Coronet Consort

The Consort is in the foreground, with the Coronet Imp at the back of the shed. A pile of plum milled from a tree in a London garden is ready for making on the benchApologies for not updating our British Woodworking Shed blog more recently. How time flies. Actually it's taken us quite a while to 'plumb' it back in since it was moved 200 yards from one location to another. Having carefully insulated it and run wires inside the walls we didn't want to take it apart. So we decided to move it in tact from one location to the other. This involved pulling it along a main road for 50 yards on a trolley made with casters. It was very funny, and not having taken any photos of this dramatic transport is one of the regrets of my life.

I have now wired in the Shed, and the first thing to do was see how well the Coronet Consort tablesaw I bought in the New Forest this summer works. It is marvellous. So quiet you can hardly hear it going, and with loads of power. It's going to be really hard to stop it being moved into the main British Woodworking workshop. There is a drive for a drill chuck for horizontal boring or to take a disc sander on the side, and I'm sure I'll be able to find other accessories to add. There's no sliding cross-cut carriage, but I'm sure one could be fabricated to fit on the side of the cast iron table. It's a mystery why these machines stopped being made, but perhaps a very sad reflection of a decline of British manufacturing in the 1970s.

The really good news is that the Consort came with a manual, and I have now discovered that I can buy all sorts of extras from Derek Pyatt at Pyatt Woodworking. I'm going to ask for the planer that bolts on the side for Christmas!