The Solution At Hand

by Robert Wearing

Lost Art Press has published another masterly woodworking guide by Robert Wearing, author of the classic “The Essential Woodworker,” who uses skillfully drafted hand drawings to teach you how to get the most of your hand tools.

Experience confers the benefit of learning what little tweaks and special purpose devices get the job done faster and better. If you don’t have that experience, “The Solution At Hand” can bring some of these benefits to you. “The Essential Woodworker” dealt mainly with basic technique; the new book offers complementary shop wisdom based upon his long experience to the jigs, tweaks and tools used to make everything woodworking better and easier.
Wearing, a traditionally trained British woodworker, might take umbrage at the concept of “hacking” your woodshop, but his book focuses on building and using what many call “appliances” – fixtures and jigs – that make your planes, saws and chisels work in the most effective and efficient way. The promise is even in the book’s subtitle, “Jigs & Fixtures to Make Benchwork Easier.”

The book is a veritable showcase of Wearing’s ingenuity on a wide range of tools and areas of woodworking, from workholding through finishing. There are 157 jigs, all of which are illustrated with Wearing’s drawings. Wearing’s tone throughout the book is strikingly practical, always focused on getting the job done efficiently without much fussing with ideology. He gently tamps down on hostility to power tools and also dispenses with speculation about whether every jig is unique or original: it doesn’t matter, since he isn’t interested in credit, just efficiency.

Even if you don’t intend to build the appliances, you’ll get a lot of enjoyment simply looking at Wearing’s creative solutions to workbench challenges. And if you’re inspired to make your own fixtures and jigs – well, you’re part of a longstanding tradition.

Dimensions: 6” x 9”. “The Solution at Hand” is casebound, sewn for long-term durability and wrapped in hardback boards that are covered in cotton cloth. 200 pages with over 500 detailed, hand-drawn illustrations by the author.

See below for an excerpt from the book.

Pages: 200
Binding: HC
Publisher: Lost Art Press