Paul Sellers

Making the Gauge Stem

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

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

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

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

Tips:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keep checking for square.

Plane up as you go.

Check for consistent parallelity both ways.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making the Paul Sellers' Marking Gauge Part III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, why would the tails not go together?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Stem

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

The Stock

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

BEFORE YOU DIVE IN

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

The Tools

Pencil

Compasses

Circle Template

Bench plane: #4

Combination square

Knife

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

Chisels

Chisel hammer (or mallet)

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

Centre punch

Drill of some kind

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

5/16" (8mm) bit

3mm twist drill bit

Saw rasp

Flat file

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

Screwdriver flat head

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

The Metal

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

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

The Other Hardware

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

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

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

Parts to the gauge

A Stock

B Stem

C Pin

D Knurled Thumbscrew 6mm by 30mm

E Brass pressure strip

I didn't own one of this particular side rebate planes before this week, but this one arriving made me realise the demise of certain Sheffield makers post-war was for good reason. Record was a company sold back and forth a few times throughout its dying death knells. It wasn't lack of sales that caused it to lose value but lack of care and quality in workmanship. A tool like this, or a bench plane or a saw, would likely need only three or four more minutes of finishing care to have substantially improved it, but who cares anyway, certainly not Record. Why did they end up with such a lacklustre approach of complacency in most British tool making over a period of a few decades? Yes, they relied on their daddy's reputation, I get that, but with such a strong and resilient foundation, why did the owners not realise that with a minor amount of extra input engineering wise they could have been up amongst the very best?

And I looked at the tool and I thought, well, it is a brilliant woodworking device. The design itself lacked nothing. I began to let my mind rip along a zip wire, imagining the tool made in brass or better still bronze all the more. They already had all that they needed in place to make the better tool become that very best, the mould models for casting, the casting equipment to make hundreds, tooling equipment, the workshop building was already paid for ten times over and then too all of the skilled workmen knowing all of the safety practices and protocols. How come they were so very, very blind. Well, I suppose we already know, really. Complacent arrogance soon sets in when you think you've arrived, think you are the best, think you no longer need to try; pure arrogance and pride will always blind the next generations and then the potential dies in their hands.

This side rebate plane was just minutes away from working, but whoever owned it before me had bought it fifty or sixty years before me and had never used it. The box was still intact, and the tiny leaflet lay at the bottom, beneath the plane when I took the plane out. Everything was there except care.

Not needing a plane does not mean not owning one. My passage of discovery was part of the package. I wanted to know the plane, even if I didn't need it and most likely would pass it along or sell it.

The leaflet was really quite vague and unhelpful and pertained to general cutting edges rather than this unique tool with its uniquely angled cutting edge. There was no mention of any angles that would be helpful, not at all how you would get the exact angle you needed?

It was this kind of laziness that began to permeate British tool manufacturing over the postwar decades. It would have taken no more than half an hour to write a proper and decent leaflet with together drawings, and they should have been ashamed for not doing so, but they weren't.

My Plastic Insert Guarantees Accuracy

This could be cardboard but plastic sign material, 1mm, snaps to a knifelike and works and lasts.

First I established the angle I needed for the bevel by cutting a strip of plastic to width and then inserted it into the plane body to get the angle.

The angle is as close to a 30º off a 90º so I used this to create a wedge shaped piece to fit into my honing guide.

From there, I used an angled protractor to establish my cut line onto as bigger piece of plastic.

This then inserts into my guide.

And my blade butts up against the plastic.

The flip-out, flip-over plastic extender gives me the 30º bevel pitch I need to abrade and hone to. I don't usually go for secondary or micro bevels to cutting edges. No real point to it, and too pernickety. But my angles did result in a secondary bevel which because it is a bevel-up plane with the bed angle the lowest of any plane ever, a mere 7º, I felt needed a steeper bevel to enhance the residual strength of the bevel.

With the plastic set up done, offer the guide to the abrasive, no matter the type, and a few rubs establishes the double 30º both ways. Go through the grits to superfine and you are nearly there.

Flip over and remove the wire edge whilst at the same time polishing out the flat face for the first and last time, and the blade is ready for installing again.

Installing the Cutting Irons

Place the plane on a decent flat surface, keep the plane body firmly pressed down and take up the slack on the thumbscrew holding the pressure bar, not too tight so as to allow moving the blades. Now, gently slide the cutters until they just nestle up to the flat surface, aligning the cutting edge with the face of the plane. In this position, cinch down the thumbscrew; the irons will flex slightly past the face of the plane as needed. Slight hammer taps will set deeper, or move them slightly laterally, but I mean slight taps and not blows. There is a little wiggle room in the channel if the blade needs tweaking for alignment and parallel shavings.

Restoration Work

My plane had the 1960's expected flawed workmanship in the plane as well as the neglect that comes from simply being left in a box unused. The blades had a little surface rust, nothing much, but the nickel plating had bulbed up because of minor rust beneath and that needed abrading away. Also, the bull nose front had fused the two parts together immoveably so that needed resolving too.

The leading edge is the top edge and this area has a slight bubbling in the nickel that will mar the wood I am planing, so I want to remove it. You can also see the general roughness in the nickel plating. Generally, this main surface roughness doesn't altogether affect the functionality of the plane, but it looks and feels rougher than it should to pick up, use and put down. The benefit of the plating has proven good, though; there really had been no real rust to speak of. From now on, the best answer to preventing rust will be my daily use, a dry workshop, and a good environment.

