I’ve been building a few of these recipe stands to take to our Sunday market. The think I like about them is that they pretty much have to be done with hand tools (the chiseling anyway). They are each made from one piece of wood, and hinge flat for hanging on the wall. The hinge requires a sharp chisel, and a bit of patience. Re-sawing down the centre of them was done with my new frame saw, and to separate the last few fibers of holding together the hinges, I use a knife I made from a metal ruler, which gives it a nice thin blade for getting in there. The wood is pink birch (again), finished with linseed oil (which leaves it very dark).

These small boards were a birthday present for my wife. They are for eating off, as they do in Germany, and we particularly like to use them for antipasti, ploughman’s lunch, sandwiches, or any meal that the guests need to do a bit of cutting a preparation before eating.

They are made from a huge cube of oak that a lumberjack I met gave me once, which he’d cut out of a damaged tree some years earlier. The tree couldn’t be milled properly because it had swallowed a metal fence. The breadboarded ends are a peculiar spotty jarah that I found a small amount of. As usual this year, all work was with hand-tools, and it took a significant amount of sawing and hand planing to get the wood to the sizes I wanted. I let the slabs dry oversize for a few weeks, and then planed out any cupping. The ends are pegged on with oak pegs, draw-bored ever so slightly, so there’s no glue on this project, just a bit of olive oil to finish off.

My veritas low angle jack plane really carried the day on this one. I swapped blades a number of times to get different angles for the oak, and the end grain. I don’t have a scrub plane, or fore plane, so the initial stock prep was done across the grain with a crappy chinese Stanley #4, with the blade fully extended and skewed. That didn’t work on the jarah of course, which was a good test of blade sharpness. As soon as the jack plane got slightly less that sharp, it just started sliding across the jarah and not taking a shaving at all, no matter how far it was extended. I had to stop and sharpen several times.

I’m very pleased with the result, but next time, I’ll make a shooting board first, and maybe a panel gauge too.

Another project I’m working on involves re-sawing, so I made this frame saw. It uses a blade from an E.C.E. bow saw, sharpened for ripping. The frame has single through dovetails at the corners, and the ends were shaped into comfortable handles using a draw knife, rasp and file. The blade is mounted using into bolts which I hacksawed a slit into to take the blade, and drilled a cross hole for a small machine bolt. One end is fixed, and the other has a wingnut for tightening.

More importantly, it works magnificently. Getting the rip configuration on my blade was a revelation enough, but having the big symmetrical frame saw body really lets me track a line pretty well. Yet another motivation to throw the noisy machines out of my shed.

This cot, made of pink birch, is inspired by one sold by touchwood cots . It’s my first project where the timber has been dressed exclusively with hand planes. The birch boards I were using were planed at the mill, which made it less work than using rough sawn timber, but they were by no means straight and square. Most of the planing work was done with my veritas low angle jack, and an old stanley number 7. I don’t have a good smooth plane yet, so the finish is mostly just done with very fine shavings from the jack plane, and yes, there are still some lines from the edge of the blade. I didn’t want to camber my jack plane blade just yet.

The joiner is all mortice and tennon (about 100 of them), with a couple of nice big dovetails holding the base together. I started doing the mortices by hand, chopping them with a chisel, which was good fun but I did use a router to do the mortices for the slats, in order to get the thing finished. The tenons were all cut with hand saws and cleaned up with a shoulder plane.

The cot is glued together with liquid hide glue, so although I think it’s strong enough to last an age, when something does eventually break it’ll be able to be steamed apart and replaced. That’s how we create the antiques of the future.

This cabinet is designed to be a stable and heavy bench for my mitre saw. It’s a recycled Rimu frame, with panels of MDF that I happened to have lying around. The frame is dovetailed together, and re-enforced with some totally unnecessary coach screws (that’s lag bolts for you americans).

Made from Macrocarpa Cypress.

Wall mounted shelving with plate racks that drain over the sink. I can’t recommend drainable plate racks enough, every kitchen should have them. Made from macrocarpa cypress.

A queen sized bed in Rimu. I initially tried to hold the head and foot onto the side rails with pegged tenons (not drawbored) but the bed shook, so I ended up adding bolts as well.