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Helmand to Blubberhouses
Saturday, 13th November 2010 18:04 PM
Barnabas first contacted me about two years ago. He is in the Royal Army Medical Corp and was based in Catterick. It's a bit boring in Catterick in the evenings, so he wanted to travel down to my evening classes in Hudderesfield. Unfortunately my class was full. Later Barnabas was posted to Helmand in Afghanistan (not everyone's favourite place) and in the hot and dusty base at Lashkar Gah his thoughts again turned to furniture making. We arranged that he would do a weeks one to one with me on his return.
The week started on Monday by looking at the tools Barnabas had brought with him and sharpening and fettling them so they performed to their best. We flattened the backs of his new Ashley Ilse chisels and fettled a Stanley jack plane. On Tuesday we marked out and cut by hand mortice and tenon and lap joints. Barnabas produced a better mortice and tenon joint than my demonstration one (rather embarassing!). The project for the rest of the week was to make an oak side table with tapered legs. For this we got a bit more mechanised. We used a combination of mortice and tenon and domino joints to fit the rails to the legs. The mortices cut using a router and the tenons cut on the router table.
Barnabas completed the table on Friday with about half an hour to spare. A very fine table it was too. I was impressed with his dilligent appraoch to the work. Some students just have the right appoach to the work, one knows that they will do good work the future, Barnabas was just such a student. I hope he continues with his interest in the craft.
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Barnabas and hit oak side table