My engineers block beneath the tight abrasive paper works well for flattening, even though that is not my goal here.

Light oiling with my rag-in-a-can oiler or some Boeshield T9 will inhibit future rusting. Also worth mentioning; Boeshield T9 is a high-performance, paraffin wax-based lubricant and rust preventative developed by Boeing for long-term metal protection on their planes. It is a remarkable treatment that works well as a rust inhibitor on tools you might use less frequently than others, and especially useful where you have had to abrade through faulty nickel plating. Also, it works as a lubricant too. Super slick.

You can see the protrusion of rust and nickel plating.

How flat do these planes need to be? Well, we only use the half-inch on each side of the plane, as the cutting edges are only half an inch wide.

Light oiling coats the surface to reduce the possibility of rusting again.

At this point, the plane works perfectly well and both of the cutters took off an even shaving straight away. Because of the single securement point for two blades, it can be tricky if one blade works well and the other needs tweaking because, of course, you are loosening the pressure on both blades at the same time.

Already the plane works well, but a little more refinement makes it feel like it is now mine.

I am suspicious that the bull nose might need some help, and when I tried to remove the front piece, it wouldn't budge. I knew there would be some rust between the components.

The rust was inevitable from the drilled holes and then too the tapping of the threads and the steel set screw.

The wire brush took care of all of the rust, and drizzling oil into the screw cavity took care of protection. This set screw was inserted 70 years go and had most likely never been removed since.

The two pins are drilled all the way through the front piece into the second and so everything aligns up perfectly with no slippage.

The last component is the depth shoe. Again, bubbling rust beneath the nickel plating needed abrading away. You can DIY new nickel plating, but that's not really helpful in the case of this plane.

The roughness of the casting and the nickel plating attests to the lowering standards of tool making in some quarters of Sheffield tool making.

Two seconds on abrasive paper again took out the rust, the nickel plating and gave me a decent surface.

Half a dozen thrusts will make the shoe smooth and level.

I also filed off the two leading edges with a file to create slight bevels, that way the show will never snag.

The abrading to 250 grit is plenty smooth enough. Wood is highly abrasive and after use it will never look any better than this.

I am happy with my £42 plane. Thrown in with my other side rebate planes, I will find out which one or ones I reach for over the coming years.

This is a deeper setting and removes stock fast. And remember, you can cant the plane over for a sloped wall to the rebate if you want or need that.

The other use for a side rebate plane is on grooves that might be a touch too tight. This for me makes the plane invaluable, as grooves by hand are difficult to enlarge with any degree of accuracy.

For increasing the width of a groove, any of the side rebate planes know no equal. I am glad to introduce this use here, as I have never seen nor heard of anyone else ever using the plane for this.

It's a neat and compact all-in-one tool altogether. The corner points on these plane types are pretty extreme when it comes to sharpness and using them as your hands are close to the points when in use.

This exemplar to refined and skilful door making will never get a mention. I could write a whole book on this one door alone. It has raised and fielded panelling, mortise and tenon joinery throughout, crisp hand carved mouldings inside and out and the man that made it remainsanonymous.

We tend to buy these planes because they bespeak of the ancients and ancient craftsmanship excelling in a pre-machine age when the finest woodworking in any period of history in a range of diverse cultures came together to predate machines that could never create what the human hands created. Yet, these planes are not so old when it comes to the all-metal version that stand out. Obsolescence spanned only four decades before the planes lay abandoned amongst others in the bottoms of tool chests, toolboxes, on shelves in cupboards and so on. The more ancient versions, those made of cast bronze and infilled (stuffed) with ebony or rosewood, whatever offcut lay abandoned from some rich dude's stately home work, evolved as rich individuals, businesses and corporations used buildings as homes and places of businesses were used the more to, well, show off their status in architecture and art forms. There is no doubt that rich people bought the work of manual workers to own them through the work that they bought. It's true, too, that without these rich empire dominants, the equivalent of Musks, the Bezos and so many other empire builders, no such fine woodworking would exist. Buying people as units, whether it's politicians and supreme leaders, business tycoons, is all part of the world's global dominants. Greed buys art to hand and stand in private places where they alone, with a few friends, walk past them knowing they owned the man or the woman that made them just for a short time.

Made from wood and sand-cast to take molten metal in a flask. The body of the plane was sold to people like me in the old days and it worked for a century.

Ultimately, the glorious facades emerging exemplified they who really never made anything with their own hands, status expressed by their rich holdings but only by their using the work of the common man and woman to create. Imagine how we too admire the rich people thinking they are something remarkable when all they mostly did was buy people for their own extravagance; incredible works of creative art purchased from skilled artisans, but they never once lifted any tool themselves to work with. Buying in creativeness influenced makers. Makers developed their skills and further refining abilities to serve their masters by making many of the tools we still use today. Shoulder planes are very much the luxury planes of our age, despite the reality that they are only minimally useful.

