Which Way Are You Going?

"A properly set hand plane should be able to plane in any direction."

That's how Graham Blackburn started up his discussion on hand planes.

Well, wait a second... that's not right! Doesn't he know you should figure out the grain direction, then plane WITH the grain? You pet a cat one way, and you plane one way. You don't want to raise the hairs on a cat's back just like you don't want to push your plane blade into the fibers of the wood. He proceeded to talk about the myth of what I was just thinking - that you should always plane with the grain.

Then he paused. And he asked us if we thought, 200 years ago or 400 years ago, woodworkers always planed with the grain.

"What about curly grained wood, like maple or mahogany? What about crotch walnut and birds-eye maple or wood where the grain changes directions? And then changes directions again? Do you think people back then planed a little one way, then a little the other, then a little the fist way again, all the way across the board?"

No, they didn't. They set their planes up properly, they clamped their wood in their bench, and then they started planing!

To further illustrate his point, he pulled out a slab of Indian walnut and clamped it into the bench. It was several inches thick, with one live edge, some curly figure, a few knots, straight grain, ribboned grain - you name it, it was on this board.

And he pulled out a Lie-Nielsen smoothing plane, made sure it was set properly, then went left, right, up, down, and sideways on the board, taking smooth, tear-out free shavings each time.

Then he showed us how he does it.

Rule #1: You need to have a sharp plane blade. Don't bother sharpening above a 12,000 grit waterstone. Your basic set should include the 400 grit, for shaping, the 2000-3,000 grit, for rough polishing, the 8000 grit for getting a really good edge, and then a 12,000 for the final mirror-like polish you need to get on the leading 1/8" of the face of your blade and on the bezel if you're going to be working with exotic woods. Most of the time, however, you will be working with just the first three (400, 2000-3000, and 8000 grit stones).
(Note: The face of the blade is the side without the bezel)

Rule #2: You need to get the cap iron (sometimes erroneously called the "chip breaker", as per Graham) fit tightly to the blade. That is, you should not be able to see even a slight bit of light between the face of the blade and the cap iron edge. So when you're sharpening your blade, you should work the cap iron, as well, to make sure the edge seats properly on the blade.

Rule #3: There were two parts to this rule...
One is that you should set the cap iron as close to the edge of the plane blade as the thickness of the shaving you want. For a smoothing plane, that's really, REALLY close. It isn't as close for a jack plane or a jointer plane.
The other is that you should adjust your plane to have the tightest mouth you can give it.

That is a simplified version, but... honestly, that's about it!

Hey, that doesn't seem too hard. If I could accomplish that, I'd be a pretty happy man!

This evening, I was in the basement with a bit of free time on my hands, and I thought I would give it a try. So I pulled out my #604.5, not without some trepidation, and grabbed a turnscrew. The blade was already sharp, so I just needed to set the cap iron properly and make a minor adjustment to my frog and then I could give it a go!

I choked up on the cap iron, moved my frog forward a millimeter or two, and then dug through some boxes to find something that I might not have attempted before. In this case, it was a chunk of curly mahogany I was saving for a tool handle.

I cleared a spot on my small bench (not an easy task, with the mess my basement is in), pushed the wood up against a stop (without checking for grain direction - not that it mattered much with this wood), and took a couple of swipes with the tuned-up plane.

Hey, that looked pretty nice! So I flipped the wood around to plane it from the other direction and watched as one thou shavings (and anodda thou... and anodda thou) piled up behind the knob of the plane.

Wow! It works! I went back upstairs to grab my camera, grinning from ear to ear.

Thanks, Graham! I'm looking forward to trying out all of the other tricks you showed us in class!

Oh, and now I also need to work on getting some of my other planes set up the same way...

Hand-Cut Dovetails With Frank Klausz, Wrap Up

On Friday, March 19th, six members of the guild met up with Frank Klausz for dinner at the Soulard Restaurant. The beer was tasty, the food was rich, and the conversation was daunting! Frank is anything but shy and his speak-your-mind approach to everything in life is refreshing, if not intimidating. If you ever get a chance to eat dinner with Frank, don’t pass it up.

The next morning, 15 guys showed up at the St. Louis Woodworking Academy, most unsure of what to expect, ready for two full days of hands-on instruction from Frank. Except to say we cut our pins first, I won’t bore you with the details of making hand-cut dovetails. If you want to learn how to do it the Frank Klausz way, then you should pick up his DVD on How To Make Hand-Cut Dovetails or you can find detailed descriptions of his technique in the September 2005 issue of Popular Woodworking magazine or in the book, Hand Tool Essentials, also published by Popular Woodworking.

I would be remiss, however, if I did not point out a compliment Frank mentioned several times during the class (and even once after the class when talking to Wayne Watson, the guild V.P.). The benches we used were not the best suited for hand tools. In most cases, we had two woodworkers to a bench and the one vice on each bench either didn’t work or was of such poor quality it was unusable. But after Frank demonstrated the technique for cutting dovetails, and gave us scrap wood to practice with, we all went back to our benches and figured out how to make it work. Not one person complained about not having a vice – people either shared what good vices we had or people made their own set-up with clamps. Frank was really impressed with our ingenuity and ability to adapt to the situation.

