Paul Sellers

Dismissing mitre joints and butt joints as non-joints, the mortise and tenon joint is the single most used joint used universally for just about any frame joinery you care to name in the world. No other joinery type come close. It was in the USA where I first heard of something the call "the thirds rule." which is not much of a rule at all and neither is it any kind of guide for new woodworkers to adopt. The time when a thirds rule might apply is when you use stock of equal thickness to make a mortise and tenon from and the best one might be 3/4" thick stock where the mortise might be a quarter-inch and therefore so too the corresponding tenon. It's a sensible equation for that scenario. It would also work for 1 1/2" thick stock, but I'd stop there. In 95% or more, we never have equality in component sizes. Legs are mostly square stock much heavier than the rails. Timber-framed buildings made from a mix of locally sourced temperate hardwoods have tenon-ended rails a fraction of the width of the posts, perhaps no more than an inch where the post might be ten inches square.

It's also a truism that in furniture making most mortise and tenons will be under half an inch thick. Even in door making, and on extra thick doors of say 2 1/2 to 3" thick, vintage store front doors and banks, for instance, makers used twin, side-by-side tenons along with or a two inline tenon stack as in tandem and still of lesser thicknesses rather than say a thick tenon of 3/4" or 1". This all about joinery integrity through and through. There was nothing about anything other than longevity and total functionality.

My next project for our woodworking master classes series is a wall clock like this one. The door is framed and jointed with mortise and tenon joints throughout. Some will be bare-faced tenons whereas the main corners will follow the pattern of equal thicknesses of three-quarter-inch frame and quarter-inch mortise and tenon.

My reason for dismissing the mitre joint and the butt joint is because I define a woodworking joint thus: for a true joint, one or both parts must be reduced to fit into or receive an adjacent piece. There need be no third component metal fastener to hold the joint together as in a nail or a screw and nor even a dowel joint, biscuit or domino insert would suit my criteria for true joinery integrity, and I understand many machine-only makers would contest this.

Still, there does remain the reality that by cutting into a stile, post or rail we do indeed weaken the receiving part to some degree, and it's this that we makers must, must, carefully consider in the final detailing of our designs. I once majorly restored a very complex Chinese lantern for a customer where the component parts were 5mm thick ebony and the interlocking mortise and tenons had a mitred interface with a convex front. I used this same joinery on my Sellers' Home mirror from for its dressing table, so this is a good example but a fraction of the thickness.

Our endeavour as makers is about composition and whereas the final appearance is important, the inner composition of our joinery assesses the stresses and strains each piece must endure over the years, decades and even centuries to come. \We consider the expectations of use in functionality, weights, pulls and pushes, such like that The reality of a dining table is that larger versions will be push and pulled rather than lifted and carried. The friction on the bottoms of legs and then the catch usually results in a harder shove. Combine this with the leverage of a 30" long leg and the strain on a mortise wall or tenon might well be beyond the intrinsic strength of the joint. And we now live in a more careless culture than ever in our history. Because people no longer make much of anything at all and democratised furniture is built for fashion not long life, people have a low expectation of even their own value for the work of others. They would never contemplate that the above joint would be highly complex for machine making and a good hours work for me. Our microwave mentality to life translates into cheapness and low cost without considering the value of makers working by hand to accomplish fine woodworking or any other craft for that matter.

In my designs I consider rails to require less strength than the stiles they fit into. Look at any vintage door from say the 1800s and the bottom rail is twice as wide as the other rails and that's because the length of the shoulders integrate with the stiles to increase the wall of resistance at this critical juncture. The rails between the top and bottom rails are often much narrower and this is because the stiles need the added mass. Also, the tenons in these mid-rails are usually much shorter. Again, integrity dictates and leaving long grain in and around these tenons preserves the integrity for strength long term.

I put this together to show that integrity is everything; joinery is the integrated often unseen integrity of a good joint and in 90% of work is rarely seen. Though I would rarely use a half-lap or straddle joint, it is important to consider the reduction of one part to receive the other before making the cuts.

My new workshop has an integrity of a different kind for a different era. The men who built it operated with integrity and were a joy to watch. Today, they are here to put the finishing details in place and I will miss seeing them in the daytime as I have for the last five months.

The intensity of learning anything new is rarely self observed, but I have a few thousand pictures I have taken through the decades that show clearly the dynamic of focus that engages the whole body in its multidimensionality. The intensity of making with your hands is dynamic; unlike most crafts, woodworking is far from a sedentary occupation. You must stand, move around, bend, swivel and twist to expedite the wide range of cuts necessary to develop any project. True is, woodworking is just flat good for the body, but furthermore, it's excellent for developing and maintaining your mental acuity.

I have other crafts I enjoy and because I am so used to bench work I usually find a spot at my woodworking workbench to do this work too. One thing that inevitably happened when I used to hold classes is that the people attending arrived at their workbenches and sat down to work. |So used to sitting at desks, they thought that they could do the same with working wood. Additionally, because they were so unused to using their whole body, they tired rather easily. Most of them were unused to this kind of manual work. A weeklong class was good training for them, enough to develop some much needed and much missing muscle tone, stamina and high self demand.

My work in teaching others to work wood in hands-on classes now spans three decades. Naturally, there is a mix of people so you cannot put them all in a single box and say 'they this' or 'they that'. The images that grab my attention are the ones of people who are so focussed they zone everything and everyone else out by their personal intensity. My fascination for the expressions of intensity is not purely facial. I draw hands every day. That flex and compression, the muscle swell and the relax all play a part of a body language you might never see outside of those working with wood with hand tools at the bench. This too separates the wood machinist from the woodworker at the workbench working with hand tools. Nowhere near one and the same persons.

Were I to draw machinists working their wood, as I do the hands of hand tool woodworkers, there would be very little worth recording. There is nothing to fascinate me about machining wood because not only does the machine do 99%nof all the work in cuts, it also dictates the way wood is fed into it and in some cases it might well take over the feed itself, governing the feed rate and direction of the wood being pushed into some its cutters, be that a bandsaw, tablesaw or jointer and all of which will be pretty much the same. Even the other machines that are pushed or pulled into the wood, the chop-saw, and radial-arm saw, work in a single axis in a direct plane. In essence, it more represents a two-dimensional work rather than the multidimensional dynamic of hand tool making. With hand tools, the options are diverse and dynamic and often even unpredictable. There is only one way to push wood into a machine. The fence guides the straight passage and light hand pressure guides it against the fence for an inline, straight cuts. |what machinists might see as crude cuts with hand saws and planes, we see as organic and stimulating. We do not mind the workout, in fact, we want it.

The students through the years taught me more about teaching than I knew starting out and I learned quickly. No phones, no sitting, not too much relaxing except when they were using excess force where a loose hand and grip would work ten times better in many if not almost all circumstances. How many men did I have to intercede with to get them to be less of the bulldog they thought to approach their woodworking with. I watched as the tried to force the saw in another direction watching them bend the plate to actually do the very opposite where the saw gain was worsening stroke on stroke.

By the end of the week, they learned that woodworking with hand tools was less intenseness and more relaxedness. The no phones, no sitting policy became internalised rather than externally legislated by me. Their intense posturing changed to a more balanced persuasiveness as they positioned their tools more accurately and ultimately, more confidently too.

Imagine taking this load home after three weeks and then some other pieces too. She made a five tier wall shelf and a Shaker candle box before these. Leah came with no real hand tool woodworking knowledge but left with enough to continue woodworking, secure in the knowledge of hand tools and the desire to work only with her hands but now knowing she could.

In these past few months I have spent some of my spare time considering early retirement. Not my own retiring, I'm already well past the sell-by date compared to most, I have been considering how men engage with this period of their lives. The men I interviewed were not necessarily my age but fall somewhere before and after–they have all been retired for between two and fifteen years. Though I have continued full-time working in my temporary space for the last five months, I have experienced some of what retirees faced when work as they knew it ceased significantly and mostly altogether. Closing my workshop in the previous building, selling the property and refocussing my endeavour, has led to a semi-retirement feeling for me in the sense that I am used to much heavier work requiring more pushing, shoving, pulling, lifting and forcing. 90% of my work is what others would call manual work. Everything owned in my former workplace went into storage. It filled a 40-foot steel shipping container from end to end, and it cannot go back now that the new studio workshop is completed.

To make things work for us to keep videoing over the past five months meant vacating the downstairs of the house to use it for my workshop and office. You are important to us and so far, in the last 16 years of producing weekly content to teach with, we have never missed a single week. Add to that a few hundred other videos for online platforms, that's no small thing with a team of five to six. During COVID, when we couldn't get together, I worked to film myself on a range of projects to keep things going. But these recent weeks and months made me consider the reason for the title of this blog.

A few months ago I spoke at a UK woodworking gathering of woodworkers. Three or four years ago I was keynote speaker for Men's Sheds UK. Since then, I have taken a greater interest in talking to jobless men who either retired or found themselves out of work for any one of many different reasons. What was a first for me was my wanting to know and get personally involved in understanding the why's and how's of their personal experience retiring. I'm something of an anomaly when it comes to writing because I like the background noise in cafés, but cafés also provide the perfect venues for interviewing in a less formal way than any other venue. And there are diversely different classes of cafés too. Even in the chain cafés like Costa or Starbucks, Nero and such, you will meet very different people. Here in Britain, there is still a class hierarchy structured according to postcode. Also, and thankfully for me, I so enjoy writing about life, articles and such, my blog; I used to write for a wide range of magazines. When my blog started, it made no sense for me to continue writing for wood magazines any more. Cultural shifts with the advent of digital media means my y blog reached just about the same audience so why subject myself to the edicts of editors who were most rarely woodworkers of any calibre, yet they set all manner of precedents that made no sense. The blog well suited me and kept me writing to an audience I wanted to help.

In this period, I found confirmation of what I suspected and that is that few men planned much of their retirement and rarely got together in cafés for male interaction. Women, on the other hand, seemed much more apt to pair off for a catchup quite freely no matter the age. In any café, you will naturally overhear conversations where you begin to see how there were very few if any flat spots in the conversations. On the other hand, men sat alone made only brief comments and if they were with someone the conversations often seemed doing and why. I wanted to better understand their particular dilemma as lone beings evidently lacking the kind of interaction and camaraderie women seemed to have so easily.

