The project invites members of the public to come and make some outdoor seating for the Stanton Park and Stratton Woods site, and we’ll be teaching some basic green woodworking and furniture making techniques along the way.

Get in touch to book your place now, and come along for a magical day of making in the woods! It’s FREE too!

Details are here:

Furniture Making Workshop

I like this gallery so much that I made a special piece for their 3rd birthday celebration – a three pendant hazel light. I drove it up to beautiful Hebden Bridge, installed it in the window and had time to sample a pint of local ale in the town.

It looks super in their window. Happy 3rd birthday, Snug!

www.snug-gallery.com

Many industries carry out life cycle assessment, which is great, and I believe that the more data that becomes available, the more broadly it will be understood and recognised.

I’ve had a go at doing my own LCA recording, and I was interested to compare the CO2 captured in the growth of the tree with the CO2 released in the manufacture.

Of course, I’m not claiming that this data is perfect, there is a degree of guesswork, although I have done it is as accurately as possible. Also, for the data to be very valid I suppose it should be carried out by an external body, and therefore impartial. I have no interest in fiddling the figures, so you can trust me here.

There is also some debate to be had about where you draw the line in the data you include. Do you include the embedded CO2 in the building that the products were made in? Do you include the CO2 emitted in making the food that I ate for lunch? How do we accurately divide the fixed CO2 output of the workshop, i.e. lighting and heating? Also, how do you predict the ultimate length of life of a piece, and know how is going to be disposed of?

For my LCA data, I’ve left much of these complicated issues out, which admittedly does make the data a little basic. In the interest of clarity and simplicity, I purely give data directly involved in making each piece. I assume that whether I was making that piece or not, I’d still eat lunch, the workshop would still be there, and the lights would still (hopefully) be on.

Have a look at this recent project that I life cycle assessed, and watch this space for more in the future. I hope to do my chairs and other products too in due course. Also have a look at this post about the project through which I first heard about LCA.

Please note the Hendzel + Hunt cabinet in the background! And go check out the shop for yourself. It’s ace.

As is normal, I took questions at the end. The students instigated some good discussion, and a few were very interested in my use of machinery in the manufacture of pieces that have been developed from a background of cleaving, weaving and draw-knifing. Some were surprised by the fact that I’m very open to machining, and don’t feel an overwhelming urge to work my material with basic edge tools.

Their questions got me thinking about the amount that I use machinery in my work, and here are my thoughts…

There is a certain romance about the idea of a quiet workshop, with nothing but the scchffffft of a razor sharp plane slicing a fraction of a millimetre off a piece of elm, or hearing the tension in the fibres of green hazel being undone by a froe as it accurately splits the wood down its length. However, I find just as much satisfaction in the sound and feel of a planer-thicknesser with razor sharp knives accurately flattening a large dried section of an oak tree, as I push it over its blades.

To me, the machines or power tools that I use are just as valuable and enjoyable as my Clifton no7 try plane, and I use them with the same level of skill, experience, accuracy, and respect. When spindle-moulding a piece of timber, you can’t simply push the wood in and hope for the best – you have to use skill to read the grain and feed it at the right speed, in the right way. You’re just as engaged with the process as you are cutting it by hand. Perhaps even more so, as you have to absorb yourself in the work, or you stand a chance of losing your fingers!

There are, of course, the pressures of capitalism breathing down my neck to keep my production times as short as possible. I can make one of my chairs in a little over a day using routers with jigs and templates I’ve carefully designed and made. Originally that chair took me a week when it was made entirely by hand, and that didn’t matter on my MA at university, but the time it takes to make my furniture informs how much it will cost my customers, and whether they buy or not makes the difference between being able to do a job I enjoy, and looking for a different line of work.

Added to this, in fact, using machines removes much laborious process that would dull the enjoyment of many of the projects I undertake.

The debate between hand tools and machinery was very widely discussed in the Arts and Crafts period, with makers sitting on either side of the fence. William Morris was a proponent of machine use in the right way, and I tend to agree with him.

“in short, we would be the masters of our machines and not their slaves, as we are now.’

