ten other makers worked from when I was an apprentice, were all made from what was then called Russian redwood. Redwood was also known as Scots pine (UK), Baltic redwood, Finnish redwood, Archangel redwood, Russian redwood, Polish redwood, red deal, yellow deal For the bench in my first videos filmed in the garden of my then North wales home, I used construction studs. I had just made ten benches to start my UK school with and made these from the same wood. This wood was basically spruce, not the kind of wood people looking for status make their workbenches from but a truly practical wood for any serious woodworker or a beginner too.

Lukas Brütsch made this workbench from my intsructions. He said, "I used "Fichten-Holz" (i guess in english its "spruce") for my workbench."

Whereas I have no need to prove my first UK versions of my unchanged workbenches, they are still going strong with not deterioration and for a bench costing less than £75 my divergence to plywood was an interesting experience. This bench has all of the essence of using say solid maple and then some. There is both a simplicity and solidity to this bench I have not experienced in other benches. It's the cross-ply striations that make the difference. No shrinkage or expansion anywhere, no flex nor movement between any components. The six years of use has surprised me because it still feels like a new workbench with little more than the usual staining benches and use will incur through normal, six-day-a-week daily use. It is weightier than my spruce versions, and it rests squat-tight where it sits. I'm not treating mine like some do theirs, as a piece of furniture, a chisel and saw slip happens, a drip of finish and stain from restoring a rust saw will tarnish the new look. That's not my world. A bench needs to be a workbench. Periodically, I take a card or a #78 cabinet scraper and skim off the lightest pass. That's always enough.

This version has been relegated to a friend's kitchen as a conversational decorative feature and it looks great there. I don't think it would work for me, but we have made progress with QR vises and some of the best now come from Asia.

I am an advocate for hand work in woodworking. When I tell you to go and buy a tablesaw and a power planer, you'll know PS has lost it. To make this workbench, unlike the all wood version, I used a bandsaw to rip all of my strips. Beyond that, I used handsaws of different types and then hand planes for the final surfacing. That means I (and most likely you) can make the whole workbench in a couple of days. Obviously, installing a vise can take a couple of hours, and you might want the apron drawer and other accessories to make the bench efficient. That's the fun part, though. I have customised my bench for efficiency. Oh, and if anyone tells you the apron drawer is inaccessible most of the time, just ignore them. 98% of the time you will find it the best tool in your workbench bar none. This single piece of kit stows every small tool you might otherwise never find a home for.

In March 2019, I wheeled out my softwood workbench to install the new and innovative birch plywood version for trialling. I have used it daily for six years now and customised it for convenience and economic working. It's staying!

So, my workbench? All of my advice on woodworking and working mainly in a machineless way has always been about dismantling industrial processes and establishing the real skills of real woodworking. This work started back in the late 1980s, when I held my very first class. When I saw the demise of skilled woodworking, I made a decision that woodworking with hand tools needed to be put to the forefront in a serious way. Colleges and educational institutions are compelled to produce workers for industry, and everywhere I have ever seen as a training institution caters to that end by training people to use machine only methods and give only a token nod to hand tools in a one or two day class using hand tools. The men teaching and training are almost always non-expert hand tool woodworkers. They may tell you differently. I can identify a dozen training centres close to home and abroad who don't have a clue. My task in this has always been to democratise woodworking through a strategy I have developed over three decades. The workbench is a democratised alternative that gives every ounce of support to any big and heavy behemoth you care to name. No hounds tooth dovetails here, not a one and installing the best vise in the world, a quick release 9" vise will support everything you care to want to hold. Imagine this. Sixty-one years in the saddle of daily furniture making and woodworking of every type and all from my basic workbench and a Record-type QR vise. Why fix what ain't broke!

And here is that first real video we did that plunged us into teaching online. When everyone back then that we were just a bit mad, we didn't know we couldn't do it so we went ahead and did it. And remember this in the mix of it all, we never took sponsorship or freebies and never allowed product placement hovering somewhere in the background to make money from. Why? We just wanted the freedom to be real and have no obligation other than to our audience.

I made and started to use my plywood workbench in 2019. My first Paul Sellers workbench video came together in 2012 and went out in 2013. I think some people saw it as an interim workbench until they could attain the status symbol of something to match their as yet to be established skill levels....

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But it could have been better. Information-postwar became more consumably low-grade but then again excessive too, to the degree that too much information took too much spend-time for people to pay enough attention to actually read it. Professor Henry Simmons, a specialist in information, said that it became an issue when there was too much information for individuals to process in the time that they had available. How much more so today. Especially as 98% of what's taking our time is of no worth at all. And that was back in 1965, btw. But things did become slack, as is the case in this leaflet. Of course, back then, the processing of hand outs like this were more time-consuming to produce than in our digital world today. How often do I hear, "Oh, I just use ChatGPT, it's amazing." . A new age of printouts was still yet to come. In our age of instant digital full-colour printouts, we can produce a leaflet at the drop of a hat and send it around the world in the same drop-of-a-hat split seconds, no problem. Enough said. This leaflet was given away free in the box with Record planes. I read it and thought it could have been much better.

Firstly, the Record Company of Sheffield, UK gives no acknowledgement to the designer of the plane and presents it as a Record Company plane design when they designed not one jot of the design in any way. The plane is a Leonard Bailey USA knock-off design of a hundred and fifty years ago. This Leonard Bailey design surpassed any and all British made versions in terms of longevity, adjustability, cost and so on. Though there have been more robust versions made (meaning heavy, clunky and too weighty for versatility in any field of use), I'm thinking mostly BedRock versions with minor but no better frog differences made by engineers using better tooling and tighter tolerances––but not one of them outperforms the Stanley originals in any way. So, the authors should have acknowledged that the Record plane was nothing to do with a Sheffield design, but should at the very least have acknowledged Leonard Bailey as the inventor and designer. In the same way, most if not all modern copyists of all Stanley versions never mention nor show any acknowledgement or respect for Leonard Bailey. A dozen copyists and more fail to respect what this designer gave to the woodworking world. For the main part Lie Nielsen, Quang Sheng, Juuma, Wood River, Clifton and many more, instead of hoping Leonard Bailey's name will be forgotten, should attribute the inventor by acknowledging clearly that they did nothing more than copy the whole of his original designs but with very minor tweaks.

What's Wrong Then?

