Hand Tools

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1 lucky winner will receive a Wood Talk T-shirt and 1 winner will receive the Wood Whisperer Guild project: Modern Chest of Drawers & Nightstand

To get things kicked off for our very first Wood Talk Giveaway we have a big one.

1 lucky winner will receive a Wood Talk T-shirt and another winner will receive the Wood Whisperer Guild project: Modern Chest of Drawers & Nightstand.

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Every month we’ll have prizes and giveaways that will make all of your woodworking buddies jealousy and envious of your good fortune (if they’re easily made jealous and envious of such things…otherwise they’ll probably just think it’s neat that you won.)

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This will be the first in the series over the next few blogs.

Two planes sit side by side, one, a wooden-bodied, handmade individual, the other, cast from iron in lots of hundreds throughout any single day. On the one hand the old wooden plane required well seasoned and dried wood that lay dormant under cover for ten years before working and cycling through began. This handmade wooden one required the much skilled work of a crafting artisan, no, many hours of highly skilled hand work. Castings in the form of iron-bodied planes on the other hand were developed and designed to reduce the necessity of such skill. Once cast, the iron castings were left to ‘season’ for a year in crates to relieve some of the stresses in the metal before the refining and milling processes prepared them to receive the cast iron block we call the frog. It took only a few minutes to make the cast metal planes, that is once the moulds were set up and the right men doing the pour poured the molten metal that would soon become the all metal counterparts we’ve commonly used over the past 150 years. The metal flows like lava to the lowest levels, fills the moulds and after total cooling they are removed from the sand and piled in crates to wait. At some point the plane soles are lifted to milling machines and the work begins to develop meeting points on the inside of the sole where the frog, the central hub governing all of the plane’s future settings, registers on three fixed points inside the mid section of the sole.

The Woden plane below is my longest bench plane in my collection of Woden planes. Woden is not my inept misspelling of ‘wooden’, it’s the name of a Germanic neopagan god, but that’s by the by. The Woden plane is a decent plane that follows the Leonard Bailey patterns of construction, so, whereas Woden is the brand name, Leonard Bailey is the designer and the originator and I have always enjoyed using the Woden planes alongside my Stanleys and Records.

I recently made this wooden plane using the gubbins from a bad eBayed Stanley to make it with. Some decades ago a man I worked with as an apprentice, worked under really, the last man I knew who really did use wooden smoothers, jacks and tri planes, a man then in his late seventies, told me that there was no real evidence to show that a wooden plane didn’t last equally as long as an all metal one. he’s the one that told me you need to bend metal planes to get them to create a straight edge. I found these facts hard to believe at the time, but now I think it more a truth than a falsehood, primarily  because the plane soles on longer planes definitely move, no matter the maker, and the patina I see on a beech-bodied plane made in the early 1800’s didn’t happen in a year or two but more like at least ten, twenty, thirty, forty and more. I have seen bench planes worn down half an inch at the toe end and filled in front of the throat with throat closures because of wear and probably this reflected another 20 years of use beyond its life expectancy of three score and ten.

Transitioning from a cast metal plane to any of the wooden planes takes a little adjusting too if indeed like me you have used them for hours every day for 50 years. Using them and gaining experience and skill is very much worth the effort though and it’s in the using of them you discover a worth and value you might never have considered before. Not only do you connect with how craftsmen felt about them when they used them in the centuries past, but you discover responses of wood on wood that it is absolutely impossible to get with any metal plane. It’s an indescribable sweetness that helps you to at last comprehend why old craftsmen in the late 1800s refused the Stanleys and clung to what they had owned and used and understood, fully.

In mainland Europe wooden planes have always proven ever popular and even today many woodworkers, especially in Germanic regions, continue hand work using wooden planes. I suppose herein is the strange anomaly in that the Woden plane was made under the name of a Germanic pagan god for a British market and yet was never sold in mainland Europe to challenge the wooden planemakers. I know this though, that no matter the era of wooden plane making, if you set the wooden plane up correctly, and they are as readily adjustable as the cast metal ones, they are more pleasing to work with and just as effective as any metal one I ever used.