By the end of the first day, 15 people had 15 boxes (though they weren’t all quite the same size) assembled with hand-cut dovetails. We let them sit overnight to allow the glue time to fully cure. On day two, we leveled the sides, shaped the lids, and cut off the tops. Frank showed us how to add the hinges and lock and we ended the class by discussing his suggested finishing techniques.

Hey, those are some pretty good hand-cut dovetails!

I really enjoyed this hands-on class, much more so than any of the lecture classes I’ve attended over the years. Some people learn better by reading and listening and others learn by doing – apparently I’m one of the latter. Though I do see the reason for and a need for lecture classes in the future, I also look forward to the next hands-on class sponsored by the guild.

I don’t expect we’ll see any finished boxes in the April 2010 guild meeting, but I do expect to see a few in the Show and Tell portion of the May meeting!

(By the way, that first picture is Frank's box, not the box of anyone in the class. I took some pictures of it for inspiration.)

Hand Tool Essentials Book Review

Hand Tool Essentials – Refine your power tool projects with hand tool techniques
From the Editors of Popular Woodworking Magazine

If you are a power tool woodworker interested in taking your woodworking to a new level, then this collection of articles, pulled from the covers of Popular Woodworking Magazine, is a great place to start. Chris Schwarz sets the pace for the rest of the collection in the first of seven chapters, with three introductory articles discussing the reasons for, providing the motivations to, and outlining the fiscal ease in which you can incorporate hand tools into a power tool shop.

Since most hand tools do not work well when dull, the second chapter is comprised of nine articles dedicated to helping you make your tools sharp. These articles focus on sharpening plane irons, chisels, scrapers, and draw knives and also cover some of the different sharpening techniques, like using the ruler trick or adding a camber to your plane blades.

Chapter 3 covers hand planes and is the subject with the most articles dedicated to it. There, you will find information on what different kinds of planes there are and when to use each one, how to restore a flea market find and how to tune a new one, and on using wooden planes, smoothing planes, and jack planes. The last article is a bit of eye candy, with some great photos and information on infill planes.

The next two chapters discuss the use of hand saws and chisels. In the chapter on saws, Frank Klausz gives us the final word on dovetails and Chris Schwarz discusses East vs. West. Another article goes into detail on the usefulness of the bench hook and how to make one. The chapter on chisels covers basic and advanced chisel techniques, restoring an old chisel, and modifying stock chisels to work better.

Do you know how to properly use an awl? Or what the difference is between a striking knife and a marking knife? Or how to glue up a table base without using clamps (I'll give you a hint – it involves drawboring)? These answers and more can be found in Chapter 6, which contains several articles on the other hand tools you might want in your shop.

The final chapter provides you with the perfect excuse for buying some hand tools – projects! Start off your bench obsession with the Roubo-style workbench. Then follow it up with a cabinet to store your planes, a sawbench for sawing boards using the proper form, and some miter shooting boards for making tight, precise joinery.

The articles are all well-written with crisp clean photos and clear captions. They are both concise and detailed and easily read one at a time or all in one sitting. Had I not won this book for planing the flattest board at a Chris Schwarz hand plane class earlier this year, I wouldn't hesitate to spend the retail price of $24.99 to add it to my permanent collection.

Unplugging more than the shop...

It's funny how trying to adjust one aspect of your life can affect others. Take, for example, my attempts at reducing the use of power tools and working more towards using hand tools in my shop. I enjoy the peaceful swish of a plane gliding across a board. I relish the minimal resistance I get from a sharp chisel biting into the corner of a hinge mortise. I must admit, however, I do use a small electronic device more when I'm downstairs - my MP3 player. Whether it is traditional Irish music or the electronic mixes of John Digweed or the classic soul-warming Grateful Dead, I can hear them all in perfect clarity during my power-free sessions in the shop.

Lately, I've tried reducing my plugged-in lifestyle in other aspects of my life. Last week, Dana and I went on vacation to the Outer Banks, NC. For one full week I didn't check voice mail or email. I didn't turn on a TV or a laptop. I used my cell phone to call family upon safe arrival and safe return and that was about it. It was very enlightening and freeing. I plan on trying to do that more often, even when I'm not on vacation.

(I should take a moment here to apologize to Kari. She thought I was mad at her when I didn't respond to her emails last week. Sorry, Kari. I wasn't ignoring you and I wasn't mad at you. I was just relaxing my brain.)

I spent a little time thinking about my woodworking while on vacation. I've stepped back from it over the last month or so, but I'm not really sure why. Probably because I'm still working on getting the new shop in order and things started feeling like "work" and not "play". I get that feeling sometimes when I accept a box order I maybe shouldn't because they've only given me a few weeks to work on it. And I know it will be like that when I accept the job, but I've never been one to shy away from a challenge, so I take it anyway.

It's the same way with the shop. Painting walls and hanging lights isn't fun! But I guess I need to look past the immediate tasks to see how much more productive my shop time will be when I'm back to being organized and settled into my new space.