The pamphlet states: "Record planes have many points of advantage to users." They don't offer anything beyond the Stanley invention of Leonard Bailey bench plane designs, so no such thing, and certainly no more than the common or garden Stanley.

"The parts for adjusting the cutting iron are accurately made to give very fine adjustment." Not really. There is as much slack in a Record plane take-up as there is in any Stanley. That said, slack is fine. The slacker, the better for me. A quick spin of a well-worn adjustment wheel and a floppy lateral adjustment lever works well by the flick of a thumb or forefinger. My fingers take up the slack in a heartbeat, and I'm set.

The article refers to the underside of the plane, the sole, only as the "base of the Body" and never identifies the plane sole as such anywhere. Now as far as anyone knows the underside of the plane has always been referred to as the plane sole.

"This Cutting iron is hardened and tempered under scientific control, which ensures accuracy and uniformity." Come on, I mean. I mean, what's scientific control but twaddle-speak anyway? I have never found any noticeable difference between Record and Stanley plane irons, either...to the point that I use them interchangeably.

More: "It is of the utmost importance that the correct grinding angle of 25º is maintained." That's never really been true. If you want a two-bevel method you can do that, but for three centuries before this time craftsmen responsible for some of the finest woodwork ever in history never ground their cutting irons to twin bevels nor a hollow grind as standard but rough ground and then whetted or honed, same thing, the whole bevel to a sort of, roughly, near to a quarter ellipse as show in the drawing. Having examined many a hundred plane irons that go back two centuries and more, every plane iron I ever saw was simply sharpened to a camber. It's just our generation that thinks we are better and more developed to come up with a complex composition of micro and macro this or that so that we can tell others you must do this and that.

I can tell by eye if or when I have allowed a bevel to get too 'thick' and I think I may have checked a bevel angle once or twice in the last three decades. That said, we do need a goal to shoot for, and why not somewhere between 20º and 35º? Why 20º? Well, not for plane irons, but yes, for paring chisels. These chisels are rarely if ever struck heavily, and neither are they levered with much either. They rely on hand and arm power to pare cut surface protrusions and such, so the bevel of resistance can be deemed less necessary. You are unlikely to get cutting-edge fracture with hand paring actions. But we do gently tap a paring chisel in necessary situations. I should also point out that on bevel-down planes the angle of the cutting iron bevel can be anywhere between two or three degrees less than the bed angle of the frog, so on Bailey-pattern planes that's around 44º so you can go as steep as 42º and it will cut fine. What am I saying? The bevel on bevel-down planes has no consequential effect on the cut because, well, it's tucked out of the way wholly behind the flat face and never touches the wood. Any wall of resistance on these cutting irons will be on the wide flat face, not the bevel. Duh!

But it could have been better. Information-postwar became more consumably low-grade but then again excessive too, to the degree that too much information took too much spend-time for people to pay enough attention to actually read it. Professor Henry Simmons, a specialist in information, said that it became an issue when there was too much...

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The shavings fell from every plane and the river of shavings kept building before my broom could get to them. "Get a move on, lad!" Merlin shouted across the bench as I swept the shavings as vigorously as a two-foot wide broom could go. You'd be surprised how much plane work resulting in shavings half a dozen men can produce in an hour of full-on planing. Pines of different kinds, oak, walnut, ash and beech. All of a different hue and scent. This becomes enrichment to a boy like me. That was then and this is now. I still have the same scents in my shop every day. Looking back on it now, I doubt that there are many out there who have ever seen what was a common sight back in the pre 1960s. Ten bin bags but hessian or burlap sacks went to burn in the boiler where I stoked waste wood to heat the workshop all day long. But I loved it. The banter back and forth, the way the men talked about their political beliefs, the arguing for one party or another and then those in the union condemning those who weren't. Then there was a certain kind of solitude in the working of the hand tools. Three men using handsaws, two with planes and another two with chisel chops coming from mortising an extra mortise. But then there was something else in these postwar heroes. They sang, they whistled, they hummed, and they sang songs they knew from their war years that lifted their spirits' in camaraderie. George was way too young for the war, but he too knew all the songs, and he'd sing along or whistle. I liked it best when they would spontaneously start ad hoc music with sticks and flexed saws; Keith pulled out his harmonica, he was good, and then the a cappella singing of men harmonising quite out of the blue had the distinct brilliance only spontaneity can bring; I have yet to hear anywhere ever again in such a real and vivid man's working environment. The masculinity of it was pervasive as if mixing with the scents of the wood, the accumulated aromatics unique to only truly vintage woodshop.

After sweeping, I would end up on the clamping machine that we used to clamp massive or small frames together, seating a dozen or so mortise and tenons in a frame all at the press of a single foot treadle before we drove the pins through the joints to hold them. Even then, there was a synchrony that somehow steadied the work from every man and boy. I learned the songs they sang. Vera Lynn's "We'll meet again..." but then they'd mingle in a classical opera piece or a more modern singer from the 50s. What is it that we lost from that era. Where do you ever hear men sing together at work? The work itself never stopped, except for an odd crooning moment where two or three of them sang Etta James' "Stormy Weather" in perfect pitch and harmony. The deep, 'do woos' background and such followed by lots of Nat King Cole "Unforgettable", "Rambling Rose."

Our singling lasted for 20 minutes. The work harmony melded with the camaraderie every other day. It was spirit lifting and we to a man took our part. Old Bill had just about lost the breath to sing, but his lips moved in unison with everyone elses. The prompts from the radio usually sparked one or another to start singing, but then too there was another aspect to the environment I saw from these men. An illness, a broken relationship, the loss of a newborn, a teen crisis by one prompted support from another. It was a whole support network never spoken or voiced into being, and yet two men, maybe three, huddled in a group to support some failure on the part of one family they might never have met. These few men impacted my life. It wasn't always good, but generally, they somehow softened under the weight of supporting one another. The war changed the working classes to empower them in ways we could never really anticipate. I wonder where we are today.

Anyway, just a few thoughts!

The shavings fell from every plane and the river kept building before my broom could get to them. “Get a move on, lad!” Merlin shouted across the bench as I swept the shavings as vigorously as a two-foot wide broom could go. You’d be surprised how much plane work resulting in shavings half a dozen...

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Well, I'll try to keep this shorter, this once. The next one I just finished is quite a long one.

It's a forever friends and friendly reminder thing, woodworking the way we do. It's a totally inclusive endeavour to include everyone but especially our children to come in the workshop during their formative years; otherwisemachining wood can make it 98% exclusive, and they just might never discover their true love of it because machining must, MUST, exclude them until they are almost always past it.

