I’m Brian, and this is my journal about woodworking with hand tools. Furniture-making is my primary focus, but every now and then, I have to make a tool or work on something else.

If you’re looking for someone to dazzle with literary flourish, tales of epic struggles against mighty celluose-and-lignin beasts, tool porn, and so on, I’m not sure what you’ll take away from here. I aim to document what I do as I experience it, and be pragmatic about it. I make mistakes and often write about those.

This blog starts at the beginning, the time when I decided to get started in woodworking and was more or less clueless about it. So you can follow the lack of clues over time to whatever my current state of clueless is.

Full Disclosure

For many years, my work was with hand tools only. This is a pretty good way to get started, at least to me; you really get a handle on the fundamentals of the medium and the methods and it doesn’t have to cost a boatload of money.

But it’s also time-consuming to do a lot of the preparatory work such as milling, and once I had a decent enough idea of what was going on, I started using some machines to perform that work for me. Specifically, I have a bandsaw (a true pal for a hand-tool woodworker) and a thickness planer (wicked beast, but can be tamed). I might write about those, but only if it’s marginally useful from a hand-tool perspective.

Regarding the Name

All blogs have names, and this blog goes by one. “I know that it’s not much of a name, but by the time I got around to gettin’ my name, all the good ones had been taken.”