Machining & the workshop
Tool selection, workholding, surface finish, fixturing hacks, and the small rituals that turn a job shop into a craft shop. Written from two decades of cuts, mistakes, and chips on the floor.
Browse the workshop notes
A working library by Mark van der Kwaak
Quiet thinking on the work that builds, sells, and delights.
Field-tested notes on precision machining, retail craft, and the new shapes of play — written for the curious operator, the founder, and the weekend tinkerer.
180+
Long-form essays
22
Years on the shop floor
3
Working worlds covered
Weekly
New notes on Friday
Where to start
Three working worlds, one shared mind
The library is organised around the trades Mark has actually practised — not the topics that look good on a sidebar. Pick a room and wander.
Retail & the small counter
Buying, merchandising, staff training, and the quiet economics of independent retail. Reflections on what survives when the algorithm stops paying attention.
Walk the shop floorModern play & design
How adults play now — board games, design objects, public games, and the slow craft of making things that ask to be picked up. Field reports from the studio and the kitchen table.
See the play archiveOperations & economics
Pricing jobs, hiring well, scheduling the week, and keeping a small business solvent through the boring middle. Numbers treated with the same care as a tolerance call-out.
Read the operations notesTools, tested honestly
Reviews that respect your time — software, hand tools, machinery, and the office kit. No affiliate circus, no ranking theater. Just what stayed on the bench after six months.
Open the tool libraryLetters & correspondence
Long-form replies to reader questions, written the way a good colleague would answer over coffee. Send a question and it may become the next letter.
Send a question
Featured insight
The 21:1 rule for first-pass finishes
If the depth of cut is roughly one twenty-first of the tool diameter, the first pass will almost always come off clean — even on a machine you don't trust yet. A short, slightly opinionated guide to starting any job with the safe end of the dial.
Read the full essay
Latest guides
Recent notes from the bench
A small selection of the newest essays, written in the order they were published. Subscribe by RSS or just check in on Fridays.
Retail
Why the back wall still matters in a year of online everything
An argument for the slow, expensive, slightly embarrassing wall of impulse buys — and how to stock it without lying to your customers.
9 minNew this week
Play
The adult board game renaissance, quietly explained
What is actually happening in the world of cardboard — who is buying, who is designing, and why the kitchen table is having a moment.
12 minReader favourite
Machining
Five workholding mistakes that cost you the afternoon
A practical checklist of the most common fixture sins, drawn from twenty years of clearing other people's chips. Most of them cost nothing to fix.
8 minWorkshop-tested
Operations
How to quote a job you have never done before
Pricing the unknown is the whole job. A clean four-step method for quoting work that scares you, with a worked example from a recent commission.
11 minIncludes worksheet
Design
The case for objects that ask to be picked up
Why the best-designed tools in a workshop share a particular weight in the hand — and what retail can learn from a well-balanced hammer.
7 minPersonal essay
Tools
Six things still on the bench after two years
A short, unromantic tool review — the items that earned their pegboard spot through the kind of weather that sorts out the rest.
6 minNo affiliates
How it works here
A library, not a feed
The site is built to be read slowly and returned to. A few quiet principles keep it that way.
01
Written from practice
Every essay starts in the shop, the stockroom, or the kitchen. Theory arrives after the cut, not before.
02
No chasing the news
Notes are written when they have something to say. There is no editorial calendar, no "must post" pressure, and no apology for quiet months.
03
Clean archive
Old posts are revised, not archived in shame. The 2019 piece on bench layout is still good — and the sidebar will tell you when it was last tightened up.
04
Reader-supported
The library is funded by readers, not advertisers. That buys the freedom to write about a great milling vice without a buy link at the end.
The working thesis
“The interesting work is the work that sits between disciplines — the join between the machine, the counter, and the table where the game is laid out. That seam is where this site lives.”