Mostly, what I have to say is a might different and difference stating. My worklife (one word) making every single day in wood using mainly hand tools, except for long deep rip cuts, has been a lived life of sixty-one years. That does not mean I didn't use machines in my businesses but depended on them quite mildly and minimally if compared to most woodworkers and then too machinist-only woodworkers. What I have done and do is use a machine for two or three minutes a day, maybe not at all, and the rest of my eight to ten hours of woodworking I do solely with a handful of hand tools. Try to imagine, roughly at least, 183,000 hours of continuous and seamless woodworking and most of those hours with hand tools. Who do you know that's done such a thing with such a living and provided for a good-sized family on a single income household? But anyway, that's not the point. I am really quite different than most, and therefore I offer a singularly different perspective.

Since this pic was taken in 2015 for my book, Essential Woodworking Hand Tools, eleven years ago, wow, I feel as healthy and as well as I did back then. I have no pain and my hands, arms and upper body, they all work just as well as when I was forty. Fact is, ten minutes before I wrote this I carried a seven-foot by three-foot-six-inch bookcase down the stairs, loaded it into the back of my vehicle and drove to the house to unload it on my own. This is not in any way a boast, but the simple reality of hand woodworking in high-demand realms at age 76 is a health maintenance regimen.

It's taken me three and more decades to finally graduate my art, which I feel more to be a composition of life through the living of it. As it is with all true craftwork, furniture making and living life is a refinement process. As a graduate, I'm not altogether sure that people I've met and meet anywhere, near get the difference between what I (and it's now more the 'we' of it) do with wood and what they, the other professionals, more generally do. And I am worried that my fighting for the cause of real woodworking might have caused more the lost-cause that might be increasing the more permanent state of affairs because those in professional realms deskilling the craft and art of work most likely will win long term and that's because of their belief system. In the eyes of some it has become 'their' competition and most likely I am sure to be seen as the loser even though I'm not. You see, I have achieved change. If I were indeed trying to convert the professionals, that would make a difference, but I'm not, and that means it doesn't matter because I'm not. But it is most often the professionals who claim me not to be, "living in the real world.", and that's because, though not to anywhere near the same level, I have lived to some degree in their world, but stopped to take myself off the conveyor belt decades ago. Also, it's because, as deskilled material handlers, they never crossed over and never made it in the skilled realms and emphatic refrain to experience the successes of successful hand tool methods––mainly, that is.

No, not turned, no gouges or turning tools. Took a lot longer, but I didn't need a lathe nor incur any of the mess. I didn't need a dust mask or eye and ear protection either. Nice to have that thoughtful connectivity to my wood and the tools. It took about half an hour to make, and I have been using it now for five years on my #4 Stanley. The wood is Yew, and it fits my hand perfectly. I could have turned it, of course I could, but I was 71 when I made it, and I was able to teach and tell thousands of other how to do without having to buy a space-hogging lathe and turning tools and teach them how to turn. Oh, a;lso, Yew is highly toxic from the tippy toe of its hairy roots, through the whole of its inner core and bark to and throughout every leaf and berry. But making it the way I did, I needed nothing more else. That's a total success story right there.

I am aware that this is something of a broad brush sweep here, so I will say that not all professionals are the same, but it is always professionals that try to counter what I say and advocate by comments they dip in with. Often they fail to see the negative impact machining wood has on them long term. Quite frankly, machining wood gets old fast and soon becomes, well, standing-around boring. You see, after 61 years of daily woodworking making some really lovely and inspiring pieces, I still can't wait to get to making more every day. It's also worth pointing out that what we have and own they never wanted and never owned. That being so, there is really no point trying to compare the apples with oranges in any way shape, colour or form. If you think that woodworking with machines for the bulk of your woodworking is the more progressive and efficient way, then you could be right. What the difference is is the how of what you actually achieve, and in this, you most likely will have indeed wholly missed the point. Recessing a hinge flap with a power router, the sledgehammer approach to cracking nuts, is something of a primitive task. The power you rely on is low demand woodworking, and me and my audience in general are looking for more in our woodworking than simply becoming a machinist. We like the "risk of work" in its entirety and want to choose whether we can interact differently. I am doing my very best to explain the essentially important difference between two extremely opposite ways of working wood, points of view and the methodology and doing it from the other side of the fence as a former professional maker and one who turned amateur to become a lifestyle chooser and maker––it's my 'professional point of view', you see!

We made a cello together by hand––him 16 and me 56, I think. It took three months of full eight-hour days to do, and he still owns and plays it now, 20 years on. These are remarkable things surrounding hand tools. Look at thios. Father and son working together to build a cello. We couldn't wait to get going every single day. He has the same skills, knowledge and ability that I have and then some. We still work alongside one another most days and what I did with him as a child growing into adulthood he has started with his own two children and I have been inputting too. We're working on the spruce top now. That back, maple, is waiting in the background now that its done.

So today, I pick up chisels and planes, handsaws I can sharpen with a file in a few minutes, no more than five, and a peace I get from the slowed version of woodworking I still love to do. I have found a few hundred thousand who feel the same way and want to understand why they feel the way they do, but can't always explain it to those who think machining wood is anything more than what it really is. It's no problem from to keep reminding my friends that they don't really need to explain their quiet and gentle ways of enjoying physical woodworking, the leverage of a chisel, the skewing of the plane, choosing one plane or saw over another, such like that. It's the technology that retained its core values in our lived life of woodworking, you see.

My classes started with this project back in the 1980s and 90s when I took the leap to start teaching one-on-one with children. I have made a thousand of these small boxes since, and taught 6,500 students in hands-on classes to master the art of hand-cutting their dovetails through this one project. Since then, we have taught over a million and possibly, probably, more than likely several millions of people how to successfully develop their dovetailing skills. Who'd have thought that was at all possible. They succeeded because they came to believe in themselves.

Well, I’ll try to keep this shorter, this once. The next one I just finished is quite a long one. Mostly, what I have to say is a might different and difference stating. My worklife (one word) making every single day in wood using mainly hand tools, except for long deep rip cuts, has been...

