46 The Woodworker & Good Woodworking August 2019 http://www.getwoodworking.com
FEATURE Alan Peters – The Makers’ Maker
giant board. Incidentally, English, or common
elm (not common at all today after the ravages
of Dutch elm disease), has something of an unfair
reputation for being unstable and not much good
for furniture making other than as Windsor chair
seats. True, it can and usually does warp badly
during the seasoning process, but if it is carefully
dried and conditioned to a moisture content of
9 or 10%, as all timber destined for use in centrally
heated buildings ideally ought to be, it is in fact
a fairly stable wood. Jane Cleal, of well-known
makers Williams & Cleal, worked for Alan Peters
at the start of her career, and told me how he
would periodically dismantle the whole sawn
logs of various species he had seasoning ‘in stick’,
inspect the boards, turn them over and re-stack
them. This helped to ensure that the timber dried
to a consistent moisture content throughout its
thickness, allowed stresses with the wood to be
relieved, and eventually, after further drying in
the warmth of the workshop, yield timber that
was in prime condition for high quality furniture
making. More than most, Alan Peters understood
the creative possibilities of wood, but also its
limitations, and always made provision in his
designs that no matter how well seasoned, solid
timber will shrink and swell in sympathy with
the humidity of the air around it. Clearly, these
considerations do not apply when using veneers
laid on an MDF substrate, but any maker who
ignores one of the fundamental characteristics
of solid wood does so at his or her peril!
Tackling the elm
Luckily, during my training in the late 1970s, I had
been taught how to plane up a board entirely by
hand. There is great merit in being able to plane
and thickness a large piece of timber with a hand
plane: it is a skill worth mastering for its own sake
but in addition, we can learn a lot about the nature
of wood and how it behaves when we work it.
The best way to go about truing up a long, wide
board is to plane across the grain, rather than
along it, in order to remove all the high spots,
so this is how I tackled this magnificent piece of
elm. Armed with a No.7 try plane, with a freshly
ground and sharpened blade, I started from one
end, having selected the better face, gradually
working my way along the board, checking by
eye and with a straightedge to judge how things
were progressing. English elm cuts fairly easily
but rapidly blunted the iron, so I had to stop and
re-sharpen frequently. It was hard going – just
lifting the board onto the bench was a struggle at
first (it got progressively lighter as shavings were
removed) but extremely satisfying as I established
a rhythm, became lost in the work, and started
to see results. Eventually the board was flat, but
not necessarily smooth, at which point I planed
it at 45° and finally along the grain with the plane
set very finely to ensure that the face was free
from torn grain. Having established a reference
surface – the ‘face side’ – I gauged all round,
turned the board over and proceeded to thickness
it, repeating the process on what would be theFURTHER INFORMATION
To find out more about Andrew and see
further examples of his work, visit his website:
http://www.andrewlawton.co.ukmachines can give to the resourceful craftsman
or woman. For example, the top of the table was
sanded on his large pad sander, which saved
many hours of handwork and gave a wonderfully
smooth, even surface. Secondly, Alan decided
that the most appropriate finish for the table
would be ordinary matt polyurethane, bought
from the nearby branch of Travis Perkins, I recall.
Many people recoil in horror at the mention of
the word, but carefully thinned and applied,
polyurethane provides an excellent, attractive
finish – it works especially well on elm – and
Alan was passionate that furniture should be as
well made as possible in every respect and built
to cope with long-term use, not simply to draw
admiration in an exhibition or gallery. With the
table now complete and the top attached to the
underframe with ‘buttons’ to allow for seasonal
movement, the final touch was to stamp one of
the long top rails with the ‘Alan Peters’ marking
punch. No fuss, no gimmicks, the name said it
all. This was the last piece of furniture in which
Alan was entirely involved in making and the last
to carry the illustrious name. On my second visit
to Alan’s workshop later that year, I worked on
a partly-made console table of Devon walnut,
but the limited time available prevented me from
completing the project. After Alan’s death we
brought the piece up to my workshop to finish
it, and soon found a buyer, but unlike the elm
dining table it cannot claim to be an authentic
Peters creation and therefore does not carry
the ‘Alan Peters’ maker’s mark.Alan Peters pictured by Jeremy Broun in 2005 for the making of the film documentary The Makers’ MakerThe elm dining table that Andrew worked on with Alan
reverse side of the top.No fuss, no
gimmicks
All this took a whole
three days and while
the remaining work
on the table involved
less hard physical
work, two examples of
Alan Peters’ approach
to furniture making I
came across during the
making of this table
are worth mentioning.
Although he was a
great believer in hand
tools and manual
skills, he was no
Luddite, being alert to
the possibilities that