Paul Sellers

Answers to blog post questions posed in Known By Their Fruits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A chisel or plane leaves its trace identity in the surface of wood in similar fashion as the shell of a bullet discharged by any firearm identifies the gun, but not really the exact same. With a firearm, there are several distinct mechanisms that make the shell casing at different points, and prosecutors can use these as evidence to identify the gun. Our forensics are slightly different in that the working of the tools, leverage points, indents, and such tell us how the manmaker worked at different points and in different ways. I can tell when he was in a hurry, which was most of the time, and when he stopped to sharpen up. Mahogany transfers the information as it takes it in impressions from the tool being used and then, as in the case of these drawers and other parts, keeps the 'trade secrets' for later discovery. I have learned more through the decades of dismantling pieces than I can possibly put together, and each piece tells its unique story. This craftsman undercut here and compressed the pins over there. The wood absorbed his rushing mostly, but then he lost it a couple of times in frustration. I'll likely keep most of those because, all in all, this man-maker had integrity, and that integrity was reflected in many ways of his making.

Before I move too quickly along, I should point out that the veneers of the past were not the fake facing of today's sheet goods and mass-making industry designed to hide the fakeness of MDF and pressed fiberboards. Adding veneers enabled artisans to do things that would be otherwise impossible with solid wood. Facing veneers enabled sequential book-matching to guarantee tones and grain patterns for the fronts of pieces, as in the case of these drawers. Mahogany can be so diverse; were the real and solid to be used instead of sequential flitches of veneer, the drawer fronts would likely be far too busy for a harmonious look to give good balance and even tone to exist. There's much more to it than that too. But there it is, the starter. The image below shows how a softwood clear soft pine was used for an 11" wide drawer front to be faced with mahogany and lipped with a thick edge for the massive drawer of a wardrobe bottom drawer.

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

The pine with the veneer is 21.3 mm thick, and the veneer is .75 of a millimeter, so 10 times thicker than face veneer on our modern-day decorative plywood.

My drawers had been somewhat mistreated before they ever came to me, and I have dragged them around with me for a few years, hoping I could repair the desk to reframe them one day. But alas, time gets away from us and becomes ever more precious as we continue to grow our output for the conservation of my craft. These six drawers have actually made it pretty well thus far, so I decided it would work best to make a new case from old wood I have also garnered from different scrappy places through the years. I've collected several panels and tabletops to do it from and plan to make a small chest for all of my art materials that I have scattered everywhere in the hopes that a central location will organise me a little more.

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

Imagine this wood was being thrown into a skip (dumpster, USA), trashed, on or about 2017/18, and the trasher-person was a woodworker who said to me, "Why would anyone want this stuff anyway?. Those three panels are about seven feet tall, 1/2" thick, and single-piece wide at 15". My cabinet will be paneled with one or two of them on three sides.

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

So, let's dissect this a little. The dovetails, as in the angles, fit well enough, but it's obvious that some were dead-on angles and some were not evenly or equally made. On one drawer the angles follow a 1:7 pitch on all three tails and both sides of the tails, whereas on another drawer they were entirely random in angle and size. This suggests to me that there was more than one man working on the piece. Was one an apprentice or a journeyman? Could one of them have been on equal standing as in fully trained but more slipshod in his ways?

Here are some questions with the pictures:

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

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

No picture for this one yet, but...

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

The drawer sizes are surprisingly accurate in that all of the drawers are equal in their overall width and length to one another, dead on 11" wide, and when they are stacked up on top of one another, they each stand square and in line with one another from front to back, top to bottom, and side to side. Furthermore, these drawers went into two separate cases in lots of three, diminishing in drawer height from top to bottom. I'm regretting using the word "surprisingly accurate" but kept it in. Perhaps I would consider my own work as accurate as this work in the overall reality of being a lifetime maker trained and training in handwork with hand tools for so very long.

The wood shows no sign of any machining whatsoever, and telltale marks tell me of handwork alone, and in different places where I have planed over existing surfaces, it has obviated hand-planed surfaces, chisel work, and handsawing all the way through. That's because there were undulations I would never consider inaccuracies per se. Such surfaces can only come from hand-planing in the course of truing and fitting them, and so too the saw work.

I have more to share on this and will also give my answers to the above questions shortly too.

