Paul Sellers' Blog

So many tricks and tips for dovetailing your corner joints, but seldom do you hear, "Get it straight off the saw," as it was said to me. This has been my way for six decades to date, ever since I heard George, my apprenticing mentor, say the same words. This mantra stayed with me, and the only time a pare cut action from a chisel edge comes is when I did indeed miscut slightly with the saw; a very great rarity and not normal at all. And as it was with George, don't put off establishing skill…

...Inside and OutThings are tight, but we have continued filming these past weeks, and it's working fine. My love of woodworking has never faltered in sixty years and is still thriving despite the disruptions that come with moves of this magnitude. What makes it work is the team spirit and support behind the scenes that others never see. We have filmed five sessions, and this week I began the latest project for woodworking masterclasses.My land is on gravel, perfect drainage for zero flooding…

I posted a picture on my FB recently showing two draw bore pins slightly protruding from the end cap of a breadboard end tabletop. I was surprised that so many confidently identified and asserted these two end-grain protrusions as our now commonly used wood plugs, and then that these plugs were hiding screwheads. They then identified the tenon haunch of the tenon that was visible as a short tenon where the plugs made no sense because they didn't reach the tenon anyway and would serve no…

I found a handful of pictures from thirty years ago. The drawings were still there. A mid-sized chest made from mesquite with some accents in walnut. The pictures had faded a little but were representative of my early designs back in the 1990s. I enjoyed the memory of making them, yes, but what I enjoyed the more was driving my 1951, one-ton flatbed Dodge truck onto the million acres of land to harvest the mesquite trees in a wilderness only a handful of people might ever know. I could drive…

My sliding doors came together well. With the drawers fitted and tidied up I just have the handles to consider, but probably will not have handles on the doors as such. My first thought was to make my handles, as I often do, but I like the idea of traditional brass pulls and such for this piece. Just handle hardware or whatever I decide.I think that this piece will be large enough to downsize my significant gathering of hardware I've accumulated and allowed to spread and drift over the years. I…

Many of my projects become courses in cabinet making, with everyday other woodworking thrown in for good measure. My work balances out the machinist in us–that couch-potato, tube-watching that's interesting but non-active. My quest for three decades parallels a phrase used in the 1980s and 90s in the USA. "Off the streets and on the creeks." They were trying to get kids out there fishing and taking in the more natural environments our childhoods were so laden with, instead of congregating in…

Making the Gauge StockEpisode three is out on Woodworking Masterclasses if you want to go that route too, but all of the details are below here as well for those who like text and drawings. Here is the link. https://woodworkingmasterclasses.com/dashboard/The stock of the gauge might seem complicated by sight, but systematic layout and steps for working brings the whole into sharp focus in the process of doing it. Keep the stock square until you've fully chopped the five-sided centre reception…

...from the IRS or HMRCBut it is about creating a step-down in the corner of wood to receive pictures, glass and a back panel or a door panel or a door into it. I cut all of mine by hand with a rebate or rabbet or a fillister or a filletster plane in my day to day. Anyway, the video on a few different planes used to make or refine rebates is out on my YT channel below. Give me a click and join there if you like it. I'm sure you will!

Making the Gauge StemA sharp plough plane can tackle this groove making in twenty to thirty or so strokes. But you might not have such a tool. Here's a link to a short blog and a video on creating a groove without owing or relying on a plough plane or machine.The steps to making are not complicated. Instead of making the five sided configuration of the gauge stem, we begin with the square edge of the stem material. I recommend making two or four stems from a 21" (53.4cm) length of a hardwood…

My Mondays all start the same way, pretty much, anyway. The week's wholly brand new and untouched, unsullied and bright for me to invest life into. I open my workshop door, hold back for a whole second, maybe two, and glimpse into the darkness; it's a personal thing, waiting for the light from the doorway, the way it floods in to my future, contrasts in the focal point of my bench, and sets my brain's recall of what I left in wait. Every past event of work is recorded within my four walls.…

I have made dovetails in pine literally thousands of times and that is in thousands of dovetailed boxes, drawers for cabinets and cabinets themselves; I think I understand every type of dovetailing there is, but equally important is to understand the many types of woods we use for these projects because they all react differently to the processes of creating them. In my hands-on class workshops, I have taught 6,500 students alone to cut dovetails on their projects. In most of those cases, we…

These next three blog posts will show you how to make my marking gauge. It's in three parts because the video series is in three episodes too, so these upcoming posts work in tandem with the videos. Here will be the link to Episode I which comes out

I didn't own one of this particular side rebate planes before this week, but this one arriving made me realise the demise of certain Sheffield makers post-war was for good reason. Record was a company sold back and forth a few times throughout its dying death knells. It

We tend to buy these planes because they bespeak of the ancients and ancient craftsmanship excelling in a pre-machine age when the finest woodworking in any period of history in a range of diverse cultures came together to predate machines that could never create what the human hands created. Yet,

There can be no doubt, wooden planes might just feel heavy in the hand when you first pick up say one of the longer jack planes or longer 22" version on up, but on wood the weight suddenly disappears; it happens to such a point that their near weightlessness

In the USA, a rebate is what you get back in taxes from the government or other organisation whereas in English, it can mean a step-down forming an internal corner. The Irish penman, George Bernard Shaw, supposedly said: "England and America are two countries divided by a common language.

I am periodically confronted about my defensiveness of issues. The key in this is to know if you are being unnecessarily defensive or not. Another consideration is whether the person confronting is actually being passively aggressive because our tendency when we are confronted by such a sentence is to say,

I realised a few years ago that many of you might be dismissing plywood, thinking mostly that it is some kind of lesser wood. I know in colleges they adopt MDF as a substrate to veneer work because of ease and its relative stability, flatness and so on. I'

My sons learned to sharpen saws from me. After a few minutes, they understood the essentiality of direct thrusts and certain angles with files into and through the gullets uniting each two teeth. The saw thrust is the uniting factor. With handsaw file-sharpening of any type, you are cutting two

This blog post is of course free, but you might want to watch the video we made and join your fellow enthusiasts. Here is the link. If a picture does paint a thousand words, then a video could do more. Enjoy the following:Hard to imagine so little wood can