Workshop Heaven Blue Moon Sale

Once in a Blue Moon Sale
Starts 31st July 2015

There hasn't been a blue moon (a second full moon in a month) since August 2012, but if you miss this one don't worry, there's another one coming up in two and a half years time.

It's nice to have a little fun every once in a blue moon, so we are sharing a blindfold discount code with everyone who reads our newsletters and blog posts, or keeps in touch via facebook or instagram.

There are discounts applied to almost every single item on the Workshop Heaven website, but you'll only find out how much your total saving is when you enter the discount code at the checkout.

Fill your boots!

Please note:

The code will only work during the full moon, from Friday 31st July at 5pm until Sunday 2nd August at 8pm

Discount code: BLUEMOON

P.S. Full credit to Ioana Davies for the stunning photograph.

Alan Peters Award for Rycotewood Student Avian Evans-White

I was lucky enough to see Avian Evans-White's Award winning ‘Revolve’ bedside tables in maple with a cherry inlay at the Rycotewood National School of Furniture end of year show last month.

Avian is taking the foundation degree (Arts) in furniture design and making and has just picked up an Alan Peters Award at the Celebration of Craftsmanship and Design to go with the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers award pictured below.

The design is original, well conceived, and very well thought through. Three legs will always be stable, even if the floor is uneven, and the choice of subtly figured timber invites you to appreciate the quality and skill of the making.

Well done Avian and well done Rycotewood.

Tom Fidgen's Sawyer's Bench Course at Warwickshire College

This week I'm at Warwickshire College building a sawyers bench with hand tool woodworking expert Tom Fidgen of the Unplugged Woodshop and An Unplugged Life.

The training course, organised by New English Workshop, is one of several going on this summer with some of the most famous woodworking instructors in the world, including Roy Underhill, Christopher Schwarz, Peter Follansbee and Yannick Chastang.

We started with boards of rough sawn cherry, fairly unpromising to look at in this condition, but trust me, there's some seriously gorgeous fruitwood hiding under that rough exterior. The first job was setting out a cutting list and Tom took us through the process of adapting the design to suit both the timber and our own personal preferences for the project. One of the things I love most about hand tool woodworking is that it is working with the wood, rather than trying to impose your will upon it, as we tend to when emboldened by the power of electric tools. It was nice to get Tom's take on this and learn some of the clever techniques that he uses to save time and effort.

The stock was then dressed and roughly dimensioned by hand. For the cleaning up I've been using a Mujingfang jack plane, the tough HSS blade makes it a great choice for preparatory work like this. I've done at least 20 square feet so far and only needed to hone the blade once.

The blade has been honed with a relatively slight camber and then I've whacked on a load of lateral adjustment so that a corner of the blade bites really deep. This slices up the waste nice and quickly and with relatively little effort, kinda like a scrub plane but less aggressive. With a couple of quick taps you can easily switch sides or square the blade up to take a few levelling strokes and see how you're doing. It doesn't take long to figure out that keeping it as ugly as possible for as long as possible is the fastest way to get down to a nice level surface.

Once the jack plane had exposed clean wood and sliced off the worst of the bumps, I switched to a Clifton No.6 to true up the surfaces.We are not aiming for set numerical dimensions here, it is a sawbench after all. If you can get away with producing evenly matched, four squared blanks, it's a lot easier to adapt the joinery than do unnecessary extra planing to thickness.

I tend to face and edge the convex side of a small batch of boards, then go back and true up all the concave faces. It would probably be better practice to finish each component completely before moving on to the next, but I find this breaks up the work a bit and helps me to stay very aware of time and progress through the day. If you are all done facing and edging before you're halfway through your time, there may be a chance to fit something else in before end of play. If you're past halfway, you get as much warning as possible that you need to ease your workrate up a notch. In either case, it is important to at least open up both sides of the board by the end of the day so that they lose moisture evenly and remain flat and straight overnight.

The little low spot next to my thumb in the photo above is a perfect example of a job for the smoothing plane. The rest of the board is flat and is the same thickness as the matching board. Because this is part of a non-show, non-working surface that won't form part of a joint, I'll be able to sort out out that rough spot with a short soled smoothing plane. The smoother will follow the slight concavity rather than bridging it as the fore plane does, which saves having to plane the rest of both boards down to the same level. I've left it rough for now so that I remember not to square off that part when jointing the edge.