A chisel or plane leaves its trace identity in the surface of wood in similar fashion as the shell of a bullet discharged by any firearm identifies the gun, but not really the exact same. With a firearm, there are several distinct mechanisms that make the shell casing at different points, and prosecutors can use...

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I have spent the last five years designing and then making pieces for a real family living in a real but quite ordinary family home. The average UK or European-sized home is more compact than those I came to know in the USA and Texas, and I chose this because globally, it was better to try for a more average size anyway. Whether people live in a cottage, a high-rise, in a single-wide mobile home, or an apartment, the ultimate goal was and is to teach and train other woodworkers how to make furniture solely using hand tool methods and embracing the whole of working with hand tools at that. I use a bandsaw for stock size reduction only. Not everyone in will be able to rip-cut 4" thick hardwood using a handsaw for many good reasons. I am using the house we bought quite publicly as a house to live in, but then also as a vehicle to showcase my made pieces in a real-life setting. The workspace I've used to make these pieces is the exact size of an average English single-car garage, so around nine feet wide by sixteen feet long with a headroom of around eight feet.

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

It was in November 2020 when I started designing and making the first prototype for the house we refer to as our Sellers' Home, which you can find under sellershome.com if you ever want to join us. All of the 40 or more pieces we have now made and filmed were made in a space the size of a single-car garage. The designs are my most recent designs and are original to this five-year program. Nothing is copied, and none of them were made prior to November 2020. By mid-March 2021, I had made four of the rocking chairs shown below; by then, I was truly settled on a thorough, practical design. I felt that anyone with some basic woodworking hand skills and no machines could make one for their family home.

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

Five years goes very quickly when you're having fun, they say, but fun doesn't quite cut it alone. Yes, I have found tremendous enjoyment designing and making every piece, but what I have enjoyed the more is seeing the gallery of pieces made by those taking the instruction seriously and making their own from what we've been offering. Watching a rocking chair emerge from a stack of hand planed strips, knowing they were all hand planed square and true, becomes all the more remarkable when someone posts that they have made their first woodworking project as a result of watching your videos. As someone who has made such things throughout his woodworking life, I can tell you this. Nothing inspires me more than to see someone who just made their first baby cot or their dining table and do it using only hand tools. How about invigorating! How very rewarding, and what an adventure!

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

My first piece in the five-year plan was a newly designed rocking chair with a three-part split seat. Even the pine version from two-by soft spruce studs I bought from the big box store, which I painted black on top and sanded through to a red base layer beneath, came out to be a working/living rocking chair and cost only a handful of two-by studs to test out every aspect of the design engineering and construction. That's the one above.

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

My garage space at the house is 14 feet long by 11 feet wide, with an eight-foot headroom. My available space for moving around is roughly four feet by 10 feet with pinch points. In this space, I have now made over 60 pieces ranging in size from coaster sets to a king-sized, solid oak bed. Currently, the number of handmade pieces for the Sellers' home series stands at 40.

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

I refer to people following my work online in what might seem to be a possessive way, but it's not at all. My audience represents a body of work reaching out to those who simply want or prefer to adopt hand tool woodworking as their progressive way forward. In my hands-on classes they became my students; it was simply a way of identifying. The 'my audience' term differentiated between those who choose hand ways of working their wood and those who don't. It's mainly a category, you see. My audience simply means the hand tool woodworkers, but that does not mean they don't or can't use other means and methods if it pleases them. It simply means that if they are watching me to learn 98% of anything, then they will be looking for hand tools in my hands and not me pushing wood into a machine; that's all. They'll never see me pick up a power router or use a tablesaw, a chop saw, a planer thicknesser, or a mortise machine; those days are long gone for me, and that is because, yes, I needed to prove something to my audience. For them to believe that they could actually do as I do or aspire to do so, they had to see me both working and then, too, the result of it, but they also had to see that I was no more gifted than anyone else would be if they worked diligently to establish skill by as much rote practice as they could muster the time for. I hope that the term "my audience" or "my following" is appropriate without being in any way possessive or even demeaning. It's just my way of addressing what has become so very different in our new age. There can be no doubt that I have already lived the best years of my life and even that I have "had a good innings" thus far. The reality of a lived life, as in my case, has stemmed from an ambition to leave a legacy and to do so in more of a philanthropic way that would bring meaning to others in the same way it did for me. Hence the name of my UK school of woodworking was 'The New Legacy School of Woodworking.'

