We Sold The Box

Some of you will have noticed that we offered one of my boxes for sale on eBay and that the money raised, £640, went to support the work at a local preschool my granddaughter attended for two years before starting primary school. We were glad to be able to do this and decided to do something similar on a regular basis.

This week I have been revising an early video we made in our starter months in video work in 2010/11. Back then we used inexpensive camcorders with a single operator. Following the workbench made in my then back yard we moved on to making a wall clock.

This is one of the original clocks establishing the design. I made several from different woods including basic pine which also looked nice. It proved to be one of our most popular videos.

Remaking this clock this past week, I spent a little time refining the design and working on new drawings. I enjoyed it. I found some extreme quarter-sawn oak with rippling grain all the way through it to make my new one from. I have had it for a while with no particular project for it so I was glad to make the clock from it. Hard to imagine making the first ones to the design all that time ago now.

Quite rare to find. There is something about going back that I like. For decades I taught my classes using just hand tools. The reinforcements for training came through projects and not exercise pieces. Better the real thing with the real challenges a project delivers than repeat exercises simply because the project itself carries with it the dynamic that cannot be replaced by any other means and especially artificiality. Skill building is best not to be put off or postponed as it's best to learn right off in the saddle.

Just six housing dadoes and the tool tote came together from dimensioned wood bought from any wood supplier. This one's taken a beating but still holds good. A great project of substance for working with new woodworkers working with hand tools; no matter the age.

My early tool tote uses the same joint: a series of basic housing dadoes sawn, chiseled and routed to uniform depth with a hand router plane. Back in or around 1992 I held my first woodworking class for local children in Austin, Texas. The kids couldn't wait to get going. Tools in plastic carrie bagss poked out through the sides and we all needed a tool tote. The wood was pre-cut to the needed lengths and planed four-square directly from the store. We could get straight to the task of laying out and cutting the first four of the six dadoes.

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