So there we have it, end of day two with almost all of the stock dressed and settling, hopefully tomorrow we can get into orientating the timber and laying out some joinery. Tom showed us a neat little technique for minimising blowout on the exit side of a saw cut, so I'm looking forward to practicing that again.

It's such a luxury to spend a whole week at the bench, especially in such esteemed company and in the beautifully equipped and lovingly maintained workshops of Warwickshire College. This is a first rate facility, kitted out in the 1960's with a lathe room, a fully equipped industrial machine shop and an eighteen bench hand tool workshop. Right, must get to bed - early start in the morning!

#unpluggedwoodshop #newenglishworkshop #workshopheaven #tomfidgen #warwickshirecollege

A little Peace (& Spafford) of Sheffield toolmaking history

I recently acquired this lovely Victorian 14" sash saw, which was made at the Eagle Works, Green Lane, Sheffield by Peaces, Spafford & Co.

The saw is in remarkably good condition, a little damage to the top horn, a little pitting on the sawplate, but overall it has survived 150+ years very well. It looks like it has spent most of it's working life in the service of a left handed craftsman, evidenced by a lovely depression in the left cheek of the handle where his fingertip has rested. Unlike many tools, it has not been stamped with any owner's marks, and close inspection of the parts not polished smooth by a left handed grip also reveals the faintest traces of rasp marks left by the man who made it.

This mark is of particular interest to collectors because it is very accurately dateable to a particularly good period of sawmaking. Peaces, Spafford and Co first appears in the Trade Directory in 1854 and again in 1856. Further research suggests that Abraham Spafford left to form his own company in 1858, so I'm pinning the manufacturing date down to between 1854 and 1858.

The Peace family started out as filemakers in the early 1800s, they started making steel in 1816, and by 1836 had set up Eagle Works - the factory where this saw was made some 20 years later. The new factory had 50 staff on the books, twin cementation furnaces and an impressive 'double 12 hole' crucible steel furnace that could brew up about 360 kilos of crucible cast steel at a time; they weren't playing at it.

The site of the Eagle Works is currently being redeveloped for housing and was excavated by archaeologists before building work commenced. In the archive assessment by Lauren McIntyre, archaeologist Roderick McKenzie notes that the cementation furnaces were some of the best pre-1850 examples yet excavated and may have been among the first 50 such furnaces to be built in the city of Sheffield.

In the early 1860s the firm outgrew this factory and moved across the river to the Harvest Lane / Mowbray Street area (where our Thomas Flinn Pax and Dorchester saws are still made today), by that time they were employing some 150 people. They took the name 'Eagle Works' with them and the green lane factory was taken over by Ibbotson Brothers and renamed Globe Works.

The 1850s were a fascinating period of history, 1851 saw the great exhibition at Crystal Palace in London, in 1854 Britain declared war on Russia over the strategically important Crimean Peninsula, and in 1857 two men called Nathaniel Creswick and William Prest invented a new game called football and set up the world's first ever football club - Sheffield F.C. - I wonder what they would make of a world cup final today!

Back at the day job, saw manufacturers were working hard to compete with London's reputation for producing the best saws, there was nothing gentlemanly about their tactics. Factory seconds had poorly finished London pattern handles put on them and the blades were stamped with fictitious 'London' makers marks in order to damage the reputation of London manufacturing. They were fairly subtle about it, the 'London' saws were perfectly usable, just not quite as nice as the ones that had Sheffield stamped on them. This practice still causes confusion among collectors seeking rare but very high quality London made saws. If you want to check before you buy, Simon Barley has kindly published a list of the known fictitious saw brands on the Tools & Trades History Society website.

The decade was also marked by the growing power of the trades unions, who sought to control Sheffield manufacturing in the same way as the Company of Cutlers did, but by rather more violent means. There were rattenings (stealing the tools of a man's trade), beatings, shootings, bombings and murders. You might think that all this would have been directed against the factory bosses, but usually it was the workers themselves that the unions sought to control. One example is Thomas Fearnehough, a saw grinder who had quit the union and gone to work for a manufacturer whose workers the union had withdrawn, for which crimes he was murdered. In 1857 his home was blown up with gunpowder (with him in it) on the orders of William Broadhead, secretary of the saw grinders union. Broadhead's trial nine years later made the papers as far away as Australia and California.