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Elm is one of our more unusual hardwoods in that its whole infrastructure, though reliant on the same essential working components are the same as all other trees, the outcome of what its capillaries transport from root hair tips to leaf top tips is a wood, as in its inner core stem, that's not like any other. That's why I say it is a timber of character, a multi-personality that defies similar means and methods of working when it comes to working it with conventional hand tools. In some ways, I'd say it might better match my own personality, in that its only predictability is, in fact, its unpredictability. Go to split it with an axe for a straight-grain split, even where the grain looks absolutely straight, and within any given inch it will duck, dive, twist and turn a dozen times before dipping where you least want or expect it to. No other western species comes even close. Here in Britain, you'll find it mostly used in vintage chairs where the seats were shallowly hollowed to fit children's smaller bottoms so you'll find it, especially in school seating for children past, not today, of course, moulded plastic replaced wood mostly and then formed plywood as well. It's a rougher, crude and coarse-grained hardwood that's not particularly hard but highly characterful and often loaded with every kind of defect ranging from a mass of diversely different knots to checks, shakes and splits, pretty much the same thing, along with stunted buds from sprouts that never developed into branches or twigs but left an intertwined mass like a knotted ball of sting within the bark of the tree stem. It''s this interlocking that protrudes from the main stem of the tree we refer to as a burr (UK) and burl (USA). Beneath these protrusions, inside the tree, is the stunning and highly sought-after, decorative feature wood comprising a complexity of swirling grain patterns, deep, dark contrasting knots enveloped by impressive grain configurations, and a mass of different 'eyes' caused by localized, abnormal growth.

My deciding to keep my wood pieces in the original profile rather than rip cut width and depth to even sizing resulted in my 'climbing wall' look I ended up with. That being so, this book case will have to be tethered to the wall at the top with a fastening or more likely an English cleat...just in case!

This is my most recent 2026 bookshelf piece, which came from large slabs of elm I bought six years ago. I had brought them indoors and left them stood on end to fully dry in my better controlled workshop environment. Knowing the tendency of elm to twist and turn as long as there is any excess of moisture there in the wood, I needed these levels to be as low as is practicable. This wood had been stored wrongly, but I knew that when I bought it and looked forward to it having added character from the neglect. It did not disappoint.

I often rely on old wooden planes because they offer a completely different dynamic to stock preparation, making it lighter and easier to accomplish. These planes float across wild wood like swans on a lake. No metal plane gives the same feeling or outcome––not a single one, but especially not the heavy weights people selling planes always espouse. Weight, with wooden plane bodies, evaporate with the first stroke.

It was during the COVID pandemic that I started to tame my wood pile. Hard to think how that botched-up control of the world through fear and manipulation caused such a global mess. Politics, manipulation and control freaks! During my self-isolating at the workshop, I found time to take care of things through the newly afforded space of time in the workshop; I cleared up my new wood acquisition by cutting off the excesses of rough bark and heavy rot to better stack and control about forty beams of mixed elm and beech. The beech has been beautiful with such spalting definitive of beech spalting and I have made five sizeable pieces for the house from it thus far.

We made this small office suite for the landing of Sellers'home at the top of the stairway. The corner-fitting desk, the chair and the filing cabinet are made from the spalted beech.

This wood was all rough sawn by bandsaw and needed planing level and smooth to remove warpage. I trued one of the larger flat faces and used that face to reference to my bandsaw table to give me square adjacent faces and parallel widths. The bandsaw cuts the wood easily with no negative flexing as with other woods. I was surprised to have people advise me that planing it by hand with bench planes would be too onerous and problematic. Most woodworkers do tend to exaggerate the hardships of working with some particular woods from their region, but few woodworkers today are used to hand planing their wood and persevering under that kind of hardship. The wood came together just fine, and it really was not hard or difficult to work in any way at all, despite the mass of knots and other defects.

My rip-cut stack starts the beginning of the workshop journey after I ripped off any excesses but prefacing this was a hundred-mile trip to collect it from bad storage under a leaking tarp. This is a mixture of beech and elm. The neglectful storage enhanced the outcome for me with diverse influences of degrade. Most of it is now used up in our Sellers' home projects.

I am expecting some movement when the unit gets anchored to the wall. We will see how much. The thing is this, though. Wood moves through atmospheric changes in exchanges occurring through varying levels of warmth and moisture––it's a given that these changes take place continuously in most home and office environments. In a family of say four, the atmosphere will be more highly charged with atmospheric moisture––showering and cooking will be partly to blame because people hang out in the shower longer or cooking takes more than say for one person, perhaps heating up a ready-meal in a microwave. I shower after work to get clean and free from dustiness, others, most if not all, now shower to go to work or even shower two times a day. My hair is short and is dried with a towel with two quick rubs. Not so for long hair. All of this changes the dynamic our wood pieces must live with, and wood WILL and DOES swell...all the time!

The paleness of spalting and then bug runs and wormholes add to the texture of this particular workpiece and I have kept rather than discarded those bits normally thrown out or burned. It's this diversity that I have retained in the wood's grain for gain in this particular depiction of natural wood decline leading to its return to the earth. I wanted to keep its silent passage as it's all part of the earth's unspoken story.

I am convinced, I could be wrong, that most of my woodworking counterparts would have discarded a lot of the pieces I chose to work with and keep. I wanted the character marks of various decline phases as influences on the wood. Now that I am old, I saw elements of my own personality reflected in my elm. Sometimes the wood seemed just a tad grizzly, but I kept those bits to work on my own stubbornness. Then there were the cracks and fissures; some were caused by the drying process and the lack of climate control to even out the pace, whereas others came when the tree was dropped. I recall two years ago when the mean-spirited man attacked me from behind and broke three of my ribs. This tree was dropped and when that happens the shock in the fall, the crashing to the ground caused cross-stem-fracture which is not the more generally accepted cracking along or with the grain.

There's a lot to take in on this journey, and even in an eight-inch jag like this we have lots to learn. The bottom corner where the first housing dado accepts the shelf has a typical gathering of small 'dead' knots to contemplate before any actual cutting takes place. Two inches above is a cross-grain fissure that passes from this side to the other. This was not caused by shrinkage, but by shock when the tree was initially dropped.

And then there are the remains of the spike showing the root of rootedness of a branch in the main tree stem at the top. Shifts in colour, grain configuration all track the history of the tree over many decades. Pollution, atmospheric shifts in climate, factor into our trees and the dendrochronology, the science of analysing and interpreting the growth evidenced in the tree stem over decades and centuries that determine what took place and when according to its scientific evaluation. Through this, we have been better able to establish a more precise environmental record, allowing researchers to study past climates, ecological events, and date archaeological sites or wooden artifact. Think of these trees as passengers on the earth. Stagnant in distance moves, but on board the ocean of soil polluted by our greed and poor stewardship.

