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I beg to differ on this. A normal bench plane (4 or 5 or so) is in my experience less suitable than a block plane when it comes to taking a bit off a very narrow edge simply because the larger planes can be hard to balance on something which is nowhere near as wide as they are. My block plane...

There are no prizes around here for making a case in a reasonable, balanced and sane way! I think you've hit it on the head although I would add one thing: he seems to be developing into a woodworking historian cum archaeologist and that looks like it is leading to interesting results in the...

My cuts tend to drift to the right (although it results in a slope rather than a curve) and so I always ensure that the waste is on the right. One thing that has really helped though is watching the reflection of the edge - at right angles to the cut line - in the saw plate: if the reflected...

I've just had a measure of the wood and if I plane the blemish away carefully I should end up with 11/16" which obviously is just shy of 3/4". To answer the above queries: I'm calling it a shoe box but officially it's more of a shoe chest. It's based on the concept of a Mule Chest as depicted...

The commonest thickness for most cases seems to be 3/4" (19 mm). In absolute terms one can see why: the wood looks neither unduly cumbersome nor spindly. What do you feel are the upper and lower limits for thickness which are still aesthetically (as opposed to structurally) acceptable? I ask...

Interesting replies, especially about Victorian doors. Do they have no effect on the side walls of the mortices then? In my opinion, they are more important to get right i.e. flat and square, than the bottom.

Swan-necked chisels (fourth item down on the link) https://www.classichandtools.com/acatal ... isels.html are designed for tidying up the bottoms of mortices. The bottoms of my mortices tend to end up a bit ragged which has never bothered me too much as I think that flat and square sides should...

That's extremely interesting. On one point though the Veritas looks like a winner and that's the cost. The monofunctional (is that a proper word?) but very beautiful HNT Gordon looks like it costs nearly as much as the Veritas but the latter can, obviously, do much more. And given that by all...

The following might be of interest as a postscript to this. On Sunday I had to cut six rails each of 16" x 1 1/2" x 3/8". I had a piece of tulipwood/American poplar which was 17 1/2" x 6" x 1 1/8" all planed, squared up and ready to go. So from the reference face I marked a cut line 7/16" in...

No, I'm not sure. However, the physiological differences between the sexes around the back and hip area might lead to slight but significant differences when it comes to addressing work pieces on the bench with a plane. If that is the case then it would make sense to analyse such differences...

From your observations it looks like it might be a question of physiognomy i.e. the fact that men and women are built differently. For instance, women benefit from bicycle saddles and rucksacks which are designed specifically for their frames. Workbenches have evolved for the men who...

That explains it. I hand planed probably about max. 1/8" from one side and took off the better part of 3/8" with the bandsaw from the other side. The subsequent cupping is not massive (all the boards are from a fairly well behaved plank) but enough to scupper any thought of dovetailing without...

That's an eye opener. The pear is lovely, by the way. Did you leave the sycamore unstained or did you go on to treat it?

About three months ago I bought a board of American poplar (tulipwood) and had it cut into 1 m lengths at the timber yard. Then it sat in my workshop. At the weekend I flattened one face and one edge of each piece so I could run them through my new bandsaw to get to a bit more than final...

Custard, that is a lovely table and chair. From the second picture it looks like you made the top and legs from two different kinds of wood (or two different cuts of the same kind?) yet you ended up, presumably after staining, with a harmonious whole. How did you manage that?

Thanks for all the tips. It hadn't occurred to me that judging straightness of a long piece by eye would be enough but now you mention it, it seems obvious. I'm also grateful for Graham's advice about the need to get it done in one go for fear of the wood moving. If I do decide to do this...

Good Morning All, I've recently had my bathroom done up and part of the work involved temporarily removing the door. As luck would have it, the thickness of the new tiles means the door is now about 1/4" too long. At first this was a little frustrating but then I realised I didn't...

You may well get to see the rest. The build of this thing has been running for more than two years now and the last job is the tills. So far I've got one and a half of the three done and the final step will be fitting little knobs to them to make them easy to move. Like a lot of traditional...

I've been making a tool chest in accordance with the plan in the book The Anarchist's Tool Chest by Christopher Schwarz. When it comes to the tills he recommends that they be fitted with oak bottoms as oak is hard wearing. The rest of the tills should made of pine. As it happens the few bits...

As the original (i.e. for teaching purposes) objective of the original description is to achieve linguistic precision, I have to accept Patrick's point. It's a subtle one though as that distinction has evaded me for the approx. 5 years that I've been using the description. :oops: