What Kind of Knob (user) Are You Anyway?

Today I was part of a discussion with  a group of woodworkers with varied woodworking backgrounds. There were furniture makers, timber framers, finish carpenters and luthiers gathered in a back room discussing the attributes of hand planes that we liked. The conversation was quite spirited at times and at some points it got downright goofy. Discussions of plane weights, styles and blade materials where flying around the room like a forum discussion on the advantages of adding ground unicorn horn to PVA glue to make it a better gap-filler. Except this was a group of real life woodworkers with years of real experience talking face to face not like forums where .... oh never mind.

At one point the conversation zeroed in on knobs. Do you like tall knobs or short ones? Is there room in the world for mushroom-shaped knobs? Why is Vic such a knob? I found out that a friend of mine actually uses the knob on a rebate plane while creating the joint. Seriously? I never use the knob...in fact I don't even know where the knob of my rebate plane is at the moment because my left hand is too busy putting pressure on the the fence to help ensure an accurate cut.

So what do you do when you find out that a friend and respected woodworker holds on to the knob of his rebate plane?

Nothing.

There is nothing wrong with it. To quote Andrew 'My kung-fu is different than your kung-fu....it's still kung-fu'. He's absolutely right and I wish more of the woodworking world (and world in general) got this concept. Being in that group today reminded me that even though we had differing opinions about how we do the wood thing, we always agreed on the fundamentals. You can't take a fine shaving with a dull blade, cambered blades on bench planes are clutch and no woodworker worth their salt would ever cut pins first. (I'm only part joking about the last one) We had great discussions about some of the finer points of hand plane use and there wasn't a single Donny Brook because when it came down to fundamentals, we all got it.

Sometimes discussing how many angels can dance on the head of pin can be fun...maybe the key is being face to face...

...and before someone commments....I did spell rebate correctly...right GH? (winks)

In order to understand, you must do.

Things to do while glue dries

This weekend Evan and I continued work on the staircase off-site. We had a chance to breathe and think about all the steps that are necessary to get the stair treads mortised into the log. The order of ops has to be bang-on or we could end up in trouble. We also made a test bracket that will get used at the end of each tread to bend the laminations for the hand rail. As we made the bracket, there came the time when we had to wait for glue to dry.

Ah, waiting for glue to dry. The time every woodworker looks around the shop trying to find a 1 hour job that they can do while something is drying in the clamps. This day there were two woodworkers looking around my shop for something to do. Evan suggested a push stick for my table saw. (Truthfully I think I made him nervous by using my hand to feed stock pass the blade when I probably should have been using a push stick) Great idea. However, this isn't your everyday push stick, nay, this is a super-customized, built for my saw with bells and/or whistles push stick.

 Can't emphasise the use of referential measurements enough...no numbers no mistakes.

This sucker straddles the fence to ride smoothly along with a small notch on the blade side to help keep wood against the fence and still moving forward. As I glued and nailed the basic box shape together, Evan was sculpting a custom cherry handle that was sized for my big mitt. Bandsawing, sanding, rasping...with a pause here and there to ask 'How does this feel?'.

We married up the handle and push box and gave it a test run...worked like a dream and because it rides on the fence it can live there - always on the ready to feed stock into the insatiable blade.

 The slider keeps fingers well away from the sharp spinny thing.

Why the smiley face? 'cause Evan still has all his fingers and that makes us happy.

But why stop there?

Gluing up the dividers for the super caddy.

As the next glue-up was drying we decided to add a custom caddy to the right side of the box where I can keep the table saw tool essentials - a square, pencil and caliper. Now most would say that we went a little overboard here but I have to admit that this little caddy is very convenient and is a much more elegant solution to stand off magnets. The best part is I'll always know where those tools are when I'm working at the saw.

  The happy push stick caddy loaded with essentials.

A pencil, square and old-school caliper right on the saw and the saw is right beside the jointer....win win.

So the next time your waiting for glue to dry, don't head into the house for a coffee, answer emails or weed the garden. Take a look around your shop and see what you can do to make life easier or safer for you and your woodworking.

In order to understand, you must do.

V

Upward Spiral - Part 1

I took on an interesting commission this year for a couple of good friends of mine and this

project is no small task. It's a spiral staircase for their beautiful log home that is currently under

construction. As a furniture maker, this is a much larger scale that I'm used to but in the end

it's woodworking. It's project like this that truly help me grow as a woodworker. If you don't

challenge yourself and your skills you can easily stagnate.