The Maker Lifts His Soul in the Making of a Tool

'And then, when the day grew dim, the workman reached down beneath other scraps of wood in the scrap bin to retrieve a piece of darkest black ebony he'd secreted there two days before. It wasn't truly scrapped, he was stealing this usable chunk, knowing he's hidden it below common beech and oak to retrieve in the evening's dark when the lights were dimmed into twilight and others had left for home. His friend, a worker in metal, had sand cast the sole of bronze, hollow in body, rough cast on the innards but now square and angular on the outsides. They traded firewood for the casting. A fair exchange for the working classes.

The day had long grown dim as he cut into the dense-grained heartwood of purest black where no grain direction was visible, and even the sharpest chisel glanced of the wood surfaces if the slightest hesitation was sensed. The work continued by candlelight. A small globe of light filtering into the dark blackness of the workshop. There was nothing furtive about the man making his shoulder plane. He knew he would be using the tool for the work in the workshop soon. The refining of shoulders to tenons would improve his work, and he would use it for decades to come. But his master would never have allowed him to own a piece of pure ebony for his ownership of the tool itself.

The main body of wood all but disappeared within the walls of the bronze casting. The channels needed for wedges were all hand filed, cut true with paring chisels, measured by eye and angled perfectly to match the wedge that held the hand made cutting iron. By morning time three days later, the plane was complete. The other men gathered to look at what he had made, each knowing how the ebony had come to him by their having done the same years ahead. Another man produced his work, and then another. Each piece was slightly different. He'd seen them before, used them occasionally, but never owned his own until now. The union of this kind of inclusivity was a scarcity amongst working people kept low and in their station. For the weeks and months ahead, there was a celebration in the heart of a man that made a tool he needed to make for others with.'

The Veritas range of woodworking planes is a remarkable achievement. The knob top left can be removed and used in the top hole on the side of the plane either side depending on the need. The rear knob swivels 190º to either side for using the plane on the left and right of tenons or whatever. The small set screws in the side allow setting the cutting iron in relation to the sides of the plane. What a remarkable shoulder plane.

I own three shoulder planes, though I rely on them only very minimally. We have become nations without the broad shoulders makers once relied on. We no longer bend our backs to carry burdens, lift and struggle with in the day-to-day of making, and we don't want anything to disrupt the comfort of ease in work. With the demise of wood in door making, the architects of design now rely on boxed steel box sections, aluminium and plastic to make our front entryway facades from. We have become highly controlling and wood has been an unruly rebel to become all but actually banned. Wow, so much opposition to our once highly sought after wooden doors. That's what we call progress. But there is nothing more annoying than a sticking door. The doors to my garage are four feet wide and made from European redwood. In the height of any drier season they each shrink 3/8" (10mm) and in the humid times, rainy periods and such, they expand fully to stick at their meeting point. If I ease the one door, there is a gap. Hardwoods do the same. Both the doors are rebated at the meeting point, and an additional cover strip inside and out resolves any gap issues.

Eighteen years ago, 2007, or so, I saw massive doors being made for the Russian Embassy here in the UK. They were solid enough. You know how heavy and solid MDF is, right? Yes, these doors were made from massive slabs of 2 1/2" thick MDF, and were 12 feet tall and 3 feet wide. The two-tone veneer hid everything inside, and no fibres of MDF could be seen once the doors were hung. That's just another aside.

And then you pick this up, and you stand and stare with admiration. This not someone hitting a ball through the skies with a bat or another knee-sliding on astroturf with his or her jaw giving out a primordial roar with two fists clenched. The manufacturer's name is on the plane yes, but the actual maker will never be known. He never expected any more than that. He rode his bike home and was grateful he could sell his skills to feed and clothe his family.

Writing about the lost planes is important to me. Shoulder planes are obsolete entities in our woodworking world, and positivity of any kind will not reverse the reality, since such cabinet work is now wholly done by machines that cut panels in seconds rather than half an hour apiece. I don't crave that past life, eras gone, neither do I take part in so-called living history to dress up and act out roles. I simply and pragmatically encourage woodworkers making individual pieces for themselves, family and friends and then lone independents who live their woodworking experience off the conveyor belts using mass-making methods and systems as mini-factorial setups in their domestic garage or shed. I tried explaining the redundancy of shoulder planes to two friends and the one said that she thought that crafts were on the comeback, saying, "...crafts are coming back." her eyes danced some as did the smile that answered the demise by her thinking saying something positive like that would suddenly reverse the trend and reality by just the simplicity of simplistically saying something positive. I decided not to pursue this. How often is it that people say, "But the colleges and the Prince's Trust are working to reverse this trend." or "I hear that crafts are coming back. There's been a resurgence!" And all because of a TV show here and there where producers and talking heads, knowing mostly absolutely nothing about anything art or craft creativity wise, try persuading people they are the influencers that will change things by simply producing half-hour episodes for a TV channel.

I doubt that I have made less than 100,000 hand cut woodworking joints throughout my lifetime.

The trend toward a craftless society is fully on and will never be stopped nor reversed because, well, simply put, we cannot stop it–it's simply too big. No so-called professional woodworker will ever be able to rejig their work because they started on machines and cold never do what we amateurs do in their professional and competitive worlds. But for us in our own personal driving seat, the quiet of our daily making, hand tools lying in wait and such, we can enjoy what many of the ancients did. We can quite easily disengage, reinvent ourselves, engineer our future to include certain aspects we once thought to be beyond our reach.

