Alongside teaching my courses, I’m currently delivering a year-long City and Guilds L1 in Carpentry and Joinery on a 1:1 basis with a young person. They come in weekly to develop their knowledge and skills, and today they finished their first project of their own design: a biltong drying cabinet!

The workshop will reopen to visitors on April 20th! Courses/tuition will resume from May 19th! 😃

Like last summer visits will be by appointment only to begin with and again some changes to help keep everyone safe, these include reduced opening hours, track and trace logging and the provision of sanitizer/hand washing facilities. 🧼

Monty and I are looking forward to seeing you all again 🐶

So what was in the brown paper package i posted on my instagram story the other day? 🧐

A 2” Barr cabinet makers chisel! 😃 I’ve admired these handmade chisels since I first saw them in a woodwork magazine nearly 20 years ago and not long after in the flesh at college during my apprenticeship!

I’ve been using a 2” Ashley Iles chisel for squaring up chunky mortises and chopping wide shoulder lines on tenons among other things for about 12 years but have always found it to be a little too long/unwieldy and the blade a bit thin, this new chisel certainly is better proportioned and has a much more robust blade, really looking forward to using this tool day to day 😁

Some machine maintenance today, it’s a job I’ve put off for far to long!

Adjusting the table saw’s sliding table.. over time the settings have moved ever so slightly, the sliding table is supposed to be set to have a very slight ‘toe out’ where the table moves fractionally away from the blade to prevent the back of the blade from binding on the workpiece. Mine had become a tad ‘toe’d in’ which made cross cutting wide boards frustrating.

The Hammer C3 31 is really easy to adjust (though the machines instructions have a lot to be desired) all it took was a spanner, a simple jig to hold a dial gauge and a bit of patience, now it’s spot on👌😃

This should come in handy next week, keeping an eye on process timing for my new Roubo workbench course trial run ⏱

Building on the success of my other courses I am hoping to launch a three day workbench building course this year.

I am about to begin building a prototype of the course workbench to check that my proposed time scale and costings are realistic.

For further information and proposed specifications please check out the link below

Tool of the Month had been a bit forgotten this year but here’s a short new entry!

Back in September I treated myself to a new Lie Nielsen number 8 jointer plane. This is the largest commercially made hand plane available, at 2foot long it’s huge!

I decided to pick one up after flattening my recently built Roubo workbench, my no 7 handled it fine but the extra length and mass of the no 8 should make the process a little faster next time, plus the sole is long enough for me to us it as a straight edge to check progress whilst flattening, rather than stopping and messing around with a straight edge.

Looking forward to using this on my next Roubo workbench build due to start in November/December (more on this soon) 😃

For more about jointer planes have a look at my previous blog post about the no7 jointer plane!

Last week was a busy one on the teaching front 😅

Beginning the week with Dan who made an ash cutlers stool on Monday (first cutlers stool to be made from ash, definitely won’t be the last!).

Then on Wednesday Oscar came in and made a beech cutlers stool with lovely contrasting walnut wedges.

Finally on Thursday I was joined by Lisa and Luke for a newly introduced ‘Taster for Two’ day!

four happy ‘students’, four fantastic stools, one slightly croaky voice...

Fancy coming on a course? Or giving a course as a gift? (Christmas is coming.... 🎅) follow the link below for further information.