Black and white

I recently completed the making of some wooden planes following two that Marples made in the earlier half of the last century. It’s a funny thing how when you want to emphasise something we might say something like, “Well let me make things black and white for you.”, or, “Put it in black and white.” When colour first came in print form in newspapers I remember the impact it had even though the print job was and I suppose still is deplorable.

I took the colour out here to emphasize something really. I am used to wooden bodied planes. On and off I have used them through the past 50 years and yet I generally go back to my all metal Stanley #4 for the major part of my working in daily life, followed swiftly by my #5, 4 1/2 and 5 1/2. Until recently I preferred the adjustment mechanisms these wonderful planes offered me and yet I do have to say that I always like using wooden bodied planes because of the ease on the wood and lightness in use. I have always liked the standard Stanleys with an emphasis that I do not particularly like thick irons. I prefer the Stanley’s because they are light and strong, hardwearing and indeed equal to the task. I also like to make certain I use what my students and watchers can get their hands on readily and yet I want something that is by no means second rate or a stopgap or in any way inferior in producing top quality work or to leave anyone with the impression that it will work until you can get something better. Stanley planes from before the pre 1970s do that for me and so I feel that I am giving woodworkers what they really need to work wood with. If anyone then simply wants to spend money on a better engineered plane, and that’s their personal preference, then that is their choice. But at least I have done my part in saying there is no need to spend more unless you just want to, prefer to or personally feel you need to. I have also done my best in defending the good name of one of the best engineering entrepreneurs in the history of plane making. A man who designed a plane from scratch and was able to patent his design because it was brand new.

Over the past few weeks we filmed making wooden planes and incorporating the body with a retrofitted adjustment facility in the form of the Stanley (or Record) frog, replete with matching cutting iron assembly unit. Marples did this in the early half of the last century. These planes were preferred by woodworking class workshops in many schools because boys could handle the lighter weight better and they of course offered the same adjustability the all metal versions were then offering as the current way forward.

I made my first one from non hardwearing pine as a prototype, using a scrap of stud for my material. It took me half an hour (minus the handle) and when I offered it to the wood, even for the first time, shavings shot through the throat and skyward like a popped cork from a champagne bottle, even though the setting was way too deep. I was absolutely stunned. I have to say it, it even felt better then the Marples beech original. It felt spunky, spritely, versatile, light and easy; oh, so easy! It made me wish I had had it to build my tool chest with.

Last week we finished up the video work on building this plane in the Jack plane size. You can in fact make a smoother, a jack and a tri plane and simply reinstall the same frog and iron into one or the other as you please if you want or you can buy in secondhand frogs the price of which just shot through the roof on eBay I am sure by the time you read this post. At the time of writing I just bought five frogs for £15 — $23.

The thing about building this plane and retrofitting the frog to fit is that the sole of the plane with its 45-degree slope acts as the extension for support directly behind the cutting-iron assembly unit and thereby necessitates cutting the frog slope down. Otherwise it will be further necessary to thin the sole directly behind where the frog might normally extend to on the sole, which in turn leaves a thinner aspect to the sole than you might want. I feel that in wood this might be a tad too thin, but then again perhaps not, whereas in the cast metal soles this works well. I am just saying that you can take the extra effort to shape the sole to receive the whole frog if you wish so as to retain the frog for interchangeability using both the original metal-cast plane and your new wooden ones.

So the next series on my blog will be about building the wooden plane above and how to build one from scratch. We will tie this in with the videos on woodworking masterclasses.com. Remember that all tool making and technique videos are always free to subscribers who have registered with us and that this too is a free subscription. You will receive n email from time to time, maybe three time a year or so, but nothing more than an odd update that might interest you.

We are also putting up another free two-part video series on making winding sticks starting next week so you may want to catch that one too.

Oh, and by the way, we are working videoing the tool cupboard like the one in my shop but a scaled down size. You will be able to scale yours either way and we hope to be able to show how you can size one to suit you and your tools too.

The post Making a Fully Adjusting Wooden-Bodied Plane appeared first on Paul Sellers' Blog.

Recently Chris Schwarz lamented that that much of the historic literature on craft is stuffed with geometry but doesn’t explain how to set up a smoothing plane. And to make matters worse the geometry lessons quickly spin out of control with drawings that look like some freakish nightmare.