A swirling mass of variation characterises elm in business. The hidden joints will hold flatness and eliminate the risk of twist over the coming century of use. It's the signature joint of all bookshelves, and I have made thousands upon thousands throughout my life. It's no exaggeration to say perhaps at least a hundred thousand of them and all hand cut with saws, chisels and hand-router plane.

My fingers trace the passage of my refining work now that the finish is on, and I have settled the matter of taking the rough-sawn tree slabs to the house. The two coats are so thin they don't measure by human touch. I feel now that I am touching the wood in all of its glory. My first sealer coat was 50/50 dewaxed clear shellac and denatured alcohol. It's also a perfect sander coat, so sanding is done in seconds to the silkiest glass smoothness you've ever felt anywhere. My first-level topcoat for this project is Osmo Polyx hard wax clear satin oil. Of course, we use all kinds of terms like 'oil' and 'resin' when many such terms are erroneous, often intended to mislead, present s natural, really. But you can mix any fluids you like together and call them 'Danish oil' (nothing to do with the Danes) or 'resin' or just 'oil' and sell them as such if you want to. Without data sheets, we really don't know what we are working with.

Grain, for us makers with hand tools, is not a surface-skimming snapshot, but an in-depth, inner-fibre play investigation every time we plumb the depths of a joint, or plane and saw into it. I have added no colour to this wood. All I did was plane, scrape and sand the wood to 250-grit and apply clear shellac as a sealer/sanding coat to lock the fibres ready for the Osmo oil.

There is no stain or colouring in the finishing material I applied, nor anything applied to actually colour the wood as a base colour. Put either the shellac or Osmo on on clear glass, and you can see through it with only the very slightest opacity and zero colour.

These medullary rays reminded me of the billions of stars of the night skies that just go on and on forever. Quite spectacular. Stunning, altogether too marvellous for words.

The plexus of joints and joinery complicate the simplicity of looks as I work through my choices surrounding the uncomplicated use of housing dadoes. Seventeen joints deliver roughly 50" of shoulder lines for lateral stability, but the amazing element is this: measuring corner to corner after the glue up and clamp removal. The corner to corner diagonal measurements are exactly the same. The significance? I didn't check because I wanted to know if it would be square, but so I could briefly discuss it here. It's a personality issue. I knew that I had worked accurately enough on each knifewall shoulder with my hand tool methods alone to delivery a dead square project because of the mass of shoulder lines. Factor into all of this about 120" of dado length, and you see that working with hand tools is indeed a character-building exercise for good mental and physical health. This is soul-strengthening work rather than soul-destroying work, in my view.

The joinery making in elm using hand tools is not hard at all, actually, it's easy, but I often think elm is born without lignin; the wood sometimes seems to have no lignin uniting the fibres, the bio-plastic occurring naturally in plantilfe is the glue that gives it rigidity and also has growing applications in bio-plastics and carbon fibres. The issue then is that bits fall off in the short grain of say dovetails and such. That point right on the corner.

At this point, I have assembled and disassembled about five times, with an average on each joint somewhere about 7 times. This is essential to ensure every joint seats well at first, but then that no one joint compromises another in the grand assembly and before gluing up. Does that mean gap-free togetherness? I'm afraid not. I thought that I did have all the joints full seated but found a couple that I should have clamped and missed. I slid in a slither and glued it in place. The final place may never be seen, but the slither neatly placed and trimmed definitely looked better than a gap, for sure.

The clamps consolidate the mass until those thin films of plastic glue unite. Taking off the clamps is to 'bring the work to rest.' There's always a settledness to this sense of preeminence over my wood, my tools and the overall completion of work. Oh, see the bent stick of plywood between the underside of the top and the top of the lower shelf. I think it's worth noting. This applies pressure where a clamp had a negative effect.

Did I use screws? I used four. Why? I missed gluing one of the housing dadoes for one reason or another. When I took the clamp off, it came apart by half a millimetre. I did squeeze in some glue but had no idea where it spread to, so I predrilled the holes to guide two long screws from underneath that bottom shelf into one of the sides and plugged the holes with wooden plugs. One of the uprights was not wide enough so I glued and screwed an added two inches in width. The screws were so I could keep working and didn't have to wait a few hours for glue to dry. Not impatient, just time saving.

My knowledge of woodworking from tree-dropping to finished pieces in the hundreds tells me that this fissure is a shock result occurring most of the time when the tree is dropped from standing rooted to the earth it grew in for two hundred years in this case. In other words, it did not occur during the growth of the living tree but in its felling. This is cross-grain splitting, where the sheer weight of the tree was too much for the stem. The fissure was in adjacent slabs either side and there was no degrade through the kind of rot that would have been present in a growing tree or a standing dead version.

You will notice that in my remedial steps it was because I really had no other option. Yes, there were compromises. I'm a practical and pragmatic maker, I have to be, but then making videos for teaching and training (and entertainment too) adds the extra dimension that often interrupt the flow of thought and the work patterns I always work to that generally disallow such issues.

Alongside my slender, sliver of a gap-filler are the original sawmill bandsaw marks I retained as evidence for the year 2126 so their forensics can paint their own picture on an earth-borne tree of magnificence but long since extinct.

When it comes to the joinery, some things might not be too obvious at first glance. Yes, they are all what I would refer to as housing dadoes. Why housing dadoes? Never really heard of it? Well, transitionally., in my changing continents to live, experiencing life in woodworking there and having done the same in the UK, I discovered that we in the UK referred to dadoes as housing joints and never at that time referred to housings as dadoes, whereas in the UK a recess going with or across the grain would be a housing. In the US, a dado is a cross-grain channel, whereas one running with the grain would be a groove. I decided that housing dado fit the description better, and I continued to consider other recesses as housings, as in hinge recesses, lock recesses and so on.

The only real consistency between the various joints is the depths of the housing dadoes, which are all 3/8" (10 mm) deep.

My joints are variations on the theme. Some are through and some stopped. Another has a dovetail to the front end; we use these when we need an added mechanical aspect as a 'pull-resistance' factor: I've used them often on the cross rails between drawers to pull the cabinet sides in to bottom the housing dadoes out.