Parliament deftly and effectively hobbled union power in the 1870s by forcing the Company of Cutlers to accept workers as well as factory bosses. Company membership soared, and as it did union power declined, owners responded rapidly by adopting mechanisation wherever they could, siezing the opportunity while it was there.

So this saw would have been among the last to be fully handmade, by well paid and highly qualified craftsmen under the protection of a strong union. It was made by a successful firm to compete with the very best in the world at the height of British imperial and industrial power, a perfect storm of factors that positively influence quality, which is why it is such a desirable saw.

I'm going to resist the urge to joint and file the teeth, there is a good chance that the plate will have become embrittled and the teeth will pop off if I try to set them.

Instead, to fulfil my need for a main user (and my addiction to saws) I have ordered an almost identical spec, new, fully handmade, English sash saw from Skelton Saws.

The quality of Shane's saws is even better than the Peaces Spafford would have been when new, and his production methods are almost identical to those that would have been used in the 1850s. All of which leaves me wondering where these two saws will end up 150 years from now?

Sources:

Academia | Archaeology | Archive_Assessment: The Horseman Works, Green Lane, Sheffield

California Digital Newspaper Collection: Sacramento Daily Union, Volume 33, Number 5094, 26 July 1867 THE TRADES' UNION OUTRAGES IN SHEFFIELD.

Trove: The Brisbane Courier (Qld. : 1864 - 1933) Sat 24 Aug 1867 Page 3 THE SHEFFIELD OUTRAGE COMMISSION.

Sheffield History | Sheffield History Chat | Spaffords Tool maker, Guernsey/Colver Road Heeley.

Tools & Trades History Society | About Tools & Trades | Articles | When was a sawmaker not a sawmaker?

And the winner is...

Congratulations to Oscar from Oxford whose pair of beautifully made bedside tables have been selected as the winning entry in the competition we have been running with Marc Fish. Typically you would expect a designer to make discrete use of colour or figure, surface texture and shape, usually choosing one or two and downplaying the others to create visual appeal. Oscar has muted all of them and created his visual impact by using the vacant space between strips on the drawer front to create a sense of movement.

Here's what Oscar had to say about it:

"The tables were inspired by the optical art of Bridget Reilly and Victor Vasarely. I found the visual awareness of how lines can be used to make us aware of our eyes stimulating and a visual challenge to transfer in to 3D without making the pieces overall feature a surface pattern.

I wanted to make the connection between the appearance of movement used in optical art and my tables, so using the main feature of my piece to suggest a handle made sense. The lower part of the laminate is set forward to create a drawer pull.

Underneath the curved laminate is a domed piece of copper to highlight the shape."

Winning this competition is a significant achievement for this talented young maker. Having been selected one of Britan's most highly decorated creative artists from a field that included some serious amateur and professional competitors, Oscar will now go on to spend a week under Marc's tuition, honing and refining his skills.

The two runner up prizes of a £100 Workshop Heaven gift certificate go to:

Jan, also from Oxford, for his 'velo chair', inspired by modern bicycle design and designed to wrap around the user and make them feel part of the chair.

Philipp, from Austria, for his 'octagon cabinet'. Geometric elements of the octagon are cleverly used throughout the entire piece, including the internal layout and the joinery.

My sincere thanks to all of the people who entered the competition. Both Marc and I were stunned at the overall quality of entries, many of which exhibited exceptional craftsmanship.

BBC4 Handmade

If you enjoyed the BBC4 show 'Handmade' on Monday evening, you might like to see some more of Owen, Jim and Michael's work.

The BBC production is quite beautiful, they are proper films rather than TV shows, with no narration or music. Just the skills of some remarkable craftsmen, skilfully displayed by some remarkable filmmakers, I for one will certainly be keeping an eye out for more of Richard Bright and Ian Denyer's work. Supplementary material with the craftsmen talking about their work has now been made available online.

As well as making and selling exquisite knives, axes and hammers, Owen Bush also runs bladesmithing courses at his South London forge.

Michael Ruh's work is available directly or through many of the better galleries in London, New York and Paris, including our friends at the Conran Shop.

