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Yes, but it has to be a proper two pack bleach, not just the household stuff, and I'm assuming you just want to take away a yellow tinge rather than remove the discolouration that comes from serious spalting. The Barnsley Workshop have been doing some amazing stuff, using two pack wood bleaches...

Yes, I've used those for quite a few years now, actually alongside a pair of the Veritas holdfasts! I don't have any tear out problems on my Hard Maple bench and the Veritas holdfasts have a longer reach. However, I still prefer the Simon James holdfasts. They grip much better and are a lot...

It's a 300mm blade with 48t ATB on a Felder sliding table saw. I have a about five or six of these blades and they get cycled through the saw doctor on a regular basis. Like most furniture makers that I know I don't actually do all that much ripping on the table saw. I do some, just not as much...

"are the thin lines running across the broken grain 'cross grain'" No, cross grain is something else entirely. They're medullary rays, they're formed in some trees in order to take water and nutrients from the centre of the tree out towards the edges. You'll only see them in certain woods, and...

At school it was a known fact that if you got a paper cut in the web of skin between thumb and fore-finger, then you'd develop lock-jaw and die. This was hard science.

At the end of the day it's all about the instructors and that's just as true in the HNC/HND environment. The head of the Chichester operation is passionate and committed, he gives up his free time to manage Britain's Cabinet Making team in the World Skills competition, in which he's achieved a...

Some give a formal qualification, Chichester College for example had a sky high reputation for its HNC/HND courses, for others it's just the halo effect.

Be careful when choosing a course, amongst furniture makers some training establishments enjoy far better reputations than others. Amongst the issues I've heard about are inadequate safety standards, overly large projects designed to keep students occupied with minimal supervision...

On the day of 911 I was due to attend a conference in Washington. My flight was turned around mid Atlantic and returned to London, some of colleagues on different flights were diverted to Newfoundland, but another group had flown in the day before and were already in Washington on that fateful...

For your purposes Craft Veneers will take some beating. You get to see a photo of the actual veneers you're buying, their quality is pretty good, and they're geared up for smaller quantities. There may come a point where you want a much wider range and to physically choose in person exactly...

What polyurethane? Some of the water based ones are notoriously soft. You can get a rubbed gloss, but the surface will be too soft to hold it for very long. Micro scratches from household polishing means it'll end up satin. The irony is that because the surface is soft, even if you begin with a...

Wot he said ^^^

I regularly make pieces with large, waney edged slabs. These can be sizeable pieces of furniture, large desks or dining tables for example. But my planer thicknesser can only take a 410mm wide board. One other thing, these slabs will often be hard, tough tropical timbers. I guess I could use a...

As long as it doesn't get packed full of shavings a shallow hole may be all you need, BenchDogs do a really short dog that's one of the "twist to lock" style, it's absolutely rock solid and dead accurate.

I'm loving my woodburner on these frosty days!

We've all been there, and if we haven't then it's lurking somewhere in our woodworking futures!

Yes, that should sort it. Provided you've got room to the left of your bench (and it looks like you have) you could also just shunt the fence over to the left by a couple of dog holes if you found yourself needing to do the occasional short cross cut. I do most of my sawing on a sliding table...

There are so many design features that are characteristic of the Barnsley Workshop, from a love affair with octagons to the scalloped shapes that you see in the Hayrake Table carried over into all sorts of other applications. Take this jewellery box for example, But there are also lots of...

That's kind of you to say Dave, but I guarantee you could make one of those. It's only difficult if you don't know how it's done, once someone has shown you how to make it, then it's no longer all that hard. And that's true for about 99% of woodworking! It's why I believe investing in training...

They're not an easy tool to source used. The reason is that the skew on the iron has to be accurately preserved across every sharpening/honing in the tool's operational life for it to function correctly, and the majority of the ones I've seen have had the point on the iron dubbed over. Easily...