Paul Sellers did it...again!

[hbmcc]

I like design, and find Sellers recent posts on building furniture for his home?/new? interesting. Experimenting with tweaks to a design [Schwarz] is one thing. You never post a flop. Well, there was at least one he did. It's a brave soul who tries something completely new or foreign to the standard fare. I like that too. Cheers to "pansy vloggs". 

OTOH, Paul can get boring. He doesn't need to proselytize to preach his methods. Just bang it out and shrink the paragraph to a normal length.

[jstraw]

Is it bad that I have never read or watched Paul Sellers until this thread? I also do not like makings and storing jigs unless I have to, especially if it’s useful for only a single project.

[Handplanesandmore]

OTOH, Paul can get boring. He doesn't need to proselytize to preach his methods. Just bang it out and shrink the paragraph to a normal length.

I suspect his devoted fans are partly to blame for this, as no matter what he blogs, some followers would add their favorable comments which are actually reinforcing his behavior. He needs an editor, or may be they tried but Paul had overruled it. I suppose his team has someone who is good at trimming wordy fat.

Simon

[blackhat]

If you spent the time wasted on this nonsense practising dovetails or mortises, you'd be further ahead.

[Bibliophile 13]

Probably beating a dead horse by this time, but I took a class with Paul Sellers a dozen years ago when I was first getting into woodworking.  He's a very good teacher, and he laid the foundation for my own woodworking, so I have a lot of respect for him.  Here are some of my impressions of him and his work:

Paul has always had power tools.  In the back of the shop where he taught, there was a chop saw, jointer, bandsaw, etc.  He and his assistants used all those tools to prep the stock for our classes.  His core audience was experienced power-tool-only guys, and he was showing them how to integrate hand tools into their work.  He focused on hand-cut joinery, assuming that stock prep would be done by machines.  Hence his reliance on the smoothing plane almost exclusively.  I remember some of us chatting during a break in the class, and one of the guys remarked, "Yeah, it's cool what he can do with hand tools, but I'm not giving up my router!"   That was Paul's audience, and it still is, I think.

I was the oddball in the class, in that the only power tools I had were a circular saw and a drill.  So although I came away from the class knowing how to cut joints by hand, I had no clue about how to prep stock and dimension wood.  I had to learn all that from other people--mostly here on this forum! 

I used Paul's sharpening method for a while.  I didn't have a grinder, so I got myself a couple diamond stones and a strop and made it work.  It worked for a while, but eventually my bevels got steeper and steeper, and I had to find somebody with a belt sander or a bench grinder to reshape my edges.  So I got a grinder and went with hollow grinding instead.  I still use my old diamond stone sometimes, and I still strop.   

The only one of Paul's methods I've never had much success with is mortising.  Every time I've tried it with a bench chisel, the chisel has twisted in the cut.  And somehow my mortises tended to come out crooked, too.  It was my utter frustration with that method that led me to get mortise chisels.  And wow, what a difference!  Now I genuinely enjoy mortise and tenon joinery.  

All that said, I can't count the number of techniques he introduced me to that I still use, everything from marking reference faces consistently to using a knife line, to laying out saw cuts, to rounding over edges with a handplane...  heck, I even learned to make spoons by watching one of his demos and adapting some of his methods (not all of them) to my own work.  Since then, I've made hundreds of spoons and have been selling them at local markets over the past few years.  So yeah, I don't agree with him on everything, but I will always be grateful for Paul's instruction.

[Handplanesandmore]

Knife line, etc. that Paul has popularized have been covered by other teachers or writers before him (as I mentioned earlier, but it is Paul who successfully brought those techniques to the front stage).

What few have noticed is the way he makes stopped cuts with a handplane; at least I have not seen any discussion on his technique, nor have I have seen any other teacher or writer use it.

Also uniquely seen from him is the way he planes an edge straight. The concept is covered in Robert Wearing's book, but not as an edge treatment technique.

Simon

[hbmcc]

Thanks for your impressions, Steve, Bibliophile 13. You put a real, grounded perspective into an otherwise graceless progression of conjecture.