I also do a spot of woodworking

[Sprue42]

I have messed about with wood for as long as I can remember and have built lots of furniture and several garden buildings, elevated decks etc. In fact I just like building and fixing things. To relax I like to go fishing, never been much good at it, but sitting on the bank peering into the water for a few hours can be amazingly therapeutic. I have lots of interests and If you want to see how I have filled some of my time look up "Ralph's workshop blog" and have a read. I also documented in the blog, the dismantling of the large workshop, which we brought with us when we moved so we could use the material for the new structures.

Here are a couple of pictures of our old workshops, when we lived in London. Still needed to put the celling up at this stage.



We also had a small shed-style workshop that was used as a turning shop later in life.

And here is an old picture of me in the small shed turning a small bowl on my wife's lathe. I am now a good three stone lighter than I was then!

The new setup should be up and running by the spring, but until then I keeping myself busy by building it all.

Ralph.

[Waspie]

I envy you. The one medium I really excel at butchering is wood!! Never been any good at it - ever. I sit and watch YT vids of what folk are designing and building and turn green. That is a superb set up. Like all things I guess having the right gear makes it a tad easier.

[Sprue42]

I envy you. The one medium I really excel at butchering is wood!! Never been any good at it - ever. I sit and watch YT vids of what folk are designing and building and turn green. That is a superb set up. Like all things I guess having the right gear makes it a tad easier.

To be honest, having the gear helps, but nothing beats knowledge and experience. I have been woodworking for as long as I can remember. I grew up in a household of seven boys. We lived in a big house with our family and my uncle and aunt and their family, plus my grandad. My uncle was a cabinet maker and became clerk of works for the local council. He taught me the basics before I went to secondary school. I was lucky enough to go to a 'comprehensive' school in the 1960s. There we had fully fitted workshops for both woodwork and metalwork, by the time I was 15, I could cut dovetails my uncle was proud of, and I had run most kinds of machine. We were not allowed to use bench saws, planners or thicknessers but just about everything else was available. In metalwork there were no limits, The forge, lathes and milling machines were all there to be used by us , albeit under strict supervision.

The school was one of the roughest in South East London, at the time, and its only saving grace was the workshop block, where I spent as much time as possible. At 15, I left school and went on to go to technical college where I studied mechanical engineering.

More by circumstance, than design I gained both practical skill and a good understanding of first principles. All that knowledge was packed away when at the age of 18 I decided to take up a career in publishing, which lead on to graphic art and design. In all that time I have never lost my love for woodworking. Yes I have "the right gear" but I also have the skillset to do it all by hand. For a while I used to demonstrate at woodworking shows. This was when cable and satellite TV were new to the UK and all the American woodworking shows were promoting power tool use. The most common question I would get asked was "I have just bought a new router, what should I do with it?" My answer was "Sell it!" A power tool will not make you into a woodworker.

Ralph.

[Andy the Sheep]

Very nice (and clean) workspace!

[Richard48]

And my wife and i do woodcrafting etc.I paint these as Christmas decorations for craft fairs near where i live.My wife does acrylic paintings and i create these and make wooden festive doors etc.

[Peter Gillson]

Hi Ralph

a man after my own heart; my other hobby is also woodworking. Over the years I have made stuff for the house and garden, carved a rocking horse for my daughter and made a couple of battery powered ride-on cars for when the children were small- and the cases for my boxed dioramas!

this was my latest large project: https://www.scale-models.co.uk/threa...inished.41440/

nice looking workshop, mine starts that tidy but as each project progresses it gets more untidy, until I finish and have a good tidy-up before starting the next. And a very nice looking bench.

I discovered this guy on the www - https://www.christofix.com/ - he has some interesting jigs, some of which I have made and are useful.

Peter

[Sprue42]

Hi Ralph

a man after my own heart; my other hobby is also woodworking. Over the years I have made stuff for the house and garden, carved a rocking horse for my daughter and made a couple of battery powered ride-on cars for when the children were small- and the cases for my boxed dioramas!

this was my latest large project: https://www.scale-models.co.uk/threa...inished.41440/

nice looking workshop, mine starts that tidy but as each project progresses it gets more untidy, until I finish and have a good tidy-up before starting the next. And a very nice looking bench.

