paul standley
01-11-2012, 10:16 AM
It’s the end of April 2012 and I’m off to the Centre for Alternative Technology for my last formal course. No wooden pig hut for me this time, they have proper beds and everything and you even have to take your boots off at the door…!
CAT is an interesting place and was literally born out of a disused former slate quarry well over 30 years ago. It used to be affectionately known locally as the piss and wind centre due to its early work on waste recycling and wind power…!
This was my last opportunity to leverage funding for my training so I wanted to make it count. Residential courses here aren’t cheap and my training support didn’t cover accommodation so I stumped up the cost of that. Compared to the wooden tents at Ironbridge, the accommodation at CAT was outstanding as they have a new residential block, very nice it was too.
This was a 4 ½ day course and gave participants an opportunity to apply their learning’s to a wide choice of workshop projects. A week’s course gives you the chance to absorb things more easily at a more manageable pace and to spend time with the other participants which is a great additional way to learn as everyone has a story to tell and a skill or experience that you don’t have.
CAT has a lovely covered workshop in local woodland about a mile away on a private estate with several pole lathes, shave horses, cleaving breaks, jigs etc and some hand tools to die for. The hand tools to be fair, all belonged to the external tutor Bob Shaw and there was a few bobs worth there too. Bob’s booty didn’t just include tools, he had a library of traditional skills and green wood working books that would have taken weeks to browse through.
Bob is a character, not exactly in his first flush of youth (like me) and not a big follower of modern technology and one of the few people I have met that doesn’t have a mobile phone…!. He is a true country guy, a gent and is true to his way of life, he lives simply using his enormous range of country and green wood working skills and has an almost obsessive love of old hand tools. He is a master woodsman and an expert in woodland management. I’m not sure but I reckon he was also a real life hippy back in the day…!
The first day was an introduction to woodland management and by now I’d seen this as a constant theme running though all of the training I’d done and included tree identification, best practice, respecting your raw materials etc.
The second day was a mixture of theory and a series of demonstrations by Bob on the most common green wood working processes which was a delight to watch.
The rest of the week involved making projects, some one-to-one tutoring, and sections on related stuff like charcoal burning, tool maintenance and jigs & fixtures.
My first project was to make a shave horse; this is often considered the Holy Grail in apprentice green wood working and rightly so in my opinion for two reasons because depending on the style, it can employ many processes such as measuring, marking, log splitting, hewing, cleaving, turning, jointing, shaving, carving and drilling. Once you have a shave horse then you have much more flexibility in terms of what you can make because the shave horse is really a late medieval Black & Decker Work Mate.
So there I am stood beside a half split conifer log about 5ft long and a 3ft Ash trunk about 10” in diameter and Bob’s saying - you ok to get on with it then ?. Of course, you say yes don’t you cus’ you don’t want to appear too green. He looks at the conifer log again and decides it would be helpful to trim it a little with the chainsaw first so that lightens my heart a as it probably saved me 2 hours’ hard graft.
There were half a dozen shave horses dotted around the workshop of different types and styles so I pick the one I’m most familiar with and like the one I’d briefly sat on once at a country crafts fair and set about taking measurements. I’d found on this journey that rulers and tape measures are in short supply in green wood working and that ‘measuring sticks’ are more the norm. Basically, you take a stick and notch it at various intervals to represent different measurements so this is what I used for my shave horse, I put notches on it for lengths of legs & body, length & width of the swinging arm clamps, sloping board etc and set about turning my big bits of wood into smaller bits of wood.
The weather was not too bad actually so most of my shave horse was build out in the open in the clearing beside the workshop with the birds singing and the smell of the wood smoke from the log burner wafting around and during that time I came to realise that this was my idea of heaven. I was relaxed, confident with the tools and seemingly able to convert all of that previous theory into practice through my own hands. I got to make the spindle elements on one of the pole lathes in the workshop and used a variety of hand tools, some of which I’d only ever seen in books, it was a magic time and was the tipping point in my journey, this I decided, was what I wanted to do for the foreseeable future.
My second project I decided was going to be either a traditional hay rake or a traditional sheep hurdle. Kate, one of my fellow participants whom I’d got to know was going to make a hay rake so I decided to make a sheep hurdle and that way, we could share our experiences as we went along to maximise the learning.
In terms of my ambitions, there were really five pivotal traditional green wood projects that I wanted to accomplish at some point over the coming years and these were a shave horse, a sheep hurdle gate, a Hazel woven sheep hurdle, a Sussex style trug basket and a pole lathe. Actually make that six because a Besom broom was also lurking in there somewhere. To me, these all represent slices of country life from a bygone age and to be able to replicate such items would be to transport me back in time.
So, tick box #1 as my shave horse was now glistening in the spring sunshine and being patted and stroked at every opportunity. I had seen patterns of sheep hurdle gates in many books and had even found an old video of a guy making one as part of an “Out of Town” TV episode presented by the Amazing Jack Hargreaves made back in the 70’s. Don’t let me run off at a tangent here because Jack is a hero of mine and I’d be here all day talking about him but suffice to say, if you haven’t seen these series, get them on DVD because they capture a slice of country life long gone no for the most part.
