This past week I taught the first Moravian bench class of 2018 at Roy Underhill’s Woodwright’s School in Pittsboro, NC. This is the sixth year I have done the class at Roy’s; we have produced about 120 benches in that time.
Over time, the class has changed and become more streamlined as my experience teaching it has increased. Of course, with each new group of students, there’s a different dynamic, even though we are building the same project. This keeps the class from ever becoming routine.
A first for this class was using a boring machine to hog out most of the waste from the long stretcher mortises. This was a huge improvement over a brace and bit.
We had a young fella named J.D. Stevenson and his father stop in to observe the class for an afternoon. We promptly put him to work. He made us all look bad – he’s 13 years old.
As always, I never seem to get any pictures of the very end of the class. The last day is always a mad dash to get as far as possible!
— Will Myers