Paul Sellers

The shavings fell from every plane and the river 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...

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

It's a forever friends and friendly reminder thing, woodworking the way we do. It's a totally inclusive endeavour to include everyone but especially our children to come in the workshop during their formative years; otherwisemachining wood can make it 98% exclusive, and they just might never discover their true love of it because machining must, MUST, exclude them until they are almost always past it.

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.

Since this pic was taken in 2015 for my book, Essential Woodworking Hand Tools, eleven years ago, wow, I feel as healthy and as well as I did back then. I have no pain and my hands, arms and upper body, they all work just as well as when I was forty. Fact is, ten minutes before I wrote this I carried a seven-foot by three-foot-six-inch bookcase down the stairs, loaded it into the back of my vehicle and drove to the house to unload it on my own. This is not in any way a boast, but the simple reality of hand woodworking in high-demand realms at age 76 is a health maintenance regimen.

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.

No, not turned, no gouges or turning tools. Took a lot longer, but I didn't need a lathe nor incur any of the mess. I didn't need a dust mask or eye and ear protection either. Nice to have that thoughtful connectivity to my wood and the tools. It took about half an hour to make, and I have been using it now for five years on my #4 Stanley. The wood is Yew, and it fits my hand perfectly. I could have turned it, of course I could, but I was 71 when I made it, and I was able to teach and tell thousands of other how to do without having to buy a space-hogging lathe and turning tools and teach them how to turn. Oh, a;lso, Yew is highly toxic from the tippy toe of its hairy roots, through the whole of its inner core and bark to and throughout every leaf and berry. But making it the way I did, I needed nothing more else. That's a total success story right there.

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!

We made a cello together by hand––him 16 and me 56, I think. It took three months of full eight-hour days to do, and he still owns and plays it now, 20 years on. These are remarkable things surrounding hand tools. Look at thios. Father and son working together to build a cello. We couldn't wait to get going every single day. He has the same skills, knowledge and ability that I have and then some. We still work alongside one another most days and what I did with him as a child growing into adulthood he has started with his own two children and I have been inputting too. We're working on the spruce top now. That back, maple, is waiting in the background now that its done.

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.

My classes started with this project back in the 1980s and 90s when I took the leap to start teaching one-on-one with children. I have made a thousand of these small boxes since, and taught 6,500 students in hands-on classes to master the art of hand-cutting their dovetails through this one project. Since then, we have taught over a million and possibly, probably, more than likely several millions of people how to successfully develop their dovetailing skills. Who'd have thought that was at all possible. They succeeded because they came to believe in themselves.

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...

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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.

My deciding to keep my wood pieces in the original profile rather than rip cut width and depth to even sizing resulted in my 'climbing wall' look I ended up with. That being so, this book case will have to be tethered to the wall at the top with a fastening or more likely an English cleat...just in case!

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.

I often rely on old wooden planes because they offer a completely different dynamic to stock preparation, making it lighter and easier to accomplish. These planes float across wild wood like swans on a lake. No metal plane gives the same feeling or outcome––not a single one, but especially not the heavy weights people selling planes always espouse. Weight, with wooden plane bodies, evaporate with the first stroke.

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.

We made this small office suite for the landing of Sellers'home at the top of the stairway. The corner-fitting desk, the chair and the filing cabinet are made from the spalted beech.

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.

My rip-cut stack starts the beginning of the workshop journey after I ripped off any excesses but prefacing this was a hundred-mile trip to collect it from bad storage under a leaking tarp. This is a mixture of beech and elm. The neglectful storage enhanced the outcome for me with diverse influences of degrade. Most of it is now used up in our Sellers' home projects.

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!

The paleness of spalting and then bug runs and wormholes add to the texture of this particular workpiece and I have kept rather than discarded those bits normally thrown out or burned. It's this diversity that I have retained in the wood's grain for gain in this particular depiction of natural wood decline leading to its return to the earth. I wanted to keep its silent passage as it's all part of the earth's unspoken story.

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.

There's a lot to take in on this journey, and even in an eight-inch jag like this we have lots to learn. The bottom corner where the first housing dado accepts the shelf has a typical gathering of small 'dead' knots to contemplate before any actual cutting takes place. Two inches above is a cross-grain fissure that passes from this side to the other. This was not caused by shrinkage, but by shock when the tree was initially dropped.