Noticeably, the same issues surrounding not working came up repeatedly in my conversations and I noticed how much they contrasted with women I also talked to and overheard talking in cafés. I'm here trying to express a concern for elderly men who seem, well, quite lost. In most of the situations I came to, the men sorely missed the basic act of waking up with a sense of real and true purpose, a purpose they got out of bed for even if they no longer enjoyed the actual work but did like the interaction they had with other people throughout their day; they only recognised the loss of going out to work after they stopped and lost themselves among the vagaries of the unemployed. Though for the majority of workers there is no compulsory retirement, there is a recognised age tied to receiving a pension that many people adopt as their retirement date. In most cases, this is rarely true voluntarism. There is an expectation that the sell-by date of whatever culture you once thrived in came up, and you were rendered redundant, surplus to requirement and your move was needed to free up space to allow younger people to take a rung on the ladder.

In the cases I looked at most of the men had not altogether planned too much for their retirement. In essence, they failed to see ahead sufficiently well for the brick wall of being more, well, uninvolved in material working. Finding themselves more highly isolated, they experienced a much higher sense of loss than they expected. There was a shock value to it that they never expected. Furthermore, looking at my interviewees, I saw a sadness that I usually saw more in the grieving process following the loss of a family member or close friend, a partner of some kind. My easy and not very deep questioning seemed to unlock their thinking to speak openly of what hitherto they had kept locked up and private. With my simple intrusion, unexpected really, they found themselves dwelling in the moment with a reality no one else had queried; I think this might be because it isolated what was a dilemma they could find no other way out of.

There can be no doubt that women develop long-term relationships even from as early on in life as school, and it's this that then cushions their retiring and enables them to more readily bond with one another for get-togethers in a wide range of social group. These groups include walking, running, yoga, Pilates and spin for exercise to book clubs, scrabbling and then church related associations. I also believe that women make themselves more vulnerable because of natural experiences they share through a wide range of issues that men simply do not have.

Not planning for retirement usually results in having something you may never have known before. The sudden impact of having nowhere meaningful to go to, something that work does give you, can be overwhelming. The impact may not come on the day you retire but within a short period the reality creeps in day by day. Now having time on their hands en-masse and seven days a week for the rest of their lives is becoming daunting. Whereas work in time slots of eight hours, the drive there and back in commuter mode, the weekends off to recover, all took on a different value. One man said he would take a cut in pay just to be able to go to work again. In other words, he would essentially pay them to go back to work.

Leaving work and having time gives you time to do more of what you like doing, but you can only take a run for so long in a day, and visiting a café once or twice, a day here in the UK gets quite costly at £4 a pop on a UK pension. Entertaining yourself is not the same as going in to work for a nine-o'clock start.

Work for most people is a unifying factor we fail to recognise the reality of. I would say that having worked in an environment where camaraderie and team work plays a key role will leave anyone and everyone more isolated, alone and lonely than they ever anticipated. The two environments I have personal long-term experience of are working as a police officer in the Greater Manchester and Cheshire police forces, and then as a pastor and church member for 19 years. Thankfully, in both cases, I could work bi-vocationally, so I never gave up my day job as such. Add to these the six years learning my craft of joinery and furniture making in my apprenticeship followed by four years working with other makers in a different workshop, I was used to living and working in large and small groups and know what it is like to have those relationships removed from my life. The worst one came from the church life I sensed a belonging too for nearly 20 years. There is a resistance in men to show any level of vulnerability to other men, yet they will often do this with their spouse or partner. Most of the men I have known and worked with pastorally are more self-isolating and less able to make themselves vulnerable with being honest about their feelings and thoughts. There is a lack of trust that works against them, and it is usually a long-term issue for them. They like to be in the driving seat all the time until something happens when they find that they have not been so much isolated but self-isolating.

I find that work sustains me, and it always has, but I need the people around me because I care for them and less because they care for me. In essence, they too care for me in my day to day and when I am in any kind of hardship, they absorb things to make life better for me and to support me. This value cannot and never should be discounted and yet when people finish work permanently, this aspect of association ends too. I am learning that there is a grief taking place in men who minimised the need for establishing true friendships. As a male, we tend to establish a hierarchy in our associations that is highly detrimental to us. In many ways, our cultural differences can be processed through various elements ranging from how much we earned, the jobs we did or do, the postcode we live in, education achieved and a vast range of other unhelpful associations that set us into our various pyramidical pedestals. Having worked with those who were isolated by physical and mental disability, I found them with no illusions of status and quite able to enter their workplace of support. Older age can be a disability for a large percentage of men, but these men do not see themselves as disabled and therefore do not seek the help they need. I think this is sadly the condition of our elderly males on a vast scale today. How will it be with generations that follow when we see dysfunctionality in males increasingly out of control?

We are not too good at retiring and this writing is not a platform for others to expound on their successful retirement that serves more to isolate the isolated still more. I post it to simply say it is not always a positive thing to retire into nothingness. There is a value to the word 'together'. Separate the word together out: together, togetherly and togetherness, and you find it comes from two words, to, which means toward and gether meaning to gather. All in all, it equals a companionable place of sharing where we share the same space, atmosphere and company. Here too we find ourselves working for a company, use terms like within our company and what is the company policy. In the military we have a company of military personnel. This body of people has a common interest and purpose. Com is the Latin prefix for 'with' or 'together' whereas 'panis' is the Latin word for 'bread'. Companio literally means to 'break bread' or 'eat together.' Looking back to my youth, the men all gathered together for lunch on stools they each made to eat and commune together amongst the machines. Looking back on those days, I recall the rich diversity of conversations, laughter and even arguments. There was a camaraderie to the whole of it; camaraderie means mutual trust, friendship, a shared sense of purpose and goodwill among people that came through spending mutual time together. Was it the military that drew these men together through a world war?

Work is the single most powerful uniter of people I can think of and yet even in work younger people are more isolated and isolationist than ever. Another aspect of observing people in cafés is to see how if one person in a group pulls out their cell phone, all the others in the group do so too.

I've kept you up to date on many things surrounding my new workshop and office. It's time for the final revelation following the grand move. This weekend Joseph and walked my workbench down the curved path to the garage doors and into my garage workshop. I have moved into five garage workshop spaces since 2009 and then five workshop training and teaching centres with four filming studio/workshops for teaching since then too if I include the one in Upstate New York, which I should and have. Our first thoughts in doing what we have started a couple of years ago and possibly ore simply because we were striving for authenticity and not a mere YouTube influencer look. We did the surveys, found what people had to work with, what they did, do and hope for in their woodworking. I recall calling hand tool woodworking 'Real Woodworking' and then too 'The Real Woodworking Campaign' around two decades ago. I also began using the term 'new-genre woodworker' around then too. This workshop is my intended last one. I plan to continue writing, filming and making pieces for the remainder of my life and the house and workshop unite my quest to encourage everyone interested in real woodworking to bring their work home with them. Work is not a dirty word and neither is making things to sell and support dirty either. My new footprint is small. We are a true team, a small team, less than half a dozen in-house, and we work together as friends to create training content for other people as enthusiastic as we are around the world. From this relatively small end-of-the-garden workshop and studio we can now build anything we want to and send it to the four corners of the world. No more stepping stones, temporary locations and temporary workshops, even my personal Sellers' home kitchen has come to an end for filming and making. This week will culminate my journey into a final destination of woodworking masterclasses garage space where I will continue my work creatively from into the foreseeable future.

I first mentioned this possibility six months ago as we dismantled what we called B2 to reduce our footprint in a way that would match our ideology in real woodworking. Only one machine stands firm as my machine of choice. I own no others. This studio workshop parallels my previous version in size and configuration. The most convenient methods of making by hand come best through the evolution of work at the bench. We hand tool woodworkers have no need to drift between a maze of machines staggered throughout our workspace. We make one turn left or right, or move back a foot or two to achieve our cuts, plane and saw strokes and all of that, and yet we still get our steps in though I gave up fit-bitting five years ago because I never got in less than 12,000 steps in eight hours of hand tool woodworking anyway.

Today, at five thirty AM, I started placing things back in place. That back wall with the conduit and plugs exactly matches the one I left behind when we sold our last building and so well is the positioning that the transferred shelving unit slotted directly into place with no retrofitting and that centre plug in the middle conduit fitted directly into the same rectangular hole beneath the bottom shelf with no refit needed at all. I have things to place back where they belong in that backdrop, clamp racks to go in, a little more shelving to hang and then my wood to bring back into the left wall. We plan to film on Wednesday, so I've got two days to get this together, but I am also culling out some excesses this time.

We have a few cosmetic things to do inside and out and the electrician has another day or two to finish off before the office can finally be set in place. The deep-dig outdoor work connecting to the worlds infrastructure stirred up a lot of mud, but that has now been buried safely and closed over, filled in, levelled and new turf laid so it looks as though it never happened. The building has total climate control along with filtered clean air. One thing I have loved is the clutter-free walkways, driveway and front parking bays for everyone to get their cars off the road. There is a little block paving yet to complete before we are finally off the road but within this week we should be there. We plan some tree planting in the near future and the raised beds are ready to take planting onboard. The new lawn will take a week or two to green up again and to establish its roots in time for winter.

What you saw in recent videos was a mock-up set. We didn't cheat or deceive anyone we let everyone know what we were doing so if you missed that bit, I'll tell you now, we always bring people on the journey with us. The walls were not brick but corrugated plastic with brick print photographic surface to replicate the look we wanted.

What we have in the new home studio, workshop and office is solid from-the-earth clay bedded and pointed with sand-and-cement mortar. The rafters above came from our previous studio as did the whole lighting rig that spans the whole underside of the roof and is infinitely multi-directional with hundreds of LEDs that enable us to control the light and create whatever ambiance we want. Yes, you might think that that is a luxury, but my video friends are as much artists and creators as I am, and we enable them to be their best.

I recently finished my autobiography, and it is with the editor as I type. My life has always been creative making resulting in intermittent mixes somewhere between ultra-peaceful drama to get me to this point. I recall first hearing the terms 'internet', 'online', 'double u, double u, double u', back in 1984 walking down a roadway that was a dirt road in the dead-end canyon of Reagan Wells, Texas from a friend. It began, "Paul, (pronounced 'Poll' or Paawl) have you ever heard of this thing called . . ." I said that will never happen. How wrong I was. Back then, when I wrote an article for a woodworking magazine, it took months between submitting the article, and it's going on the newsstands. Within ten years that changed and a little after that the same process took only three weeks. The digital age was upon us and the whole of life for everyone everywhere changed.