Imagine using a hammer to hit a nail. You don’t feel the metal of the head of the hammer in your hand send a shock through the handle, and in to your palm as it bounces back off the nail. It’s not this detached – you feel the head of the hammer strike the nail. The hammer is at this point an extension of your arm. It’s the same with a hand-held router, the tip of the cutter is the furthest extension of my arm, and I feel it cutting the wood, able to respond to complicated grain.

I have to use machines to stay in business, but I get as excited about having an accurate and sharp radial saw, as I do an accurate and sharp dovetail saw, and I’m grateful to have a good balance of both available to me in my workshop. It allows me to enjoy making accurately, quickly, and with sensitivity to the material.

Last week, my good furniture-maker friend Liam Treanor and our interns went off to my new hazel supply in Kent, which isn’t too far from my workshop in South East London. We had a brilliant day cutting and got plenty of good quality straight coppice. I just wanted to put a few snaps up from our day out.

The stuff we’re after:

Good straight hazel ready for harvesting.

Us hard at work:

Coppicing in action

And after we’re done, we take the hazel away to turn into useful things (and in doing so, store CO2 in solid form in people’s houses), and leave behind a pile of brash for the birds to nest in; a hazel root system ready to throw up vigorous new shoots of hazel; and a load of new light on the woodland floor for wildflowers. What a perfect process.

The woodland cycle is set to begin again

Huge thanks to Liam, Dougie, and Stu for their help. For more information on coppicing, please see my Coppicing and Conservation page, or my Video.

Hi,

I’m Dougie Pulman and I am a 2nd year 3D Design Student studying at Plymouth University.
I was shown Seb’s work by my tutor, I liked his style and felt I could really relate to the story behind his work.
Before christmas 2012 I approached Seb with the idea of doing a 3 month internship and thankfully he accepted.

Recently Seb has taken on a project to create a display unit for a graphics design company. It is made from coppiced hazel harvested locally by hand.

It was specifically requested to be a sustainable and environmentally sensitive undertaking. Seb decided that an LCA (Life-cycle Assessment) would be appropriate for the project as this provides the client with a relevant representation of how ‘Green’ the piece will be.

Using a method for calculating Carbon Sequestration, the ‘Carbon Value’ of the resultant piece can be accurately estimated. This is done by calculating the C02 captured (via the tree) minus the C02 burned in the transport, manufacture and production.

Sebastian set Me the task of doing the appropriate maths to acquire this information. This is when we found out that the necessary information is few and far between. It was well hidden, brief when found and extremely outdated.
The British Forestry Commission provides an information sheet containing facts and definitions regarding the topic but no form of data that can be used to directly. The most relevant information was in the form of a Report of Greenhouse Gases by the U.S. Department of Energy from April 1998!

Despite it being old it is still more than worthy of providing the correct figures. Via this source of urban forestry annual carbon sequestration rates; I found out that a 25 yr. old, fast growing hardwood such as hazel typically captures 24.1 kg of carbon per tree, per year.
All that was left to do was then calculate the kilowatt hours of the machinery used and the transport from Kent to Greenwich. Which meant lots of repetitive use of a formula. The resultant information is the weight of CO2 produced, which is yet to be finished.

Surprisingly the transport was by far the most environmentally unfriendly with 13.5 kgCO2 per kilowatt hour for the 40 mile journey from Kent to Greenwich. As opposed the greediest machine running solidly for an hour only emitting 1.6 kgCO2 per kw/h.

Considering our role of stewardship of the planet, and our ever growing infatuation with global sustainability , I was very surprised how unreadily available this information is.

We have the media consistently forcing powerful imagery at us, conjuring up the worlds imminent and untimely demise, forever putting ‘Greenness’ on our conscience. And yet there is no outlet directed at the masses of us that aren’t multi million pound industrial manufacturers. We can use this kind of knowledge appropriately to achieve more sustainable commerce and lifestyles in the ever consumerist society we live in.

Pop along and have a look, and if anyone can take any pictures of them in store I’d be very grateful for a copy, I will get round to it eventually!