sutton046

At last, I have completed the plans for the awesome MkIII Shaving Horse and Bowl Carving Bench Combination.These plans are now available for purchase. This device has received considerable interest since I first posted about it in May 2015: Combining a Shaving Horse and Bowl Carving Bench - My "Mk III" Shaving Horse. The plans I have produced are comprehensive, consisting of nine A3 pages made up of scale drawings and some photos, but you can always print them out in A4 if you wish. Available in pdf format, the cost is AUD$50 , which at the current exchange rate is approx. US$37 . To all those who have been waiting, my sincere apologies. I had hoped the plans would be available on my hew website, but this is not yet operational. So rather than have you keep waiting around, there is a way forward here: To purchase these plans, please email me adventure@wn.com.au and right now Paypal would be the easiest way to go, until the E-commerce site is up and running. Sorry about any...

I've got about 8 shaving horses, which I use for running public workshops. I had previously made a batch of shaving horses from packing crate material and other recycled wood, which I did a post about  in July 2014. Since then I have made another version, like a super-modified saw horse. Let's call it the Mk II - a multifunctional shaving horse and bowl carving horse combo. My favourite horse, it is about 7 feet long, has fixed legs, and a heavy vise built into the tail of the bench. All this limits its portability. Some of the original shaving horses, English Bodger style on the left and Dumbhead style on the right. The Mk II Shaving Horse / Carving bench combo. A beautiful beast - with a tail vise! The Mk II has fixed legs, as it is a supermodified saw horse at it's core. Being all jarrah, it is heavy. It is very versatile in its holding capacity, but there are times when it is too big or tricky to transport.  I was invited by Timbecon to demonstrate Green W...

At the end of June, I had the pleasure of running another Green Woodworking workshop. This time we used the Vic Park Arts Centre as the venue. On a nice sunny day, it was great to be able to work out in the garden and on the verandah.  Front side of the info flyer for the June workshop. Calling it "A Taste of Green Woodworking", the ten participants had a choice of either bowl carving or spoon carving. The wood we had to play with was Cape Lilac and Camphor Laurel. Here are a few pics from the day:  That's me doing a demo on cleaving some Cape Lilac with froe and beetle. Another lovely spoon taking shape. Doing a demo on hollowing out the bowl shape with an adze. A Camphor Laurel Bowl in the making. The Shaving Horse is a joy to use! The small bowl carving adze is a beauty. A moment of contemplation... Working on the verandah. There were an assortment of hatchets and adzes to try out. Shaping the outside of a Camphor Laurel bowl with a hatchet. Using a Hook Knife to h...

While traditionally a shaving horse would be made from green wood gathered from a forest or wood somewhere, not all of us city dwellers have easy access to the right kind and size of trees for this purpose. However, we do have access to wonderful seasoned timbers from all around the world which arrive in our cities in the form of packing crates, dunnage, and pallets. What a resource to work with!  Packing for the picking. Off the verge and into the back of the ute. Nice pine from the USA. Earlier this year, I was needing to make up a few shaving horses for running workshops. So I started out by using some of the packing crate material I had collected which was in my timber racks. Two models: the English Bodger style and the fabricated Dumb Head style. There are many variations on shaving horses, though the most common styles would be the "Dumb Head" style, which has been around since at least the 14th century,  and the English Bodger's style which is a m...