Category: Techniques

  • French Polishing – Notes from a Short Course

    I recently went on a French polishing course and I took a few notes while I was there. What follows below are the notes I took typed up neatly so that I don’t forget everything. Some of it might be a bit disjointed but there are some gems in there and it’s in roughly the…

  • Hand Carved Decorative Molding

    Hand Carved Decorative Molding

    Recently in the workshop I’ve been making sash windows for an extension we are having built. I haven’t documented the process yet as I have more windows still to build but I thought I’d capture one small aspect now – hand carving the decorative molding on the bottom of the stiles.

  • Splitting Large Stones

    Splitting Large Stones

    When we bought our current house it came with the mother of all rockeries. I kid you not this thing was built to survive a direct nuclear hit. The largest stone probably weighed in at 150kg and perhaps more than that. It took both the wife and myself to shift it a couple of meters…

  • Paint Stripping

    Paint Stripping

    Our tumble down house has progressed a long way since we first bought it and it’s got to the point where we need to start tackling the hectares of gloss paint that needs attention. Over the past 200 years or so most of the woodwork had been painted at least a dozen times or more…