Life is like wood, it comes with knots in it. But it also comes with woodworm, spalting, full punky-rot, cracks, shrinkage and expansion along with other more negative susceptibilities. The alternatives are not acceptable to me and to my audience. We are not so much tolerant as accepting of the occasional inevitable realities of working with natural materials. I have accepted good quality plywoods but not low-grade alternatives, but I doubt that I will ever accept MDF or pressed fibreboard.

Elm is one of our more unusual hardwoods in that its whole infrastructure, though reliant on the same essential working components are the same as all other trees, the outcome of what its capillaries transport from root hair tips to leaf tips is a wood that’s not like any other. That’s why I say it...

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Last week I talked about life working wood that few might know today. A journey through youth to adult life, maturing through migration to live and work as a maker in the USA. No one could have imagined my life. Not one ounce of it would have matched anything of their world, nor any other I ever knew of. Looking back on my own unfolding life, I never met any others that took anywhere like the one I took. Most people are worried about risk, looking foolish to their friends and colleagues, and would never sell up their entire family home and belongings, nor go to live permanently on a continent 5,000 miles from home without the secure promise of some kind of future life elsewhere. Life for the majority is clearly about self-safety, low- and no- risk enterprises, with mainly a gym-safe security for health exercise rather than whitewater kayaking, freeclimbing rock faces over 250 feet and real mountain climbing without Sherpa guides rather than dropping trees in a Texan wilderness, deserts really, nor are they about driving penniless to shows two thousand miles through four other states in a beaten-up 30-year-old Ford Country Squire station wagon with 400,000 miles on the clock and, dare I say, on threadbare tires. Monarch Pass in January snow blizzards, just over 11,300 feet, puts Snowdon's 1,000 into foothill realms, and the magnificence can never be compared with hills you never see the top of for thick cloud.

Even in summer, snow often remains in pockets, but in winter, the story is very different. One of my trips was in January when the roads were bad enough for me to pull over to fit snow chains when I found those that came with the old car were not for my size of wheels.

Yes, my Life is somewhat more sedately paced in some ways, but I am still impressed to keep encouraging my fellow man even when they insist on comparing handwork to machining wood, the two of which have only the barest minimal of connections when it comes to skill building and the whole immersive experience I get from hand work. It bothers me all the less which methods people use, what might irritate me the more is any consideration that the two are one and the same, and it's just a matter of choice. My world is far more diverse, much healthier and absolutely richer. No question. Unless you have truly developed hand skills to a substantial degree, and that means a couple of weeks full on in terms of time, not all at one go, you cannot understand that of which I speak. In most cases, when `i speak of what I know about handwork, the eyes of machinist woodworkers glaze over in a few seconds. At best, they try to extrapolate some kind of legitimate comparison to persuade me differently. About five magazine editors over the last three decades have tried too, the truth was, they didn't know either. They often developed their knowledge by reading, writing giftedly and only minimally doing. Sorry, but that comes from personal interactions and relating to them!

This adventure launched us into online teaching, and our early videos were filmed from inside the castle walls. Imagine being given a handful of ordinary tools, about ten, and a workbench and walking out with a beautiful rocking chair.

So, here I am in a small village of 4,000 called Odiham at a woodworker's venue called Cross Barn and will shortly be surrounded by a mass-congregation of woodworkers making me feel settled and very much at home. It's been a while since I gave any kind of public talk, but meeting Trevor a few months ago and him asking whether I might consider speaking sparked something in me. He had recently come to my workshop, and he intrigued me as we talked about his input into the lives of younger people himself. He's one of the few people that took my investment and started reaching out to them by teaching hand work. Trevor is a gentle soul, kindly, easy to be with. He seemed to know everything about me through following our online work. Our exchange revolved around woodworking, woodworking with children, and then his association with an association of woodworkers just over an hour's drive from me if the weather's good and outside of connecting arterial roads to city lives. When the day came to travel, in heavy, incessant rain there and back, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I was thankful for Joseph volunteering to come with me. The journey is shorter with company, and satnavs often need a nudge at complex intersections on unknown routes.

This was the Men's Sheds talk I gave a few years ago. I enjoyed that talk too. One day, I hope to do this again. These organisations need our support all the more.

The days ahead of my visit prompted me to be more thoughtful about what I might want †o say. I prodded myself with thought-provoking considerations, thinking of the significance woodworking had had on me throughout my life, but then three and more decades trying to dismantle the commercial impact that changed woodworking to become machine-only practices where everything made now came off a rotary cut from carbide-tipped cutterheads and blades of all kinds. The effect on people wanting to just make an occasional piece, a coffee table or perhaps a wedding gift of some kind, every now and then, something for a granddaughter, something like that, has been quite remarkable. Imagine, needing five machines of different types just to make a few pieces every few years! I know, I'm exaggerating some here.

Snowdon will always have a special place in my life. It was where I spent my younger days climbing and beachcombing with my family. I also had some special neighbours living in the Llandygai Village next to the Penrhyn Castle where I had my UK woodworking school workshop, New Legacy.

My life experience as a full-time, lifetime maker of 98% handmade pieces seems to me, at least, to be unparalleled in that I haven't really met many, if any, who have actually spent as long as I have working wood in self-employed ways, travelling through life as a maker and then going most of it alone much of the time. On this evening I didn't want to be just an interesting 'guest speaker', though that's important too. Time is important to me, and I wanted this Southern Fellowship of Woodworkers to feel inspired enough to investigate other options where needed. I was altogether sure that these woodworkers would be like all the others I ever meet, and by that, I mean in my more amateur realms rather than so-called 'professional' ones—those fascinated by possibilities, interested in every new discovery and no matter how small, excitingly interesting, considerate in passing on any ability and knowledge they might have to others. That sort of thing. No trade secrets here!

My work teaching in the US ended with a cluster of hands-on classes in and around 2012. This New York class was a beginner class, but we did complete a month-long workshop that enabled many woodworkers to transition into full-time making.