I discovered this guy on the www - https://www.christofix.com/ - he has some interesting jigs, some of which I have made and are useful.

Peter

Hi Peter,

Sorry, I am late coming back to this post. I love the bar billiards table, reminds me of a miss-spent youth in the 1970s... You just don't see them in the pubs anymore. Come to think of it, the pubs are not that common now either

The workshop was only tidy on that side of the camera! The bench started life as a welsh dresser I built for an article in a UK woodworking magazine. After it was finished, I removed the plate rack and built a top with a well along the back edge and mounted a Record vice that belonged to my late father.

If you like workshop furniture you might like THIS. Something I wrote for Popular Woodworking (in the USA) a few years ago.

Ralph.

[Peter Gillson]

No problem about timing - we are a;l busy.

strangely, Guernsey has a thriving bar billiard league, with quite a few pubs and clubs having tables. The world champion has often been from Guernsey or Jersey!

clever idea of re-purposing the dresser. It looks a nice book, you must be quite proud of having it published.

Peter

[Sprue42]

...It looks a nice book, you must be quite proud of having it published.

Peter

Yes, I am always proud of getting stuff published, but it is nothing special. My first job after leaving college was working for a military/model book publisher. Over the years I have written numerous magazine articles and books on all sorts of subjects from model railways, airbrushing and woodworking. I have also been involved with the editorial side of things from day one. I worked on model magazines like Model World and Airfix magazine with people like Chris Ellis and Ken Jones back in the day. When, later in life, I was editing The Woodworker, Ken was editor of Military Modelling for the same publisher.

Retired now, but still have a passion for both woodworking and plastic modelling.

Ralph

[Peter Gillson]

We both share the same 2 passions. I combine both in the form of box dioramas.

peter

[Scratchbuilder]

Ralph, an interesting and productive interest.
My other 'hobby' is plane spotting... Yeah i know the anorack and bobble hat.... Like all kids decades ago it was on the bike and off to either the local railway station, bus depot or airfield (Yes I went through all three) armed with the log book, Ian Allen book of lists, sandwhich and pop. This interest lasted untill I became aware of airliners and that is the direction I took (girls and ladies came later). The hobby was put away in the memory bank due to life commitments and surfaced again later when I lived in Newcastle upon Tyne where there was the local MAFVA/BMMS club and next door the local spotting club Air North met, and as you do you meet up and talk and the spotting interest revived itself, with regular overnight trips down to Heathrow with a stop off ramp tour at Luton. I also became interested in the over flights and took to logging those down with the help of an early airband radio (dot spotting). Leaving the Architectural/Petro Chemical model making company after being lured to Hatfield and British Aerospace in 1980, it was a dream, working on the then BAe 146 airliner mock up and Airbus A300 wing all mostly from wood. A short trip down the road and it was a day at Heathrow or even Gatwick, lunchtime was a dash through the back lanes to Luton to see what was visiting there.
Well the dream had to end and with the closure of Hatfield I had to start another career and that was HGV Class 1 driving, to start this took me all over the country (tramping) and in a short period I was all over the continent of Europe and into the Eastern Bloc countries as they were. But what about the plane spotting??? Well at night you needed to park up and what better place than near an airport, later it was either a weekend or a few days waiting for a return load and again parked outside an airport cargo area like Charles de Gaule or Madrid or Frankfurt satisfied the interest. No sitting on a service area with just a week old newspaper to read. Experience soon taught me where I could park and not be disturbed and with a couple of bottles of beer shared with the local police I soon became a familiar face.
The introduction of the virtual radar and computers changed spotting, and now I still venture up to Luton or down to Heathrow when the weather is fine, I have the SBS set up to run and I can sit at home and keep an eye on what is happening for 50 miles around my location. I still log down the ones I see, and still underline them in the Annual Air Britain books, but also now on the Aerodata log program...