Here’s a short film of Brian Alcock the last self employed grinder working in Sheffield. It’s a trade that dates back many centuries. The city is literally paved with worn out grindstones in places. Once every stream running through the area was dammed to power thousands of waterwheels. Brian grinds all of our axes along with work for many other…
I can’t remember when I first heard of pulled fibre birch brooms, it may have been in Sweden at Taljfest or may have been through my friend Jarrod Dahl in USA who now makes them ocassionally. Whatever they are a wonderful green woodworking craft. I wonder who first pulled a few birch fibres in this way and worked out that…
The best way to keep an axe sharp is to store it in a leather sheath when not in use. It’s fun to make your own axe sheath but many folk would rather buy one and concentrate on the woodworking. We have sourced some of the best vegetable tanned leather available made by Clayton’s one of the last traditional tanneries…
Last year I helped my friend Jarrod Stone Dahl build a birch bark canoe, it was quite simply one of the highlights of my traditional woodworking life. We only had about an hour with it on the water though and part of the dream was always to paddle a canoe in a proper wilderness area in the far North. This…
Way back in June I documented the various stages of our birch bark canoe build, this is the final chapter. Ther last blog post had us fitting the gunwales and thwarts once that was done we had to fit the ribs. These are made from cleft and shaved cedar. Here is Jarrod working with the crooked knife to shave down the…
So now the build starts in earnest. We laid out the rolls of bark that we collected last week, sorting the pieces and deciding how to get the best from them. Jarrod has a building board which raises the bed 18″ off the floor and gives a level bed to measure and work from. There is a great amount of thought…
Building a birch bark canoe is something very few folk in the world will ever get to do so I feel extremely fortunate to be helping my friend Jarrod Stone Dahl one of only a handful of folk left with the skills to make them. This and the next few blog posts will share some of the proceses involved. Here…
I get asked which is the best axe for carving a lot so thought it would be good to make a blog post which I can refer folk back to. In the world of Bushcraft most folk go for the Gransfors Bruks small forest axe, it is recommended by Ray Mears which no doubt helps it’s popularity. It is like…
Years ago I loved to experiment with wild food and worked my way through Richard Mabey’s “food for free“ After a couple of years experimenting with stewed nettles and the likes I came down to half a dozen wild foods which I still enjoy when in season but the rest are the sort of thing which in the words of…
We don’t have a TV but occasionally folk tell me about things that are worth watching on BBCiplayer so this week I watched the last episode of Ray Mears Northern Wilderness series. I chose that episode partly because I had heard it was the best and partly because if covered the North West coast of Canada and area where there…
