One 2-Day Class Before a Season of New Builds

Discovering Woodworking

It's a favourite of mine and it so helps those who have little or no knowledge of what real hand tools should look like at the bench. My experience with woodworkers in general is that they never used a truly sharp tool and neither do they understand sharpness and how to achieve it. In one hour they will. of all the things I teach I think that sharpness is the single most important skill to learn and master. It all starts here.

Don't Despise New Beginnings

When we began this Discovering Woodworking the hardest thing was to get woodworkers to realise they might just be nearer to raw beginners than their asserted intermediate level woodworkers. Some years back some US magazine editors were discussing the fact that most woodworkers never considered themselves beginners even if they had only been woodworking at weekends for a few weeks. Getting them to believe this was an impossibility and so they went with the status quo and ranked all beginners as intermediates and rarely ever used the term beginners in their articles. Hence the false assumption that a machine only woodworker considers him or herself to be at the same level in hand work as they might be with machines. Tomorrow we establish the exact patterns I learned 50 years ago and the reason is that it is so fundamental to become a skilled woodworker.

New-builds for 2014/15

I promised myself a season of building new pieces and of course we have a lot of training for others to learn from. Following this last class of the season I have a some months set aside to design and  make some fine furniture pieces. New, inspirational designs for a home that will encourage others to make their own furniture. I am looking forward to this time. In my first piece I felt it's time for a new dining suite for my home, which is a small cottage and I have been planning this for some time. So, in the offing is an oak extendable dining table with six dining chairs to match. Psyching myself up for this is as much a part of the building process as the building itself. I walk myself through the stages weeks before and enjoy drawing up the joints and shapes and sizing different parts. I pull out my tape measure in a restaurant when I see or feel something comfortable and so ensure I feel good in the design as it grows.