Hello, I'm Tom
I make things out of wood in a small workshop, mostly in the evenings and at weekends.
One room, one bench, too many clamps
A lathe, a table saw, a wall of tools that took far longer to arrange than it should have, and a dust extractor that never quite keeps up. It's not a large operation.
Why I do this
I find woodworking calming in a way that not much else manages. About twenty minutes in, the phone is on the other side of the room and the only thing that matters is whether this cut is square. A few hours go past without my noticing.
And at the end of it something exists that didn't before, which is the part I can't get anywhere else. Most work disappears as soon as it's finished. A bowl doesn't. It sits on a table for thirty years and somebody puts their keys in it.
Why hand-made
Let me be straight about this, because a lot of nonsense gets written on the subject. Mass production is brilliant, and it's the right answer for most of what you own. A factory will make you a chopping board flatter, more consistent and much cheaper than mine, a thousand times before lunch. If what you want is a board, buy a board.
What a factory can't do is connect you to anybody, and that turns out to matter more than I'd have guessed before I started making things for people.
When you use something made by hand you're holding a set of decisions. Somebody picked that piece of timber out of a stack because of the way the grain ran, decided the rim should be thinner than was strictly sensible, and sanded the inside of a box nobody will ever see because leaving it rough would have bothered them. None of that is efficient, and all of it is still there in the finished thing.
Which brings me to the imperfections, because there will be some. A tool mark that catches the light. A joint that's a hair proud. Grain that changes its mind halfway round a bowl. I could sand and fuss until those disappeared and what you'd be left with is something that looks machine-made, at which point you may as well have bought the machine version and kept the money.
The variation is how you know a person was there.
How I work
Slowly, and one thing at a time. No staff, no batches, nothing subcontracted. The timber mostly comes off a local sawmill's offcut pile, which is cheap and good and would otherwise be burned. Everything gets a food-safe hardwax oil unless there's a reason not to.
Because this is evenings and weekends rather than a full-time business, the lead times are real. I'd rather say eight weeks and mean it than say two and apologise later. And because I'm not trying to make a living from it, the prices are lower than a professional maker would charge.
If you'd like something
There are pieces finished and waiting, things I make regularly to order, and commissions from scratch. The last of those is the most interesting, so ask if you're wondering whether something's possible.
Work on the bench
