How long does it take to read The Essential Woodworker?
Robert Wearing
The Essential Woodworker by Robert Wearing takes about 2 hours 56 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 2 hours 56 minutes
An evening's read
First published 1988. 160 pages, about 44,000 words.
6 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 4 hours 53 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 2 hours 56 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 1 hour 50 minutes |
The page count is the median across 4 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
What's inside "The Essential Woodworker?" I think it's a gold mine of traditional hand tool techniques. Assisted by more than 530 hand-drawn illustrations, plus dozens of photos, Wearing walks you through the process of becoming a hand-tool woodworker. He starts with sharpening and ends with dovetailed casework. To illustrate all of the basic principles, Wearing deftly guides you through building a few small projects. He starts, most ingeniously, with building a table, which teaches many of the core skills you need to build more advanced casework. He then works you through open casework, backs, plinths, doors and then drawers. He presents no shortcuts or cheats. All the the methods are "neat and workmanlike" and would stand up to the scrutiny of an 18th-century master joiner. But most of all, I think that Wearing can help you organize everything you know (and don't yet know) about handwork into a framework that makes sense and is the baseline for every skill you will acquire in the future.
Subjects: Woodwork, Amateurs' manuals
