Paul Sellers

I've seen pegboard backdrops and kitchen-style surrounds for a number of years, but an open benchtop with lidless tills and wells works best for instancy in the zone. That's because I do believe lidded boxes and tills and drawers are very practical for storing things like tools and equipment at the end of a tidy-up, but storing them after each use is mostly inefficient and wasted time. Clutter is only clutter if the person working is careless, and by that I mean that they

care less than they should in how and where they place their tools as repetitive work takes place. My tools might look disorderly, and I occasionally need to make a quick eye-scan for one or the other covered by another at different points in the day; generally, my hand goes right to the one I need in the moment. Mostly it's about knowing it is already out, so if and when I know I will need that drill bit or awl again in an hour or so, it's out there in the well or on the benchtop where I last left it.

My mentoring craftsman, George, never moved too far from his place at the vise. 95% of his tools were within arm's reach despite the size of project we were jointly working on. Looking back now, sixty years since, my tools and support equipment, sharpening stones, strops, dustpan and brush, and suchlike have followed the same patterns. There is no AI or device nudging things this way and that; order comes from the practice of working. Both George and I were thankfully right-handed, which meant all of the tools we used were placed in the midsection of our two-sided bench to each of our right sides or directly in front of us when we put them down to take up another. Hence, the vise is always placed to the left front corner of the bench for right-handers.

I have discussed the silliness of placing bench planes on their side often enough over the decades. It still surprises me how much pushback I get, even though it is such a mindless preoccupation with no value to anything at all. I never saw any of the craftsmen I worked with professionally throughout my life lay any of their bench planes on their sides, only schoolchildren and their teachers establishing rules to stop them from continually clunking them down on other metal tools like squares, chisels, and saws.

After any planing task, George, the craftsman who mentored me for six years, slipped his plane onto the benchtop or into the well in a quick and slick move, leaving the plane upright and full-sailed, ready for the next plane strokes. He himself moved from plane to saw to chisel seamlessly. The bench planes were never clunked down, bumped, or knocked and certainly never laid on their sides. I soon knew that any careless placing of the plane, knocking, bumping, and even slight nudging at the end of use resets the plane negatively, but more than that, I was taught by actions that tools always deserve our respect—I never once in six years of apprenticing saw any of my mentoring craftsmen mistreat or misuse any hand tool, ever. Remember, these men were in their sixties and had bought their tools as I did when they were in their mid to early teens. They expected their hand tools to outlast their work life and often handed them down to their sons. I don't refer to my hand tools as "old friends". Not really. There is a much deeper reality to them in my world, and no title exists. But I do look at the ones that served me through difficult times and over long periods, the ones I bought as a boy starting out, the ones that truly cost me almost everything differently than I ever would any other piece of equipment. Learning to work alongside men of real substance was a godsend for me. Their patience and kindness worked almost every time, but a quick rebuke and more soon set me to do rightly by them when I needed it.

The art and craft of work is in all ways about working in and creating order. Without this intent, things quickly fall into chaos, and this then leads to our becoming inefficient, awkward, and usually less productive. Because of the created confusion, our minds become equally cluttered and confused too, I have worked with chaotic individuals, and it's hard work. Order is critical to our well-being. Knowing where every tool we are working with in our sphere streamlines our working. Having said that, I do not want to spend time reorganising my benchtop more than a couple of times in a half a day. There is something about my personal unorthodoxy that generally works for me. Repeat operations almost always require the same tools, especially those with the small and smaller items. On my benchtop my planes have one stow area to my right hand, as do my tenon saws. Lesser used planes, awkward braces, plough planes, and filletsters have their place on the shelves or the narrow bench behind me unless needed repeatedly. I am right-handed but use tools with both. The placement of tools for an idle period of non-use means placing them always with my right hand and always to my right for quick and easy placement ready for ultimate retrieval. Over long periods, our humanness chooses all paths of least resistance, and this is evolutionary.