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

The recognition of luxury woodworking came through pure hard work and long days in the saddle. Hand tool woodworking is ten times harder and more demanding than machining wood; of that there can be no doubt. But people choose machine woodworking over hand tools for the wrong reasons. Usually, they misunderstand that developing skills takes a little time but that it should not be a prohibitive belief. In six days my students, the ones who came with zero knowledge of hand tools, took away a dovetailed lidded box with recessed hinging and bullnosed edges, a wall shelf with either three or five shelves fully recessed and mortise and tenoned, and an occasional table in solid oak with shaped legs, and mortise and tenoned joinery. I'm not too sure whether any one of them ever believed that they could actually do it, but I did.

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

Month on month and year on year, 15 or so students arrived every week and took their place at a bench or around mine. Within the hour they were making their first dovetail joints with surgically sharp hand tools, and their eyes were aglow with excitement and self-belief.

What do a California judge, a Texas obstetrician, and a Dallas Episcopalian priest have in common? They all came to learn chairmaking with me back in 2008. But the most important point here is to see that these men had no prior experience beyond my week-long foundational course, and that is primarily what woodworkingmasterclasses.com replaced, along with our sister site, commonwoodworking.com. None of these men were in any way manual workers per se. I say this to say that we may have been led to believe that the more academic were not likely to be good at manual crafts. I have found that to be far from true.

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

But that was quite the luxury. I had to reach a wider audience, a greater following to pass on my skills to, and I had to write all the more not to be swallowed up by the fake-makes on social media. My craft of hand tool woodworking had been dealt a tremendous blow over several decades, and the craft of real handwork was dying out unchallenged. With no next-generation cohort entering the world to carry the baton, we would soon lose our future skilled makers...and we have!

Magazines dedicated to woodworking rarely promoted hand tool methods at that time. That was because their main income stream was from the big machine makers, who then spent masses on advertising on their pages and so hogged the limelight as the progressive way most of the time. Their high-demand output was therefore for a working knowledge of machines, not hand tools. Or at least that was the editor's interpretation of it. When the editor of Fine Woodworking at that time told me he didn't want "anything philosophical" in submitted articles, I realised just how much magazine editors controlled the rhetoric of writers and that what they wanted was my expertise in hand tool woodworking but not any ideals I might want to express. I felt it best to not write for magazines and start blogging. Magazine editors just wanted new wallpaper every few weeks. Best move ever, but the best and most accommodating editor I knew was the editor of the now defunct magazine called simply Woodwork. John Levine encouraged me month after month and took every article I wrote. I was sorry to see that one go, and though it was bought out or taken over by another magazine with the promise that it would continue as before, I could see the writing on the wall, and after a couple of issues, it was scrapped.

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

By April 9th, a new coffee table emerged quite quickly from some rough-sawn planks and piles of shavings by my feet. This piece had a secret drawer that swung out sideways from one of the aprons in an arch. I wanted something for remotes and such. I think it was a clever point not only in the idea but also in the construction too. I kept continuity of grain throughout the five pieces so that nothing exposed this hidden feature of my design.

I enjoy seeing some basic hand tools surrounding my work, knowing that when I lift them to task, they will always obey the muscle and sinew I use to connect them to my goal. The idea was an experiment, but not the making methodology. Decades of handwork make my outcome predictable.

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

The blank canvas was near magic for me. Each design came together as a freedom of expression, and yet the traditions of my craft were indeed insistent in my designing. By that I mean that mostly I wanted the proven longevity traditional joinery gave to my designs, while at the same time I could use a screw through a dovetail that would never be seen if I wanted to. Yes, it would increase the strength of resistance that comes through such a fastening, but that was not the reason for its inclusion. I used it as an immediate 'clamp,' and, if I can conjugate the verb, the clamping with permanent pull power too. Even though it will be hidden from sight, there is an attractive quality to it.

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

The tri-part seat construction was to facilitate the reality that a 24" wide piece of solid cherry within a frame would want to both expand and shrink according to seasonal atmospheric moisture changes. When I now sit in the chair, I am glad that I thought to accommodate the possibility; the wooden seat expanded by a total of 12 mm, which is half an inch in old money, and the gaps have all remained closed up for five years to date.