A panel raising plane creates a step-down which then raises the field. That top flat face is referred to as the field, the slopes are referred to as raised and so the combined outcome is referred to as a Raised and Fielded Panel.

The luxury of owning my shoulder planes reminds me of the value and inheritance of fine woodworking and cabinet making we from past years–that's decades and centuries of the absolute finest handwork we almost know nothing of today without visiting the past. We in the UK and Europe especially have this inheritance, even though it was from a somewhat nefarious past in what was then no more than slave labour.

It's not old. It's quite new. It raises the panel and creates a field, completes pristine dead square and planed shoulders to a crisp edge, and it is by far an exceptional plane..

The true intent of shoulder planes is this and was this alone.

I pull my shoulder plane to task on work that might just need that extra effort. I perfect a rebate or shoulder by passing it along a surface previously sawn, or refine this and that with a very quick but single swipe. Seeing it as a luxury plane, I might name it so, but mostly not. Tools we use become essential to our personal us for a variety of different reasons but mostly because of their refining qualities. My tools are essentially mine and became essential to me by functionality in refinement. Even so, it's my hands and body that make them work. Nothing is fixed by it; I often pain my body with awkwardness to make the tool work efficiently and well.

The shoulder plane can be used on long grain, though it was fully intended only for cutting across end grain as in tenon shoulders.

Why have you never seen me use this and other types in my video work? It's because 99% of my work doesn't need them. I teach methods that keep specialist tools out of the mix because I cannot send people out to buy special tools if I can teach methods that deliver what they need. I see woodworking gurus with pristine rows of tools in shops that look like a chemist's lab or a professional commercial kitchen. When did such a thing come in. Rows of three and four hundred dollar planes racked up. It gives the wrong impression of richness rather than reality and real woodworking. We've become collectors of wealthy tools to show off our prowess, I'm afraid. I don't really mind. We do it with the status cars and our clothes, shoes and so on. Why not tools as decorator items on the backdrop of our machine shops in so-called man-caves. That's not me, no, not for me.

I will end up like this five times a day. I stop five times, put tools away, and start over afresh. Was it not Albert Einstein who said: “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?” I apply this to my productivity rate of high-quality woodworking for over sixty years, with never a single day where I did not have productive work. No apology needed or given!

Watching me, my videos, really, reading my blogs from the past couple of decades, people, friends following for long enough will have established knowledge and skills by which they can then make their seriously educated choices. I will never influence people to buy into excesses, hence a #4 Stanley bought by me, aged fifteen, will take care of 99.9% of my everyday surface planing and trimming needs and a knifewall establishes dead square shoulders, that generally takes shoulder planes out of the equation. Also, and it is worth noting here, a fancier plane made by so-called premium plane makers nowadays, you know the names dropped into conversations, do no more than my common or garden Stanley #4 bench plane, and they never will. Also, and it is no small thing for my audience around the world, luxury planes costing hundreds of whatever currency they live with are usually just flat 'plane' out of the question. A shoulder plane the size and quality of this one will cost £300 and on up to not quite £400, depending on the manufacturer.

But narrow shoulders to tenons, as in the width of the rail and not the depth of the shoulders from outside face to tenon cheek, do not offer enough length of runway to register and land the plane on and take off the shaving I need. I'd go to a knife and square to perfect a shoulder, rather than a shoulder plane.

I am not sure if people altogether believe me, but a Stanley, Record or Woden #78 type plane will work quite well enough to trim shoulders, despite the shortness of the forepart of the plane's sole. Assuming you are working on wide rails, simply start halfway along, embed the blade into the shoulder by pushing down to seat the plane sole to the shoulder, push forward and remove the shoulder into a sacrificial piece on the out cut. Turn the plane around, end-for-end, set the plane to the previously started point and work the opposite way. Oh, you must take time to refine setting the plane and making certain to sharpen up before you start.

The luxury of pare cutting tenon cheeks became completely unnecessary on the majority of any tenon fitting when I put out my technique of using the router plane to perfect tenons paraplanar to the external faces of tenoned rails. That's not to say you cannot do it, just that generally it will be utterly unneeded because of the added advantage of complete control of surfacing by router plane use and the depth of cut that's established by registering the sole of the plane to the adjacent immovable face. No other hand tool method comes close, and that is why people have unquestioningly adopted my technique in their handwork.

This ancient plane worked so well it was never replaced by any other for its hundred years of weekly use. `the users and makers were content

I give credit to inventions of the past and now too the present when people like Veritas invent the new from an acknowledgement to past designer-makers.

This has to be the most sophisticated rebate plane ever. Micro-adjustable to thousandths in every way you care to think of, had it had a skewed mouth and blade it would have been absolutely perfect. Would it do what a primitive panel raising plane does? No. It's a luxury plane, altogether, but still the admirable quality of Veritas who do invent their planes.

There can be no doubt, wooden planes might just feel heavy in the hand when you first pick up say one of the longer jack planes or longer 22" version on up, but on wood the weight suddenly disappears; it happens to such a point that their near weightlessness can barely be felt as you push it forward. Take a small step further, add a zigzag of candle wax from an old stem candle or a dab or two of furniture polish to the sole, and it's the gentlest parachute drop as in a canopy-type (ram-air/square) that creates a soft and controlled descent to a supremely gentle landing. Did you know that parachutes don't fall, but fly? So too a wooden plane merely floats and glides with free-friction ease. No muscling to task or "bearing down" overhand. No matter what you do with steel or bronze, cast metal type planes of any maker you care to name, they can never come close to a wooden plane, no matter how you slice it.