My stepping stones through my sixty years have fed my soul to this point, but now I am ready and settled for the next decade of woodworking. I have planned to rework my first book to make it current and bring it up to date and once my autobiography goes to press I have a book I have been illustrating for the last few years that I would like to see come off the presses before too long. This latest iteration of my workshop is key to my future and the future of the friends and family I work with. But it's more than that. Whether amateur or full-time woodworker like myself, I'm both and have been for over sixty years to date, think a little differently about where you work your wood. Change things bit by bit and work towards the best environment you can. Amateur woodworking never ends. In my purview, taking on a craft you might feel called to but could never do for a full-time income-producing job, is no less important and probably more important than those who do it just for money. Do whatever you can to customise your workspace.

In recent years, life has changed a lot for all of us and sometimes not. Watching and listening to any news might leave anyone thinking about hoping in a future. But if you go back to the 1960s, as I can now, you will recall distinct similarities with the advent of nuclear threats with capabilities between two world powers as power-filled nations and a potential outcome that could signal the end of the world as we knew it. So what's changed? The goodness of our COVID year was a year of recognising elements of humanity that came to the forefront instead of having been quite buried; it was a belief in humanity doing the right thing as we saw sacrifices made on every level, kindness, support, willing and open compliance for the better good of all and then international unity. It didn't take too long for that to leave us and for life to go back to the old normal of dysfunctionality. People who had drawn closer become self protecting rather than considering the better good of the whole, we see that that seems to have waned in our going backwards instead of forwards. We have threats of wars since COVID that we have not seen in almost a century. Nothing's much different than the 1960s with wars and rumours of wars and nothing's off the table. Violence is the violation of any limits. But it is different these days, of course it is. Violence is always distanced from the perpetrators when projectiles in the form of bullets and rockets are used. It's very different than physical attacks and all the more by a laptop directing drones with warheads. But violence is violence, no matter how it's carried out.

The significance of establishing boundaries is that they keep things in place. Think shelves and cupboards, houses and boxes, carrier bags and balloons. The importance of limits in joinery and woodworking for we woodworkers is that they make the work critical by boundaries we set. I first heard it in the US: "Good fences make good neighbours." Today, I see a million boundaries designed to force life to work for all things. The contents of a tree stem, 70% water is tightly held to deliver the essential life support to the leaves through which we exchange or breathe for fresh air Understanding parameters keeps life sane and sanity is what craftsmanship is all about.

I use crisp walls made by knife, knifewalls, I renamed knife mark made by a marking knife because it doesn't match the outcome; knife with wall does, so I married them as a single word so now it exists much more accurately than knife mark because the sharp knife doesn't merely mark or only score the surface, it delivers a definitive wall created by a knife-edge cutting capability, a means to separate the waste from the wanted; areas more deeply defined in crisp cut lines we then cut directly into with other sharp tools like chisels and saws, planes, spokeshaves and such like that.

Cut away from these knifewalls and the joint will be either loose or too tight. If it's loose, there is no appropriate remedy, too tight means more work. Force doesn't work without a split and bruising occurring somewhere at some point. We strive for an accuracy that mitigates miscuts and mistakes with every incursion in one way or another. My dovetails come straight from the saw and the resulting saw kerf becomes key to keying surfaces that ultimately absorb the glue which then interlocks the surface fibres by a water-based expansion so that when the glue dries lock the meeting surfaces permanently together. When the glue swells the fibres, two and more meeting surfaces permanently tie the knot of permanence in the process. Most woodworkers look for a perfect insertion of one part into another with no surface fuzz and fail to give value to the reality that the surface fibres left from a handsaw cut, compress and expand to key the surfaces with these interlocking fibres and that's because we can scarcely see or feel what's taking place inside the joint but they are there nonetheless permanently bound as one.

Future and the belief in it wakes me with hope first thing for my everyday. I have seen this work for six decades so far. In the sixties, when we were really concerned and worried by "The Bomb!" the threat was as real then as it is now. The remoteness of distant, non-physical contact aggression established by missiles capably crossing great and short distances with an accuracy never seen before, has not made humanity any better but even worse if that's possible. But we know that acts of aggression warrant defence when we have something worth defending. It was when I went to work and made, when I saw that my handwork could distance the threat of nuclear to a fading distance of nothingness, I realised that my hands on my saws and planes, chisels, etc., took me into a place of safety and, well, nothing happened at that time and not for six decades. That's not the case these days. A drone sent by a man operating a keyboard can and does cause some very serious issues. If AI takes this on and human emotion and empathy are eliminated, who knows what the next new level will be. Some of you may not know of my police days when I worked shifts and carried a firearm. It became my normal for years. But my arrests were mostly people with other means of violence than guns. An axe here, a knife there and then too a car often became as much a weapon of offence as a broken bottle in a pub bar. In my day back then, bricks were lobbed of motorway bridges onto passing cars below. I dealt with worse than that.

I'm about to launch into a new project for our next woodworking masterclasses Sellers' home project. I intend to replicate one I designed and made 20 years ago, one that has a reliable and genuine mechanical mechanism and one that I have found can be adjusted to the microsecond if that's what matters to anyone. I have taken the oak from my desk cupboards to repurpose them in new piece. The new office space disallows the whole desk I once had, so this will be a positive outcome.

It takes time to develop your workspace . . . to establish the version you've created in one or more places and reestablish it in a new one if that's what you have to do. What I have learned through the decades is that being different to be yourself is mostly all that matters. I haven't had a series of machines adjacent to my workbench since I lived in the USA. That's almost 20 years. I mainly had the half a dozen machines to mill wood for my classes of 16 students who need upwards of fifty sticks of wood to make their projects from. I rely solely on a single 14" bandsaw now. It takes a two-foot by two-foot footprint with a dust extractor next to it. We all make choices good or bad and need to live with them either way. I'm looking for something more in my life than machine cutting every stick and stem. I'm still evolving as a woodworker and each day seems to be a decision day. What excess do I need or want to get rid of next?

Being aged 77 on January and having yet still my steady hands, good eyesight and no aches or pains anywhere in my body is mostly down to lifestyle and healthy choices in food, exercising and especially my work. Every healthcare professional I meet with now that I am old ask me the same questions. "How long have you been retired?" and then, secondly, "How many units of alcohol do you take in a week?" I usually say something smart like I retired in 1965 when I started woodworking for a living or let's try how many units of alcohol I consume in a year. I have never really cared for alcohol and certainly never needed it for anything, and my work is physical activity because, well, I'm a manual worker.

Woodworking is a lifestyle for me. I've integrated into all of my daily activity by visiting woodlands, harvesting trees, creating pieces large and small and making my living from selling what I made. More latterly I have taught others to work with wood using hand tools and converted one or two from machining wood to become more hand tool oriented. These life choices have made me contented and fairly healthy too. But don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong with machining wood and owning machines. Let's just not confuse the two very different entities as one and the same. No, no, no.

Moving workshops these last few months and having been settled for the last seven years has been difficult for me. Even though we replicated my temporary space as closely as possible to the one I have been in since 2019, there has been a kind of creeping occupation I could very much live without. What I had prior to this was a wholly evolved workspace I finally felt matched my best shot at a domestic home workshop with the practicality of making anything I want from wood using hand tools. So, by 'domestic' I mean a workshop space that I could make just about anything needed for a home or office in in reasonable comfort. And remember, please, I just made the last hundred and more furniture pieces in a space the size of a single car UK (not USA) garage, so that is roughly 5 metres by 3.3 metres, so 16 feet by 11. Of course, we have other things that take up space; a pair of stepladders, saw horses, work support, wood, the list is endless.

Though missing my work zone proper, I have been enjoying getting on with other things. Being on-site, the builders have shown extraordinary diligence working through the extreme high-heat summer days with no respite and not stopping in recent days on the outdoor work when it rained. I have enjoyed seeing their accuracy and work ethic along with their consistent high standards of workmanship. We are but a few days away from handover. The electrician wired the office plugs and has the conduit in my space for lighting and plugs. He's thinking Friday to be done on what's left. Mario is but six square metres away from finishing up 150 square metres of paving parking spaces, walkways, two patio areas and about to be garden plot. The larges block pavers are 8" by 5" with others 5" by 5". He's spent four weeks on his knees to do that.

My sedum roof is on and successful and as green as can be. This, together with the open or porous paving, reduces my carbon footprint on the whole development to as near zero as possible.

I rode my bike along the cycle path that parallels the Thames. I can't see it, but it's there as I ride through the mist hogging the river. The geese signal my passing in the morning and I can hear the river in various places sometimes as I ride. The river is still lower than it should be, but that's bad river authority management. Heaven help us if the state takes it over. I'm in no hurry, and stop in the early mist to listen and see; the atmosphere changes in pockets of density where the cloud cover moves, thins, thickens and then leaf density and colours shift in range. The berries hang in clusters of red, of crimsoned jewels I knew a few weeks back to be green buds yet to form bright white flowers. Leaf fall has been more a shedding of excess for survival this year; our unusual heat of a long summer cyclically passes through every half century or so, reminiscent of my Texas summers long ago. Was it really 2008 when I endured forty straight days when the heat never dropped below 38C (100F in real money) even in the night. Leaves tell stories, transmit into the grain in ways we never see, a swelling growth ring followed by shrunken ones . . . still never seen. Surviving by shed leaves and deeper root passage reduces the intensity of deprivation. The grasses lose all colour to a sere yellow blandness we seldom see in the UK summers. Stopping takes determined effort to get off the conveyor belt that gets us through distance faster, yet pacing through we dismiss the journey as being of little value. Transitional spheres do that, undermine the value of being there, the allowance of time stops to shift reasonably from a zone that spans and then extends the breadth of our existence to process, compress and then decompress. It's something we should enter with listening awareness of both life and silence.