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

In May, I had bought in more rough-sawn cherry for bookshelves. Buying rough sawn gives you an extra quarter inch of thickness, and if you work with hand tools, cut judiciously, you can get a good inch of thickness if you want or need to. Yes, it took some planing, by hand, that is, but it was so needed for my health exercise, and I enjoyed it very much too.

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

The luxury of prototyping results in a solid design, but of course it's not possible for everyone to make two with a home for only one. My first one came from pine studs, some might consider low-grade material or, in some worlds, trash wood, but I have never seen any wood as a trash wood. Here in the UK, we favour spruce for studwork, which is more stable than southern yellow pine, which crawls all over the place once the steel bands are snapped off.

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

By now you will better understand my world. The luxury of hard and diligent work became affordable for me because I chose my time would not be spent digitally more than a couple of hours a day. By nine in the morning I had worked for two hours writing every day. Then I put my computer away and didn't touch it again unless it was essential. My phone, too, is not much of an entity. If I am in a cafe with a friend, my personal rule is no digital devices. That's for me. I am totally in the presence of my company. It might surprise you that with this as a personal rule, rarely will my company pull out their phone either...and guess what? We spend the whole hour talking with each other. It's always nice!

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

It's mid June 2021 when I think of this. To be honest with you. I don't even know how to turn one on, nor do I know how to change channels. It's 1986 since I last watched TV or switched one on. But even so, I accept they are still central to most homes, even if it is only for the big events. But I was interested in creating a TV stand for my audience, though. The only game I ever played on a computer, which was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in or about 1984, was a game called Thro' The Wall. After ten minutes I was done with the boredom of it and never returned.

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

The very sizable drawer makes a wonderful toy drawer for my granddaughter, but it works equally well for family blankets to watch TV on colder nights. The blank canvas allows me to invest in different joinery.

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

Life in woodworking is always about composition of one kind or another and then composing the whole in a way that delivers a sense of completeness. My living room only needs small pieces now: a wall shelf, some coasters, one or two other casual tables.

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

I'm at the end of July with the above piece, still 2021. It's an exceptionally sad time for my family. We are about to fly to Dallas and on to Waco to be with my son and his wife and family. We had a sudden death this month, a young soul lost to us. As I look through my history of photographs, it's a loss that hits me most days and enough to remind me that life is very fragile. The deep questions in life rarely get answered fully enough for us to rest. Making, for me, reflects the physical as much as a drawing or written text, the photograph, and the video our minds play back to us as we go through our day. I hold to the fond memories, the smiles and laughter, the scrapes and tumbles that make for living.

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

The coasters are still working fine; not much to go wrong with them. I like the clean, striped look emulating tambour and then the multicolored diversity of mixed woods and grains like this. Offcuts, or what we called thinnings, work great for small pieces like this too.

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

Here, last but not least for this post, is the wall shelf replicating the tambour used in the television stand below it. This method of closing in with narrow strips of otherwise useless offcuts that have almost no use is an unusual and remarkable solution. I just started keeping the rippings with this in mind, but of course you can create rippings from solid wood too. I like the the overall look it creates, and it really takes very little effort to create the strips, whether from waste offcuts or solid pieces from a wider board.

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

This next cluster of tables came together in November. I made more than this, some in cherry and some in oak. They are corner fillers, armchair companions, plant elevators, and such. Just handy sports in any house or office, really.

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

We have five more spaces to create for at the end of 2021. I may dip back into this room later, but for now, it's ready for Christmas celebrations 2021.

I will close by saying this work has been 98% hand tool woodworking. Just so that you know it can be done and that you will more than likely be equal to it.

I have spent the last five years designing and then making pieces for a real family living in a real but quite ordinary family home. The average UK or European-sized home is more compact than those I came to know in the USA and Texas, and I chose this because globally, it was better to...

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Please join us in wishing Paul a happy 76th birthday!

Can you believe he is 76? We can't!

Thank you for all your support for him. He loves showing you all his work and has much planned for the year ahead.

