Well, I've been lurking around here for long enough without introducing myself. I've been waiting until I had something to say. Well, i'm William and I am just getting started with hand tools. I mostly finished a Paul Sellers bench yesterday. I've got a couple of odds and ends to wrap up, but it is basically finished. Some of it is pretty ugly and rough, but some came out pretty good. I did use a miter saw and planer for some of the bench/apron parts, but I did all the joinery by hand. I know this is a hand tool forum and I hope I don't get flamed, but man is it difficult to build with hand tools without a bench. I thought I'd post a couple of pictures here for anybody else starting out. I had doubts of my ability to do this, but if I can do it so can you. Here are the pictures (ugly ones too)!
I haven't figured out the posting system yet to be able to post a caption with each picture, but you can kinda make out the progress. The hardest part was making the 1/2 mortices with a marginal quality (Woodriver) bench chisel. After I finished mine, I watched a video of someone using a real mortice chisel. That looked much more of a appropriate tool for the job! Now if it just wasn't so darned cold here (Colorado), I would be in the garage building something!