Listening Up! It's Important!

One of the single most important aspects of my craft is listening to sounds that resonate from the wood as we work it. I have often said to my students 'Listen to the thickness of the shaving!' At first, they seem somewhat bemused by the statement but once shown they get it. After many years of teaching this to thousands of students in hands-on classes, I decided to make a video on it and put it out there. That was some years ago now. Why? Well, back then I was trying to help the students to do less grunt work and bull-dogging tools to the sharpening stones and then too the plane in use to the wood so that they retained the full values from their sensitivity receptors. For some reason, depictions on the sides of carpenters vans show a hand plane in a double-fist power-grip, that is rarely if ever what's needed.

I wanted to try this in a live Q&A on YouTube with everyone to see what everyone felt and so I could demonstrate the realities too, and so that you could ask questions if you had any. It is a fascinating statement, "Listen to the thickness of the shaving!" don't you think? But we will go much deeper in just a few minutes because we will be talking about other tools too.

The Q&A will take place on Thursday 11th June 2020 at 2pm BST on my Youtube channel. Each live will have a ‘theme’ to focus on one topic. This week our Q&A will be on listening to the tools.

If you would like to ask a question then you can comment during the live stream and I will answer as many as I can! You can watch it here on the 11th:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEt7AzCsm-A&feature=youtu.be

You can catch up on our past live videos here.