- Paul's Family

Please join us in wishing Paul a happy 76th birthday! Can you believe he is 76? We can’t! Thank you for all your support for him. He loves showing you all his work and has much planned for the year ahead. – Paul’s Family

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The distinction in greetings often differentiates American from our UK English. One continent generally says a, "Merry Christmas," and in the other it's more likely to be "Happy Christmas." Having lived in the USA as a 'resident alien' with rights to live and work, pay taxes to two revenue services, be that HMRC (His Majesty's Revenue Service) or the IRS (Inland Revenue Service), I know that the meaning in both is the same. We all want others to be joyful, find rest, and have a period of recovery as we close one year and prepare to begin a new one.

Wherever you are in the world, this message is for you. I hope that you will find peace and space to enjoy a few days of fun and enjoyment with those you hold dear as we break away from work to be with family and friends over the next few days. You have all been very supportive and encouraging for such a long period: thank you, and peace to all of you this Christmas as we close 2025.

And where you can, nod a hi to the lonely; speak it if you can. They'll know they are there if you do.

The distinction in greetings often differentiates American from our UK English. One continent generally says a, “Merry Christmas,” and in the other it’s more likely to be “Happy Christmas.” Having lived in the USA as a ‘resident alien’ with rights to live and work, pay taxes to two revenue services, be that HMRC (His Majesty’s...

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My advocacy for high-demand hand tool woodworking doesn't preclude machining wood; it never has nor will. I don't own or use power machines like chopsaws, power planers, tablesaws, mortisers, spindle moulders (shapers USA), their smaller cousins, power routers, and such like that, and that's from both personal choice and my advocacy for the art and craft skilled hand tool woodworking delivers in my personal choice. I do use and advocate a bandsaw , though; that's for reducing larger sections of wood (as in beams and boards) down to manageable sizes and near workable final levels of width and thickness. This one machine balances out my day for a truly practical approach without sacrificing the valuable space the majority of amateur woodworkers rely on for their machining work. It also reduces unhealthy and invasive elements that create excessive noise and atmospheric pollution. I was about to take a few lines in a few paragraphs to address erroneous thoughts and comments people have, and then I thought, I wonder what AI says about Paul Sellers' views on machining wood. Here are some revealing and unexpurgated AI insights:

A spokeshave sharpened well cleans up surfaces like curves to an impeccable level of smoothness, needing no further sanding or file work. It's fast and efficient and knows no equal.

I think we are all somewhat concerned about the impact AI will have on the work we do. I have a friend who produces written content as a copywriter who sees the writing on the wall for his work as his hours are being gradually reduced, and he's reading what AI has written more as a proofreader editing role "until AI gets more reliable.", his bosses say. The company executives controlling his job and changing the details of his contract year-on-year are as insensitive as AI is. I'm less in the entertainment business than others, but there is as much a reality to today's working population who extol the benefits of AI as there was when Luddites tried to protect their world of artisanry as the Industrial Revolution developed its rotary cuts through machines to ultimately dispense with skilled workmanship to make money for mill owners and the wealthy at the expense of craftsmen and women. Of course, you can't stop progress, and we all know that good things come alongside influences that destroy our health, stability, and sustainability. Science gave us the oils from which we create plastic skin to cover our bodies with and then the shoes and socks to run in, which restrict the body's largest organ that lives and breathes as the chief organ that works like the bowels, liver, kidneys, and such to keep our bodies clean and clear. What's that? The skin.

My son's hands carving the neck of another cello, and he works the box for tuning pegs using only mortising techniques he learned when he was less than ten years old.

The largest organ of our human body is our skin. The skin serves to protect our innards against germs, temperature changes, injury, and much more. It's the first wall of defense in regulating our body temperature while at the same time producing vitamin D. Our skin covers the entire external surface, which is roughly about 2.137 square meters. Whereas our skin is the largest overall organ we own, our liver takes second place as the largest internal organ, followed by our lungs, which are equally intermittently large by our breathtaking capacity in their expanding and contracting. Even so, our skin leads, but tight black plastic skin worn in athletics denies the body's ability to fully eliminate as it naturally should and would were it left to its natural ability, which it does throughout every day of life. I try for full-time cotton regardless, and I like the resistance factor of wearing my cotton top and bottom for all work activity, cycling, walking, or whatever. Of course, I'm not out there to show off my body, and neither do fashionistas control the image I have of myself. I just wear what wears well, and none of my jeans were bought with slits at the knees. I have worn all of my current pairs of jeans now for four years on a daily basis, and none of them have splits occurring. Makes you wonder how working jeans became a fashion to emulate.