Renowned Windsor chairmaker Jim Steele is based just a few miles up the road from Workshop Heaven in the beautiful Warwickshire village of Southam.

Here are some links to the facebook pages and websites of the craftsmen involved, please take a moment to give them a like, share or a comment:

Michael Ruh
Michael Ruh Facebook page

Owen Bush & Bushfire Forge
Bushfire Forge Facebook page

Jim Steele Windsor Chairs

Robinson House Studio Competition

1st Prize

Take your making to the next level. Win a one week training course with

Marc Fish at Robinson House Studio.

Situated in the beautiful seaside town of Newhaven in East Sussex, Robinson House Studio is one of the hottest creative talent 'shops in the world. Under the leadership of Marc Fish, the team push the limits of materials and explore new techniques at the absolute cutting edge of modern furniture design. Having won four guild marks and the Claxton Stevens award, Marc now sits on the Guild Mark Committee of the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers, who decide whether other designer-maker's pieces are up to the coveted guild mark standard.

This course is designed for the improver or beginner who wishes to improve their making skills. You could choose to make a simple piece that will teach you the fundamental skills of hand tool woodworking or perhaps focus on a specific subject like laminating, routing, understanding good design, surface finishing...

To enter, send us a photo of something that you have made which you feel demonstrates:

"an innovative or unusual use of wood"

Please include your name, phone number, email address, and the town or county that you live in with your entry. If you wish to include a couple of lines of descriptive text to explain the entry that's fine too.

Runners Up Prizes

Two runners up will each receive £100 to spend at:

What would you choose?

Dates and Details:

• Send entries to competition@workshopheaven.com
• Entries must be in by noon on the 31st May 2015.
• Photos should be no larger than 1Mb.
• Entries will be judged by Marc and the winners announced on this blog on the 5th of June.
• Entry is free of charge, no purchase necessary.
• Entrants will be automatically added to Robinson House Studio and Workshop Heaven monthly newsletter lists - we don't bombard you with daily deals and won't share or sell your details to anyone else.
• Winners will be announced in the form 'John from Middlesborough' if you prefer to remain anonymous please include this information on your entry.
• We wish all entrants the very best of luck, and trust that the gentlemanly spirit of the competition be upheld by all participants.
• Accommodation not included.

Bespoke Hand Tools: The MiniMac Woodcarving Knife

This is the best woodcarving knife I have ever used - by a very long way.

It is the finished product of a long collaboration between two good friends of mine, both of them wonderfully skilled craftsmen. Creative artist and woodcarver Jon Mac from Dartmoor and custom knifemaker Chris Grant from Arbroath.

The knife began as a bespoke commission for Jon's work carving elegant spoons, bowls and kuksa. When you watch Jon carve you'll quickly grasp the care and consideration with which he approaches all creative tasks, the design of this tool is no exception. There isn't a straight line on it, and every curve has been considered, refined and perfected by hand and eye.

Chris thrives on the creative process, he gets deeply involved in the design of each project, feeding in his rich experience of blade steels and heat treatment processes. Working to the highest standards in metal, wood and leather, he brings everything together to deliver an exquisitely handcrafted product. He only makes knives, but boy does he make knives!

The development since the original commission has been entirely organic, other carvers have tried the knife and been sufficiently blown away by its performance and dexterity that, with Jon's blessing, they have commissioned their own. Jon is a big guy with large hands, so when the stream of people who wanted one showed no sign of abating, the two got together again to work on a smaller version of his original design that would be better suited to people with average sized hands.

The result is the MiniMac, same sweet balance in exactly the same spot as the MaChris, same extraordinary edge strength, but when you compare the two side by side you can see that the subtleties of both the blade and handle shape have all been completely reworked. The MiniMac is a stick tang, which makes it considerably lighter, although in use they both just blend into the hand.

I've had this MiniMac for a few months now, and apart from a couple of very light dressing strokes on 5 micron lapping film I am still using the original shaving sharp edge.

The MiniMac has very quickly become an integral part of how I work; to the extent that trying to carve with anything else just feels wrong. I can work with it for hours with no fatigue and place cuts with a level of precision I had previously not understood. It is no understatement to say that I would now be at a loss without it.