Cyclists of a serious ilk barrel through towns and countryside knowing nothing of what I speak and seek, things special we dwell in. Such groups centred on self and self-centred then on the roads of any kind and for the main part dismissing more self-disciplined users dominate all where they can by scaring speed. Cluster groups like these uniformed cycle junkies (unfortunate men) rarely stop except to adjust a Lycra skin and to glug water or crunch through another protein bar. But the paths I'm on aren't meant for the thin wheeled road bikes with dropped handle bars and ultra-thin bike seats. The deeper mud and rougher terrain is quite high demand in cycling skills but relatively slow speed compared to their workout. Heavier bikes take a little muscling through. I want the stops to listen in and look beyond what speed stops. The subtle colour changes of a single berry type like hawthorn brings me back to reality with another cycle called life. It's in this cycle that life prepares for the new winter migrants with berries in full ripeness and bright red leaning to crimson. In the US, I loved seeing the Cedar Waxwings drop by to crop the junipers, so much bird life in my former Texas life there is gone for me. And then there's the anticipated long-haul flights across Texan skies in continuous passing when the Sandhill Cranes cried across the skies en masse. Never heard them? You missed a treat of sky gazing, I can tell you. I have yet to see my first Redwings and Fieldfares arrive to feast over winter from Scandinavia and Europe. We might seem Bohemian Waxwings as an irruption now and then. In my North Wales backdrop of Penrhyn Castle where my last real workshop was housed for my workshop classes, I remember these Waxwings descending in a massive takeover of various berried trees. Their chatter came differently to other birds without the melodic song and more softly, with overlapping variations of pitch in thin whistles, the buzz and twitter of action through stiffened wing movement and constant position shifts for highly competitive berry grabbing.

My field trips embrace the impression wild life has on me still, it's governed my movements throughout my life since very young. Texas gave me some of the best years of wildlife because of the still wilder and big places I found where even in the late 1980s and early 1990s I frequented land that only a handful of human souls ever found over that and previous decades. It's saddening to see how people now more relate to nature only through the minute lens of a smartphone rather than the wide-eyed amazing human eye. As I pass along my path I see many people looking only at their phone screens with little regard for what surrounds them in the now of it. Worse still is the baby in the pushchair whose parent pusher rarely seems to see the baby and then even looks at the baby through their phone. It's as if the bigness of real life in nature has to be confined to a rectangular 12.5 by 5.5 glass-faced rectangle.

In some ways, I liken this to my woodworking where the majority never touch a sharp gents saw to cut a dovetail nor plane a surface with a hand plane, and yet they think what they have is the same as mine. A machine cut can never be the same as a hand cut anything even if it delivers a pristinely smooth and dead square cut end. I can't even begin to describe being surrounded by a hundred-strong heard of totally wild longhorn cows amidst mesquite trees in semidesert with the cactus in bloom and the sweet and even sickly fragrance of mountain laurel in a Texas bloom time. Javelina striking out of the undergrowth in front of you with screams so wild they chill you to the bone yet still represent the experience of being immersed in nature, no question about it. Life is tame here in the UK. The biggest challenge to our humanity is our humanity. Cluster groups on bikes travelling through towns is always intimidatingly done by the privileged as is those barrelling through individually these days on electric cargo bikes regardless of age, disability, space occupancy and so on. Their dominance in cities, noise and light pollution, air travel, changing patterns of life when we know the answer but don't do what we should or could.

My walks and cycle route excursions lack the wildnesses of past life for me and I surely miss the explosion of nature in Texas in my opening years there. Being alone in the middle of a hundred thousand acres of ranchland owned by a neighbour way down the canyon in Reagan Wells never caused me concern. His land surrounded my home and I never suffered any fear or doubt. I am more threatened here in the UK than I ever was in the wilds and alone in Texas wilderness life. There is an unfortunate element of people who are more belligerent living in a comfort they don't like disturbing. They rarely distance themselves too far from a luxury car, a road and familiarity. But I still enjoy taking time out for the wilder things, the stops and starts of the flash and snazzy blue of a darting kingfisher when and where I least expect one. I have mixed feelings about COVID. Pre covid days meant freer spaces from people, and now it's hard to escape them and their extreme habits of pure badness. It's been nearly three years since the cowardly attack on me from behind. The man broke three ribs and left me unable to breathe on the cycle path not far from my home but far enough in my inability to take a breath. Being surrounded tight by a hundred longhorns never spooked me one bit and neither did the wild-eyed bobcat that stared me down unflinchingly and would not move as I approached. It was me that stepped aside for a much wider birth in his country, but it was him that stalked me until I was a safe distance away.

I'm vlogging again in my different spaces and places, thinking about the coming week. I hope my pace of life matches yours. I have missed my workspace since we started building the new one, we are so close, just a week or so should do it.

This will be the most climate controlled workshop I have ever belonged in. It's more compact and I look forward to sharing it with you. I doubt that you will see any difference from your side of the camera but for me, it is a space I have evolved with and in to.

I like my inches, they always made total sense to me and I think that that's because learned imperial measuring as a young child. Inches made me think, and I think the more in fractions of inches and then there is the foot distance and yard too. I picture distance in yards and miles. In my culture, imperial has been a common thing. I take it for granted as standard to me. I look at sixty-fourths of an inch and see an increment, a percentage of that inch that fits into it sixty-four times, but then a half-inch with thirty-two increments in it, or eight thirty-seconds of an inch in it, at quarter of an inch with sixteen in it or8/32nds of an inch in it. What's to fault that, anyway?

Sense comes in many ways. Remember, at aged fourteen, my headmaster told my parents, "Paul can never be educated." This man thought you could cane and strap education into children who didn't learn at the same rate or in the same way as all the other children did. He used a wide leather strap to drive his point home and strapped them to learn compliancy. But I knew feet and inches, could measure with these increments easily. Sense comes in many ways and experience makes theory concrete for minds that envisage in three-dimensional reasoning. Twelve inches to a foot made great sense to me as did a foot distance and a yard made up of three feet toe to heel in a length. Get over it!

It seems a strange thing to me that the birth of the new world adopted imperial as it's standard measuring system. The USA measures a large percentage of its work in imperial feet and inches but less so using yards. The whole of the English imperial measurement system is not quite its officially adopted system but close to. Furthermore, the US uses its own United States Customary System (USCS) as its primary system of weights and measures used for everyday commerce, but the length of inches determining feet and yards remains the same as imperial measuring, translating into the exact same distance as the English or British inch which only older people like me still relate to in the everyday of life here in the UK. It's actually borderline. The majority of the UK in every sphere adopted metric in and around 1965. In the US, volumes and weights differ to the UK imperial units but of course the change over to metric in the UK started in 1965 and is now pretty near complete. The British Imperial system was imposed across the British Empire in 1824 to standardise it throughout the empire, hence the term Imperial Measurement. The UK transitioned to the metric system following a request from British industry who sought to adopt metric units for international trade competitiveness. This may have prefaced joining the EEC (the title prefacing the EU) but it would be 1973 before Britain was finalised as a member. I'm sure that with the evaporation of my generation we will see the evaporation and extinction of the imperial system in the next five years also.

Even understanding and adopting both system of measuring distances, working in inches still makes more sense to me than metric does, but that is purely because I learned to use imperial in my formative years and subsequent training in work, building on solid foundational knowledge. I can relate better to the inch and foot more readily than metric, though those using metric can rarely relate to that level of security. You see, owning the knowledge means I have no need to be threatened by it, and therefore I don't argue with inches at all for my daily work: I simply own them. They're quite fine to me, but that doesn't mean rejecting a metric system too. Once you learn complicated systems you can easily and readily adopt simpler ones, but you will more than likely never go the other way.

What still stuns me each time I go to my bandsaw is that a tape measure for modern-day equipment might well come only in imperial (or USCS) on a tape measure. I installed a US made Kreg fence on my newest bandsaw recently, and the tape that came with it had no metric measurements on it. Imagine such a thing in 2026. Such a simple thing seems to have escaped the brilliance of their refined engineering, and yet I will guarantee that the engineering of all the components were carried on machines governed by metric control.

Being born to inches and feet, understanding each one of then, I placed inches into feet and yards, then feet and yards into miles too, quite readily. 5280 feet end to end in every mile is a happy treasure I value. I will die in a casket I made using inches knowing inches gave me height and width before cutting the dovetailed corner and making the lid with three-eighth inch mortise and tenons for the lid corners. I love inches, understand them, think in them, imagine them in any number you give me to see visually in my brain and anything in three-dimensional sizing. Once you know them you use them and using them means you own them. I have earned the right to them.

When I received the minor instruction guidance in designing the two White House credenzas, I was given four sizes: length, height and depth and then the radius for the curved wall they would stand against in the Cabinet Room on each side of the door leading to the Oval Office.

These measurements came in Imperial inches and fractions thereof throughout, though some pedantics might say USCS inches (one and the same size), so not a millimetre anywhere in sight. The exchanges between my US colleagues and myself were in inches though mine were imperial all the way. No matter: we delivered.

Addendum: I work equally well in metric and imperial and quickly switch to either if discussing with metric-only users, which is now the majority here in the UK. I learned metric in 1967 in ten minutes. There's nothing to it at all. Especially is this so when you've mastered the reality of maths classes where you learned about pounds, shillings and pence where such was the day back then when we entertained 20 shillings to the pound, 12 pence to the shilling and denominations of farthings, halfpennies, pennies, three-penny bits, sixpences, shillings, half-crowns and crowns and ten shilling notes all inside a pound equalling twenty shillings.

I admire the insight and sensitivity of D H Lawrence in this:

"some old things are lovely, warm still with life ... of the forgotten men who made them." which comes from his short piece "Things Men Have Made"

Things Men Have Made

THINGS men have made with wakened hands, and put

soft life into

are awake through years with transferred touch,, and

go on glowing

for long years.

And for this reason, some old things are lovely

warm with the life of forgotten men who made them.

I live in an age of unmakers. My work is the making of things hand made, and I know my craft well simply by the doing of it. Artificial intelligence adds nothing to my work of any value and though I do use computer design technology here or there, my personal prized drawings come from pencil points of graphite and dip ink pens only. Drawings the way I do makes me look in a way that forces me to see. This high-demand artwork embraces my involvement to the nth degree. My pen inks in the blanks indelibly, both on paper and in my brain. It's non-erasable. Until you have drawn it, you haven't seen it. Unless you have drawn it, you haven't seen it. Drawing makes you look and see.

This plane is a most remarkable work of art. The wooden version, made to cast several times in sand alone, is a work of art designed and made to create secondary art. Each plane made from pouring molten iron into flasks filled with oiled sand will make a hundred thousand surfaces smooth and true and square. I'd like to see the insides of the metal but never will. But the fineness of the woodworking relating so precisely to the metal curves, the seating of it, expresses the handwork so exemplary of the 1600s, when the finest woodworking in history came without any machines in sight. What is it that I am saying? Well, plastic was two-hundred years away, three-dimensional printers three-hundred. These inventions would replace the men's hands, their eyes and their brains. And what of AI?