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.

A swirling mass of variation characterises elm in business. The hidden joints will hold flatness and eliminate the risk of twist over the coming century of use. It's the signature joint of all bookshelves, and I have made thousands upon thousands throughout my life. It's no exaggeration to say perhaps at least a hundred thousand of them and all hand cut with saws, chisels and hand-router plane.

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.

Grain, for us makers with hand tools, is not a surface-skimming snapshot, but an in-depth, inner-fibre play investigation every time we plumb the depths of a joint, or plane and saw into it. I have added no colour to this wood. All I did was plane, scrape and sand the wood to 250-grit and apply clear shellac as a sealer/sanding coat to lock the fibres ready for the Osmo oil.

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.

These medullary rays reminded me of the billions of stars of the night skies that just go on and on forever. Quite spectacular. Stunning, altogether too marvellous for words.

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.

The joinery making in elm using hand tools is not hard at all, actually, it's easy, but I often think elm is born without lignin; the wood sometimes seems to have no lignin uniting the fibres, the bio-plastic occurring naturally in plantilfe is the glue that gives it rigidity and also has growing applications in bio-plastics and carbon fibres. The issue then is that bits fall off in the short grain of say dovetails and such. That point right on the corner.

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.

The clamps consolidate the mass until those thin films of plastic glue unite. Taking off the clamps is to 'bring the work to rest.' There's always a settledness to this sense of preeminence over my wood, my tools and the overall completion of work. Oh, see the bent stick of plywood between the underside of the top and the top of the lower shelf. I think it's worth noting. This applies pressure where a clamp had a negative effect.

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.

My knowledge of woodworking from tree-dropping to finished pieces in the hundreds tells me that this fissure is a shock result occurring most of the time when the tree is dropped from standing rooted to the earth it grew in for two hundred years in this case. In other words, it did not occur during the growth of the living tree but in its felling. This is cross-grain splitting, where the sheer weight of the tree was too much for the stem. The fissure was in adjacent slabs either side and there was no degrade through the kind of rot that would have been present in a growing tree or a standing dead version.

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.

Alongside my slender, sliver of a gap-filler are the original sawmill bandsaw marks I retained as evidence for the year 2126 so their forensics can paint their own picture on an earth-borne tree of magnificence but long since extinct.

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.

The only real consistency between the various joints is the depths of the housing dadoes, which are all 3/8" (10 mm) deep.

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.

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 tips is a wood that’s not like any other. That’s why I say it...

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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.

Even in summer, snow often remains in pockets, but in winter, the story is very different. One of my trips was in January when the roads were bad enough for me to pull over to fit snow chains when I found those that came with the old car were not for my size of wheels.

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!

This adventure launched us into online teaching, and our early videos were filmed from inside the castle walls. Imagine being given a handful of ordinary tools, about ten, and a workbench and walking out with a beautiful rocking chair.

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.

This was the Men's Sheds talk I gave a few years ago. I enjoyed that talk too. One day, I hope to do this again. These organisations need our support all the more.

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.

Snowdon will always have a special place in my life. It was where I spent my younger days climbing and beachcombing with my family. I also had some special neighbours living in the Llandygai Village next to the Penrhyn Castle where I had my UK woodworking school workshop, New Legacy.

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!

My work teaching in the US ended with a cluster of hands-on classes in and around 2012. This New York class was a beginner class, but we did complete a month-long workshop that enabled many woodworkers to transition into full-time making.

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.

Another adventure unfolded when I started my UK school from an old farmyard on the Isle of Anglesey as the snow started falling on my wood and the only place I could use machines outside.

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 feels like I could just have made about a thousand of these but lost count. I made on in every box-making class alongside the students I taught, and that is thousands of students.

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.

This is roughly what a month-long class looks like. Absolute success and no school in the world had expectations like this: a dovetailed box, a wall shelf, an oak end table, an oak coffee table, a pine tool box replete with raised panels and two drawers, and an oak rocking chair in 26 days with all the students having minimal or zero hand tool experience. Oh, how we have dumbed down expectations for hand tool woodworking.

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 and Kat joined me in New York to help with the class. It's always special having them along with me.

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.

This is Hannah's work I took to show off at the venue. Everyone loved it and all were surprised it was total handwork

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.

