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 adjacent teeth, the back of one and the front of the adjacent one, which is the equivalent of one 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.

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 also, 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.

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.

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."

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."

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.

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:

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.

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!

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.

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.

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. . .

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I enjoyed the evening. It went well.

A chisel or plane leaves its trace identity in the surface of wood in similar fashion as the shell of a bullet discharged by any firearm identifies the gun, but not really the exact same. With a firearm, there are several distinct mechanisms that make the shell casing at different points, and prosecutors can use these as evidence to identify the gun. Our forensics are slightly different in that the working of the tools, leverage points, indents, and such tell us how the manmaker worked at different points and in different ways. I can tell when he was in a hurry, which was most of the time, and when he stopped to sharpen up. Mahogany transfers the information as it takes it in impressions from the tool being used and then, as in the case of these drawers and other parts, keeps the 'trade secrets' for later discovery. I have learned more through the decades of dismantling pieces than I can possibly put together, and each piece tells its unique story. This craftsman undercut here and compressed the pins over there. The wood absorbed his rushing mostly, but then he lost it a couple of times in frustration. I'll likely keep most of those because, all in all, this man-maker had integrity, and that integrity was reflected in many ways of his making.

Before I move too quickly along, I should point out that the veneers of the past were not the fake facing of today's sheet goods and mass-making industry designed to hide the fakeness of MDF and pressed fiberboards. Adding veneers enabled artisans to do things that would be otherwise impossible with solid wood. Facing veneers enabled sequential book-matching to guarantee tones and grain patterns for the fronts of pieces, as in the case of these drawers. Mahogany can be so diverse; were the real and solid to be used instead of sequential flitches of veneer, the drawer fronts would likely be far too busy for a harmonious look to give good balance and even tone to exist. There's much more to it than that too. But there it is, the starter. The image below shows how a softwood clear soft pine was used for an 11" wide drawer front to be faced with mahogany and lipped with a thick edge for the massive drawer of a wardrobe bottom drawer.

The pine with the veneer is 21.3 mm thick, and the veneer is .75 of a millimeter, so 10 times thicker than face veneer on our modern-day decorative plywood.

My drawers had been somewhat mistreated before they ever came to me, and I have dragged them around with me for a few years, hoping I could repair the desk to reframe them one day. But alas, time gets away from us and becomes ever more precious as we continue to grow our output for the conservation of my craft. These six drawers have actually made it pretty well thus far, so I decided it would work best to make a new case from old wood I have also garnered from different scrappy places through the years. I've collected several panels and tabletops to do it from and plan to make a small chest for all of my art materials that I have scattered everywhere in the hopes that a central location will organise me a little more.

Imagine this wood was being thrown into a skip (dumpster, USA), trashed, on or about 2017/18, and the trasher-person was a woodworker who said to me, "Why would anyone want this stuff anyway?. Those three panels are about seven feet tall, 1/2" thick, and single-piece wide at 15". My cabinet will be paneled with one or two of them on three sides.

So, let's dissect this a little. The dovetails, as in the angles, fit well enough, but it's obvious that some were dead-on angles and some were not evenly or equally made. On one drawer the angles follow a 1:7 pitch on all three tails and both sides of the tails, whereas on another drawer they were entirely random in angle and size. This suggests to me that there was more than one man working on the piece. Was one an apprentice or a journeyman? Could one of them have been on equal standing as in fully trained but more slipshod in his ways?

Here are some questions with the pictures:

No picture for this one yet, but...

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

The drawer sizes are surprisingly accurate in that all of the drawers are equal in their overall width and length to one another, dead on 11" wide, and when they are stacked up on top of one another, they each stand square and in line with one another from front to back, top to bottom, and side to side. Furthermore, these drawers went into two separate cases in lots of three, diminishing in drawer height from top to bottom. I'm regretting using the word "surprisingly accurate" but kept it in. Perhaps I would consider my own work as accurate as this work in the overall reality of being a lifetime maker trained and training in handwork with hand tools for so very long.

