End of year break: 19th Dec to 14th Jan

Welcome to my website

You will find in these pages details of my woodwork, my teaching, and my writing.

For me, these are not separate activities, as they mutually reinforce each other.

I don’t think there is a better way to learn what you know about a subject- or, equally important, what you do not know – than to try to teach it to someone else. The constant pressure to integrate everything you know about a topic into easily understood words and processes, forces you to connect up the various bits in your mind, and meld them together in the most easily understood whole. Years of teaching have helped me isolate what I think are the most important details that anyone wanting to master a woodworking task needs to be aware of, and to concentrate on.

This blend of integrated knowledge and hard won experience (hard won usually by making mistakes), in turn, becomes the perfect material for writing. All that remains is to find the right words, which I hope I am sometimes, at least, able to do.

It has been a constant surprise to me over the years, and a source of constant pleasure, that no matter how much I learn about woodwork, there is always more to find and to know.

It is no small and easily mastered craft.

There is more than enough to last a lifetime.

Thank heaven for that.