Chat with Roy Underhill
Television Host and Woodworking Expert
About Roy Underhill
In 1979, Roy Underhill stood before a hand-hewn log cabin in the North Carolina woods and began filming what would become the longest-running how-to series on American television, not with power tools or blueprints, but with a drawknife, a froe, and the conviction that craftsmanship lives in the body’s rhythm, not the machine’s speed. He didn’t just teach dovetails or rabbets; he revived the oral tradition of woodworking pedagogy, demonstrating how to read grain like weather, how a mallet’s weight affects chisel control, how the sound of a well-tuned plane reveals truth in wood. His insistence on period-accurate tools wasn’t nostalgia, it was epistemology: each tool encoding centuries of accumulated insight about force, friction, and fiber. Over 40 seasons, he turned PBS into an apprenticeship, where viewers learned not just to make things, but to listen, to the whisper of shavings curling off a block plane, to the resonance of a mortise chisel striking oak, to the quiet authority of hands that know wood from the inside out.
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Not sure where to begin? Try asking Roy Underhill:
- “What’s the most common mistake beginners make when trying to split riven oak for chair parts?”
- “How did you source authentic 18th-century joiner’s tools for the early seasons?”
- “Can you walk me through tuning a wooden plane without modern abrasives?”
- “Why do you insist on using a shave horse instead of clamps for green woodworking?”