My woodworking world expanded exponentially when I decided not to machine wood too much in my life again. Remember I went from mass-manufacturing production work in a midlife crisis when I all but lost my woodworking coordinates. It became less like woodworking and my first love waned with the extraction unit for dust and wood chips attached with suction capability to every machine.

I believe I could make the plane myself. Create the form in the body of the plane, shape it with a handful of hand tools, bend wood, taper it to come loose from the sand flawlessly and even develop enough heat from coke to melt the iron. If I used bronze that would be lovely too. The ancients in the Caucasus region of the Middle East gave us bronze 3500 years BC. It was the Chinese who gave us cast iron in ancient China and also the first throes of sand-casting too. They were well attuned with the development of sand-casting techniques and methods by the 6th century BCE. Even so, the patina on my plane strikes me as a remarkable gift to my art. And then look too to the shaped holding positions. Surely, we embrace such loveliness willingly. This is not engineered work as we know it. There was no 'sending' or programming taking place. But it is endangered by obsolescence now. An evolution that dismisses the need for skilled workmanship.

My pen here, the one I write a thousand words a day with, is a remarkable invention though it knows no hand work beyond the mere tapping of keys. It is most likely the most remarkable pen I have ever owned simply because of the precision by which it was machined into being. Each fill of my refill chamber seems to last me about week of my daily writing perhaps five hundred words minimum, really, double and more if I'm on a roll, which I mostly am.

I now own three of these specific pens and have yet to find one of them faltering when I pick them up to write though with one or the other it could be a week, so I touched it. The pen itself has no plastic to the outer and the only plastic on the inner is in support of the nib and the filler unit that fits and works snugly. I have yet to have one of them leak on me though faulty filling with too much will cause a slight spill if you're not careful. The pen is far from flimsy and I find it well-balanced in my hand for writing. I never really liked roller ball pens particularly but I do favour a particular roller-ball pen for book signing if and when i have a lot to do.

Thinning things down these last few months, probably a year since we decided to build the workshop studio at the end of the garden, didn't yet take care of everything. Currently, much of our equipment, furniture and hand tool gatherings are in a 40-foot container or in my house kitchen where for three months we have been keeping our work a living entity as we continue videoing and making in a slightly more confined space. Outside, Mario is currently laying the paving blocks and it's a big job. The blocks allow any rainfall to reach the ground below so that it does not enter the water systems as run-off. It still gets there if it's an excessive rain day but it does so more naturally.

My recent post covered some of what I saw in the four men building my workplace. These skilled men work with what's to hand and then reach for lasers to pinpoint levels digitally and measure square-footage and distances that need accurate calculation. Even so, they still reach for spirit levels, which historically go back to the late 1600s when the French scientist gave us the liquid in a slightly bent glass tube that allowed a bubble to rise into the high point in the tube to check on site for level. Imagine that, 400 years of spirit levels, and we still use them because, well, they are often far more convenient and accurate is many working areas of our lives. But then so it is with hand tools. To be honest, the reason my work comes together so quickly and efficiently is because I have nothing with a digital readout connection to steer me and my dovetails need no jigs or guides because at my age my hands don't falter or tremble, and my eyes still gauge distances within fractions of a millimetre. Frankly, too, a machine would only speed up wood stock prep but equally frankly, my body needs exercise all day long and not muscle from gym work that would be absolutely useless, useless to me. More than that, I need the brain power too. My hand work is high-demand mentally and physically. Those of you going into the illusion of retirement might best be taking on a new career working wood. It's never too late. Oh, and by that, I don't mean machining wood.

Rising to different challenges can come acceptably in later life. I was in my late fifties when I started serious writing and drawing. I hadn't touched a computer before then. It didn't mean I left my handwriting out, it came alongside it in tandem. I still write a paper page of text every day with a fountain pen I fill once a week from a bottle of ink and then write on my computer into the future of woodworking so that nothing dies with me. Remember it was around the start of the last decade when we filmed making a damned good workbench in the garden of my house. This one act of videoing worked as a bridge between training and developing the confidence to make by hand rather than always machining the stuff of wood. Our amateur video efforts changed the lives for a million woodworkers who thought they needed half a dozen machines at least to simply become a woodworker. When they saw this very radical move on our part, it was Joseph and I and two inexpensive camcorders, they suddenly went, "Wow, I can do that!" The black and Decker workmates came out unembarrassingly to plane wood on, bumped up against a laurel tree. Some of you have been with us through thick and thin since then. Some of you planned your future into woodworking as an engineered intent, bought a handful of hand tools and built a workbench from construction-grade wood with knots and twists and cups in it.

Since that time, I have designed a few hundred pieces of machine-free furniture and woodwork and progressively, progressively, moved towards 98% elimination of the machines I once relied on. Of course, no longer holding classes for hands-on students meant I no longer needed 500 to 1000 pieces of wood for the classes. The half a dozen boxes I made in the last few weeks came from my handsaws, planes, square, chisels and a chisel hammer. Making a tray to slide inside took me half a day and whilst I was doing that, Mario was outside laying almost three square metres of paving by hand too.

I noticed how Agnis and Mario worked in the ground to get the foundations and drainage of my new building and the paving that's currently going in. The foundations were meticulously detailed, and no corners were cut. If I know anything about building, the foundation is perhaps not the prettiest work and is often very tedious, but you must get it right. Everything that goes from there on relies on detailed accuracy that takes place in the foundation. So it is with woodworking and all other skilled crafts. The fundamentals of all things craft are critical in the beginning work. That's why we taught saw sharpening and plane initiation right off. We talked about chisel bevels and bevel-edged or mortise versions. You've never seen me use mortise chisels in any of my videos even though they are boxed in a chisel tray somewhere. No one's asked me why and that's because they see what I use works. And none of my planes are retrofitted with thick irons or special steels. My fundamentals take good care of all that artificiality. And what about low-angle bevel up planes anyway?

So here is another word we rarely consider too deeply: foundational. This word needs a little explaining to gain the full value of it. In Latin, the word foundational comes from fundamentum, meaning, guess what, foundation. The root of it is bottom or base and from this we get basic too. In our recent English we might refer to it as primary and original so foundation and fundamental come together. I just created a box (above) I call my Dovetail Sampler Box. This is now a fundamental course in foundational dovetailing and the first episode in training on dovetails will be out as I type. It is not my first online training, there are dozens and dozens of projects with dovetails that I have put together. My goal in this was to get the foundation right and record it for posterity.

Though still running my own business, still making and delivering on target to provide for my family, It was in and around the early 1990s that started to invest in the lives of others. Oddly enough, mixing in Christian situations, it was the ones I worked closest with that ultimately stole from me in one way or another. This really took me by surprise and the reason I am aware of it now is that I recently finished my autobiography to recount my work-life since my young days of woodworking. Most of my apprentices and trainees ultimately stole and deceived my in one quite serious way or another. My writing has always sustained me as much as my woodworking. My hands-on classes, writing for US and UK woodworking magazines, such like that came ever more naturally to me hence my two books on foundational woodworking and hand tools. This earlier work would undergird my future as an artisan maker teacher. Today, building what will be my last workshop studio, comes from my foundation work in both creating to sell and then advising others to take on their vocational calling no matter their age. Becoming anything is not hinged to age or retirement, but it is hinged to altitude and self belief. Thankfully, because \i have taught so many in hands-on classes and workshops, apprentices and so on, I believe in you. Just plan on some investment in real-time woodworking to train yourself and discipline yourself into your future.

See you soon.

Tools get placed in practical ways that make for easy pickup, instant alignment to task and minimal waste in time. They do everything I ever ask of them and never balk in action. I never abuse them or require anything of them that I don't know they can do. Tools I place wait ready for action. That's the reason I rarely ever put tools away until I'm really done with each of them and that is for the day, half day or two hours. It irritates me when someone says, "So glad to see you work in a mess like us." because that's not the case at all. I don't work like them or every copy the working of others. I'm orderly and disciplined; otherwise I don't work efficiently at all.

Though I may well have apprenticed, and I am grateful for all the men taught me in the days when an apprentice served ten men as part of the teaching and learning experience, 98% of my adopted work ethic, methodology and working techniques came from both my parents and especially my mother who was an artisan herself. She too was structured and organised, and I spent many hours at the sewing table working alongside her.

Most of my tricks, jigs, guides and so on originated with me and though some might have been around elsewhere, I worked all the further to improve the methods and invent new ways of working. |This is the way of the craftsman and the crafting artisan. It wasn't about shunning what was there, it was about improvement so that my version matched my expectations. I stopped using shooting boards when I came up with my vertical clamp-in-a-vise version that vastly improves on what was there with ordinary shooting boards for my type of woodworking. It's both a method and a technique.

No matter which book you read or where you learn of it, my introducing using the router plane for fielding the surfaces of tenons began with my quest to make sure others could get perfect tenons to fit perfect mortise holes. To match that came the vertical mortise guides. Other gurus now use these but give no credit for where they got it. It doesn't altogether matter, but they should give credit, really. There are hundreds of others that go along with my vertical clamp-in-a-vise trimming strategy for end-grain squaring that beats regular shooting boards hands down. What they see as mess is careful placement by choice of kept-out tools I need at the ready for further work. Their mess is often procrastinated tidy up, days and weeks of neglect and not me at all. But they like to think that I give the nod of approval to their lazy neglect. My economy of movement is not their economy of cleanliness and tidiness. That's usually the fruit of an undisciplined work ethic.

Everything out on this benchtop at this point in the development of my project is intentional. I do not put tools and equipment away if they are all current to my use and needed within an hour or less for the next point in my work. If I had done all of my plane work, I would put it in its stowing spot at the righthand end of my workbench. It's not clutter, its practical placement and economy of motion.

The nature of construction work often results in mess and clutter. Four men keep their site clear, as clean as possible and safe and at various points in the day, like my bench, tools get put away, waste is picked up, and the site looks pristine. Today is Friday, though they might or might not work tomorrow, by evening time today the site will express disciplined craftsmen. All four have a remarkable work ethic and high standards of workmanship. I see them every day working away no matter what. When they are finished, I will miss our daily interactions.

