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…
What Do You Like? Not liking hammers doesn’t make you a freak. It gives you the opportunity to like something else. One of my friends has trouble concentrating for more that a couple of minutes. He will stop work, stand up and walk away! Hammering, sanding and lacquering just don’t hold him. BUT, when he…
Pallet wood has challenges.If patina tells a story, this is a saga of neglect.The milling process was rushed, the drying stage left twists and warps, and nails fixed the stigma of an abusive past with rusty stains.With such baggage, construction needed to compensate by accepting skewed realities. All timber in this table was rescued from dumping…
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…
Another rescued lathe stand. This steel construction makes a rigid scaffold on which to mount a work top. The surface is an oregon timber beam removed from a house during renovation. There are splits and twists, but to remove them would have lost 20mm in thickness and 70mm in width. After judicious machining, the bench…
A woodwork project with children led me to revisit Sam’s basket as an Easter project. Here it is with a bit of upholstery and a few eggs in side. Modifications Making this with dexterous children allowed a few modifications to the original method.The skewers that we laboriously drilled for and hammered in could be simple…