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...

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Answers to blog post questions posed in Known By Their Fruits

1: Why did this maker take a saw to each corner of the appliqued drawer bottom groove at the back of the drawer when no one would see it, ever? On each of the drawers, he cut this corner off, in situ, after the drawer bottom was screwed in place.

Answer: This extreme created an overhang over the next drawer down. This had the potential of catching items in the lower drawer. Sloping the leading edge this way reduced the risk of snagging fabrics, paper, and other items, nudging them away. Also, all of these back corners are ‘eased’, and ‘easing’ was the common practice so that when drawers passed back into their openings, inset doors too, it was common practice to bevel back the leading edges at all the corners. 

2: Why, out of the six drawers, did this drawer bottom split where the screws anchored the drawer bottom to the drawer back?

Answer: I removed all of the drawer bottoms to rework the insides of the drawers in one way or another, but particularly to sand them because they were actually left without any finish. As a result, the surfaces were fuzzy and unpleasant. I decided to sand them and finish them. The other drawer bottoms were well-fitted but not tight. Now this unit was made before central heating was developed and installed in every home. Park a desk like this near to a radiator or other heat source, and shrinkage will take place. Whereas all of the drawer bottoms had shrunk by 3/16” in the ¼” deep groove, this particular drawer bottom was tightly fitted in the groove and took some effort on my part to extract that ‘wedged leading front edge from its tight groove. In other words, there was enough retentive grip to prevent it from shrinking to the fixed point of the screwed edge, as in all of the other drawers. Something had to give, and in this case it was the screw-points of the back edge. I added an extra ⅛” to the front edges of all of the drawer bottoms.

3: Why was this common, through dovetail so gappy at the back but with no gap on the inside corner?

Answer: Speed was of the essence in an age where handwork was barely surviving the age of the Industrial Revolution. For every skilled maker at work, there were ten outside the gates and doors ready to take your place. Industrialism was replacing and thereby displacing skilled workers with machine made alternatives. It was hard to compete. But in this case, reading between the lines, I suspect he’d possibly given this individual drawer to his apprentice, as you can see the line of the inside of the drawer was precisely cut and neat. This wood being so soft, you could cut all the way from the inside face to the outside from one side. Here, I have these considerations: the cut was from the inside all the way through onto something solid and without a gap, so the cut was clean with no breakout; the maker was experienced and somewhat careless; the main maker was in a hurry to get the work done; or the work was that of an apprentice.

4: Why were so many repairs required to the front face marquetry veneers, especially at the corners?

Answer: These corners are really quite unprotected and rely on the glue alone. Through the main outer sources, there is little if any friction to pull the veneer away, but on the edges, there is friction if the drawer has any play at all in it. Rushed or careless closing will catch on the frame surrounding the drawer. Especially is this so with very thin veneers. Also, when the drawer is open, it can be subjected to clothing catching the corners of the veneer. Notice that on almost all of the drawer corners, 24 of them, there has been repair work to restore broken off veneers at the very corners, and this is because of the short length of the grain at that point.

It’s worth mentioning here that the main purpose of cockbeading was to protect the exposed corners of doors and drawers from being damaged. It’s much easier to replace damaged or broken cockbeading than it is the veneered surfaces and corners. Also, the extremes of wood veneers are a little like the edges of wallpaper that have curled away at the edges. The uptake of moisture coming from the edges will allow the veneer to expand and pull away from the core wood. Veneers are really ultra-thin solids of wood, and wood of every kind expands and contracts according to atmospheric moisture. The best way to protect wood is to apply a coat of resistant film or a penetrating oil that forms a barrier of one kind or another. Finishes shrink during the curing, and the breakpoint of sharp corners to edges creates  the narrowest thickness of finish, and in some cases no finish on the tight corners exists with any kind of continuity. That's the reason we remove the arris or lightly sand off the corner edges to a slight round.

5: Why did the maker use planted or appliqued drawer grooving instead of ploughing the grooves directly into the drawer sides?