The wood shows no sign of any machining whatsoever, and telltale marks tell me of handwork alone, and in different places where I have planed over existing surfaces, it has obviated hand-planed surfaces, chisel work, and handsawing all the way through. That's because there were undulations I would never consider inaccuracies per se. Such surfaces can only come from hand-planing in the course of truing and fitting them, and so too the saw work.

I have more to share on this and will also give my answers to the above questions shortly too.

I have spent the last five years designing and then making pieces for a real family living in a real but quite ordinary family home. The average UK or European-sized home is more compact than those I came to know in the USA and Texas, and I chose this because globally, it was better to try for a more average size anyway. Whether people live in a cottage, a high-rise, in a single-wide mobile home, or an apartment, the ultimate goal was and is to teach and train other woodworkers how to make furniture solely using hand tool methods and embracing the whole of working with hand tools at that. I use a bandsaw for stock size reduction only. Not everyone in will be able to rip-cut 4" thick hardwood using a handsaw for many good reasons. I am using the house we bought quite publicly as a house to live in, but then also as a vehicle to showcase my made pieces in a real-life setting. The workspace I've used to make these pieces is the exact size of an average English single-car garage, so around nine feet wide by sixteen feet long with a headroom of around eight feet.

It was in November 2020 when I started designing and making the first prototype for the house we refer to as our Sellers' Home, which you can find under sellershome.com if you ever want to join us. All of the 40 or more pieces we have now made and filmed were made in a space the size of a single-car garage. The designs are my most recent designs and are original to this five-year program. Nothing is copied, and none of them were made prior to November 2020. By mid-March 2021, I had made four of the rocking chairs shown below; by then, I was truly settled on a thorough, practical design. I felt that anyone with some basic woodworking hand skills and no machines could make one for their family home.

Five years goes very quickly when you're having fun, they say, but fun doesn't quite cut it alone. Yes, I have found tremendous enjoyment designing and making every piece, but what I have enjoyed the more is seeing the gallery of pieces made by those taking the instruction seriously and making their own from what we've been offering. Watching a rocking chair emerge from a stack of hand planed strips, knowing they were all hand planed square and true, becomes all the more remarkable when someone posts that they have made their first woodworking project as a result of watching your videos. As someone who has made such things throughout his woodworking life, I can tell you this. Nothing inspires me more than to see someone who just made their first baby cot or their dining table and do it using only hand tools. How about invigorating! How very rewarding, and what an adventure!

My first piece in the five-year plan was a newly designed rocking chair with a three-part split seat. Even the pine version from two-by soft spruce studs I bought from the big box store, which I painted black on top and sanded through to a red base layer beneath, came out to be a working/living rocking chair and cost only a handful of two-by studs to test out every aspect of the design engineering and construction. That's the one above.

My garage space at the house is 14 feet long by 11 feet wide, with an eight-foot headroom. My available space for moving around is roughly four feet by 10 feet with pinch points. In this space, I have now made over 60 pieces ranging in size from coaster sets to a king-sized, solid oak bed. Currently, the number of handmade pieces for the Sellers' home series stands at 40.

I refer to people following my work online in what might seem to be a possessive way, but it's not at all. My audience represents a body of work reaching out to those who simply want or prefer to adopt hand tool woodworking as their progressive way forward. In my hands-on classes they became my students; it was simply a way of identifying. The 'my audience' term differentiated between those who choose hand ways of working their wood and those who don't. It's mainly a category, you see. My audience simply means the hand tool woodworkers, but that does not mean they don't or can't use other means and methods if it pleases them. It simply means that if they are watching me to learn 98% of anything, then they will be looking for hand tools in my hands and not me pushing wood into a machine; that's all. They'll never see me pick up a power router or use a tablesaw, a chop saw, a planer thicknesser, or a mortise machine; those days are long gone for me, and that is because, yes, I needed to prove something to my audience. For them to believe that they could actually do as I do or aspire to do so, they had to see me both working and then, too, the result of it, but they also had to see that I was no more gifted than anyone else would be if they worked diligently to establish skill by as much rote practice as they could muster the time for. I hope that the term "my audience" or "my following" is appropriate without being in any way possessive or even demeaning. It's just my way of addressing what has become so very different in our new age. There can be no doubt that I have already lived the best years of my life and even that I have "had a good innings" thus far. The reality of a lived life, as in my case, has stemmed from an ambition to leave a legacy and to do so in more of a philanthropic way that would bring meaning to others in the same way it did for me. Hence the name of my UK school of woodworking was 'The New Legacy School of Woodworking.'

