A mid-life crisis?

“No matter how insignificant the thing you have to do, do it as well as you can, give it as much of your care and attention as you would give to the thing you regard as most important. For it will be by those small things that you shall be judged.” Mohandas K. Gandhi

As I was working hard, planing some ash stock to make a sewing box, it occurred to me that I  had been concentrating for a good few hours on what, in the big scheme of life, is fairly meaningless. Ought I to be wasting my sunday evening on the "simple" task of making four pieces of wood to perfect dimensions, all square and true? There are so many other things that really need doing. Am I burying my head in the sand? Am I procrastinating to delay more important tasks (mostly work related)?


Probably. But one thing is certain: I had not thought about everyday stresses in all that time spent in the deep immersion of my woodworking.


I could try meditation, yoga, fishing…


At least this way I am producing something that will hopefully be of use, be aesthetically satisfying and god willing be appreciated for years to come.

The tail vice and bench dogs

For planing boards and a variety of other tasks where the workpiece needs to be flat and firmly held, one option is the tail vice with a bench dog system. See how I made mine very easily here.

A Panel Board

If you have visited my page on making a tail vice and bench dogs, you may recall mention of a panel board.

Well I finally got round to putting one together. And very easy it is too.

It's basically made from a few off-cuts of plywood and pine. It only took a few minutes to make and is very useful for working on a medium size piece.

The baton is screwed in place and can be moved depending on the size of your workpiece.

The wedges hold things nice and secure

The board has a stop underneath which is clamped in the vice.

Easy!

Been Rather Busy!

Since my first post a couple of weeks back I've been pretty damn busy. Mainly with my real profession which maybe I'll go into at some point.

I've finished my intermediate course with the completion of the oilstone box. 

I'm pretty pleased with the result. Check it out. Comments are very welcome.

The box was a great chance to play with the Veritas low angle jack plan both for end-grain shooting and also using the higher angle iron for smoothing the iroko's interlocking grain.

My new Father's Day present (Lie Nielsen low angle skew block plane) got a bit of a workout too on the coffin top ends. It's a beautiful plane which I'm sure I'll get tonnes of use from in the years to come.

The African iroko finishes beautifully and with a danish oil and beeswax finish is sooo smooth.

In addition I've been prepping ash for my first attempt at a dovetail box. I've made a box lid from some beautifully figured sapele. I've used a door frame type construction incorporating haunched stopped mortise and tenons hand cut with a hand-me-down motise chisel from my Dad. I also used my Grandfather's old wooden plough plane to prepare a groove in the frame to accommodate the central panel. This was prepared with a rebate cut with my L-N medium shoulder plane (before I had been given the skew block plane). Using a baton clamped to the workpiece was actually really simple and very effective.Keep a lookout for some pics before the glue up stage.

First post in a new blog!

I've been learning the art and skills of fine woodworking since October last year.
I thought it may be of interest to record the process as I (hopefully) develop from virtual novice to… well I guess I'll have to wait and see.
Maybe just an older, greyer novice.

First things first..

I must give a big mention to John McMahon School of Fine Woodworking based at Pleasley Mill near Mansfield Nottinghamshire. Check out the website if you're interested.

schoolofwoodworking.co.uk

I'll add posts now and then with thoughts and experiences as i build up my experience of creating things out of wood mainly using hand tools.

The question is 

why in this age of CAD, CNC equipment, 3-D printing and so on, would anyone want to spend the considerable time and effort to make something from solid wood, by hand using techniques that have been around for centuries (millennia actually - think Noah and the ark!) when there are much easier (and cheaper) ways to "get stuff".

It's not easy to give a simple answer

There are lots of reasons why it would be much simpler to go to B&Q or Ikea and buy a kitchen or flat-pack piece of furniture. I've built (assembled to be more precise) lots of flat packs and even installed my own kitchen.
There is a certain satisfaction in working through those wordless pictorial instructions until the item looks just like the one you saw in the shop.

The kitchen is doing OK after a couple of years of hard use in a family with 2 teenage boys.
But I recall how it grieved me to tear out the solid pine kitchen cupboards, with their warped doors and drawers that didn't close properly.
No "soft close" gliding action here I'm afraid!

The thing about MDF is:

It's precisely reproducible to exact size on machines.
It's also perfectly stable once machined to size: it doesn't shrink or warp or split. (unless it gets wet!)

BUT:
it's totally lifeless - never was alive (ever).
It has no smell.
It has no beauty.
It creates fine dust particles that give you cancer if you breathe too much in!

It doesn't even burn well when you've had enough of it!

So what's the deal with solid wood?

Well it has grain and texture.
That means:

• it might split or tear along the grain as you cut or plane it
• you can't easily work across the direction of the grain
• it will shrink then swell and twist and warp so that your carefully prepared stock no longer fits together

So why on earth would we choose to work with this difficult material??

Precisely because it's is a real, natural substance.
No two pieces are the same.
It's unpredictable.
It's part of nature.
And the desire of us all is to tame the Wild Earth.
Why do humans create landscapes, gardens, even buildings?
We have a deep seated need to modify the raw planet around us into something more controlled.
That which was created by the force of natural laws, by evolution, or by an almighty being, we seek to conquer and re-make in our own fashion.

Perhaps this finds its ultimate expression in the felling of a tree after maybe hundreds of years of growth and by using little more than bare hands to destroy the tree only to recreate something of our own design and making.

By this, (maybe) we are closer to our Creator...