Here are the parts of our back scratcher. As with most of our work, fixing is achieved by belting 6mm dowels into 5.5mm holes. The handle is well suited to batch production but the body of the scratchy bit took a while. Each had to be individually marked out. It was the least efficient part…
Three Variations of the Same Theme There is a tradition in Melbourne secondary schools that has twelve year olds in their first woodwork lessons making a pencil case. Regardless of how ordinary the results may be, these things end up with magnificent decoration. During boring lessons they are canvas for expression of everything from undying…
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…
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…
For Whom Do We Make? The stuff we make involves many interested parties. There are: the makers, staff who help, managers of the centre, recipients of the objects, et al. Given the positive power of enthusiasm, it is good to spread that good feeling as widely as possible. When the makers make more than they need,…
Work with my disabled friends depends heavily on efficient batch production. For reasons not worth recounting my workshop is out of action for about a year. So, work with my friends has stalled, horribly! To maintain our hands together relationship I need to invent stuff that requires very little wood machining. Here are two pieces…