Another key difference in my world was the reality that children these days are highly unlikely to experience real woodworking of any kind, even machining parts of it. Children can not work with or near to ultra-dangerous machines, and that, by its very nature, leaves 98% of them outside the workshop doors during the most critical era of formative learning. If that was true in my day, how much more today with the advent of mobile phones and total access to the internet twenty-four-seven? The competition for things of interest today is unparalleled in history. It's all about the scarce recognition that we rarely have enough time to PAY FOR ATTENTION! Also true, another reality, The majority of those youngsters wanting to do woodworking would be held firmly outside the machine shop doors for obvious safety issues that must never be ignored. The simple reality is this; it's not just the machinist-user who is in danger. Those standing or working within close proximity to machines, mostly a single-car garage-sized space and such, are in equal levels of danger. Anything that can wrong will likely go wrong for everyone and wood and splinters fly, when wood explodes from the impact of a three-horse-power motor, wood splits without warning and people can forget where they are and become disoriented. Furthermore, which young person, when having access to a mobile device of any kind, wants to stand around listening to the scream of machines watching someone else make all the cuts for them anyway? School woodworking and D&T (Design and Technology UK). It's no wonder we have seen half a decade of rapid decline in woodworking around the whole world. I recall not too long ago the racks in every UK supermarket and bookstore having several linear feet of dedicated space for DIY woodworking magazines for sale. But it was the editors that shot themselves in the foot by prioritising machine methods in 98% of their pages. How short-sighted they were. For the main part, they simply regurgitated the same old, same old every few months. There are only so many moulds you can make with a power router and so many straight cuts from a tablesaw.

Another adventure unfolded when I started my UK school from an old farmyard on the Isle of Anglesey as the snow started falling on my wood and the only place I could use machines outside.

Funny enough, I think, the majority of richer, machine-only woodworkers actually believe that these others, the ones yet to discover woodworking for themselves, could own machines like they do; that this was available to all, and that it was really the only way forward. Owning a few dedicated machines and a workspace large enough to house them does speak of being well-off and better off than the majority. My outreach is to both the well-off and those not well-off. This is based on my reality that my work will indeed equal the cuts made using a chop saw, power planer, and tablesaw but that it takes real effort and skill to do it and that it is well worth the cognitive development of making three-dimensionally and probably 4D. With time, many cuts actually become quicker––even with the need for further refining with a second or third tool. Starting from scratch, any dovetail I make will be faster than machining it, and it will always fit straight off the saw. But I know that if I need a thousand identical dovetails, a power router and jig will repeat the process a thousand times faster. But, go ahead, ask yourself, who needs a thousand dovetails outside of industry anyway? Machines have the capacity to always deliver dead-square cuts and that could never be achieved using hand tools in the same time, but there is much more to woodworking than the square and straight cuts you get. And it's this that my audience wants. It's the realness of high-demand woodworking.

It feels like I could just have made about a thousand of these but lost count. I made on in every box-making class alongside the students I taught, and that is thousands of students.

It's easy to forget that machines demand big-foot footprints and dedicated spaces around each piece of kit, volumes of investment, and more beyond. I have spent 30 years proving that 98% can't and never could or would have access to such wealthy woodworking, and that once that thoughtful consideration passed, the minute was lost, and those looking for the new hobby moved on with a sense of loss and impossibility. We're talking thousands upon thousands of pounds, whereas hand tools might cost less than £300 for a complete kit and a relatively compact workbench will make every stick and stem to furnish a home with 60 pieces of high-end furniture. 98%, that's my using the reference ninety-eight percent, is a favourite number in percentages for me—it's arbitrary, of course. I picked out what I could from my lived life as what others refer to now as an influencer. Actually, inspirer suits better.

This is roughly what a month-long class looks like. Absolute success and no school in the world had expectations like this: a dovetailed box, a wall shelf, an oak end table, an oak coffee table, a pine tool box replete with raised panels and two drawers, and an oak rocking chair in 26 days with all the students having minimal or zero hand tool experience. Oh, how we have dumbed down expectations for hand tool woodworking.

Success usually speaks positively for itself because mostly the unsuccesses rarely get a mention. Of course, we must take care not to give the impression of total success when ten failures prefaced the reality of the risks you took for your one eventual success. The truth is, success can be staged performances based on small gains through lesser failures at each successive rather than successful level––most of them are simply serendipitous bolt-ons. You persevered, of course you did. It's all too easy to give others the impression that you planned the whole thing and that there were never any failures, that you planted each stepping stone to get where you are, whereas for me, failure seems always to undergird some measure of ultimate success in someone who didn't give up. It's one thing letting go of something and another being discarded, and it's one thing discarding something and another recognizing it's your time to move on. But I fleshed out ideas that seemed to expand positively from time to time. Rarely, if talking about wood to woodworkers, will I ever be stuck to relate to others on common ground somewhere, and that's because my woodworking comes from a wholly lived life of daily experience. If I took any one-year span of my life, I could relate to others through the wood in it, simply because it was the life I'd lived. Any given year would give me sixty diversely different woodworking topics, from making mesquite birdhouses to mesquite credenzas for the Cabinet Room of the White House.

Joseph and Kat joined me in New York to help with the class. It's always special having them along with me.

Joseph coming with me to Odiham was nice for me. I think our relationship is remarkable. The deep gutter-water, hydroplaning, and such made the trip interesting, but we arrived safely and dead on time and at the right place. The evening dark surrounded us as we parked by the Cross Barn venue. We were to meet with a smaller group at the Red Lion pub for a tantalising menu for choosing supper. The ten or so of us sat for a good hour, discovering our common ground across the table. The venue was a five-minute saunter through the village.

This is Hannah's work I took to show off at the venue. Everyone loved it and all were surprised it was total handwork

My mixed feelings about presenting this night quickly evaporated with the crowds hovering in hospitality to greet both Joseph and myself. I was glad for his company and support, but he too has his own unique story that few fathers and sons working together through life have. It seems to me at least that he and I have been partners forever and in so many ways. I'm not really nervous about talking to a crowd, but more feeling that what I might share is more important to me than I first thought. You see, I am on the other side of the uncertainties early life can be paved with, the other side of unsuccesses the other side of seeking the approval of others. I'm not saying I have arrived, and then again, I feel in much of my life, I have. Living my kind of success is measured far less alongside famed people we might generally acknowledge as successful and more about the sense I have that I have actually achieved something quite substantive, an important objective through my isolation and ambition. To be 'there', after living 'out there', we must shed lots of the excess baggage we usually accumulate from many sources along the way. This often begins in childhood and passaging through life, we accumulate and accumulate like we do possessions. As I said, my life as a maker has never had bolt-ons in my designer-maker living designing many a thousand pieces and then doing 98% of all work using hand tools rather than machines. As a result, I have taught a thousand children how to work wood in traditional ways and then ten thousand woodworkers to strive for the more real experience of high-demand woodworking I consider to be hand tool woodworking. Take any segment of a working man's life with hand tools in it, and a story exists that most other woodworkers will be interested to hear of it. I had considered a couple of things, but critically I wanted to reach out to those there to reconsider their amount of handwork and to see how it might relate to others––people like those I had trained three decades ago when they were kids and then those in recent years, people, unusually, like Hannah. Hannah has been my only ever serious female to go through apprenticeship.