Back in the day, books were expensive. A modest book in the 18th century could easily cost a weeks wages so a treatise on things like milking a cow or setting up a smoothing plane, or constructing window sash never entered anyone’s thought. In a village of a hundred souls, ninety-nine knew how to milk a cow and half of them could set up a plane in their sleep. Yet no one in the village, possibly no one in the county might know (let alone share), the knowledge that lies behind the smoothing plane, window sash, or that magnificent cathedral up on the hill. That my friends is geometry. But hear me out. It’s not as devilish as it sounds. This artisan geometry of the trades doesn’t involve memorizing a boatload of theorems and formulas that make you want to light up a cigarette and knock down a shot. Well you might want to do that for the pleasure of it, but not because the geometry drove you there.

I admit when I first explored what the old writers had to say, I complicated it by my own ignorance. I often passed over the simple stepping stones of knowledge and then skinned my shins. Here’s an interesting bit on this path of artisan geometry best illustrated by Plate one, figure one from Roubo’s monumental collection of engraved drawings.

Plate 1, figure 1 from Roubo

Plate one, figure one starts with a point. Roubo isn’t alone in beginning at this humble starting place. Many similar examples could be cited, often there is a break in forty pages of medieval Spanish text with a single          .           followed by another twenty pages of narrative. Point being you can learn to visualize and build some really marvelous things if you begin at the right beginning. And that beginning is the humble point.

Jim Tolpin and I are at it again, writing a workbook that takes that historic knowledge and walks you through it step by step. Who knows? Maybe there’s some window sash, elegant chairs, or even a grand cathedral inside your head just waiting to be made if you knew what they knew.

George R. Walker

Thanks for reading all this time. I really appreciate it.

Most of the Japanese tools I have I’ve bought from eBay. I think the same rules apply to buying Japanese tools as they do for buying vintage western tools.

• Look for listings with lots of good quality photos, and if there isn’t a photo of a particular part of the tool, assume that the seller is hiding something.
  
• Spend some time just looking at listings so you can get a feel for what price Japanese tools are selling at. I have an eBay search that looks for the term “Japanese” in the Collectibles → Tools, Hardware, and Locks category, which is quite useful.
  
• Try to buy from sellers that have a good eBay reputation. 
  
• And finally, take your time. Despite the number of listings for Japanese tools that are labelled as “rare”, things do come up again.
  

One of my earliest traumatic memories is being mortified by my mother searching for a scratched butterfly chair at the functional equivalent of a Kmart. She enjoyed seeking damaged goods and then indignantly demanding a discount at the register. This tactic worked far too often. This only reinforced the behavior.

The Butterfly chair. The one back then was yellow with black piping.

This was the first piece of mid-century modern furniture I remember actively disliking. First of many, I might add. And now it’s back. Vintage and reproduction. I just can’t get away from the stuff.

Ironically I was at a local auction preview (mid-century modern) when I read Chris Schwarz’s Lost Art Press blog quoting  George Nakashima on modern furniture. I don’t think he liked it.

Who can forget the stressless chair, this style attributed to Charles & Ray Eames:

This chair is still being made.

Animal prints were big:

Stylish design and attractive fabric. Stereo is from the ’80’s.

This is a complete living room set with the kidney-shaped, glass coffee table, animal print floating couch and multi-headed floor lamp:

We never owned a kidney-shaped coffee table.

I was impressed by the back of this furniture. Look at the size of those Masonite® back panels. Each one is a single board. Can you imagine the size of the Masonite® trees they came from? Might be river bottom wood-like material.

The fronts are interesting, too.

If you would like, you can click HERE and see the rest of the collection.

If you must…

By Joshua Farnsworth

In the above video you’ll see my fascinating trip to Colonial Williamsburg as part of a study of a relatively unknown type of molding plane, called “Mother Planes”.

On a grant from the Early American Industries Association, Bill Anderson, Larry Preuss, and myself studied Williamsburg’s collection of 400+ Mother Planes to see what we could learn about molding plane construction.

 What is a Mother Plane?

In the 1800’s, larger molding plane manufactures used “mother planes” to cut a particular profile to larger quantities of molding planes. An attached fence is a main characteristic of a mother plane.