Answer: These drawers are about as thin as they can be, and that’s to reduce the weight of the drawer. The grooves need to be no less than 3/16” (4.76 mm) to be of any real retentive value, especially at the leading edge to the front of the drawer. The drawer front is ⅞” thick, so the groove was ploughed in directly to ¼” (6.35) deep just fine. Ploughing that deep into the ⅜” (9.5 mm) sides would result in an ultra-weak point along the long axis of the drawer sides. Planting the groove from an independent piece added more wear surface and increased the strength of the bottom edges where the weight within the drawer would be. It’s also easier to plough a long length on the edge of a board and then rip it off to expose a new edge to plough again. That way you can then cut the grooved piece to length.

I also noticed that he had written ‘Plant’ to the pieces at different points in pencil and a cursive writing style, which might well mean that someone else was working on the cabinet and he was sending the message to someone else. It is worth noting that often a foreman did all of the laying out and allocation of materials to individual makers working on the same piece. Highly economical to do it that way.

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

Answer: Poplar is a relatively inexpensive wood compared to most other hardwoods and is a sustainable tree to source wood from. Also, the consistent density, lack of contrasting growth rings, uneventful patterns of growth made it a better choice than other softer, easy to work woods, including the whole softwood range, though something like old-growth eastern white pine from virgin North American forests (now long gone through greedy rich pioneers and investment companies on every continent) was popular too. Poplar has been used throughout the furniture industry for decades, whether for commercially produced furniture or in small workshops like mine. You can stain poplar to just about any colour you want, and it can be just about the easiest wood to match to other wood types. It takes stain and dyes well too. This is a soft hardwood, which makes it exceptionally easy to work with every type of hand tool. It grows to good widths and lengths and is very stable too. I had already disposed of the ‘evidence’ by the time I decided to create a blog post. Apologies for no pics.

Answers to blog post questions posed in Known By Their Fruits 1: Why did this maker take a saw to each corner of the appliqued drawer bottom groove at the back of the drawer when no one would see it, ever? On each of the drawers, he cut this corner off, in situ, after the...

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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.

It looks like it, but no, it's not solid mahogany but a thicker veneer on softwood.

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.

The French polishing with shellac has preserved the wood really well here. The panels are dead flat because the wood was quarter-sawn and book-matched for grain and colour matching. Another skip find!

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.

Drawing out the dovetails to one side of three of the drawers and checking the widths and angles, encapsulates the reality that you have not seen it until you've drawn it. The smaller, left hand dovetails were really very inaccurate, even though for the most part the dovetails matched the recesses in width and aligned with the pins.

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:

1: Why did this maker take a saw to each corner of the appliqued drawer bottom groove at the back of the drawer when no one would see it, ever? On each of the drawers, he cut this corner off, in situ, after the drawer bottom was screwed in place.2: Why, out of the six drawers, did this drawer bottom split where the screws anchored the drawer bottom to the drawer back?3: Why was this common dovetail gappy at the back but with no gap on the inside corner?

4: Why were so many repairs required to the front face marquetry veneers, especially at the corners?5: Why did the maker use planted or appliqued drawer grooving instead of ploughing the grooves directly into the drawer sides?

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.

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...

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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.

A bandsaw is my only freestanding machine. This blog post proves the efficacy of what I have taught others over three decades. It's not a powerful beast, just a sixteen inch version that costs around £1200 and takes only a small amount of floor space. The base measures

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.

When clamping is possible it my well be impractical so why not drive a screw and leave it there, tucked in beneath a tabletop that will never be seen. My act of pure practicality seemed sacreliges to the puritan woodworkers but I suspect that they, as always, were just looking for fault.

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!

This rocker looks entirely different when it's painted into a solid like this. Two friends came for a visit shortly after I'd finished three of them in different woodsin different woods, and they said that they liked this spruce version painted over the oak and cherry ones.It's something of a luxury to have an empty room; this blank canvas was hiding beneath old carpet. Now the whole room became the blank canvass we needed for our first efforts. We'd decided to dedicate the whole house like this as a luxury goal to teach others my hand skills in the realest of ways we could think of.

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.

All of our western hardwoods are easy to work with ordinary hand tools. My workspace gets less as the projects come together in a single piece, but all the less when I make three or four of them in quick succession. But planks and beams of wood standing in shavings where I stand too have been my life for six decades now. I'd like another decade like this and without changing a thing.I have designed and made several rocking chairsdesigns through the years but I have never copied the work of another Many vintage rockers were actually working chairs used by people sitting to weave, spin, and work other hand crafts. Especially was this so in the USA, where people sat to work outdoors on their porches to get out of the heat indoors and then too the sunshine. In more recent years, rockers became more generously shaped as a luxury chair to relax in and were better suited for a more relaxed fit.