The recognition of luxury woodworking came through pure hard work and long days in the saddle. Hand tool woodworking is ten times harder and more demanding than machining wood; of that there can be no doubt. But people choose machine woodworking over hand tools for the wrong reasons. Usually, they misunderstand that developing skills takes a little time but that it should not be a prohibitive belief. In six days my students, the ones who came with zero knowledge of hand tools, took away a dovetailed lidded box with recessed hinging and bullnosed edges, a wall shelf with either three or five shelves fully recessed and mortise and tenoned, and an occasional table in solid oak with shaped legs, and mortise and tenoned joinery. I'm not too sure whether any one of them ever believed that they could actually do it, but I did.

Month on month and year on year, 15 or so students arrived every week and took their place at a bench or around mine. Within the hour they were making their first dovetail joints with surgically sharp hand tools, and their eyes were aglow with excitement and self-belief.

What do a California judge, a Texas obstetrician, and a Dallas Episcopalian priest have in common? They all came to learn chairmaking with me back in 2008. But the most important point here is to see that these men had no prior experience beyond my week-long foundational course, and that is primarily what woodworkingmasterclasses.com replaced, along with our sister site, commonwoodworking.com. None of these men were in any way manual workers per se. I say this to say that we may have been led to believe that the more academic were not likely to be good at manual crafts. I have found that to be far from true.

But that was quite the luxury. I had to reach a wider audience, a greater following to pass on my skills to, and I had to write all the more not to be swallowed up by the fake-makes on social media. My craft of hand tool woodworking had been dealt a tremendous blow over several decades, and the craft of real handwork was dying out unchallenged. With no next-generation cohort entering the world to carry the baton, we would soon lose our future skilled makers...and we have!

Magazines dedicated to woodworking rarely promoted hand tool methods at that time. That was because their main income stream was from the big machine makers, who then spent masses on advertising on their pages and so hogged the limelight as the progressive way most of the time. Their high-demand output was therefore for a working knowledge of machines, not hand tools. Or at least that was the editor's interpretation of it. When the editor of Fine Woodworking at that time told me he didn't want "anything philosophical" in submitted articles, I realised just how much magazine editors controlled the rhetoric of writers and that what they wanted was my expertise in hand tool woodworking but not any ideals I might want to express. I felt it best to not write for magazines and start blogging. Magazine editors just wanted new wallpaper every few weeks. Best move ever, but the best and most accommodating editor I knew was the editor of the now defunct magazine called simply Woodwork. John Levine encouraged me month after month and took every article I wrote. I was sorry to see that one go, and though it was bought out or taken over by another magazine with the promise that it would continue as before, I could see the writing on the wall, and after a couple of issues, it was scrapped.

By April 9th, a new coffee table emerged quite quickly from some rough-sawn planks and piles of shavings by my feet. This piece had a secret drawer that swung out sideways from one of the aprons in an arch. I wanted something for remotes and such. I think it was a clever point not only in the idea but also in the construction too. I kept continuity of grain throughout the five pieces so that nothing exposed this hidden feature of my design.

I enjoy seeing some basic hand tools surrounding my work, knowing that when I lift them to task, they will always obey the muscle and sinew I use to connect them to my goal. The idea was an experiment, but not the making methodology. Decades of handwork make my outcome predictable.

The blank canvas was near magic for me. Each design came together as a freedom of expression, and yet the traditions of my craft were indeed insistent in my designing. By that I mean that mostly I wanted the proven longevity traditional joinery gave to my designs, while at the same time I could use a screw through a dovetail that would never be seen if I wanted to. Yes, it would increase the strength of resistance that comes through such a fastening, but that was not the reason for its inclusion. I used it as an immediate 'clamp,' and, if I can conjugate the verb, the clamping with permanent pull power too. Even though it will be hidden from sight, there is an attractive quality to it.