The folks at Colonial Williamsburg were kind enough to host us for several days in the top floor of the historic Capitol building.

Below you’ll see our research team (from left to right) Bill Anderson (the founder of the project), Larry Preuss (an expert plane maker from Michigan), Erik Goldstein (Curator of Mechanical Arts & Numismatics at Colonial Williamsburg Foundation), and Joshua Farnsworth (I took sevaral thousand photographs & scans of the mother planes):

Our study took place over several days in October 2014 and Feburary 2015. I’ll have to admit, prior to Bill’s invitation to join this study I hadn’t even heard of Mother Planes. But I quickly fell in love with the lovely mother planes, just as I had with molding planes in general.

This is my “cave” where I spent several days photographing and scanning nearly 400 mother planes:

After removing the iron and wedge, we scanned the “toe” of each mother plane, then photographed each side. Here are some photographs of different views of some fascinating mother planes:

In addition to photographing and scanning each plane, Bill and Larry spent considerable time inspecting each mother plane for interesting characteristics such as cutting profile, dimension, size marks, and maker marks.

Details were meticulously recorded on detailed data sheets that Bill created, and each plane was assigned a number:

Erik Goldstein was kind enough to spend many hours with us to ensure that the valuable plane collection was handled properly:

Over the course of our stay, Erik gave us some amazing tours of rarely-visited parts of the capitol building, including incredible tool collections and a trek up the steep steps of the bell tower, which has only been visited by a handful of people since it’s dedication by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940’s.

Below you’ll see some fun photographs that I took of the Capital Building at Colonial Williamsburg (I highly recommend a visit to this 18th century wonderland):

At this stage in my life, I cannot take woodworking classes. I have the will and the money, but I also have kids, a wife with a crazy job and my own endeavors – a publishing company, a custom furniture business and (oddly enough) a teaching schedule. So until I can make our home life look like Lake Placid, I am always looking for other ways to improve my work. […]

The post Outside Your League appeared first on Popular Woodworking Magazine.

Expectations. We all have them when we walk into the shop. Ah yes, I have come to spend a pleasant relaxing day at the bench undisturbed, unperturbed.

Then you begin work.

Things can go wrong. Jigs don’t work, parts mis-align as the glue holds fast in the wrong spot, wood tears out, screw heads break off, and finishes blotch. Lest it be misunderstood that I am somehow above the fray here, that nothing ever goes wrong for me, that I am the calm sea in the eye of every storm at my bench, just ask my assistants over the years. Loud is a good way to describe my woodworking.

It comes down to what we think is going to happen and what actually happens. It comes down to practice and preparation. But mostly it comes to slowing down because you’re in a hurry. That’s the key. Expectations.

March. Hmm… it means two things to me right now. One is turn the page on the Yurt Foundation calendar, the other is to march, get going, quit fooling around. This is the month that my schedule picks up. So rather than just picking up whatever project happens to catch my fancy at any given moment, it’s time to knuckle down and get some stuff done.

Oak:

spoons:

oak:

spoons:

I keep shifting back & forth. I have to ignore these spoons in the daylight right now, and get to work on my desk box, and the 2 chests with drawers I have underway. At least by having these spoons roughed out, I can carve them at night.

Spoons and baskets for sale today – here: https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/spoons-baskets-bowls-for-sale-march-2015/

Daylight is for heavier bench work…so the goal for this week is to get the desk box all cut and ready to assemble, then work on cutting joinery and laying out carving for the chest with drawer that’s the focus of my class beginning later this month.

Enough. Here’s details on the 2 classes coming up this month. The first is a 2-day class in spoon carving at Plymouth CRAFT – 2 spaces left they tell me. The class is March 14 & 15 – details here. http://plymouthcraft.org/?tribe_events=carving-wooden-spoons-with-peter-follansbee  There’s knitting, cooking & egg decorating classes at the same time – http://plymouthcraft.org/?post_type=tribe_events

The other class is the first entry in the 5-month “build a chest with drawer” class at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking. We can squeeze another joiner or two in…If all goes well, I’ll be showing you some of oak for that class tomorrow. http://www.schoolofwoodworking.com/woodworking-classes/29-speciality-weekend-classes/534-build-a-17th-century-joined-chest-with-peter-follansbee.html

and the rest of the schedule is here: https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2015-teaching-schedule/ including two weeks teaching in Olde England – I’ll write about that next week. 