I also have four or five partially completed boxes sitting downstairs just waiting for a bit of inlay, a tartan lining, and a coat of finish. Maybe I can compromise with myself between working on some boxes and working on the shop to more easily get through the latter.

I also got a bit of a motivational boost yesterday when I received a large flat package from Popular Woodworking magazine. It was two free issues of the December 2009 issue! Can anyone tell me what it means when you get two free issues of a magazine? That's right - it usually means you have something published in that issue! In this case, it is my Out of the Woodwork article called, "But aren't you a woodworker?". The original title to the blog that generated this article was, "But I thought you were a woodworker!" I still like my original title better, but other than that I'm quite happy with how it turned out.

If you happen to read that issue, pay particularly close attention to the last bit under my Contributors section, the part where it says, "... his first for Popular Woodworking...". I think we can all agree that means there will be more.

Speaking of "woodworking" I hate doing...

Before we left on vacation, I'd spent six or eight hours on Saturday getting my yard leaf-free. I piled them into my double-sized compost bin until it was overflowing and then filled my 55 gallon yard waste container and 14 yard waste bags with leaves. My yard was nice and clean, just the way my OCD personality likes it.

This is what I came back to - where did they come from? More importantly, are there more on the way? (Yeah, as you can tell from the first picture, they came from my sugar maple and my sweet gum trees - I guess I'm just a little upset I didn't get to enjoy the leaves on the trees as they were changing colors.) As much as I'd love to get in the shop and work on some boxes (or even paint some walls, honestly), I'm afraid most of my Saturday morning is going to be spent raking leaves tomorrow.

It isn't the kind of hand tools I like using, but at least I can listen to Jerry while I work...

Working Together...

I've spent some time over the last two weeks working on some boxes. I have two at a "joinery completion" stage and four more with the pieces just dimensioned. One of the boxes has the intended purpose of holding my up-and-coming Christmas present - a custom set of four dovetail paring chisels from Blue Spruce Tool Works. They all have curly mahogany handles (wood supplied by me) that match the carbide burnisher owner Dave Jeske made for me a month or two ago. They arrived two weeks ago and Dana let me see them just long enough to take some measurements before she secreted them away for the next six months. We ordered them a bit early to take advantage of a 10% discount Dave was offering and to get one of his Blue Spruce Tool Works t-shirts for free.

(And by the way... isn't my wife just the greatest?)

The other boxes don't yet have specific buyers but they are all intended to hold sgian dubhs. Well, dimensionally they would all serve that purpose, anyway. I'm making them for two reasons, one of which I can't really divulge right now. But the other reason is simply because I want to have some boxes on hand that I can offer as "immediately available" so I don't always have to bust my butt with a custom box when someone contacts me and says they need a box in three weeks. I'll take some pictures and post them along with some of my design ideas as I get a little further along in the process later this week. I had an idea or two that coincided with the Guinness 250th Anniversary that I wanted to play around with...

They are all sliding lid boxes with rabbeted butt joints. From a design point of view, the joinery is relatively easy to cut on the table saw with a flat tooth rip blade. Some of that challenge is in making sure the saw cuts are accurate. Over the past few days, I've learned some tricks for making these cuts incredibly precise - all without using any measuring devices. Again, when I start on the joinery for the next four boxes, I'll take some pictures and share with you.

But what has me more excited than anything is how I've quite naturally started blending hand tools with power tools into a true power tool/hand tool hybrid shop - the two halves are now working together. For example, the other day when I was working on the sliding lid for the chisel storage box, I had a board that wasn't exactly thicknessed properly (it was the last board from a bunch of resawn lumber); it was just a bit thicker on one edge than it was on the other. Without a second thought, I went downstairs to the workbench, marked the board thickness on all the edges with my circular marking gauge, grabbed my #604 1/2, and started planing the slight high side down to size.

Later, when I needed to cut dados and rabbets on the edges of the lid so it would slide in and out of the grooves in the main part of the box, I pulled out my Record 043 plough plane instead of trying to make the cuts back on the table saw. Wow. That was more satisfying than planing a board flat! After just a minute or two of careful setup (and scoring a line on the cross-grain cut to prevent tear out), it was just a matter of planing until the blade stopped cutting.

Finally, when I was cutting the panel for the second sliding lid, I had a board with one side far, far from straight (it was a raw edge with bark on it) and the opposite edge ended up not being a terribly straight line, either. Again, I headed back downstairs to the workshop, put the board on edge in a vice, and took about 15 or 20 strokes with the #604 1/2 (it was too short for the #7) to make the not-so-straight-edge perfectly jointed.

A great benefit to using more hand tools is that I can plug in to my MP3 player and listen to some Grateful Dead or Cat Stevens or Jim Malcom while I'm working - certainly something that helps my creative juices flow.

I'm starting to approach every part of the project with the question, "How can I do this with hand tools?" It is very freeing. If you haven't yet tried it, I would highly recommend at least making an attempt at it the next time you find yourself in the shop.