Hello — I'm Tom
I make things out of wood in a small workshop, mostly in the evenings and at weekends, and I enjoy it more than almost anything else I do.
One room, one bench, rather too many clamps
A lathe, a table saw, a wall of tools that took longer to arrange than it should have, and a dust extractor that never quite keeps up. It is not a large operation. That's the whole point of it.
Why I do this
I find woodworking soothing in a way that very little else manages. There's a particular kind of quiet that arrives about twenty minutes in, once 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 pass without my noticing, and at the end of them something exists that didn't before.
That last bit is the part I can't get anywhere else. Most work disappears the moment 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, honestly
Let me be straightforward about this, because there's a lot of nonsense written on the subject: mass production is brilliant. It is the right answer for most things you own. A factory will make you a chopping board that is flatter, more consistent and a great deal cheaper than mine, and it will do it a thousand times before lunch. If what you want is a board, buy a board. I mean that.
What a factory cannot do is connect you to anybody. And that turns out to matter more than I would have guessed before I started making things for people.
When you use something made by hand, you're holding decisions. Somebody chose that piece of timber out of a stack because of the way the grain ran. Somebody decided the rim should be a little thinner than was strictly sensible. Somebody sanded the inside of a box that nobody will ever see, because leaving it rough would have bothered them. None of that is efficient. All of it is present in the finished thing, and you can feel it.
Which brings me to the imperfections, because there will be some. A tool mark that caught the light differently the day I finished it. A join that's a hair proud. Grain that decided, halfway through a bowl, to do something completely different from the other side. I could sand and fuss until those disappeared, and what I'd be left with is something that looks like it came out of a machine — at which point you may as well have bought the machine version and saved the money and the wait.
The variation is the evidence. It's how you know a person was there. In twenty years that's the part you'll be able to point at.
How I work
Slowly, and one thing at a time. I don't batch, I don't have staff and I don't subcontract anything. The timber mostly comes from a local sawmill's offcut pile, which is cheap and good and would otherwise be burned. Everything gets finished with a food-safe hardwax oil unless there's a reason not to.
Because this is evenings and weekends rather than a full-time business, lead times are real lead times — I'd rather tell you eight weeks and mean it than tell you 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. That's deliberate.
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 fun, so don't be shy about asking whether something's possible. If I don't think I can build it well, I'll tell you that too.
Work on the bench
