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| A modern Lie Nielsen plane. This one is slightly larger than the one Sellers used to build his bench. |
I've had some good days in the shop
lately. Not as many as I'd like but that probably never changes.
I've been struggling with hand tools for about 12 years now, couldn't
seem to get cuts with a hand saw both plumb and square at the same
time. I'm an avid watcher of woodworking videos and, in addition to
subscribing to 2 paid channels, I'm always on the lookout for ways
that other people work wood. In one of my searches I came across a
British woodworker named Paul Sellers. I would guess he's in his mid
sixties and his workshop is in a castle in Wales. The only electrical
tool visible in his shop is a cordless drill.
I don't remember which video of his I
watched first but I liked it and searched for more. Sellers is one of
the few woodworkers who came up through the apprenticeship system.
His craftsmanship is impeccable and his attitude to his craft is
anything but precious. His enthusiasm encourages you to pick up the
tools, whatever tools you have, and work with them, learn how to
sharpen them and then make things. There are places where absolute
precision is necessary and other places where it isn't.
Unlike a number of hand-tool
woodworkers, Sellers doesn't have the latest and greatest tools from
Veritas or Lie Nielsen. His tools are old. He has Stanley planes
with the original irons and chip breakers, no replacement irons that
are thicker and heavier than their predecessors. In one of his videos
he drew the camera's attention to the button on the hand saw he had
just picked up. The date was in the 1700's. Of another saw he
commented “This saw is 90 years old.”
I recently watched fascinated into the
wee small hours of the morning as he built a workbench from spruce
construction lumber using a hand saw, a chisel, a couple of hammers,
glue, clamps, screws, a cordless drill and a #4 Stanley smoothing
plane. A Stanley #4 is a relatively small plane and I was very
surprised to see him straighten and flatten boards 6 feet long with
it. I thought you needed a much longer heavier plane for the job.
For a work surface he plopped a piece
of medium density fibre board onto a pair of saw horses in his back
yard. At times he sat on the work to hold it. Other times he clamped
a board to one of the saw horses. Of course this is the way woodwork
used to be done before table saws, chop saws and routers.
What struck me most as I watched him
work was how simple the process was. When I use the table saw I need
to set it up correctly, get the blade to the proper height, adjust
the fence make a test cut, use a push stick to keep my hands away
from the blade. Often I need to make a jig to put the stock in the
right position during the cut. This involves more cutting and
checking and testing. When working with hand tools Sellers measures
the board, strikes a line from a reference surface, picks up a saw
and makes the cut. The actual cutting takes longer than it would on a
power saw but with the skill that resides in his hands, eyes and
muscles he is surprisingly efficient and the sounds of his day are
not the various whines of machines. Sellers' bench videos are filled
with the shouts of children from a nearby school, sea gulls off the
coast and the occasional police siren.
Sellers uses machines in his shop for
doing the repetitive dull tasks. When he teaches classes he machines
boards so they are ready for students. To hand plane each board foot
of the thousands he needs for a class would be absolute madness.
Although I'm not about to get rid of my table saw or my bandsaw, more
and more I find myself looking at a machine and thinking, “It's too
much trouble to set that up. I'll just do it by hand.” Each time I
make that choice I practice and my skills improve. I don't produce a
huge amount of product and, for me, the joy is in the doing. I have
the luxury of being able to work slowly and as my skill level
increases I'm more and more inclined to reach for a hand tool rather
than flick a switch.
Now I'm off to the shop to make some
more shavings.
