One of Alan Peters’ apprentice’s masters the art of
tight dovetailshttp://www.getwoodworking.com August 2019 The Woodworker incorporating Good Woodworking 45
Alan Peters – The Makers’ Maker FEATURE
and down the country, and as well as furniture
we had a shared interest in cycling and cycle
racing, having both been keen time trialists
as well as riding non-competitively.
Phone call out of the blue
In May 2005, out of the blue, Alan phoned me
and asked if I was able to go to his workshop and
help with a couple of projects. By this time – now
in his early 70s – Alan had moved from Devon
to a smaller workshop in Somerset and his former
assistants, Stephen Hopper and fellow judge Keith
Newton, were employed elsewhere. I had several
commissions to be getting on with in my own
workshop but luckily there were no tight deadlines
to be met, and so it was that I was able to spend
a few weeks down in Minehead, starting almost
straight away and returning for another spell later
in the summer, not quite knowing what to expect
but looking forward to a bit of an adventure.
Alan may have ‘downsized’ but this was no
double garage affair. His new workshop was
spacious and well laid out, with five benches and
all the machines from his old workshop sharing
a former builders’ merchants premises, dating
from the 1960s at a guess, within a couple of
minutes’ walk of the seafront and within earshot
of the steam locomotives on the West Somerset
Light Railway. As well as having large front
windows the workshop had plenty of natural light
from a number of skylights. A small display area
and office completed the main workshop, while
out in the yard two substantial outbuildings
housed Alan’s stocks of timber and veneers. Alan
didn’t do anything by halves it seems; to set up a
workshop like this when past the age when many
would have retired says a lot about the man!
My first job was to complete a partly-made
dining table of solid English elm. The design was
Alan’s contemporary take on the classic ‘hayrake’
style; the sort of timeless design that would
look as good in a modern town house as a rustic
farmhouse. The underframe was more or less
complete but Alan wanted me to alter the shape
of the projecting ends of the lower stretcher rail,
which didn’t look quite right to him. There was
nothing wrong with the way it was, of course, but
in Alan’s eyes, wasn’t quite as he wanted. Classic
Alan Peters attention to every last detail! If the
table had not been assembled, still a stack of
components, doing the alterations would have
been straightforward but reshaping on the
glued-up table was a little tricky. It involved
some careful work with a shoulder plane, but
I eventually got it done to Alan’s satisfaction.At this stage, the future table top was still a single
board of wild-grained English elm, around 2.2m
long, 1,000mm wide and 75mm thick, complete
with the waney edge on both sides. As is often
the case with English elm, this board had warped
somewhat during seasoning and was anything
but flat. The obvious way of using this board, and
the method I guess most makers would choose,
would be to rip it into several narrower, more
manageable pieces, then plane and thickness
by machine, shoot the edges and glue up to make
the finished width of the top. This was not Alan’s
way, however; he was concerned that because
ripping, shooting and butt jointing a wide board
inevitably removes a portion of timber, the result
can be a slight mismatch of the grain. In other
words, however carefully the original board
was re-joined, it could destroy the appearance
that, in reality, this had once been one single,Walnut console table made by the late Alan Peters OBE