When others see my workbench loaded, they often comment that my mess is just like theirs. It's very doubtful that it is so I usually say something like, "It's not." My space is rarely ever a match to their mess. Only laziness allows squalor and unkemptness, dirt buildup, and such like that. In periods of transition, we do often allow a degree of disorder, and that is usually because we do not have a place structured to take everything. My transitioning to my new workshop in two months will by necessity be less structured because we have needed to downsize space for a season. But the daily use tools are exactly as they were in my previous workshop over about ten years. I have evolved to use the hand tools I will not change from in the next ten years of woodworking. If I have not adopted but one or two hand tools in sixty years and I have produced hundreds, even thousands of pieces using 95% hand tools, what needs to change?

My advice to anyone new to handwork with hand tools is to persevere. After I had made ten dovetails in my mid-teens, I never cut a really bad dovetail nor a mortise and tenon resulting in a twisted door or a loose fit. This might well be the same for you, but equally so, it might take a little more. I don't know, but the speed of my performance has become the gift of mastery to me.

I suppose the contrast between machining pieces and those hand tools, as shown on the bench I work from, is the expansive spread of machines. My hope is that those young enough to experience the use of hand tools and eventual mastery will continue the tradition without being traditionalists. My perpetuating these skills is not for nostalgia or a refusal to move with the times. It's just plain practical, enjoyable, and satisfying to know I made them and not a machine.

Twenty days in, the foundation work undergirds any future building work we care to do. Fifteen days of full-time work for two and three men have passed quickly and productively. We've used the same Lithuanian builders over the last six years. as we kept altering the house to suit our emerging designs with a positive backdrop of walls and space. Sixty or so new pieces later, five years of daily work, my house is full of specifically designed pieces to exactly fit or suit my home; additionally, we've continued to train new woodworkers all around the world. It's my belief that we all have a vocational calling, but only a fraction of a percent actually find it let alone even know if such a thing might exist in the world or specifically for them. Go back 150 years, and a young person might well be asked what they feel their vocational calling would be. I doubt anyone hears of such a thing today.

Now that I am old, I reflect on this as a point of interest. What starts out as a game and an app on various devices for children ultimately steers them towards some kind of long term interest and possibly work, but is that the vocational calling i am speaking of and do vocational callings truly exist in most cultures today? I mean, can anyone realistically find rewarding work working with their hands as I have? In my sixty-odd years of daily woodworking, I have yet to see my chosen craft calling leave me bored. On the contrary, every aspect of handwork in woodwork has sparked my interest. The end result of my work is the training of others. It's not that I want to be a tutor, teacher, or trainer; more that I must see my craft lived out in the lives of others. Why? Because I believe that the only true conservation of craft is in the physical doing of it, and people that feel they, like me, have to do it, not just read about it or watch it. Woodworking is not a museum entertainment but more the cultural working out of it in our lives as working people.

Talking to the two men working on my new workshop, watching them work, digging deep for the foundation, skilfully operate all of their equipment, and suchlike, I know that they are just like me. The wall plate is aligned as perfectly as my mortise and tenons, and the blocks and thermal block layer leveled guarantee the green roof will be spread on steel beams and capably support the added weight of six inches of growing medium. Of course, the foundational work takes time, and little happens above ground until this is in, inspected by building control, and so on. We sat and talked about their work, and I realised that, just like me, these two men lived for the importance their work brought to their lives.

So the walls are going up as I type. By the time the cladding and heat and sound insulation are in place, the walls will be 11" thick. The concrete and block foundation footings started two feet down, and then the concrete and the underfloor insulation finalise the level. The mounds of soil and gravel, old concrete footpaths, patio, etc., have filled the massive grab truck five times so far.

In my temporary workshop, the house kitchen, we have succeeded in filming several episodes without a glitch, though things are a bit tight. This planning work followed the architect who designed the building to comply with local planning authorities and then, too, our neighbours, who are ever important to us as neighbours and friends. I have been making my dovetail sampler box, and it's gone quite well. I finished the prototype ahead of the filmed version, which came out just fine, although I never take as much time with the prototypes. I never have the WPS I identified and spoke of in my last post. I suppose I feel confident, and my confidence comes from six decades of daily woodworking, writing, and always drawing too.