Two of my half a dozen wooden bench planes. They look very, similar, but the tell-tale is in the skewed wedge in one and square across one in the other. The square across one on the right is simply a longish bench plane used for straightening and levelling boards on the face and adjacent edges. The left one is called a badger plane, and we use this plane for planing inside or creating rebates. More below.

I own more than enough wooden planes, currently around 200. Most of them are not bench planes but a variety that will come under the general heading moulding planes, but a quarter of which would never make a mould in their life. I'm mentioning these two planes because they are mine, they are always at the end of my bench, and when I am tired of working with other planes, metal ones, I reach for one or the other of these to help me out. Why do I not just use them in my videos and advocate using them for all? Availability, problem-solving, knowing what to buy, excessive wear and more. But it is worth knowing that, contrary to popular belief that metal versions last longer, have better adjustability, are less expensive and just work better, there is no evidence that metal planes outlast wooden ones whereas there is plenty of evidence that wooden ones have and do often last in excess of 200 hundred years. Also, for good reason and not trying to halt progress, woodworkers in every category from barrel making and carriage building, furniture making and every other woodworking craft, refused to use all metal planes for half a century. It was to do with the ugly heaviness and the fact that they stuck to wood like molasses, compared to the wood-on-wood experience of wooden soles on planes.

Looking back in investigative way of researching the history and the development of hand planes is very interesting. Here we find the reason that most all-metal planes were well over 95% obsolete after a short 50-year lifespan of woodworking at least. Wooden ones had a much longer lifespan of centuries but even holding their own for so long a period, ultimately resulted in decline in the same period of the first half of the 1900s that the metal ones died out. The wonders of industrialised woodworking progressed from hand work to machine work. The outcome of decline on the one hand and incline on the other, influenced domestic home workshops, where we now see the most prevalent way of creating things from wood is machining it; this is generally seen as highly innovative, progressive and cost-effective in time, skill level and financial investment even though for the main part it is quite deceptively presented. For experienced men like myself, it is generally true that my skills enable me to work more efficiently to produce the quality work I need. Did you know that furniture makers rarely laid out 90% of their dovetails, but freely cut them solely by eye and a few pencil lines? My trained and capable abilities make my work as fast and faster in many areas of woodworking. But people give up far too soon and fail to really establish the substantive skills and knowledge and speed needed and believe machines are the better way forward, and, well, who am I to contradict the beliefs of others? Actually, there is no doubt that this is true in many areas of stock prep and more, but please factor in the elements that most machine advocates ten to always leave out. We dive deeply into the benefits of physical and mental high demand, but I will park that here.

L. COOK kept things simple. Short name no frilly edges, and he never passed the plane on to others yet used the plane for half a century of daily use going off patination.

My 22" wooden plane made from 3" by 3" beech is a fine example of an English plane made by W. GREENSLADE of BRISTOL, ENGLAND in the mid-1800s. It's one that was worked with and worked well for its former owner, L. COOK. The name stamp tells me that there was likely just one owner before me. This plane seems always to pull itself to task and when people advocate low benches to power-down on their planes to make them cut, I understand all the more that they simply do not know what they are talking about or worse still, how to sharpen and use their planes. I push forward with a firm but not excessive push, my fingers around the tote and my forehand wrapped in an overhand hold, and up comes the shaving, rising effortlessly like wispy camp-fire smoke from oak, cherry, walnut ash and even knotty elm. The shavings, one after another, after another, spiral up from the throat as if each one pulls the other. Setting the depth of cut comes from slight hammer- and bench-taps in a split second, and so too aligning the cutting iron's cutting edge to the sole of the plane. A bump here and a tap there governs the plane's passage, and all of this rubbish about bearing down does not bear thinking about. Of course, you might just not know what you are doing, so I am careful here. Unless some laziness has set in, and then not finely adjusting your plane accordingly, or worse still, refusing to sharpen the dull one you are forcing to submit, your experience will be less positive altogether.

Some people will consider this a crude way of setting any plane, and we in our ignorance might consider ourselves to be superior, but it was superbly effective and fast in the hands of a master. In many cases, it was a side tap on the edge of the bench for alignment, a nudge on the nose or heel for a deeper or withdrawn depth of cut.We once called it "hammer ash". The end grain of beech takes shock well, hence few other woods in the UK were ever used for plane making for three hundred years.

Don't be shocked by the hammer marks on the fore end, top of the plane or its heel. For that is exactly what they represent, shock marks. The blade and wedge are shocked out by quite swift and severe hammer blows with a steel hammer. Nothing prissy about this. A swift whack dislodges the wedge and cutting iron assembly altogether or, with light taps, the iron is retarded to lighten the depth of cuts.

I could take a hundred shaving to spill from the plane without any jamming and without stopping or adjusting. What a remarkably designed and made plane this is. No plane made today compares to these once commonly made and used planes and that is not nostalgia but pure truth.

