Innehållsförteckning för May - June 2023 från Quercus

The stop hinge for lids that keeps them upright has long been a frustration for boxmakers, with the only ones available having an ugly, square knuckle. Now Andrew Crawford, known for designing the smartHinge (a corner hinge that makes stopped lid fitting so much easier just by routing the rear sides of the box and top), is launching smartButt (www.smartboxmaker.com). The knuckle is beautifully rounded, rather than square, just as a normal butt might look, though at £46.00 a pair they aren’t cheap. We will be using them soon when we join a boxmaking course at the Furniture Craft School (www.furniturecraftschool.co.uk). You have to construct your box before fitting the hinges, and now Veritas have designed and produced a Small Plow Plane (www.leevalley.com) for boxmakers (below), costing about £220. We…

When I set up my table at a local craft market to sell the wooden spoons I make, I also set out some paintings that my teenage daughter Keziah does on scraps of wood. My customers often ask me, “Do you paint, too?” I tell them, “No, my daughter is the ar tist. I stick to craft.” A few protest mildly that my spoon-making is also ar t. I don’t fight them on it. After all, skilled making does involve ar tifice, the imposition of form on raw material. Yet they aren’t using the word ‘ar t’ in the sense of ‘ar tifice’, but in the sense of ‘beautiful’. For most people, art is something unique created for an aesthetic purpose. If my spoons are nice to look at as…

In October 1901, at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign, the first issue of The Woodworker magazine was published, and it continues to this day. From its inception, the publishers issued annual ‘volumes’; bound books containing copies of the magazines issued in the previous year, but without advertisements. Sadly they are no longer issued, the last ones being produced in the 1990s, but they are frequently seen in old bookshops and charity shops. For a couple of quid they provide fascinating reading, with a mixture of articles on joints, furniture design, tools old and new, and general reflections on the subject of woodworking. I never consciously set out to collect the volumes, I really didn’t, but as a lifelong amateur woodworker I would pick up the occasional one when I…

In addition to the regular and reassuring arrival of Quercus magazine, how can a woodworker seek inspiration between issues? For me, in my retirement, I have time dedicated to advance my woodworking abilities and I remain keen to learn. Of course other magazine titles are available plus a multitude of books, but what of online resources? Herein lies a mine of information and content, but sorting out the better from the worse is challenging. I profess no inside knowledge or system for calibrating content but have certainly found a number of resources that I enjoy. Inevitably these are highly subjective and may not be to ever yone’s taste. Indeed my own choices can vary from moment to moment depending on how well my current woodworking project is going. In despair…

Having just spent a week at Westonbir t Woodworks (www.westonbirtwoodworks.co.uk) on a chairmaking course, which you will find featured in QM20, it was a pleasure to be invited then to nearby Highgrove Gardens, where King Charles III lives, now also home to the Snowdon School of Furniture (www.highgrovegardens.com). Founded by The Prince’s Foundation, the new college is led by Nick Wright and runs a handful of courses and caters for aspiring furniture-makers. The school is part of Highgrove Traditional Crafts, which includes textiles courses in the Barley Court farmhouse beside the School, and there are also short courses in stonemasonr y. The 16-week Create Programme: Rethinking Wood for Furniture is tailored for eight students, who can live on-site. It is aimed at furniture and product design graduates as a finishing…

If you get hold of Vol.1 of The Woodworker, as Hugh Thompson has, you will discover some valuable suggestions that are as prescient now as they were in 1901. One such direction (in the Notes of the Month column) was that even on vacation woodworkers should be ready to keep records. “Probably many of our readers will have been holiday-making within the last month or two,” someone wrote. Observant ones will surely have come home with lots of ideas for projects. The author (who was doubtless Percival since he would have been shor t of contributors), asks how many woodworkers will carry a ‘sketch-book’ away from home. “The practice of making a pictorial note of the many things which strike one’s fancy, cannot be commended too highly.” You might think…

As great marketing brainwaves go, up there is the idea to commission 135 bespoke slipcases to promote a book launch decicated to the finest British craft today. The idea was conceived in a Yorkshire craft workshop back in 1998, when journalist Helen Chislett had travelled Nor th to inter view David Linley, the 2nd Earl of Snowdon, well known for his fine furniture and for having been a pioneering student at John Makepeace’s Parnham College. “We got on really well,” Helen recalls, “and stayed in touch. Then in 2008, we began thinking of doing a book together.” In fact that’s exactly what they achieved in writing Star Pieces, the Enduring Beauty of Spectacular Furniture a year later. Then, after a decade apar t, COVID struck, a new wave of craftspeople…

The armchair is designed in the long folk, artistic tradition called slöjd within craftsmanship; the material involved and influencing the final form. All timber is carefully selected in the forest according to the bent-grown shape and properties. Patterns and shallow relief carvings carved in the centre of the back tray is a rhombus, with a cross which is a symbol of femininity and strength. The two whirling wheels stand for the eternal change of life and the dancing figures for the love of life and relationships. The dog is for her ever yday walking-the-dogs. The faces that appear in the four central pillars stand for the family and the firs represent the universe. The seat and legs are in Bone Black and Raw Umbra for soil and mulch. Moss Green…

I am not going to beat about the bush here, but I generally hit a mental hurdle shortly after a magazine goes to press, especially once it is printed. Just as Billy Connolly once said of performing an especially good gig, it is hard to see how the current issue can be matched since editing, like most of life, is about constant improvement. Only this time, when QM17 (March/April 2023) came alive, I was struck by a much deeper cerebral malaise than normal; a low-key, Churchillian Black Dog. I was very much on the verge of either closing Quercus, going entirely digital or publishing quarterly. Full of doubt, and fear that I was wasting time and money, I consulted the Taoist Book of Change, which was given to me in…

There are many ways to carve a seat and many tools that can be used to do the job. A good seat can be shaped with almost no tools, but you should expect to work a bit extra to achieve your results. To those new to seat-car ving tools, they can seem downright exotic, but all of these follow the same basic sharpening process as other tools. This ar ticle shows how to maintain the tools that I’ve found useful for car ving a seat consistently and quickly. I use a few different widths and sweeps of gouges for jobs such as car ving the gutter and trimming the legs where they protrude through the seat. When I first tune a gouge, I polish the inside flute to a high…

Recently, I’ve been making a project with triangular drawers that needs some precise 45° angles. I was wondering how I might achieve this, perhaps with a jig for a fine saw, or by cutting the pieces a little overlength on a bandsaw refining on a shooting board later. But the drawer components are not only too wide for a shooting board, they are wider than any plane I have. So I faced a dilemma. Considering my options, I got this idea that I could get a hard lump of oak or something, and cut an accurate 45° reference face on this slab, holding that in a vise with a fence down one side to align the pieces with clamps, registering my plane with the oak and the fence as references.…