I watched on and off from the temporary office window today as Mario laid this concrete and steel driveway-to-footpath drain guttering twixt the four new parking spaces and the road. The level, the string line, the digital readout for precise levelling and the concrete mixer were exchanged in his work for four hours. It was truly structured work at the measured pace only a craftsman used to handwork has and I respected the how of how he worked as much as his well-maintained order and self-discipline throughout. When the super tight string line was taken away the site and sight was perfect.

My tools are now stowed. They are sharp and set ready for four more dovetails that must look equal to this one. I saw Sergi closing down for the evening around 5 PM this Friday evening. I commented on how precious it was to see him close up his day the way they always do. He commented back, "We like to make sure everything is in order so that when we start again, we are ready to go and are not looking round for things before we start work again." An orderly work ethic is everything.

The last few sheets of plasterboard give me a double skinned sound absorbing feature reducing the transfer of noise in both direction whilst in the garage workshop you see here. We then added a third layer of plasterboard with sound insulating soft foam. It's a luxury, I know, but the air training airport two crow miles away make it necessary, but then I do not want my next-door neighbours to hear the tap-tapping of a chisel hammer when they sit out in the garden. No plasterboard on the ceiling above and the insulation is on top of this beneath the sedum roof covering. Nearly there now.

This will be my last workshop--most likely. I'm taking pictures as it comes together because once It's up and closed in the evidence of construction will be mostly hidden. We didn't knock this one together stick-frame fashion as in most times past and for economic self-build speed and reasons. I'm thinking fifty-year lifespan and then another fifty. Maybe the outer cladding will go but not the inner superstructure.

The building base is 200 metres to the front of the house we've been building all the furniture for and there is only a narrow entryway on either side of the house so everything has to be moved by mini diggers and such. You cannot believe how much concrete and brick we have taken out to green-up our footprint but we have persevered.

We didn't build on pads but poured concrete footings dug down two feet and block-built on top of that to ground level. Within this, we packed several inches of concrete-ready hardcore ready for the big pour to come, over a waterproof membrane and then 4" foil-backed insulating foam for heat retention long term. The final layer will be screed, tamped, levelled out and trowelled smooth.

Now comes the superstructure. Maya, the architect suggested twelve inches packed with insulating solid foam inside the six-inch studs followed by a skin of 2" foam inside and then even more sound and heat insulators you can see below. There is one more layer to come and that will be the one-inch wooden cladding.

The inside of the building is now separated by an insulated stud wall, double skinned with plasterboard both sides for sound dampening so that the office stands separated from the workshop studio. My workshop has evolved and in some measure morphed to what I like the most. We need to both film and make at the same time. This morphing was intentional when we started teaching through videography and stopped hosting hands-on classes. I also stopped having other woodworkers working in the same space (except for Hannah who will be back soon), I got rid of my machines and the excess of support equipment that comes with that. I actually make in a space the size of a single-car UK domestic home garage. That averages about 18 feet by 10 feet--it's enough to make any piece of furniture you might need for an average home. The picture here is somewhat deceptive because half of the space is for video work and not my making space per se.

When we are done with the walls, the sound insulation will be such that you can't hear sawing planing and general hammering outside of the building. I will always have a bandsaw, not a big one but one that's more than adequate, for downsizing large or thick sections of wood. My 14" (I downsized that too from a 16") will readily cut through 12 inches of any temperate hardwood I might ever choose to use. By the time all the skins are on, and the insulation fills any gaps, they feel as substantive as solid stone and brick. Stainless-steel anchors, screws and bolts run through different levels be they vertical or horizontal. Maya is the founding architect of Studio 13 Architects who behind this building, and she really has delivered over the past few years.

Today I saw the electric-opening skylights go on top of the three openings in the office. The insulated doors and windows will go in hopefully in the next few days. Being dried in leads to plastering, plumbing and electrical work. Everyone was in on Saturday this weekend and made inroads to keep the show on track. Nothing is ever too much trouble.

We've successfully worked in small spaces for most of my work life though I have had large versions. The big shops were for multiple occupancy by staff, other makers, friends and then for teaching hands-on classes with twenty or so workbenches, tools and machines I no longer need because of not hosting classes. Time does not permit hands-on classes any more, so I can't justify wasting space and the cost of it now.

What does matter and keeps me going is my teaching. I'm not sure if that will ever wane nor my making creatively either. I don't make to sell as in times past and for most of my life. I can also see myself making another prestigious piece or two if my interest is piqued . . . maybe.

And of course, we, for our part, have kept video filming in the occasional quiet spots all too rare but enough to keep you fed with new and ongoing content. This is our latest project for box makers to create different types of dovetails in a single box.

Some Influencers work more silently to say the more. The sway of words gently put lift the spirits in ways and sways that swerve away from the shoutings of the disingenuous who so negate the power of art's reasoning. This post is not directly associated with woodworking so much as the woodworker I am. The union and synchrony of two arts collaborating, bringing the essentials of two lives together, no matter how briefly undertaken, matches the murmuration of Starlings at dusk; no one can walk away from the event and forget what they witnessed. These works of art, the Lost Words, exemplify deep care and concern in too many ways to speak of here. They remind me of my working. The opposition of those who think not much at all and then the support of those who, though often unable to express themselves, know inside their very being that, well, things are going quite badly wrong and speaking out about it is not negative but highly sincere. Reading and looking through these pages made me grateful that caring people put two arts together to speak out more loudly yet without anger and shouting down with the loudest voice. Jackie Morris and Robert Macfarlane have risen in wings that murmur the sounds and sights we need to hear and see.

Murmuration is an art form in flight, one of those phenomenal scarcities where starlings in the thousands, hundreds of thousands and sometime even millions, voluntarily rise spontaneously to swell the evening sky with twists and turns en masse without colliding though wing tips touch and in their swirling, unanimously shroud the earth, blot out the descending sun and rise to spread and expand their magnificence in stunning displays of aerial flight and by self-protecting sways confuse birds of prey to prevent them taking even a single one of them. Murmuration, when you stand in its presence, hear and see the wing beats of 500,000 small birds unify in the sky above you, holds within itself the essence of onomatopoeic strength. It sounds like what it is.

I went to the Weston library after the prompting of a murmuration of a friend 5,000 miles away in the USA. My spirits were lifted on the day of my visit. I hope that you too can feel the prompting of a murmuration. I don't generally encourage selling things too much on my blog, but this book should best be owned by others to dip and dive in flights of true inspiration.

Back at the bench this morning, planning the week with everyone first, writing my next book now, now that my autobiography is with my editor, I'm faced with my own murmuration but not with the support and mass of a million wing beats, just the gentle fanning of the flames in the silence of a singular workspace at a lone bench. But the love of making and teaching spurs me on all the more. Murmuration has grown since my first posts on different platforms. I hear we're reaching over a million woodworkers, nearly two million each month now. You have the wings of flight, my friends, so keep striving for your own murmuration!

Sometimes bits split and it's nothing you did. Do you bin all the work to start over or do you repair? On this project, I would have had a major loss in work and wood. I decided on a patch.

It's not always something we did and wood always has some unanticipated idiosyncrasies that cannot be mitigated for. Beech, maple, elm . . .easy-peasy! Mahogany is good 90% of the time, but then there are some fibrous aspects to it, short grain, reverse and spiral grains that, well, they just split off if you even look too long at them.

The weakest points on dovetails are, well, the points of the shallow angles. On this dovetail, the splits went in a highly obvious place.

I cut a similar corresponding shape from a scrap of the same wood. Only the angle needs to match, nearly but not necessarily exactly.

And just a sawn surface will suffice, too.

PVA glue will work well, press firmly with the finger and hold for a few minutes before letting go. Leave it to fully dry, overnight is best.

Saw off the excess once the glue is dried. . .

. . . from both end and face.

Pare down flush as needed.

The finished appearance when done.

In 2021 I published my guide for getting the two bevels on narrow plough plane blades dead on 30-degrees and 25-degress and 90-degress dead across too. You read that post here if you're interested. There is also a video on YT here too. Chisels are different because they always taper from the cutting edge to the handle and chisel makers use different ratios.

If, like so many, you have struggled to get your narrow or thin chisels with a pristine square and accurate angle on the bevel you are the same as almost everyone. I developed this style of honing guide for my narrow plough plane irons described above but this one I developed for thin chisels-it's slightly different, I think it will be the best honing guide for narrow chisels you will ever use bar none. It's also just out as a standalone YT video on my channel here. Please subscribe and Enjoy!

Lots of people struggle to get the same levels of accuracy on narrow chisels and the looks frustrate them. Obviously, it makes very little difference to the chisel's functionality unless it's a long way out. Long term, I will always suggest you develop your freehand skills for sharpening because speed in the zone is important. This guide should take about ten minutes to make, no more and that's because it's quick and simple to make.

Any wood will do, I used a poplar scrap. One piece for the main guide at 6-8" long 1" by 7/8", but that's more just what I had to size rather than critical. The second piece, for the wedge, is 4 1/2" by 1/2" square.

Somewhere near the mid-section, strike a crisp cut line at 30-degree using a sliding bevel with a sharp knife. This line goes across the one-inch face.

The taper on your wedge can be whatever you want but the shallower the wedge the better the retentive friction quality. My wedge starts out 110 long and tapers from 4mmto 10mm before cutting to length later.

Place the chisel and the wedge against your 30-degree knife line and mark the second angle with a pencil. Four of my MHG chisels are the same taper, so one guide will suit all four small chisels I need it for. I have found this method and guide works well up to say 1/2" chisels if you want to alter the sizes of your guide.

Square the extremes of the two lines on the adjacent faces on both sides of the workpiece.

Set a marking gauge to 7/16", shallower than the width of the wedge, and mark a depth line on both sides to cut down to.

Saw down the two angled lines as tightly as you can and then as close to depth lines as possible. These walls need to be dead square as the chisel and wedge will be aligned and pressed firmly to them.

Chisel out the waste, working from both sides and after first removing the bulk of the waste, work down to the final gauge line.

If you have a router plane, then use that to establish the seating level, otherwise straight off the chisel will work fine enough.

Slide the wedge and chisel snugly in the recess.

Take a straightedge and mark the angle, making the wedge short of the bottom as shown.

Saw the angled end of the wedge.

The wedge is wider than the depth of the rebate. Clamp the two in the vise with the top face of the wedge aligned with 30-degree wall and plane to the sole of the holder.

Your holder is ready for use.