It’s not unusual in the basement workshop to find myself doing simultaneous glue-ups on identical components, in fact I do it quite frequently. Typically the reason is because of a lack of clamps, and a strong desire to make progress on the project as quickly as possible.

If I stepped back and paid close attention to the amount of time I spend creating a strategy for just how it is I’ll accomplish the task I’d probably discover I spend way too much time overthinking it.

The reason I’m writing about this topic is because a viewer on my YouTube Channel had a question about it, and a couple of others regarding the glue-up process and results.

I thought they were important questions to ask and answer, so rather than just replying in the comments over there, I decided to share them here.

“When you gang the interior frames for the glue up aren’t you worried about glue setup, squaring and even clamping pressure?”

Yes, I am worried about the possibility of the glue-up and clamping process causing the components to become unsquare.

To help minimize this as much as possible I spent a fair amount of time doing test fits and dry-runs prior to the actual glue-up. Inevitably it won’t guarantee there won’t be issues once the glue is applied, but it’s a great way to get a feel for what you’ll have to do to get a successful glue-up.

Not to mention, it’s also an opportunity to discover if any joinery needs to be tweaked.

Did I discover any issues? Yes I did actually, they weren’t severe enough to warrant filming and discussing (at least in my opinion they weren’t) but all it took to resolve them was to breakout my shoulder plane and adjust the shoulders on a short rail or two.

It turned out while I was routing the tongue on each end, one or two weren’t as square as I had thought they were originally. To fix it was a matter of using my square to identify the high side and then removing a little bit of material from that end and repeating the test fit until it all lined up square.

My choice to use the web clamps made the glue-up even easier as once I had the joinery squared I was able to put everything into place, then wrap the clamps in position. And really they did all the work of aligning the parts together for me. On top of it, the web clamp’s corners were wide enough to support the entire thickness of the two frames completely.

“Invariably, there will be slight dimensional differences between the frames that may make the clamping pressure uneven between them. Also, since the bottom piece is obstructed by the wax paper, isn’t it difficult to ensure the bottom piece is square as well as the top piece?”

Since the clamp corners were only on the ends, I was slightly concerned about the middle rail. I had a straight clamp ready to be added in case it was necessary, but in this case it wasn’t.

If in the end I had discovered there were issues with square I would have grabbed a long pipe clamp or two and applied them diagonally from corner to corner to pull it square, but as we all saw, the web clamps did their job (thanks to the square joinery.)

In the video, when I checked for square I had actually pushed one frame proud of the clamp’s face, afterwards I carefully pushed it back down into position.

Because they both lined up so evenly with each other, I took a gamble that they would both be square as a result. Turns out it was a gamble that paid off in the end.

“Finally, by the time you’ve assembled the second piece hasn’t the glue started to set on the first?”

I can’t tell you how much I’ve worried about this scenario over the years. I’m simply going to assume it’s due to my woodshop’s environment, but I typically have a good 10-15 minutes of open time with most PVA glues I’ve used (I used Gorilla Glue’s white PVA glue in this build.) Even though it’s super dry this time of year in my shop, there was still plenty of open time that allowed me to apply the glue, assemble and then adjust components into position.

This is also where previously doing a dry run and test fitting the components ahead of time helps too. It’s not only about double checking the fit and joinery, it’s also about creating a strategy for how it should come together and discovering where you might trip up and how to get around it.

Does it guarantee a flawless glue-up everytime? No, but it sure helps to minimize the amount of anxiety and the unknowns in your glue-up process for complex pieces.

Do you have other questions? Please don’t hesitate to ask by leaving them in the shownotes or using the form on my contact page here at the website.

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I’m very excited to have the opportunity to give a talk on Japanese planes to the North Jersey Woodworkers Association at 7 pm on Monday, March 16 at the at the Allwood Community Church, 100 Chelsea Road, in Clifton, NJ. The NJWA is a great bunch of woodworkers, and if you live in the northern part of New Jersey and don’t belong to a woodworking club, you should join these guys.

These talks seem like they are becoming a habit. I’m good with that. Hope to see you there.