I enjoyed the evening. It went well.

Last week I talked about life working wood that few might know today. A journey through youth to adult life, maturing through migration to live and work as a maker in the USA. No one could have imagined my life. Not one ounce of it would have matched anything of their world, nor any other...

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Answers to blog post questions posed in Known By Their Fruits

1: Why did this maker take a saw to each corner of the appliqued drawer bottom groove at the back of the drawer when no one would see it, ever? On each of the drawers, he cut this corner off, in situ, after the drawer bottom was screwed in place.

Answer: This extreme created an overhang over the next drawer down. This had the potential of catching items in the lower drawer. Sloping the leading edge this way reduced the risk of snagging fabrics, paper, and other items, nudging them away. Also, all of these back corners are ‘eased’, and ‘easing’ was the common practice so that when drawers passed back into their openings, inset doors too, it was common practice to bevel back the leading edges at all the corners. 

2: Why, out of the six drawers, did this drawer bottom split where the screws anchored the drawer bottom to the drawer back?

Answer: I removed all of the drawer bottoms to rework the insides of the drawers in one way or another, but particularly to sand them because they were actually left without any finish. As a result, the surfaces were fuzzy and unpleasant. I decided to sand them and finish them. The other drawer bottoms were well-fitted but not tight. Now this unit was made before central heating was developed and installed in every home. Park a desk like this near to a radiator or other heat source, and shrinkage will take place. Whereas all of the drawer bottoms had shrunk by 3/16” in the ¼” deep groove, this particular drawer bottom was tightly fitted in the groove and took some effort on my part to extract that ‘wedged leading front edge from its tight groove. In other words, there was enough retentive grip to prevent it from shrinking to the fixed point of the screwed edge, as in all of the other drawers. Something had to give, and in this case it was the screw-points of the back edge. I added an extra ⅛” to the front edges of all of the drawer bottoms.

3: Why was this common, through dovetail so gappy at the back but with no gap on the inside corner?

Answer: Speed was of the essence in an age where handwork was barely surviving the age of the Industrial Revolution. For every skilled maker at work, there were ten outside the gates and doors ready to take your place. Industrialism was replacing and thereby displacing skilled workers with machine made alternatives. It was hard to compete. But in this case, reading between the lines, I suspect he’d possibly given this individual drawer to his apprentice, as you can see the line of the inside of the drawer was precisely cut and neat. This wood being so soft, you could cut all the way from the inside face to the outside from one side. Here, I have these considerations: the cut was from the inside all the way through onto something solid and without a gap, so the cut was clean with no breakout; the maker was experienced and somewhat careless; the main maker was in a hurry to get the work done; or the work was that of an apprentice.

4: Why were so many repairs required to the front face marquetry veneers, especially at the corners?

Answer: These corners are really quite unprotected and rely on the glue alone. Through the main outer sources, there is little if any friction to pull the veneer away, but on the edges, there is friction if the drawer has any play at all in it. Rushed or careless closing will catch on the frame surrounding the drawer. Especially is this so with very thin veneers. Also, when the drawer is open, it can be subjected to clothing catching the corners of the veneer. Notice that on almost all of the drawer corners, 24 of them, there has been repair work to restore broken off veneers at the very corners, and this is because of the short length of the grain at that point.

It’s worth mentioning here that the main purpose of cockbeading was to protect the exposed corners of doors and drawers from being damaged. It’s much easier to replace damaged or broken cockbeading than it is the veneered surfaces and corners. Also, the extremes of wood veneers are a little like the edges of wallpaper that have curled away at the edges. The uptake of moisture coming from the edges will allow the veneer to expand and pull away from the core wood. Veneers are really ultra-thin solids of wood, and wood of every kind expands and contracts according to atmospheric moisture. The best way to protect wood is to apply a coat of resistant film or a penetrating oil that forms a barrier of one kind or another. Finishes shrink during the curing, and the breakpoint of sharp corners to edges creates  the narrowest thickness of finish, and in some cases no finish on the tight corners exists with any kind of continuity. That's the reason we remove the arris or lightly sand off the corner edges to a slight round.

5: Why did the maker use planted or appliqued drawer grooving instead of ploughing the grooves directly into the drawer sides?

Answer: These drawers are about as thin as they can be, and that’s to reduce the weight of the drawer. The grooves need to be no less than 3/16” (4.76 mm) to be of any real retentive value, especially at the leading edge to the front of the drawer. The drawer front is ⅞” thick, so the groove was ploughed in directly to ¼” (6.35) deep just fine. Ploughing that deep into the ⅜” (9.5 mm) sides would result in an ultra-weak point along the long axis of the drawer sides. Planting the groove from an independent piece added more wear surface and increased the strength of the bottom edges where the weight within the drawer would be. It’s also easier to plough a long length on the edge of a board and then rip it off to expose a new edge to plough again. That way you can then cut the grooved piece to length.

I also noticed that he had written ‘Plant’ to the pieces at different points in pencil and a cursive writing style, which might well mean that someone else was working on the cabinet and he was sending the message to someone else. It is worth noting that often a foreman did all of the laying out and allocation of materials to individual makers working on the same piece. Highly economical to do it that way.

6: Why did he use poplar as the secondary wood even where it could be seen in place?

Answer: Poplar is a relatively inexpensive wood compared to most other hardwoods and is a sustainable tree to source wood from. Also, the consistent density, lack of contrasting growth rings, uneventful patterns of growth made it a better choice than other softer, easy to work woods, including the whole softwood range, though something like old-growth eastern white pine from virgin North American forests (now long gone through greedy rich pioneers and investment companies on every continent) was popular too. Poplar has been used throughout the furniture industry for decades, whether for commercially produced furniture or in small workshops like mine. You can stain poplar to just about any colour you want, and it can be just about the easiest wood to match to other wood types. It takes stain and dyes well too. This is a soft hardwood, which makes it exceptionally easy to work with every type of hand tool. It grows to good widths and lengths and is very stable too. I had already disposed of the ‘evidence’ by the time I decided to create a blog post. Apologies for no pics.