The greatest gift from a teacher is success, for success fertilises the desire for more success and nourishes self esteem. A student, typically, is the hardest assessor of their own work. So, the creation of work where students feel their own success is the art of teaching. This piece of work began with the donation of…
Enthusiastic, beginning woodworkers look for a place to discover their skills. They read about traditional benches; material costs and required skills are both intimidating. Such great fulfilment can be had when woodworking that I hope the people to whom I talk feel encouraged to go out and experiment with their own creativity. How simply and…
There are versions of this on ETSY and Thingiverse and probably many other places. I couldn’t find anywhere that seemed like an original source. My whole family are all getting one. They will love it because it is from my hands.
My friends were impressed by the notion that our train’s carriages could be hooked together and towed around. It failed, however, in that each woodworker could only take home a single carriage; they had nothing to tow. At the end of the train project, and experiencing a flush of overconfidence, I asked staff for inspiration. They requested a fire…
It has been a long absence from blogging. To explain would take a box of tissues and a patient listener. …suffice to say, I lost my workshop, but am now close to finding it again. A workbench on castors suffers from lack of mobility when small diameter wheels bump into chunks of stuff on the…
Wooden hand plane aficionados (ambiguity intentional) make much of the fact that they can use words like “frog, cutting angle and throat” with confidence. That confidence is proof that they must be experts! If you add complexity to the activity then great reverence must be assumed. Much is made of achieving chisel cuts at particular…