A hundred thousand hand cut joints have come from my hands in the provision for my family. Six decades have passed using hand tools when everyone elsewhere said, "you can't make a living that way." Of course, you could. I was more interested in living to make rather than making a living. I'm still alive and still working full-time. It worked!

That aside, just what does Paul Sellers feel about machining work in woodworking?

One thing I should say up front is that I have never said machines are inherently "bad"; I simply advocate strongly in defense that hand tools and hand tool woodworking methods have progressively—there's that word, "progress" again—been diminished by the common but erroneous belief that machine-heavy methods are the progressive way. I do, therefore, criticise what I see as an over-reliance on machining wood, and especially is this so for beginners. My argument is that handwork provides the most incredible physical and mental benefits that simply get lost when wood is processed mainly or entirely by machine. The problem I also see is that machinists cannot see this because, well, they rarely master any level of handwork in their woodworking. They believe an evolutionary process always results in improvement and never see the losses that take place.

The solitude of handwork remarkably pleases my day, and at the end of it I still feel fully relaxed in my whole body and mind. My blood pressure is usually around 115/65 and pulse rate stays dead on 60 beats a minute. It makes me both grateful and thankful.

Over the years, my thoughts have evolved progressively towards what I see is a reversal of major industrialism in the amateur realms of woodworking, yes, but then too in independent small-scale woodworking as well. As a case in point: imagine recessing a hinge with a power router, or cutting a dovetail with the same equipment. What a fiddle faddle. Nu huh!

My way, has been to deindustrialise true craft in a way of reversal that then releases the dependency while at the same time provides the essential exercise and fitness training for a fit body and mind. Of course, there are the key benefits machines give us that downsize a tree to handleable, manageable sizes to just get on with the creative side of creative work by the dextrous endeavour of using our hands. As a result, my main criticism of working wood by machine and then too machine-first woodworking have my following concerns:

Every mortise I have cut these past fifteen years have come this way. The grip, the power, the direction all belong to me.

Through the years and decades, I have decided it's best for me to separate working wood with my choice of hand tools so that the hand tool is always delivered to the wood by my own human entirety; by this I mean that that includes any and all involvement regarding cut direction, power and energy to control by personal self-discipline, etc, but all the more, it's the multidimensionality demanding a whole mind and body.

It's only by my using my hand tools that I find myself fully and mercifully enveloped in my world of hand work; by this alone I become engaged with the wood and the tools I am using. I have no choice to disengage my senses even for a split second in deploying shifts in my dexterity to guide the cut. I have no machine to wait for as surfaces are planed or passed into a power-feed. It's a totally different and unconnected, unplugged world, and I like it that way.

So, hopefully, you will see that it is more about balance than prohibition. I know that in business, most machinist woodworkers must rely on speed to expedite every cut. They live in a competitive world where the less expensive gets the approved bid by the client. Everyone wants to pay less so that they can own more, in that world. Also, physical ability or inability can disable us for many different and good reasons, and a machine will often but not always help here.

Aged 39, I had taken myself off the conveyor belt for a decade already. That's four and a half decades ago now. I lost nothing and gained everything I wanted in woodworking.

I should make this absolutely clear, though: I do not advocate for a total rejection of any and all machinery at all, and I have never told anyone to get rid of their machines. I have encouraged everyone to take much more risk in their work until they develop some real woodworking skills that ultimately result in greater confidence and thereby absolute predictability; I don't wonder if a mortise and tenon will fit well or that a dovetail will have gaps; they just do. Advising people along my lines is not at all one and the same thing as saying get rid of your machines. As said above, I acknowledge that machines are useful and even more than useful in some situations. My using a bandsaw for quick reduction in dimensioning rough stock frees me up for the more critical work joinery brings to my life, but I draw the line at housing an under and over power planer. Yes, it would save me more time, but I feel fit and strong and could never get what I get from being bored in the gym with earbuds in and trying to self-entertain to relieve the boredom of gym work. My core mission, therefore, is to restore a balance that allows the continuous development and maintenance of skilled handwork and muscle toning for necessary and usable muscle, which happens to emphasize the importance of traditional methods and skills that have been sidelined by the machine era. Hence, by way of correction, I never, nor ever will, call any power equipment a 'tool.' If it has any kind of motor, it's a machine.

