Top all-time · #12188
Paul Sellers
Personal blog · paulsellers.comother
Paul Sellers's personal blog at paulsellers.com. Since 2018, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-25, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Paul Sellers for hand-tool woodworking instruction, including his workbench and trestle builds, and his YouTube channel. Commenters mention using his projects as beginner projects.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A lifestyle woodworker.
Most-linked posts?
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-10-02
What Hacker News says?
Paul Sellers have moved back to the UK. In addition to his website [0] and blog there's plenty in his YouTube channel. And my feeling is that Europeans in general don't insist on staining everything like Americans do. Or maybe it's just us in Scandinavia that actually think the bright natural color of birch, but even pine, is quite beautiful. [0] https://paulsellers.com/
Comment linking /
on “Woodworking for Engineers”Submitted Hitachi Wood Plug Cutter Works Perfectly in Hand Held Drills (2013) as a story · 138 points
HN discussionI've taken up woodworking as a hobby after not doing much in that vein since 7th grade. Using hand tools, not power tools, and taking time. One of the leaders in this movement is Paul Sellers [1], who couldn't be kindler and more inspirational. One of his key points that he stresses is that "It's not what you make, but how you make it." I know I'll never come close to the skill level he exhibits, but I hope to appro…
Comment linking /
on “In Praise of Mediocrity”I'm not exactly sure about carpenters, but I know blacksmiths like to write long essays with many photographs about their tools and how they are set up and why some are better than others and in what circumstances and here are the great things you can do with them... and I presume I have already had the benefit of filtering out the illiterate and uninteresting ones, because these essays tend to be pretty good. https…
Comment linking /2013/10/debunking-myths-mysteries-scary-sharp-methods/
on “I'm Joining CloudFlare”If you're in it for quick results, absolutely agreed. If I had to earn a living making furniture or any kind of carpentry, I'd definitely use power tools. Even Paul uses them. I.e. as far as I know he does the rough cutting and planing for projects using machines but finishing is done using hand tools. Something I totally forgot until your reply made me remember. Paul Sellers actually made a piece for the president…
Comment linking /2020/11/a-white-house-design/
on “Woodworking through the mind of an engineer”I never said it's easy if you have nothing yet. But it's satisfying ;) And yes, I started by building Paul's workbench actually. I built the version that uses regular old 2x4s and 2x6x glued together. He also has a version using plywood. I built it using only hand tools I bought off Ebay and the "work bench" I used to build that was just some old Ikea table I had. You might use a couple of cheap saw horses and a she…
Comment linking /paul-sellers-workbench-plans/
on “Woodworking through the mind of an engineer”His workbench tutorial is excellent, but for me, an absolute noob, it was still daunting to build a workbench as the very first project. What I ended up is building the Paul seller's Trestle [1] as my Hello World project, and it has been super handy. Even after that, I still think his workbench is too much work for me, and I eventually decided to build Christopher Schwarz's knockdown workbench [2]. [1] https://pauls…
Comment linking /trestles-drawings-and-cutting-list-download/
on “Wood Joint Strength Testing”