Badger Plane

Badger planes are a different breed of plane altogether, though at first glance they might look the same to the uninitiated. This plane offered above and top is commonly called by the English name Badger plane. It's a rebate plane that's often worked adaptively against a strip of wood clamped to the workpiece for rebating or to refine existing rebates by taking of a shaving or two to take out plane and shaper marks left by machines, but mainly it was used for creating raised panels for panelled doors, solid wood panels installed into grooves and rebates.

Looking at the plane over the mouth and from above, the complexity of a skew-mouthed plane becomes far more complex in every way. There are no square angles to it anywhere. The bed is skewed, and the wedge recesses are all angled, necessitating angled recesses throughout.

Often, gurus describe the reason any plane that was made with a skewed cutting iron was to make the plane cut better; more efficiently. That was merely a byproduct of the real reason, and far from the main reason at all. Think this differently and the answer makes tremendous sense. The point of the skewed iron tucks tight into the internal corner. The push engages this point and the skewed iron keeps the plane pulled-in tight to the inside side of the rebate as the plane deepens the rebate and so prevents the plane from slewing off course. The plane then needs no steering to keep it 'on point' and tracked. A squared across cutting iron always drifts from its path. In regular planing, this is easier to control. In rebating, you want accuracy to keep the internal corners sharp and crisp.

And here is another unspoken reality. Every bench plane we use is automatically skewed and that's because when we need to hold bench planes, our two-handed hand holds on the plane fore and aft forms a triangular pattern from the wide part of our shoulders which are 18-20" apart down to our two hands centralised on the plane to power through. This triangulation skews the smoothing planes and the longer bench planes in action; it is not so much an intentional skewing, but a practical application to present the plane according to a more comfortable angle for our body moves. The badger plane needs the pull of the advanced point at the cutting edge to pull the plane into the corner as the rebate is formed. All the more do we need this because of the bias presented by our body stance in upper shoulder wideness to our hands on the plane forming the triangulation. Physiology in every aspect of hand tool woodworking must be considered, and it's this, mostly, that makes hand tool woodworking ultra-different to machining wood where only minimal physical work involving our dynamism is necessary and used. Dynamism is the theory that phenomena of matter or mind are due to the action of forces rather than to motion or matter.

The two inside faces are chased out at an angle and so are not parallel to the outside faces. This corner tapers from zero to 1/4" and the opposite groove on the far side runs exactly parallel to the bottom of this groove. These grooves receive the cutting iron assembly and the wooden securement wedge

This mouth looks square across in the image, but it is drastically skewed, with the point being the most forward point. The cutting iron protrudes slightly past the side of the plane when set correctly.

See how the blade is not parallel to the mouth; it's more important that the blade lies perfectly parallel to the face of the sole so that an even thickness of shaving is removed. Notice, though it might be less obvious, that the corner of the blade protrudes past the side face of the pane by a paper thickness. Without this, the plane will move away from the side of the rebate with each stroke, leaving the wall sloping. Not what we want at all.

Many people theorise about hand tools in the same way they have about low bench heights, but rarely present from experiencing tools and benches through decades of use. Well, too low, low bench heights and the modern advocacy for them revolves around poor teaching saying you need to bear down on and over the plane and the wood to effect a cut. Totally erroneous. Sharp planes always, always pull themselves to the surface, whereas dull planes push themselves off and away. Dead simple, really.

It's the upside-down name and logo in the centre that is the name of the actual maker, the other names are owner names, stamped to identify planes that might otherwise get mixed up with others. Varvill and Sons were prolific plane makers from York, England, and made excellent planes.

This plane had three known users and possibly others who did not own a name stamp. Ed Campbell and E. Campbell were likely related, but not one and the same. Possibly father and son, Ed Campbell being the senior. C. Laseby and J. Goodwin were earlier owners, going off the patina in the name stamps. Rhykenology, the study of hand planes and their history, evolution, etc is an interesting study though I only researched and studied as part of my using and use for planes.

The skewed cutting iron facilitates a particular action in rebate planes. It is not to make the planing action easier. Not at all. It is purely to keep the plane tight into the corner of the rebate. Sharpness right up to the more fragile corner is critical.

These planes are very much a joy to use when sharp and set up correctly, tuned to the particular wood and such. They remove material rapidly with zero friction-rebellion or stubbornness, even facing the intermittent rise of opposing and awkward grain that every other all-metal version of planes generally balk at. Set quite deeply for initial rebating and then lightly for the final refining strokes. By running a saw kerf across the grain, they can raise a raised field and panel very succinctly by simply tilting the plane against a clamped on fence until enough depth establishes a wall to work to. And this is where the skewed iron works really well too.

This slot receives the head of the set screw so that the cutting iron rests fully supported on the bed incline. Though now old, the crispness of the final cuts are pristinely made. Then see the two channels either side of the slope. Both tapered, they receive the cutting iron assembly and the wedge. The whole escapement is pristinely cut by hand and eye. There are hardly any square edges to this Badger plane. It's a remarkable and outstanding piece of woodwork that never gets noticed and is never mention in these terms.