Other crafts have stopped me in my tracks for decades now. A friend of mine, a blacksmith, muscled and hard, had the most delicate touch of any manual worker I ever knew.

By now, you will see that I do not advocate that everyone should exclusively rely on hand tools, but I am a strong proponent of them and use them for 99% of my woodwork. I acknowledge the utility and functionality of machines in some circumstances and that they might well prove expedient to those already owning them and the shop to house them as they transition through a period of development if that suits them. My using a bandsaw is not transitional, but an arrival of all I need for the day and future. Ripping down thick sections of any hardwood is not fun at all, so resawing and dimensioning lumber, and using a handheld circular saw for ripping in some situations is an acceptable option, though it has been years since I used anything much beyond my bandsaw. Machines for all of us do take out some of what I refer to as the 'donkey work'. The problem comes when they replace hand tools and all hand involvement beyond passing wood into cutterheads. This, for me, is a disconnect. The bandsaw has become my best complementary machine, but it's definitely a machine and not a tool. 

Here is my truism: I prefer traditional hand tools for the feedback they always, always give me. They pull me into a world I truly enjoy. In other words, they give me the 'sensation of knowing my work in every dimension of my being.' This type of work demands an ability to adjust my presentation immediately I feel something feeding back to me as I work. I teach and promote this because it fosters a deeper understanding of woodworking principles along with developed sensitivities; the work becomes much more alive because my muscle and mind continually develop their 'muscle-tone' creatively as I go through my days and weeks of woodworking.

My classes drew fathers and daughters, fathers and sons and then mothers and sons too. It's a unique passage for both, and they added a new dynamism to the courses.

Again, in case you missed it, finding our personal balance is critical to wellbeing and is not hinged to those selling and marketing product for profit. Remember, all the magazines ever published are ultimately put out by publishing companies of one kind or another and are hinged to one kind of marketing strategy or another. In the woodworking magazine world, half the pages are usually dedicated to selling stuff, and machine sales and support equipment usually take up all the advertising pages that are designed to make you buy fashionably.

By Way of Correcting:

My world is less contaminated than most people's worlds, where couples sit down in cafés for a sociable cup of coffee, pull out their phones, and spend the next hour or so tip-tapping the flat, hard-wearing glass screen with an occasional brief few words followed by a nod, a grunt, or the raising of an eyebrow to follow. So I have to admit to being taken somewhat by surprise by the level of accuracy AI replicates its information about my digital endeavors; I might even say 'pleasantly surprised' because I don't intentionally work digitally that much in my average day. The fact is, I love to write about a sentient life making and recall things from my past, the day I'm in and then my unfolding future hopes too.

Handwork is a composition in every turn of hand, twist and hold. We offer the tools to the wood in special ways that are not always comfortable but always quite unique.

Also from me, PS: AI suggests that I use a drill press, but of course, I never use one in any of my online teaching because it sends the wrong message to my audience. I'd hate for anyone to think they must own such a thing and must go out and buy one. Also, I don't use one for woodworking either, as it happens: no one needs a drill press unless they are in some level of production. Mostly, those that have one have one from preference. I own one, and I use it for metalworking. I also own a hand-held jigsaw, which I use mainly for cross-cutting long planks of mainly rough-sawn 40mm thick hardwood when I first bring it into the shop from my suppliers and then too for sheet goods. Some happenings around my day disafford me the luxury of spending too much time hand sawing, but you might be surprised by how much I use handsaws for the same purpose. As far as power-sanding goes, I am an advocate for both random orbit sanders and 4" belt sanders. I own a Makita belt sander and a DeWalt random orbit 5" sander. I do not rely on them very much at all, though, and that's because all of my surfaces are hand planed smooth anyway; sometimes plywood arrives with raised-grain surface fibres; nothing knocks this back better than an RO sander. RO sanding does give the wood a nice surface to apply finish to. That said, every single surface I create is straightened and trued, squared and leveled with a couple of very basic, non-retrofitted Stanley bench planes; mainly I use a #4 and #5 Stanley but still reach for a #4 1/2 and #5 1/2. I have no preference between Record and Stanley. Neither one works better or is better made than the other. Brits might cling to an erroneous belief that British Sheffield-made is better-made from better materials, but that's never been true at all. The materials may not be questionable, but workmanship since the 2nd World War is. Most of the tools bought since then, even so-called premium ones, should be seen more as a kit of parts requiring an upgrade in craftsmanship. Investing your sweat-equity (though it shouldn't be needed) will give you a good feel about the tool. Saws and planes can take but five minutes to do what the makers should have just done it in the first place. Such is the pride of British making that relies on their daddy's reputation. It's also the reason that premium planes from North America (excluding Mexico) and Asia have set such high standards.

