If you can't find Good Woodworking in your local newsagent, you can order a copy direct from 0844 848 88 22
Welcome to GW256,
This month GW is proud to present the first part of a round up of high quality work from the summer shows of final year furniture makers who have just finished degree and diploma courses around the country (page 66). As you will see styles range from the traditional to the more avante garde such as…
If you can't find Good Woodworking in your local newsagent, you can order a copy direct from 0844 848 88 22
Chris Tribe, a successful maker of fine furniture for many years, was only too keen to go back to school to learn the proper way to make an instrument – actually he made two and nipped round with his camera – and tells us how he got on at West Dean College. Les Thorne turned this huge bowl from air-dried timber…
Welcome
Was there ever such an adaptable material as wood? We could be in strictly practical mode, using it like Andy King does in ply form to make shelves and drawers for his new van, to enable him to store his tools ready for site visits. Then at the other end of the scale we can only look on open-mouthed to see how Mary Ansett-Parry tempts woodworkers away from their squares and rules to become students of carving, as Dave…
Welcome
It never ceases to amaze me how woodworkers can produce the most stunning pieces while working in spaces not much wider than an arm span. Take Chris Alley for instance. There he is, allocated with not much more than a cubicle in a huge tithe barn – admittedly he has a share in machines in another area – making everything from staircases to sideboards with painstaking care and innovation, having found a way to…
Welcome
I thought the lovely people at Bosch were setting me up. Drill through this concrete, they said so, just to show I was game for the joke, I seized my weapon… and all I had to do was hold it in position – the motor did the rest. Read about the Bosch Blue tools that are being launched in the next few months in my business profile.. I also got up to London, to meet the Makers in Residence at the Building…
Didn’t it make you feel just a tiny bit smug, watching that episode of The Apprentice where the would-be entrepreneurs tried to design and make a piece of flatpack furniture? The heroes and heroines of this month’s issue don’t know the meaning of the word smug. We’ve got Ludvig Solvang talking to the boat builders who protect the heritage of their very different techniques in the Arctic Circle…
Wow! Is there some up-and-coming talent in the UK! So much so that we are having to split our coverage of New Designers, the annual London show for graduates, into two, this month looking at the work of the Building Crafts College, Bucks Uni and the Williams & Cleal furniture school and next month at the rest. But it isn’t only those who have had higher education-level training who can prosper and I report on an apprenticeship,…
Magazine planning, like that for any job I suppose, is subject to variables. You start with a few givens, the features you know have a place come what may, then you go into frantic plate-spinning mode, trying to juggle all the unscheduled but wonderful things that happen in a month into too few pages. For example, having covered what I thought would be the best of graduate work last month, I went along to New Designers…
The shiny face and through-a-bush-backwards hair are the result of spending a fraught but fun taster day at Axminster Tool Centre; there was certainly no time for getting the comb out to rectify the coiffural damage wrought by a protective head shield and facemask in the rush to turn a vase in two hours, not to speak of a plumb bob, a leaf carving and, er, what you see pictured below. Projects of a far more professional…
The internal structure of Cressing Temple Barns and the throng of people gathered there for the European Woodworking Show, serves to illustrate this Special issue of Good Woodworking admirably: we’re focusing on big timber-based structures and also on the fun to be had with wood. Woodworkers down in the West Country are still using methods that this ancient barn would have been built with, and,…
A while back a reader observed that GW was all furniture, but conversely I am expecting those of you who associate timber with tables, chairs and cabinets to enquire where it has gone lately, but it’ll be back next month I promise. It is, however, interesting to note how many objects that enrich our lives rely on wood for their effect. Take the guitars that we major on in this issue – Shaun Newton restores a…
