European Woodworking Show, The Best One Yet!!

The 2013 show is over and it's been the busiest and best one yet. Set in two magnificent ancient barns as well as smaller buildings and a number of large marquees, it specialises in wood working hand tools with a great mixture of demonstrators and small scale tool makers and a handful of the larger manufacturers.

Needless to say the two photos were taken before the show began, you can see below what happened when the doors were opened!

Andy Ryalls and his brother gave up their weekend to educate visitors on the mysteries of Japanese planes and tools. like many stands at the show they were constantly busy.
Andy makes these long uninterrupted shavings look easy. He let me have a go and even after some instruction on stance, holding the plane and walking down the board, I still couldn't pull a complete shaving.

Andy belongs to the Japanese Tool Study Group more details here http://www.hsow.co.uk/japanese-tool-study-group/

Here's Vic Tesolin from Veritas having a go with one of my wooden planes. He's a cheery bloke, full of life and great at shows.

Here's camera shy plane maker Phil Edwards. His planes are superbly made and he has a 6 month waiting list http://www.phillyplanes.co.uk/

I was next to bench maker Richard McGuire who had a selection of his fine Little John work benches on display http://www.rm-workbenches.co.uk/ . Like Phil Edwards, Richard (and Helen) are struggling to keep up with demand. Richard enjoys a good chin wag and there were no shortage of visitors to their stand, here David Charlesworth and Vic Tesolin were debating the merits of various bench designs.

Marionette maker Lenka does some fantastic work, with a style and a charm of her own. She had a large display but it best to take a look at her website http://www.praguemarionette.com/

The Veritas shooting plane does a great job and was very easy and comfortable to use. It takes a more modern approach to styling the Lie Nielsen and looked good for it.

I always like to see work brought to the shows by wood workers, here's a nice infill shoulder plane in Padouk and brass.

The same maker also did these very comfortable cutting gauges from hornbean, one bevel in, one bevel out.

The last piece was a hexagonal box with angled dovetails on all corners. No wonder he was proud of this, I'm not sure I would like to attempt one of these!

So that's it the shows over for another year. Most people stayed around all day and some were there for both days. It was good to see a lot of overseas visitors, it is truly a European show.