Wood engineering...

[neds]

Was watching a programme on Disc realtime called 'The workshop John built' anyway in it had a little feature on this chap named David Charlson? I think that was his name.

This guy was an absolute perfectionist and a true craftsman. This guy now teaches his trade. Some of the skills he teaches really interested me, like not marking out by a pencil but using a knife instead. There were reasons behind this which I wont go into too much depth but it gave a better cut in the end.

The other thing he showed was some superb planes. He kind of invented a new way of sharpening and honing a new plane and he was saying something about new planes are not ready to use out of the box. He then proceeded to show some of his Tom Lie Nielson planes which were also pieces of art. One of them was priced at over £1600! With one of these planes he proceeded to plane an end grain piece of wood, and it planed like it was on the grain with real thin slithers. Incredible!

He also showed us some of the japanese saws which cut on the backward stroke. Look pretty nifty.

This really has got me interested on the fine art of Wood engineering. Anyone really fascinated with this stuff?

 

[breezer]

im "board" already

 

[Jasonb]

The guy is David Charlesworth, his bench is too clean for my liking but then he does spend most of his time fettleing tools rather than cutting wood

Jason

 

[gregers]

i watched that aswell neds,your right about being a perfectionist but lets face it you can becume quite anal over it .but lets not split hairs or is that not precise enough.we used to mark out with a knife when i was at school and when i first went to college to do c&g,
the table that was shown was fantastic .

 

[neds]

Thanks for the correction Jasonb! Name was close though

But I think you're all right and he does spend a lot of time messing about with the tools and less time on the wood itself. I just found the aspect of precision engineering with wood fascinating. Although a lot of his work is fancy fine furniture making I'm more of a functional man than 'ooh that looks nice' sort of man.