Placing a chisel carefully, powering through with a firm and measured control, brings guaranteed results to live for and live with.

It's not cheating to use wood fillers of different types, ranging from superglue to coloured waxes, in the same way it's not to use stains and wood dyes. My quest is to persuade people to pursue mastery as an achievable way of woodworking and a way to reduce the dependency on repairing work because of the lack of establishing skills early on. I do believe that there is working knowledge with machines, but that that is so easily achievable I cannot truly call it skilled woodworking. 95% of machine working is pretty well unskilled but produces similar or even better results as skilled handwork, and it's this that makes people look more accomplished than they are. My conclusion in machine work is that it revolves around how to work machines safely, and that's because they are so inherently dangerous; you will lose part of or even a whole finger or three in a heartbeat, and a SawStop only works if skin connects to the running saw blade, whereas other things occur when sawing by machine; for instance, wood splits and throws wood back at the machinist despite anti-kick safety features. Wood splinters back without any warning and throws them like mini darts at eyes and faces generally.

Some tools rest while others keep working in preparation for the others to come into play. So it is with the gauges, squares and knives.

One thing that we should be prepared to either accept or make again is a poor joint. Slithers and fillers in dovetails for the sake of simply starting over and trying again doesn't usually cut it for me. That said, I do have a technique for gap filling, as long as it's no more than a thou' off. Even so, it's better to cut a fresh piece and strive for a good fit rather than accept second best if, if, the work is intended to represent your good and serious woodwork. In commerce of the past, it was commonplace to use colour-matching preparatory fillers, plastered in and on and belt-sanded off level, because the machined joinery might not have been that good. These days, machined joints are well-made, even though they always look machine-made. That said, it is not handmade, and I have never advocated machine making in place of handwork, nor have I leaned towards using power equipment except in my commercial making, making thousands of one type of cut or joint. These days, especially, well, it would rob me of the joy I get from hand cutting my joinery.

And there is is. The best router in the world. I designed it and made it and now love it over all others.

I have seen and learned about just about all the 'cheats' used in woodworking, and I have created many of my own, but never to deceive, more to resolve for several excellent reasons, including the reality that wood moves even overnight or even cracks in a drier atmosphere and the frame of it is glued up and irretrievable otherwise. Wood can split for different reasons in a finished and glued up project, and you can miss something you should have seen and didn't. Adding a handmade veneer to clean up an edge that would be impossible to fix any other way is perfectly acceptable. Painstakingly abrading something level where wiry grain wholly despised the plane and positioning disallowed the scraper at that critical intersection of a joint keeps our sanity and speeds recovery. Our perfectionism is usually little more than mere pride and legalism anyway; both of these bedfellows, opposite sides of the same coin, are destructive even when they are self-induced.

Turned on the lathe or spokeshaved by hand. Both ways work fine but one leaves me very contented.

At the end of the day, we should feel after how we feel about a repair in the new work we are making. I wish I had a pound for every repair and recovery I have personally invented and resorted to. With an expert eye, they might possibly be detected, but this will be someone trying to catch me or us out in decades to come, should my or our work ever go under the eagle-eyed scrutiny of legalists trying to find fault and using X-ray equipment or even sonar to undermine the output.

And it is not glued up yet, nor is it clamped. Every surface is always, always hand planed.

Sometimes, often, we need to take away the colour to punctuate our realness to others. Beyond the conveyor belts is a private place to rejig without jigs and guides, to take risks in our handwork that might just surprise us by our exactness. The cut delivered a beauty that jumped off the page we were living that day, that hour, and that millisecond when the smile came, our eyes rested on beauty, and we rested from a beautiful accomplishment..

My advocacy for high-demand hand tool woodworking doesn’t preclude machining wood: it never has nor will. I don’t own or use power machines like chopsaws, power planers, tablesaws, mortisers, spindle moulders (shapers USA), their smaller cousins, power routers and such like that, and that’s from both personal choice and my advocacy for the art and...

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