With another DVD (or digital download) in his excellent series on machinery, Peter Sefton has established himself in tackling what’s easily a dry, technical subject and making it essential viewing for woodworkers. In fact, he managed to keep my attention for just over two hours, which is admirable!
The Woodworker Magazine
Peter Sefton’s students share the trials and tribulations of making a workshop stool project full of tapers and compound angles.
I’m Garry Rowberry, a full-time student at the Peter Sefton Furniture School in Worcestershire. This is my account of constructing what looks like a simple workshop stool and how I deal with some of the issues and challenges along the way.
The workshop stool project introduces us to compound angles, using full-size drawings and we work as a group to make a small production run. We get involved with setting up machines and jigs for repeated tasks, and all the students use the same settings to mill and construct their own workshop stools. The brief gives us latitude in selecting timber and the final finish.
Furniture & Cabinetmaking Magazine
Peter Sefton Furniture School graduate Simon Denton tells us of his plans to forge a successful career combining his two lifelong passions: music and furniture making.
The Woodworker Magazine
For many woodworkers, the bandsaw is often the first machine they buy. Not only is it less intimidating, safer and quieter than other workshop equipment, but it’s pretty versatile. From cutting accurate joints such as dovetails, bevels and tight curves to simply sawing logs for firewood, there’s not much it can’t do as a saw. Like any machine it needs to be set up correctly to get the most from it, though. Following on from his excellent range of hand tool DVDs (Series 1), furniture maestro Peter Sefton has progressed to Series 2, focusing on woodworking machinery. Starting with the bandsaw, I should point out that this is the first of three DVDs dealing solely with this machine, the subsequent pair concentrating on Advanced Techniques – we’ll take a closer look at those in a future issue.
The Woodworker Magazine
These days there’s no shortage of information out there for woodworkers that just wasn’t available when I were a lad. Unless you had college training you either had to dip into books, enrol in an evening class or work it out for yourself. Early instructional videos could be painful to watch, a fast track to an afternoon nap, and even now some YouTube demos can be a bit dodgy. A happy exception is Peter Sefton’s series of Fine Furniture Making DVDs, which are professional and certainly absorbing. Admittedly this is the first one I’ve watched, but if preceding discs are of the same standard (Andy King assures me they are), then you may want to reserve the DVD player for an evening or two.
Good Woodworking Magazine
These two volumes from Peter Sefton’s new Fine Furniture Making DVD range are very well produced and the professional and authoritative delivery instils the viewer with confidence throughout. As part of a five-volume series (Series 1), I selected these two as they cover similar areas to the David Charlesworth DVDs I reviewed back in GW320. There are certain similarities within them, which I guess is to be expected as the areas of flattening and preparing stock, as well as the hoary subject of sharpening, are age-old, and the principles are essentially the same. However, for me, Peter has a far more hands-on approach that makes the time fly by as you watch, accompanied by excellent little nuggets of information that explains the reasoning and methodology as you move on through.
The Woodworker Magazine
Buy Now
Timber Preparation DVD
Chisel & Plane Sharpening DVD
Fine Furniture Making Collection – Set of 5 DVDs
Peter Sefton and his students learn about the hand cutting of dovetails and use these newfound skills to make a small chestnut letter rack.
Good Woodworking Magazine
Peter Sefton shows us how there is more than one way to shoot a mitre joint.
At first glance, the mitre is one of the easiest joints to make but getting it right and well fitting can be a little trickier than expected. Two of my students have just been working on some constructional mitres that can make or break their projects.
Woodworking Crafts Magazine
Peter Sefton describes all the essential tools you’ll need for marking and measuring.
The accurate marking and measuring of timber is a critical part of our furniture making; to do this well, we need quality reliable tools. In this article, we’ll look at some of the tools that we use in our teaching workshops and show you how to check the tools that you have, to make sure they are doing what you need.
Woodworking Crafts Magazine
Peter Sefton tells us about what’s going on at the Furniture School this month and shares a few important tips on timber selection.
February is an exciting time of year for us in the Furniture School; the professional long course students bought their timber for their major projects before Christmas and now it’s time to start cutting it up and making their ideas on paper come to reality.
Woodworking Crafts Magazine