Another note worth mentioning because of erroneous comments is that the bed angle is five or more degrees steeper, or so it might appear to the uninitiated. Skewed badger planes have a steeper bed because of the skewed presentation of the cutting iron. Presented as it is, the skew directly affects the angle and because of the skew, the angle parallels that of the common bed angle used in square-across plane irons. The skew lowers the angle; the more the skew in relation to the long axis of the plane, the lower the level of resistance; if you were to turn the angle to say 90º, I know, ridiculous, the apparent and now compound angle of cut or bed angle would be the equivalent of zero.

This brass dome, attached to the cap iron, extended the thread area for the set screw to better fasten to in a metal that tapped well and was less brittle. And notice the neat chamfer around the top of the cap iron, too. The small details of a content creator creatively taking his work seriously.

This plane is 150 years old; it comes from the bygone, never to return, age when every component was hand hammer forged, hand trued by hand planing, hand chiselled, mostly but not necessarily hand sawn, metal hand tapping threads in steel and brass, hand shaped when no power routers working according to CNC programming, in fact, and I mean, in fact, utterly hand made. The cutting iron and components are shaped and consolidated using hammers on an anvil by eye and also forging using a hand made trip hammer. Under intense heat, 2,300º, the two pieces of metal, lie in wait in the full heat of the forge, heated by coke or gas, and using no more than household cleaner, borax (to prevent oxidation), a naturally occurring high-alkaline white mineral powder, intense, repeated hammer blows in quick succession, welds the soft (mild steel) and hard (high-carbon tool steel) steels together so that you have the resilience of a shock-resistant body metal combined with a durable (hardened steel)cutting edge.  I have a Stanley plane iron that was made using these two soft and hard metals, and it is vastly superior to any plane iron I have come across bar none. Alas, the blades made this way were discontinued after a short-lived production run.

When the set screw is loosened, the gap opens and there is no tension between the cutting iron and the cap iron . . .. . . when it's cinched tight, the gap closes and creates tension between the two. It's a dynamic, physical phenomena in the diametrical opposition of two metal parts.

From the outside of a fully assembled and set wooden plane, it's easy to miss the incredible fine work of the wedge itself. How remarkable is this hand made component. The fineness of wedge ensures that there is no vibration and no snagging to the shavings rising in the throat of the plane.

The wedge finds its perfect mating to the grooves in the inner faces of the plane.

In the USA, a rebate is what you get back in taxes from the government or other organisation whereas in English, it can mean a step-down forming an internal corner. The Irish penman, George Bernard Shaw, supposedly said: "England and America are two countries divided by a common language." Others say Oscar Wilde expanded on it, along with a few others. The phrase highlights how our sharing a common language, American and British, may use terms differently to describe something even though our two distinct cultures may well say it the same way. We sometimes experience misunderstandings due to our cultural differences in vocabulary, spelling, and idiomatic expression. We are, of course, programmed through education to think and speak according to our culture. The language may not express who we are so much as the what of what we do. In the UK, you can leave a tip in a place you ate or drank or not.

These rebate planes are on my work shelf and I pull them into work now and then. The Stanley #78, their #90 and the plough plane top left are the ones I will use in videos. The three or four others are more luxury planes I can live and work without. I will discuss these in later blogs

Whatever term you decide on is fine with me. A rabbet and a rebate are one and the same. Another term is the duplex filletster (same as fillister USA) plane. I dismiss this term because, well, it's too long a title and I think a non-relative term so it's more of a misfit that adds confusion to the mix. The double meaning of 'rebate' works for me because it relates to and through context, so is not confusing at all. All of that said, in Stanley UK's pamphlet user guide, it entitles the pamphlet and the plane as a Stanley No 78 DUPLEX RABBET PLANE

Here is the link to a previous blog and video you might find helpful.

The Stanley #78 Rebate Plane

My personal best version seems to be quite unique in that it has an ultra-smooth handle instead of the textured version that adds to the ugliness of the plane.

The singular most important plane to any hand tool woodworker after the bench planes is the plane that's generally capable and dedicated to creating a whole rebate. Only one of the planes shown at top has that capability completely within its design framework. The Stanley #78 has both fence guide and depth stop (once referred to as a depth gauge), controlling alignment of the plane to the wood and then finalised depth. All of the other planes are quite uniquely designed to 'clean up' and are well adapted and adopted to task in one way or another, and so are secondary-use planes that follow on from the #78 or machine work. Because the #78 plane is so important, let's start with the #78.

It's a remarkable utilitarian plane, typifying the mass production tool making work of Stanley. They made what sold at as low a cost as possible, and intentionally worked to put other toolmakers out of business and competition wherever they could. In its early history, Stanley bought out toolmakers wherever it was practicable.

The Stanley #78 can never be described as an attractive or pretty plane. The wooden ones can be very attractive, but not for my discussion here. I have relied on the seventy-eight I own now for over sixty years and after the opening awkwardness of starting out, it soon became second nature for me to use it. Two key elements must always be maintained–sharpness and blade width. Keeping the plane blade nice and sharp takes only a minute to do yet sadly this the aspect of the plane that is most neglected.

The ruler shows the narrow gap needed between the plane side and the side of the blade to enable it to take shavings. You would think that would lead to too much wiggle room and inaccurate rebating, but, no, it works just fine.