How To Use Your Guide + Useful Tips and Options Too

We have a couple of options. You can load the whole holder assembly 'upside down' in the vise, squeezing the wedge and holder in the jaws as shown below...

...or you use the holder to hold the chisel on the surfaces of the diamond honing plates or other abrasive like wet and dry. A 10" flat file usually works provided the chisel steel is not super hard. It's an option to use the vise hold for the whole assembly as shown which allows you to use the flat file to establish the first level of abrading.

I prefer using the diamond plates so I can work through the three grit levels. In my case, they go to 1,200 starting at 250-grit, then 650-. You can polish out with abrasive compound on a wooden strop with no leather and trailing the cutting edge so it doesn't dig in if you want, that can take you up to 10,000 in a heartbeat but on such narrow blades it's really not necessary.

I have diamond surfaced paddles and they work great. The wet-n-dry option of paper abrasive is less durable for long-term use.

Also, I never use the double-bevel or so-called micro- or secondary-bevel method. I use the single macro bevel of near 30-degrees or a macro-camber on wide cutting irons and chisels. However, for those that want a secondary bevel, just load the chisel against the steeper bevel, tighten the wedge and give the chisel edge a couple of rubs on the fine plate only and the result is as show below.

Once you have established the coarse bevel level, you can tap the chisel to send it through an extra fraction for more honing as shown here.

To remove the chisel and wedge, shock them loose by striking the end of the holder a couple of times.

Using the end of a steel rule to press the blade against the bottom of the recess works well.

Inking in the 30-degree angle saves confusion as to which angle is which when installing the chisel.

A cross-pein hammer is advantages for tightening wedges

What I like the most about my craft is the days are laden full with work I want to do. I have put in more days than probably, possibly all of you and I still go willingly to work to make something I've designed, picked out my rough-sawn wood for and do not use a machine or a machine process to make with. Imagine, sixty-one years of six-day weeks making every day from wood. I carry this DNA of designing, engineering and making inside me. It's inside you too, most definitely. It's got a name. Identifying it is essential. Its name is 'calling'.

Our humanity is designed to make in the sense that the word design comes from the word designate. Break it down more, and you will find in there the word de= out or from + sign= derived from. Look too to author as in designing something we wrote into being by design. That's the reason I say that we carry within our DNA the ability to own ideas and develop them into multidimensionality. Only humans can capably do this.

So, following hundreds if not thousands of years of mapping out our ideas in drawn from our knowledge of craft, of growing, harvesting, curing, preserving and cooking, such like this, is indeed, in the deeds that we do, hard-wired to trace our design paths by taking the raw and unprocessed ideas into process mode to process it by the logic of our amazing humanity.

When I'm making, I find myself wrapped in a world of intelligent making, a high-demand world of critical thinking, processing, high-level interacting with the raw I process with my hands and mind. There is no passing wood into the mouth of an insatiable machine. My hands take on the full meaning of making and the felt textures speak volumes in my decisions for cutting and processing with a chisel, a spokeshave and a plane of one kind or another. Because I am born to make all kinds of things using my hands, I chose to do just that and never fought it but wholly volunteered into it.

In the same way birds migrate by crossing mighty oceans, deserts and continents so too I follow a call I can scarcely describe. I would that we could all return to our true callings, that vocare that spoke to our inmost being for our trade and working to the days when we knew who we were and what we had to do because the magnetic fields, scents and sights spoke deeply unto deep. Shop work as in vocational training is but a hundred years old and an Americanism that adopted the idea whereas vocation calling is ancient and had both spiritual and physical implications relating to the deep essence of knowing in a deep way what we were to actually do with our lives.

This morning I woke to a live brain and was ready to take on the challenge. Over the days before, I processed design intuitives, patterns worked out to follow that I must volunteer into to ensure the dead-on accuracy of a fully fitted lid. The lid anchor point is unchangeable and non-adjustable.

It's quite hard for me not to find joy even in the difficult things. Whether that is in the actual process or at the final outcome I am never sure. My chemical neurotransmitter feeds on the dopamine to ensure my joy every time, uniting brain and physical sentience every time I work things like this out. Passing it on to you and others heightens my awareness that what I give was also given in my vocational calling.

I love that a mind opens in our working

That we return to our roots of making

Answer the simplicity of dreams to make

and lift the tools by hand to create

what's yet to come from our fingers, fingertips

hand, arm and upper body pressures.

Hand Holds On Bench Planes

I wonder if we truly understand the hold we have on bench planes, the subtle grips, the slips and slides left and right and then the difference between skews and slides and a combination of both in a sliding skew. Because something has a handle doesn't mean we have to use it. I wouldn't look to a carpenter for sound advice, I've seen too many men's vans over the years depicting a viselike bulldogging grip with two fists whole finger-wrapped around the handles and tote to believe they know very much about planing wood. Perhaps it's because there's a cord attached to their version of a plane and to them, shavings come away in tiny chips spit from the so-called power tool in the millions. In the hand tool world, it's a clutch of long and wide ribbons that spill noiselessly to our feet. Two completely different worlds, thankfully.

When George hovered over my woodworking at the workbench, me fifteen years old and a complete novice, he'd nudge my elbow, speak softly or loudly but always with a tone that said, 'Listen and obey' then, depending on my response,"Get a grip!" The firmness in a voice of true authority speaks volumes and my hand hold on my plane searched for the as yet unknown version yet to be revealed. At first, I simply assumed he was saying 'more force' or 'grip harder', but I soon learned after various initiation sessions that he was saying the grip needs adjusting.

George was the gentle giant in my teen years of apprenticing. He was big on teaching and training and never let anything slide when it came to hand tools. In general, we worked in 20 different woods and I learned that each different wood type had its own idiosyncrasies with almost no two being the same. Planing wood meant handling a plane accurately according to task and sentience. No one speaks in these terms and though George didn't either, the unspoken worth of silent words spoken by action spoke volumes; I learned from a cough and an 'um' or the heavy industrial-grade clearing of a throat.

Grip is everything in handling any hand plane, but instruction comes best through an experienced woodworker at the bench. I am talking about a man-maker with decades in his hands at the bench rather than a college graduate teacher who scarcely if ever made for a living. My hand holds may change fifty times in pursuit of a smooth surface. The subtle shifts drive for more than just shoving the plane at the wood. That slightest of skews, a square-on equalling out of balanced pressure to get the fullest width, the lifting of the [lane heel and the lightest circular motion here and there that changes the dynamic majorly with so minimal an effort. Of course, that means far too many to remember and recall in the saddle. I always told my students in hands-on classes to take time to experiment even on their projects. Mostly they were too diffident and especially if the plane strokes they were using worked. Why fix what ain't broke isn't really a good maxim if you want to gain mastery for future use. I recall one time planing a wide board absolutely across the grain at ninety degrees to the long axis of the plank and how many woodworking carpentry and joinery 'experts' told me in comments how very wrong that was. With wood grain, there may well be one right way for that plane stroke, you just have to find out which one will give the result you want. It might be one out of the 50, and I wouldn't limit that number to 50 either. A slice cut is not a skew cut, but there are skewed slice cuts mid-stroke over complex grains that deliver smoothness. I had that in my newest and latest two boxes where you might have thought it would be the curly-grained woods causing an issue when it was the straight-grained elm every time.

Planing the ends of my dovetail pins, smoothness came readily going across the grain rather than with it. Several circular motions planes up my end grain even on small sections. I learned that from George too when I was a boy, and he was only just a man of 25. We tried different techniques and strokes that defied books. Ever noticed how old books rarely if ever spoke of such techniques. They only ever showed rigid hand holds with no versatility. Looking at what I know about woodworking today, I realise how little value they offered to novices

Of course, what's right for met might be right for others, but what is often lacking is experienced makers talking about alternatives. Also, though many experienced makers might have been working wood for years and decades, very few of them, perhaps one percent, will use any hand tools for any significant time in a day. This sad reality holds them back. Would I ever use a power router to rout out for a hinge flap? Of course not. Would I level the nubs of my dovetail pins or tails with a belt sander or power planer, hand held or static? I wouldn't. It gets too complicated and absolutely unnecessary in my world of non mass-making. I have the job done in a heartbeat with a sharp plane and a few choice planing techniques.

Would I use a random orbit sander on my work? Or a belt sander? I have no problem with these two creatures. An RA sander loaded with a newish 280-grit disc will leave the very smoothest finish. The advantages of planing is creating the dead flat and true plane. The RA with a fine grit paper doesn't take the surface down more than a small thou of an inch and so retains the flatness you get from a planed surface. Going through various grits from coarse to fine creates problems on fine work..

I recall the year quite vividly, September 2019, hard to imagine 7 years passing so quickly. I was invited to be the keynote guest speaker at the Men's Sheds Shedfest that's been a growing entity through recent decades and now 900 Men's Sheds host community gatherings to support members in a social enterprise that helps individuals find their space in local communities. I've spoken with many leaders and members through the years, and it's impressive to see how many people volunteer into the wellbeing of others in a wide range of social ways and especially sharing shed space to work alongside one another in small cluster groups.

There are other associations similar to Men's Sheds that may go under other names, but the term 'sheds' is often used in the title and speaks volumes as spaces men like myself like to be in the day-to-day. Many countries have their own version, and it might take a degree of courage to break through your inhibitions. I doubt that you will ever feel unwelcome! Here's a link to get you started.

Retirement is not an easy space to fill for men. One day, they enjoy a certain type of camaraderie and the next they can feel inadequately lost, displaced and eventually, the loneliest person on the planet. When I hosted classes on two continents, I found it remarkable the way men came together with a common cause to learn and work together. In a matter of minutes of not knowing one another the barriers came down and suddenly, they were interacting with comments, jokes, smiles and nods as if they were the best of friends. Many of the men developed substantive friendships that lasted for years. It was a revelation to me that the very unique condition of transparent vulnerability, not knowing about something, could actually become a unifying factor to bring down barriers that leads to uniting people through a common goal to know and learn together.

My reason for this blog post is to encourage anyone who has found themselves isolated and lost to reach out to a Men's Shed somewhere, pay a visit, and join in the common goal to help others as you gain new control of your future. I'm glad I was able to give that talk. It felt wholly good to be there amongst like-minded people.

...and my, does this design of mine deliver punchy simplicity in making the simplest router plane you'll ever make!

