Lockdown! Tools and new book projects!

It's been an extremely productive lockdown here in mid-Michigan. Our Governor recently extended the stay at home order through April 30th, so we have a few more days at home with our daughter Abigail. In addition to this wonderful family time, I've been getting a little more time in the shop, which I have been using to work on little projects here and there.

Here's the finished infill plane that I wrote about here.

I fitted a new oak handle to this large Ohio Tool socket chisel. It has been languishing in my "someday" pile for years, and now it is a wonderful, Underhill-esque worker.

I've had this reproduction Iron Age Celtic socket axe head sitting on a shelf over my bench for a while now, and I finally found the right piece of maple firewood from which to make a handle. The axe head is carefully fitted onto the handle and currently lashed with twine, though I will redo this when I get some proper rawhide lacing.!

Finally, and perhaps most exciting of all, I've been making significant progress on two, yes, TWO!, new books. One is tentatively titled The Hand Tool Woodshop: How to Create Your Space and Build (Almost) Everything In It. Like my first book, With Saw, Plane and Chisel, it is a how-to manual to produce many of the hand tools, layout tools, and work surfaces you need to be able to work efficiently by hand. This one is taking me a while to finish, and I've been working on it since last July. I'm hopeful it will be available by the end of the year. More to come.

The second is more akin to my book On Woodworking. It is tentatively called Tall Tool Tales: Hunting Rusty Treasures and the People Who Made Them. It features (mostly true) tool hunting stories, ideas about how to find the best of the best, and biographical stories of some of the men and women who made the objects we most revere. I expect this to be available by late summer.

If you're interested in keeping up with news on these two new books, shoot me an email and I'll add you to the list!