It’s all too easy to say that my apprenticeship gave me all that I needed. It’s the harder elements of traditional handwork that has kept me so very fit through the decades, as well as a good diet and plenty of additional physical exercise too. I now reach these woodworkers with an apprenticing strategy through the internet platforms I now teach on. This union between the old world and the new emerging one created the symbiosis I needed to reach the millions that soon followed. It was that pre-internet and the pre-YouTube period before blogging, selfie-videoing, etc. This resulted in well-fitting mortise and tenons and no more twisted frames for panels and frames. I knew of the various problems all woodworkers experienced regardless of experience levels as it came to light through the 6,500 students I had trained in the 1990s through 2010. The unique combination in my using the router plane to correct small surface discrepancies, thicknesses of tenons, such like that, and then developing the mortising guide created the perfect symbiosis in a system of M&T joinery. The greatest struggle in my class, and any classes I taught anywhere on two continents, was not so much cutting the tenons paraplanar to the outside faces but chopping the mortise paraplanar to the outside face say of the stile or rail of a frame and such. A technique I came up with and indeed invented is the foolproof mortising guide and the system that goes with it. At a low cost of £10 on eBay ten years ago, and being passed over at garage sales and car-boot sales, it now sells for £150 and up secondhand. I took the router and showed what it was really capable of doing and introduced it as a refinement tool for several joints and other aspects of woodworking etc. It seemed, at least to me, that no one anywhere was using a hand router plane anymore and no magazines nor books for decades even mentioned them as a viable tool let alone advocate their value to woodworkers. One of the most evidential realities was the almost abandonment of the hand router plane throughout even the world of hand tool woodworking. Through my research, many techniques became evident and could only have been rediscovered through the dismantling of furniture pieces to see which tool did what and which technique enabled this and stopped that. Skills and techniques were being lost one by one and this became evident to me as some were indeed lost altogether already. Through the years, these studies equipped me to further embrace my quest to research woodworking of every kind on a continuing basis.
That I had gone on to study and train myself beyond my apprenticing would not at all be evident to all, but study and train I did. I was surviving just fine in my newfound world making things predominantly through my handwork and skill. My hands have provided for my own needs and the needs of my family and friends despite almost everyone telling me through the five, now nearing six decades that you cannot make a living using these “primitive methods” in today’s times. I wondered this though, was I some kind of dinosaur destined for extinction and a denier refusing to move with the times and see the writing on the walls of ‘progress’. Sloughing off my past thus then empowered me to pursue my love of true handwork without being intimidated, humiliated or bullied by anything or anyone. Then too, I was not controlled by peers, disabled through my own fears and self-doubts, trying always to be accepted, things like that. That there was no competition between handwork and machine work because the work itself was so completely different. The different path? I think mostly that I recognised for the first time that I as a woodworker skilled in hand work was somehow relieved from the pressures of competitiveness. It seemed a more narrow path if you like. This new beginning enabled me to strike out on a hitherto unknown, unused path that unfolded rapidly. My arrival in the USA in the mid-1980s broke many biases, prejudices, and, especially, the cultural barriers that held me back.
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I think, for the main part, that this is mostly because I didn’t continue along the same paths as those I worked alongside when I was a young emerging craftsman, and then most of the professional woodworkers shifting from handwork to machines during major shifts in industrialism back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. At what point things changed I am not altogether sure. I live and have lived in a different world than most for many decades.
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