The second key to a well functioning #78 is the plane blade width. The plane blade comes with the plane slightly wider than the plane body, and new owners might think that this is down to sloppy manufacture. It's not. Ideally, the blade should protrude slightly past the sides of the plane. This is the case with any kind of rebate plane. This slight oversizing extension, a paper thickness each side, gives relief in the cut from the plane body riding the existing or emerging rebate to allow a shaving to be taken. Too tightly in and without this relief, the plane will gradually move stroke on stroke away from that internal corner, creating annoying steps with each ensuing stroke.

Set deeply for faster reduction, the ribbons rise to take out the bulk of the waste and then reset for a finer cut and with two more shavings the two adjacent surfaces are smooth as silk.

Thankfully, this plane is one of the cheapest and most readily available of all planes via eBay. Currently, there are 300 available on that platform this morning with the majority priced at between £15 to £50 and at various levels of having all the parts, so some without fences and depth stops and others altogether there. A fully restored, sharpened and complete, still-in-the-box version might go for £100 and though restoration is no biggie to do yourself, it is still worth that higher price for a dedicated and unique hand plane as a tool that would last a lifetime of full-time use. Considering its dedicated but perhaps limited purpose, it's not too surprising that most woodworkers do not own such a plane.

Here the blade has been reinstalled at its forward or bull-nose position for the inside of existing rebates. It's often less than ideal but for the fitting of components it might be the only way when a project part has moved for whatever reason.

The term duplex refers to the dual position the cutting iron can be installed in the plane at. Though you lose the internal lever adjustment, installing the blade at the front enables shaving to be taken within an internal corner. The remaining quarter inch of uncut wood is chiselled level after each level of rebate planing.

Adaptation: The #78 Scrub Plane

Scrubbing down with a converted Stanley #78 takes out crowning and other warpage very quickly and even if you are a general machinist, this will prep wood for passing into a machine.

Installing a slightly radiused cutting iron in the same standard #78 plane converts it to a highly efficient and inexpensive scrub plane that removes the high places in warped wood rapidly. Scrub planes and the term comes from the way we tend to scrub the surface using the plane in just about any direction that works. Vintage short soled wooden planes, now worn out and well-worn through long-term use had gaping mouths that allowed heavy shavings to fit into, through and out of the plane. These old planes were not discarded, but repurposed as 'scrub' planes, adding another decade of use to the owner. All metal versions were created by Stanley Rule & Level Company back in the first half of the last century. These planes are useful additions to our accumulation of planes in that we use them prior to say the jack plane or the smoothing plane. You can read me further on this and watch my video here.

Showing the radiused cutting iron installed. Looking on from the end view, the cutting iron only uses about half to three-quarters of the cutting iron, depending on the depth of cut you set.

In some woods, like pine, the undulated surface after using the scrub plane to thin down over thickness stock can be really dramatic. I have seen furniture with this left in as a surface treatment on tabletops and such.

Pine reduction is very rapid with a converted Stanley #78 to a scrub plane.

Normal Function

The plane is intended for both with and across the grain use. You can create rebates across the grain for various reasons, such as creating panels to be installed into grooves and rebates in frames. You can also use it to make tenons on wider rails as well, though this is not practical for narrow rails as there is not enough registration surface to support the sole or for the fence to ride against.

Across the grain for tenoning works really well with the spur side cutter down to sever the fibres ahead of the main cutting iron.

Cross-grain planing cuts really well with the spur in place, a clean shoulder line is cut before the cutting iron just behind the spur cutter lifts out the waste wood.

The built-in spur is stowed in the side of the plane. Loosen the set screw and turn the spur 90º so that one of the spur cutting edges protrudes past the sole. This spur cuts an inch ahead of the main cutting iron to sever the cross-grain fibres. Without this turned to its active position, cross-grain rebating will result in very rough, unusable work.

Two Tip Solutions

If you do not have the spur, use a knifewall to cut through the surface fibres and keep cutting with subsequent strokes, or saw down the knifewall first and then follow on with the plane.

Because there is no long grain cutting, the shavings gather easily and quickly, as shown. The experience is really quite unique and pleasant. Very different.

The stowed spur cutter has three spurs and that is because these cutters, if used a lot, will have a short work life. Rotating to a new spur extends the life of the plane for cross-grain cutting.

The actioned spur cutter protrudes past the sole of the plane by a millimetre and from a fixed, non-adjustable centre point anchored by a set screw. Subsequent sharpening shortens the useable length, so I sharpen minimally and only when essential.

These planes, when new, arrive with only one of the cutters bevelled and ready for use.

I want you to notice a barely discernible dishing of the triple-pointed cutter here. This 'dishing' more dimples the steel to then send the tips slightly out so that when the set screw is cinched tight, the points will sit slightly proud of the plane body and at the same time, intentionally, aligns the tip in action with the main cutting iron protruding beyond the plane's side as it should. Instead of this part being simply drilled and countersunk, the centre is dimpled by force, hence the dark graduating shadow surrounding the screw head that evidences intent.

Do you have to sharpen dead square? No. I freehand most of the time and correct myself as I go, as this establishes a good habit and works faster than using a honing guide. But most important is the self-discipline of muscle-memory establishment and its maintenance long term. Some planes are really quite forgiving when it comes to sharpening. The narrower the blades, the easier the passage into the wood. Plough plane cutters are a good example but, even so, I never neglect sharpening any edge. The width of the #78 makes it easy to work in the wood, no matter the species.

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....

Source

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...

Source

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!