Tick box #2 was now within my grasp, deep breaths were needed because this was the stuff of dreams that I was involved in here….
Catch up with me in part 5 as my journey is not over yet…
Paul
CAT is an interesting place and was literally born out of a disused former slate quarry well over 30 years ago. It used to be affectionately known locally as the piss and wind centre due to its early work on waste recycling and wind power…!
This was my last opportunity to leverage funding for my training so I wanted to make it count. Residential courses here aren’t cheap and my training support didn’t cover accommodation so I stumped up the cost of that. Compared to the wooden tents at Ironbridge, the accommodation at CAT was outstanding as they have a new residential block, very nice it was too.
This was a 4 ½ day course and gave participants an opportunity to apply their learning’s to a wide choice of workshop projects. A week’s course gives you the chance to absorb things more easily at a more manageable pace and to spend time with the other participants which is a great additional way to learn as everyone has a story to tell and a skill or experience that you don’t have.
CAT has a lovely covered workshop in local woodland about a mile away on a private estate with several pole lathes, shave horses, cleaving breaks, jigs etc and some hand tools to die for. The hand tools to be fair, all belonged to the external tutor Bob Shaw and there was a few bobs worth there too. Bob’s booty didn’t just include tools, he had a library of traditional skills and green wood working books that would have taken weeks to browse through.
Bob is a character, not exactly in his first flush of youth (like me) and not a big follower of modern technology and one of the few people I have met that doesn’t have a mobile phone…!. He is a true country guy, a gent and is true to his way of life, he lives simply using his enormous range of country and green wood working skills and has an almost obsessive love of old hand tools. He is a master woodsman and an expert in woodland management. I’m not sure but I reckon he was also a real life hippy back in the day…!
The first day was an introduction to woodland management and by now I’d seen this as a constant theme running though all of the training I’d done and included tree identification, best practice, respecting your raw materials etc.
The second day was a mixture of theory and a series of demonstrations by Bob on the most common green wood working processes which was a delight to watch.
The rest of the week involved making projects, some one-to-one tutoring, and sections on related stuff like charcoal burning, tool maintenance and jigs & fixtures.
My first project was to make a shave horse; this is often considered the Holy Grail in apprentice green wood working and rightly so in my opinion for two reasons because depending on the style, it can employ many processes such as measuring, marking, log splitting, hewing, cleaving, turning, jointing, shaving, carving and drilling. Once you have a shave horse then you have much more flexibility in terms of what you can make because the shave horse is really a late medieval Black & Decker Work Mate.
So there I am stood beside a half split conifer log about 5ft long and a 3ft Ash trunk about 10” in diameter and Bob’s saying - you ok to get on with it then ?. Of course, you say yes don’t you cus’ you don’t want to appear too green. He looks at the conifer log again and decides it would be helpful to trim it a little with the chainsaw first so that lightens my heart a as it probably saved me 2 hours’ hard graft.
There were half a dozen shave horses dotted around the workshop of different types and styles so I pick the one I’m most familiar with and like the one I’d briefly sat on once at a country crafts fair and set about taking measurements. I’d found on this journey that rulers and tape measures are in short supply in green wood working and that ‘measuring sticks’ are more the norm. Basically, you take a stick and notch it at various intervals to represent different measurements so this is what I used for my shave horse, I put notches on it for lengths of legs & body, length & width of the swinging arm clamps, sloping board etc and set about turning my big bits of wood into smaller bits of wood.
The weather was not too bad actually so most of my shave horse was build out in the open in the clearing beside the workshop with the birds singing and the smell of the wood smoke from the log burner wafting around and during that time I came to realise that this was my idea of heaven. I was relaxed, confident with the tools and seemingly able to convert all of that previous theory into practice through my own hands. I got to make the spindle elements on one of the pole lathes in the workshop and used a variety of hand tools, some of which I’d only ever seen in books, it was a magic time and was the tipping point in my journey, this I decided, was what I wanted to do for the foreseeable future.
My second project I decided was going to be either a traditional hay rake or a traditional sheep hurdle. Kate, one of my fellow participants whom I’d got to know was going to make a hay rake so I decided to make a sheep hurdle and that way, we could share our experiences as we went along to maximise the learning.
In terms of my ambitions, there were really five pivotal traditional green wood projects that I wanted to accomplish at some point over the coming years and these were a shave horse, a sheep hurdle gate, a Hazel woven sheep hurdle, a Sussex style trug basket and a pole lathe. Actually make that six because a Besom broom was also lurking in there somewhere. To me, these all represent slices of country life from a bygone age and to be able to replicate such items would be to transport me back in time.
So, tick box #1 as my shave horse was now glistening in the spring sunshine and being patted and stroked at every opportunity. I had seen patterns of sheep hurdle gates in many books and had even found an old video of a guy making one as part of an “Out of Town” TV episode presented by the Amazing Jack Hargreaves made back in the 70’s. Don’t let me run off at a tangent here because Jack is a hero of mine and I’d be here all day talking about him but suffice to say, if you haven’t seen these series, get them on DVD because they capture a slice of country life long gone no for the most part.
Tick box #2 was now within my grasp, deep breaths were needed because this was the stuff of dreams that I was involved in here….
Catch up with me in part 5 as my journey is not over yet…
Paul