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.

On the other side of that black floor line is the footprint of my single-car garage. Nothing is ever made on this side of that demarcation line. This side of the line is for cameras only to look through that invisible wall.

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.'

My candle box class covers box making in a day and a half of the six-day class. I came up with this project as a means of teaching how to use the hand plane, the #4 Bailey pattern Stanley, and dovetailing the corners of a plain box in 1990. All the roundovers are completed with that Stanley plane.Part two in the class covers shelf making and how to cut two types of housing dado, along with the first four mortise and tenon joints, arching with stop cuts and a chisel followed by a spokeshave and so on.The final part of the course is table making so this piece can be scaled for any other table typs with four legs. It comprises eight mortise and tenon joints which provides a thorough understanding of the M&T joint plus planing and shaping with a variety of other tools. M&T is the most used joint of any kind in the world.

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.

Even the over anxious soon settled around my workbench for demonstrations they could walk away from and say to themselves, "I think could do that." In this demonstration, I sharpened a tenon saw before showing the students how to sharpen their edge tools and expected them to sharpen the tools on the bench whenever they wanted to.

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.

The Judge . . .The Priest . . .The obstetrician

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.

Cherry is highly regarded as a furniture wood in the USA. When you work it, it peels like soap whether you use a plane, a spokeshave, or a chisel. Though it is a western hardwood that I am using here, there is nothing hard about it all. The other beauty in it is the change that takes place over the months. The colour goes from a light hue to a deep, rich redness.

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.

Even now that the years have aged and coloured the cherry pieces in the living room nicely, when the drawer is closed, you can barely see its outline, and it fits perfectly flush with no discernible difference between the drawer front and the rest of the apron.

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.

Newly installed, the colour is as yet undeveloped. In six months it will be transformed altogether. Much warmer and richer.

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.

Cherry is one of the most manageable hardwoods to work with hand tools, and it planes up to a pristine finish readily. That was good; making all of the pieces in cherry was a lot of handwork and fitness training too.

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.

Prototyping from two-by-four studs (the one on the right) is the least expensive way to work up a design style. It planes well, and you could, if you wanted to, make a bookshelf that would be perfectly sturdy and serviceable to sell or give to family or friends later.

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.

The room is now softening gently as complementary pieces begin to take their place in the whole. Five or six more pieces will come together before the year's end. See how the rocking chair has changed colour and is waiting for the coffee table to catch up.

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!

Height, depth, and width determine how much space can be taken up in the making of any piece. That's the benefit of prototypes, but, of course, scale drawings will do the same two-dimensionally, and usually that is where I begin.

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.

Oak and cherry combine nicely to give a tambour look to my design. Each frame is mortise and tenoned at the corners to ensure longe the work longevity.

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.

Most of my joinery will never be seen again once the lid (cabinet top) gets anchored on with turnbuttons, the pulling power of a hidden dovetail or two will never be known beyond this image, but the secure feeling I get from knowing it's there, unseen, doing its job, is very satisfying.

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.

Whereas the oak will remain the same colour, the cherry will darken two times before it settles to contrast within the frames. Watching my granddaughter dip in and out for her toys is always an enjoyable moment. It's a huge drawer, so I used metal runners to make it easy for her.

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.

These coasters came from scraps I'd kept back to use for things like these coasters, but then, too, some other pieces. I used this style for clocks and cupboard fronts in other Sellers' home pieces.

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.

Go for round, octagonal, or square with this strip-wood look; they all work well. I even made some from strips of the same wood and used the grain for contrast, and they looked good 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.

I used only ten common hand tools (which most of you will likely own already) to make this uncomplicated wall shelf unit. Any wood will work but cherry, oak, or darker woods like walnut are great woods to work with.I used only ten common hand tools (which most of you will likely own already) to make this uncomplicated wall shelf unit. Any wood will work, but cherry, oak, or darker woods like walnut are great woods to work with.

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.

This table design lends itself to a range of alternative tops going from round to elliptical and square to octagonal simply by adapting the leg frames and elongating one stretcher or the other.

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.

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...

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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

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

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