Could you still carve with a lesser knife? Of course you can, absolutely, but at the end of the day I carve for pleasure. There is nothing quite so luxurious as leaning against a tree on a sunny afternoon with a really good knife and a nice piece of wood and relishing every single cut.

Tom Fidgen @ Warwickshire College

The courses run by New English Workshop last summer were a roaring success, both were well oversubscribed and the lucky ones that did get a place had a fantastic time. With the Anarchists Tool Chest built by Chris Schwarz going under David Stanley's auctioneers hammer today (March 28th) it occurred to me that I'd better get my finger out if I want to snaffle a place on one of this years summer schools.

Last year I mentioned to Paul and Derek how amazing it would be if Tom Fidgen could come over from Canada to teach in the UK. Tom is probably the coolest woodworker on the planet, his work is fast, accurate and meticulously well planned, but I'd swear his heart rate never climbs above 60 beats per minute. If you're not already subscribed, take a moment to check out his youtube channel and website.

Anyway, to my surprise, they did ask him. To my even greater surprise he agreed, and then to top it all the course location was changed to Warwickshire College, which is just up the road from Workshop Heaven, talk about the stars coming into alignment!

The project is a sawyers bench - kinda like a 17th century Black and Decker Workmate. Tom has made a few significant tweaks to the traditional design which will make this a fantastic addition to the workshop that will earn its space many times over.

For me the course isn't really about the project though, it's all about sharing and enjoying the creative process with like-minded souls and picking up a few wrinkles of experience from one another.

From that perspective, a huge extra bonus is that another woodworking legend Peter Folansbee will also be teaching at Warwickshire College the same week, so with any luck I might get to enjoy a brew and a natter with him and the people attending that course as well.

The New English Workshop Summer School offering has grown from two woodworking courses last year to ten available this summer, spread across Kent, Sussex, Warwickshire and Somerset. All of the courses are led by world class woodworking instructors and hosted at well equipped workshops.

If you'd like to book a place, I'd recommend getting your deposit in fairly sharpish. Spaces are limited and opportunities to share time at the bench with woodworkers of this calibre are few and far between.

Here's Tom with some more details about the course, for more info about the other woodworking courses available, visit the New English Workshop.

Waters & Acland Furniture School

Cumbrian furniture makers WATERS and ACLAND are well known for creating exceptionally elegant modern handcrafted furniture. Their furniture has drawn the attention of the Royal family, the bespoke guild mark committee of the Worshipful Company of Furniture Makers and graces well appointed homes up and down the country.

When I visited their light and airy workshops in the village of Staveley last October, I was surprised to find something even more impressive than the covetable furniture in their showroom.

Waters and Acland don't just make commercial handmade furniture and commissions, they also deliver some of the best furniture making training courses available. The thing that really struck me was the astonishing rate at which students in the adjoining training workshop acquire the skills of fine furniture making and the standards that they achieve right from the word go.

After a week, students are able to complete an immaculate pair of matching dovetailed and mitred oak bookends. By the end of week two, they will have finished a stool with double wedged through tenons.

With those two test pieces perfected, it's straight into their first box - a dovetailed and mitred wall cabinet with morticed panel doors, made in the student's choice of materials.

Chris (left cabinet), who also made the two pieces above, had done a bit of making before but was looking to up his game. Keira (right cabinet) achieved this standard in 9 weeks flat from a cold start. I have seen both cabinets up close and the details reward even the closest inspection.

You could be forgiven for thinking that making this much headway in a few short weeks must involve compromise, but you only need to look at the standard of Waters and Acland furniture to see that they are not really the compromising type. In fact the opposite is true. This astonishing progress is the result of being uncompromising, very high staff ratios, beautifully maintained high quality tools, and lots of one on one tuition with professional makers.

The Waters and Acland team believe fervently in getting it right first time and checking their work at every stage. The same standards are applied to the job of training as they are to the job of making furniture, with layers of perfection locked in at every stage.

Both Chris and Keira have since gone on to make progressively more complex pieces and worked with progressively greater autonomy as they completed their 24 week course of training. I would like to wish both of these calm, confident and competent new makers every success in their future careers. For the last word, I'll leave you in Keira's capable hands:

If you would like to receive further information about training as a furniture maker with Waters and Acland please visit their website.

You can also get some free tuition by subscribing to the Waters and Acland You Tube channel