When I decided to start woodworking I chose do it with wooden planes. Perhaps this was heavily influenced by what Richard felt would be a good route to take, but also because I've always felt a great attraction towards them. Setting up a wooden hand plane is...
For someone who hand planes everything when building furniture, I find that I traverse (or plane across the grain) very little. I avoid it deliberately as I find the action suits neither our workbenches nor our bodies particularly well. The reason that I thickness by...
Marking tools are rarely given all that much attention, and they're clearly not as exciting as the tools that get to see all of the action. But they are vital to our work and being able to use them quickly and accurately still requires good technique. When...
Today I want to talk about basic hand tools, which are new, cheap and practical. There's been a huge interest in the second hand tool market in recent years. Second hand prices are variable, but on the whole they're popular because they're cheap. Cheap is an awful...
If I were taught about fire breathing dragons in science at school then they'd be as real to me as dinosaurs. They told me Pluto was a planet and I wasn't going to question it. Our young minds can accept facts printed in a text book, but I realise how little of...
You can never have enough space today, or surround yourself with enough things. Woodworking is no different. Where it used to be a man in his shed it now seems that only an air hanger and corresponding air field would be big enough to house all the machinery, jigs and...
I don't use screws often in furniture making but when I started building lots of benches I found myself in need of a good cordless drill for all of the vice fitting and particularly around the tool wells of the Little John's. I also needed something with plenty of...
Choosing a project for a video build is a tough decision. Picking the first project is even tougher. We didn't want it to be too complex or too simple and we wanted to ensure there was a lot that could be learnt. We had all of this in mind when we opted to build the...
I'll be the first to say that I'm crap when it comes to small scale box making. I could never make a living at it because it takes me a tremendous amount of time to create something that is much too small to command a decent price and turn a profit. That's the problem...
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xKy11hh-PU] Here's a quick teaser for our first Online Video Course - The Spoon Rack Series. For more information on this series and to start learning today read here. To find our what other's think of our series, have...
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Many of you have pointed out my shoddy array of straight-ish, straight edges. I'm often asked if there's a reason why I favour these home made things over something more posh. This is one of those questions where I really wish I had a good answer. I don’t, but I'll...
Buying timber can seem to be some sort of secret club that you've yet to be initiated in to. I'd like to say that after all these years of sourcing timber I've been through that initiation, but if I'm honest I'm often still stumped. It's not the technicalities that...
Sadly I ain't one of those that can say he’s been in a generations old workshop all of his working life. There aren't tools still hung on the wall that my grandad put up, or boxes full of secrets who's keys were lost lifetimes ago. Instead I seem to move workshop like...