My smallest homemade, handmade user-router plane came from a worn-out, worn-down, overused flat file I kept in a worn file box for the day when I needed tool steel for whatever and then the scrap bin of bits of wood. The brass wear plate is not really necessary, in the sense of an essential, as the wood can always be replaced for free if it does wear, but that would take a lifetime, and the plane remade from scraps is free and easy anyway. But I like the idea and the thinness of the extended front edge extension. The spalted beech is an ideal wood of free character, but any wood, even a softwood stud, will work anyway.

This is an ultra-pleasant plane to make and have ready to use; inside an hour or so, I'm almost together with it, but now I have designed and made so many router planes, 30 or more at least; I know exactly where I am going point on point. I downsized the components and used my making methods from the original instructionals we did to pass on to others via my YouTube channel and my blog here.

I know that you can make router planes smaller than this, but, really, why would you? Such smallness gives no value and meets no necessity for 99.9% of furniture-making needs. A narrow-bladed plane like this, 3-4 mm (1/8" - 3/16") offers the most minimal of resistance in the cut.

I lowered the bed angle (the slope the cutting iron sits at in the plane body) to 44 -45º+- from my original 52º in my original router plane to see what it felt like on so narrow a width of cutting iron. That was just to simplify the angles so I could use a combination square's existing 45º. The steeper angle works well on regular router planes, so I won't change that. With this downsized version, you can barely feel the shavings lifting off as long as you don't take too deep a cut.

Heating the file with a blowtorch to bright orange and leaving it to cool until handleable means you can cut the steel with a hacksaw as easily as mild steel and then file it with a hand file. No need for a mechanical grinder at all. I like to leave evidence of the original tool steel source in the metals used so file teeth, though filed down to evenness, are self-evident. 95% of all the cuts in the steel, the bevel, the notches, etc., came from the hacksaw and were finessed with a flat file. A final rub with wet and dry -400 left the steel feeling soft and pleasant. Aesthetically, the final look I wanted is achieved.

The 1.5 mm brass plate cuts easily with both hacksaw and file. There will be some conflict between the wood's exchanges of moisture levels and the brass remaining true to the original cut size.

I used contact cement to maximise adhesion quality. This will never turn loose, but I also added extra belts and braces by using some screws through the plate.

The hanger bolts are common enough hardware available online via eBay and Amazon, as are the 4mm (M4 by 10mm) by 10mm knurled high-type thumb nuts. Three of the 4mm by 40mm hanger bolts and thumb nuts, plus two 4mm split washers and four 4mm washers takes care of what you buy in as hardware.

The spring or split washer between two ordinary 4mm washers allows mechanical pressure to be applied to the retainer bar, which spans the blade in situ. Instead of cinching both nuts tight, cinch them tight and then turn back a single turn. This then gives enough pressure to keep the cutting iron hard down while at the same time allows for any further adjustment without having to tighten and slacken the retainer bar nuts.

The simplicity of making this hand router plane is the single piece of wood and the two scallops each side where the thumbs provide the push points in using the plane rather than attaching knobs.

The slight discrepancy between wood and brass wear place is of no material consequence, but consider making the brass plate 1 mm undersize, and it will never show.

The retainer bar is 68 mm (2 1/2") long by 20 mm (3/4") wide and 3 mm (1/8") thick.

The two 4 mm holes in the retainer bar are bored on 50 mm (2") centres.

The blade recess is a millimeter less than the thickness of the blade, so pressure on the back of the blade from the retainer bar holds the blade firmly to depth.

If you like the idea of measured increment marks, measure the teeth of the file. Often, as in my case here, the teeth will be at metric increments. I know that it seems odd, but I live in both imperial and metric measuring and use both all the time and at the same time. Measuring my half inch and dividing the number of teeth showed that a single full revolution deepened the cut by a fraction I could relate to my work. Because the bed angle is near enough 45º, a full revolution of the depth adjuster deepened the pass by a fixed amount, and I could set the depth according to the teeth on the file. A full revolution deepened the cut by half a millimeter. I mark the adjuster with a Sharpie to see exactly where the turn starts and ends.

It may not be obvious, but the two notches allow for deeper housing dadoes. Also, you can flip the knurled thumb nut, which gives you from minus zero on through whatever depth you need.

You can still support our work by buying our full-size hand router plane kit which provides all the hardware here.

I will post on another couple of hand router planes I have made that you will also love to make and own soon.

And I am talking about what woodworkers new to woodworking don't know starting out.

I'm not really a hand tool enthusiast, but an enthusiastic maker that works primarily with the hand tools he's worked with for over sixty years and has no plans to change a thing. Why? Because Paul Sellers is good at using them and is considered something of an expert. What many do not know is that I'm just as experienced and competent a machinist as I am with hand tools. I once used machines in my day-to-day business ventures and developed production lines I enjoyed too; these businesses were on a one- or two- to five-man scale. Nothing massive or factorial, just common sense. More important though, and so worth noting and comparing: after my sixty-one years of daily hand tool woodworking, I learn something new about the hand tools, the work methods, and techniques every day. Much more than that, the reality of my working with hand tools means that I know the depth and breadth of the woods I work with far more because of the handwork. You simply cannot get this by machining wood. It doesn't happen because it can't. No one gets the kind of information I speak of as long as a machine is processing the wood in your stead. Once you understand that, you understand you will need to start on the learning journey. You simply cannot gain the diverse experiences from machining wood, and neither can you read about it or look at pictures or videos, etc., to gain such experience. Only hand tool woodworking delivers the goods, and this usually gets dismissed by those from all other camps.

I am never trying to be divisive when I say things like this. The issue for me is anyone drawing a comparison, thinking machining is the same thing, only a more advanced way, when they, in 98% of cases, never actually mastered any one of the hand tools or techniques hand tool woodworkers use. It might not take a lifetime to glean the information I speak of, but it does take repeated working of all the different types of tools and woods because within every tool and every species there are remarkable differences where the wood or the tools affect one another very differently. This exchange means that we , the hand tool woodworkers, engage with our work in radically diverse ways. We rely on what we feel when we plane and saw and chisel. Passing your wood into the jaws of a thickness planer takes zero sensing of any kind. The power feed pulls the wood in and pushes it out for the machinist to catch. Nothing sentient about it. For us, the hand tool worker, woods change within any given distance. You can never gain such intimate detail of character and workability by simply feeding the wood into a cutter head of any type. So there you are. That's the reality that is rarely, if ever, really considered by machine-only makers and advocates. Simply put, you never know the wood by simply pushing it into a machine or pushing the handheld machine types into the wood, and it's this distinction that makes the difference between a machinist and a hand tools maker.

But you see, we want and focus on developing this sentience in our work life. We don't want substitutes for skill; nothing that stands in our stead. We even want the unpredictability of it, like the challenge, and then too the risk of it, and the call to mastery. Without this, woodworking is dull and predictably boring. There is almost nothing to consider without the sensing of the wood through the hand tools we use. Additionally, there are still so many things to consider with the cutting edges delivering information as we work with hand tools. Even in the end results, though they might look identical, possibly, are intrinsically incomparable.

And on another tack. Using terms like scary-sharp was a more attention grabbing strapline (tagline USA), like a fun piece of trivia; the man coining the term achieved no more than the ancients had done for centuries before, and salesmen selling equipment use it all the time because it grabs the mind. If tools are not essentially surgically sharp, you might as well just go and use machines where the blades are traded out and sent off for resharpening the carbide tips and cutters. What was accepted for the previous few hundred years still proves the same for us today. In an age when almost everyone has no knowledge of how to sharpen anything, developing a sharp edge to a knife can certainly put you on a pedestal; it was nothing more than a substitute distractional term to entertain. It's the same with micro-bevels and such. They're mostly just cute terms and something to say. Any bevel between 25-30 or even 35º cuts well, and you'll scarcely, if ever, tell the difference with one or two bevels up against one another. Also, I vary my cutting edges for different tasks, and I never ever grind my chisels on any kind of mechanical grinding wheel. The no-grind method of old is the fastest and unfussy methods for non-commercial methods, such as we need at the bench in a few seconds, and it delivers exactly the same level of sharpness and cutting ability.

Did you know that despite my still learning about my hand tools and such, the half a dozen machines used predominantly in woodworking take no more than an hour per machine to learn just about everything you need to know about machining wood? And that most of your time will then be spent considering how you must use them as safely as possible. After that, you become a jig and guide maker for each project. Is that really the woodworking you wanted when you started out? For some, that will be the case, and then there are the others. Those who want the high demand of woodworking mastery

I was introduced to a man in a cafe recently. The wife, who I knew, introduced her husband as "a woodworker too." It soon became apparent that he was disdainful about anything unmachined and described himself as a "biscuit addict and a domino fan!" There was an immediate cut-off with glazed-over eyes at the mention of hand tools. I try not to waste my energy on such and switch topics as best I can. Their blindness is not my concern. To do what I do the way that I do it, you have to want it wholeheartedly. You must volunteer into it. There is no substitute, and without that, you will never do it and thereby know any of the gain of it. Running a marathon is never done by bus, and whitewater kayaking demands total concentration. There is no distancing yourself from the cutting edges of hand tools to cut the pins to fit the tails and the mortise to the mortise hole.

Getting others off the conveyor belt to adapt, adopt, and end up as truly skilled makers is and will be the ultimate measure of my objective and success. If anyone intersperses their day with the use of machines, I am fine with it, I do not mind at all. I think machines are handy pieces of commercial equipment, but 98% of new and even seasoned woodworkers around the world will never own even a single machine. Think high-rise dwelling, inner-city complexes, social housing piled one on top of the other, and then, simply, the poorer majority of the world. My woodworking style embraces the demanding work of hand tools for a dozen good reasons I am always ready to give. What about better physical and mental health, developing patience and fortitude, mastery in skilled workmanship? There is, of course, much more to it than any of that. How about fulfillment and satisfaction, sharing your space with your young children, an apprentice you are helping to shape, and giving others the hand tools you are using to do their own work with...'off the devices, wood in the vises.'

My being good with hand tools is not in question, and neither are many of the operations I perform any faster using all machine methods. The only way to really test this is to run everything in parallel, which I don't have time to do. Fact is, machine methods might even be slower, more dangerous, more isolating, and then just plain dull and boring. In my view, most people can gain mastery in hand tool woodworking within a year or two. I have found that a 14" bandsaw makes the heavy cuts in hardwoods like oak easier and less tedious. It's there in the background, taking its small footprint. Not compromising; nice!