Brian Boggs

Battling The Burr

I have been wanting to make a video on plane blade sharpening for some time now.   I know the 20 minute video format we chose just doesn’t leave room for the whole story.  The last time I taught a workshop on sharpening was a two-week sharpening basics class at Penland School of Craft and …

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Innovative Card Scraper Techniques

Before making this latest video on scraper techniques, I looked at quite a few YouTube scraper sharpening videos.   I watched so many makers talk about their method for getting a good edge with interest.  All of them are going after the same thing but speak about it differently.  Those differences are important to hear and watch. Each will …

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Introduction to Planing Wood

James Krenov called hand planes “the violins of the woodworker’s orchestra”.   I never got what he meant by that exactly other than to express his own reverence for this group of hand tools. I have never played a violin, but I have learned, over four decades of using hand planes, that the nuances of the …

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Who Owns a Design Idea?

In the larger sense of things, I think of ownership of ideas the same way I think of ownership of land or water.  This stuff isn’t ours to own, really.  We share it, take care of it, maybe even develop it, and ultimately, we return to it. The concept of owning land is a way …

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Brian and Melanie Celebrate the GOOD Design Award

Moving Beyond Berea

I began chair making in the early ’80s following the tutelage of Jenny Alexander’s book Make a Chair from a Tree. It took a few years for me to find my own voice in chair design, but by the late ’80’s I began to feel more at ease in my design experiments. By the early …

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