The tri-part seat construction was to facilitate the reality that a 24" wide piece of solid cherry within a frame would want to both expand and shrink according to seasonal atmospheric moisture changes. When I now sit in the chair, I am glad that I thought to accommodate the possibility; the wooden seat expanded by a total of 12 mm, which is half an inch in old money, and the gaps have all remained closed up for five years to date.

In May, I had bought in more rough-sawn cherry for bookshelves. Buying rough sawn gives you an extra quarter inch of thickness, and if you work with hand tools, cut judiciously, you can get a good inch of thickness if you want or need to. Yes, it took some planing, by hand, that is, but it was so needed for my health exercise, and I enjoyed it very much too.

The luxury of prototyping results in a solid design, but of course it's not possible for everyone to make two with a home for only one. My first one came from pine studs, some might consider low-grade material or, in some worlds, trash wood, but I have never seen any wood as a trash wood. Here in the UK, we favour spruce for studwork, which is more stable than southern yellow pine, which crawls all over the place once the steel bands are snapped off.

By now you will better understand my world. The luxury of hard and diligent work became affordable for me because I chose my time would not be spent digitally more than a couple of hours a day. By nine in the morning I had worked for two hours writing every day. Then I put my computer away and didn't touch it again unless it was essential. My phone, too, is not much of an entity. If I am in a cafe with a friend, my personal rule is no digital devices. That's for me. I am totally in the presence of my company. It might surprise you that with this as a personal rule, rarely will my company pull out their phone either...and guess what? We spend the whole hour talking with each other. It's always nice!

It's mid June 2021 when I think of this. To be honest with you. I don't even know how to turn one on, nor do I know how to change channels. It's 1986 since I last watched TV or switched one on. But even so, I accept they are still central to most homes, even if it is only for the big events. But I was interested in creating a TV stand for my audience, though. The only game I ever played on a computer, which was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in or about 1984, was a game called Thro' The Wall. After ten minutes I was done with the boredom of it and never returned.

The very sizable drawer makes a wonderful toy drawer for my granddaughter, but it works equally well for family blankets to watch TV on colder nights. The blank canvas allows me to invest in different joinery.

Life in woodworking is always about composition of one kind or another and then composing the whole in a way that delivers a sense of completeness. My living room only needs small pieces now: a wall shelf, some coasters, one or two other casual tables.

I'm at the end of July with the above piece, still 2021. It's an exceptionally sad time for my family. We are about to fly to Dallas and on to Waco to be with my son and his wife and family. We had a sudden death this month, a young soul lost to us. As I look through my history of photographs, it's a loss that hits me most days and enough to remind me that life is very fragile. The deep questions in life rarely get answered fully enough for us to rest. Making, for me, reflects the physical as much as a drawing or written text, the photograph, and the video our minds play back to us as we go through our day. I hold to the fond memories, the smiles and laughter, the scrapes and tumbles that make for living.

The coasters are still working fine; not much to go wrong with them. I like the clean, striped look emulating tambour and then the multicolored diversity of mixed woods and grains like this. Offcuts, or what we called thinnings, work great for small pieces like this too.

Here, last but not least for this post, is the wall shelf replicating the tambour used in the television stand below it. This method of closing in with narrow strips of otherwise useless offcuts that have almost no use is an unusual and remarkable solution. I just started keeping the rippings with this in mind, but of course you can create rippings from solid wood too. I like the the overall look it creates, and it really takes very little effort to create the strips, whether from waste offcuts or solid pieces from a wider board.

This next cluster of tables came together in November. I made more than this, some in cherry and some in oak. They are corner fillers, armchair companions, plant elevators, and such. Just handy sports in any house or office, really.

We have five more spaces to create for at the end of 2021. I may dip back into this room later, but for now, it's ready for Christmas celebrations 2021.

I will close by saying this work has been 98% hand tool woodworking. Just so that you know it can be done and that you will more than likely be equal to it.

Please join us in wishing Paul a happy 76th birthday!

Can you believe he is 76? We can't!

Thank you for all your support for him. He loves showing you all his work and has much planned for the year ahead.

- Paul's Family