Fortunately I'm not arrogant enough to think that I have all answers, so I made a list of people

who I thought had the expertise to get me though this project. One of the key aspects to this

job was the layout of the stair treads. The stairs had to wrap around the log that was in situ

holding up the rest of the house. They needed to rotate through 270 degrees from the second

floor up to the third and I didn't even know where to begin. I love adding curved elements to

my furniture but this was something completely different.

My coworker Steve, a talented industrial designer and engineer made easy work of the layout for me and was even able to provide me with measured drawings that spec'd out the joinery locations and template for the tread shape and size. Steve did in a few hours what would have taken me days with my pencil and 47 erasers. Also, thanks to Steve, these will be the only stairs that fleam was taken into

consideration for.

Enter the next subject matter expert, Evan. Evan is a friend of mine who has many talents but

the one I was particularly interested in was his skills as a timber framer and heritage carpenter.

Evan uses wood as a structural material and understands the joinery required to make the stair

treads become one with the log. While I'm no joinery slouch, I had no experience working with

large-scale woodworking. Now, Evan is either a really nice guy or a complete loony because

he offered to help out with the build for free ... nothing ... nada. He just wanted to be part of a

cool build and to add it to the list of things he has done with wood. Truth is, this type of thing

used to happen a lot in the past. People would offer to help with jobs in order to gain more

experience and to just be part of something cool ... and this is definitely something cool. Evan

has been there from the beginning of this project and I've learned a lot from his experience as a

carpenter. He also plays guitar and drinks beer ... :-).

Any ways, here is where we are with things up to now. We took Steve's drawing and marked

out all of the locations of the mortises on the 5-foot diameter log. No easy task as we quickly

found out but after a bit of head scratching it dawned on us that a water level was the way to

go. It allowed us to wrap the lines around the log while keeping things on the level. ;-)

The next step was to make the stair treads. We started out in my friend and fellow woodworker

Karen's shop to use her beautiful Knapp 16" jointer/planer to get one face and edge jointed. I

like hand planes just as much as the next guy but I wasn't looking forward to jointing a face and

edge on 13 stair treads...thanks Karen.

 

Evan driving 12/4 pine over the jointer

We then had to laminate pieces together to come out with a pie-shaped set of treads that

would come together to wrap the 270 degrees we needed. For this job we used a Festool

track saw - the largest they have available in North America which we borrowed from Karen. It

worked like a charm and in most cases the cut was so fine that we went straight to glue up off of

the saw.

 

Tough work made easy thanks to the track saw

No light here - Perfect surfaces that are ready for glue

You know how woodworkers always say 'you can never have enough clamps'? Well this was the

first time I was forced to stop work because I ran out of clamps. Evan and I had things under

control and only had to go to Home Depot twice for biscuits (alignment not structure) and more

glue.

Now I have a shop filled (literally) with pie-shaped stair treads that are waiting for this weekend

to be shaped and installed. Evan and I will load up my vehicle with treads, tools (hand and

power) and a workbench and make our way out to Rosetta to start the real work....installation.

 

No room to move in my little shop

Stay tuned....

V

Wrong again...

I know, I know...it's been awhile. What can I say? Life gets in the way and my writing took a hit. Let's move on shall we?

Recently I was reading an article that was singing the praises of WD-40 as a Godsend for woodworking hand tool maintenance. Whoa! Hold the phone! WD-40 in the woodshop? Are you kidding me? Everybody knows that WD-40 will ruin any chance of having finish stick to wood. Follow my thinking here - you're spraying down your hand plane after using it and some over-spray makes onto a component you've been lovingly preparing for finish. The WD-40 over-spray wicks into the wood and makes it impossible for any finish to stand a hope in hell of sticking to the wood.

Picture it, finish flows onto the wood, finish runs for the hills leaving fish eyes everywhere, your work is ruined, you start drinking and next thing you know, it's 20 years later and you're still drinking while living in a van down by a river.

OK. Hyperbole right?

Fine. It's a sub-compact, but the point is you can't use WD-40 in the wood shop. The writer even went on to claim that he had tested the theory by spraying WD-40 on a board letting it dry there and then having no trouble getting finish to stick.

Liar!

Now I'm on a mission to prove this wrong because ever since I starting woodworking over 10 years ago I was told that WD-40 is the devil of the wood finishing world. A can has never been in my shop in fact it has been relegated to the shed to help maintain things like shovels, rakes and other garden tools.

So I bring the WD-40 into my shop, carrying it like its nuclear waste, and spray down a piece of cherry. I left the cherry to dry and soak up the WD-40 for a few days and then started apply polyurethane just as I would to any other piece of wood I would finish. I applied three coats, sanded the third and put on a final.

Today was the reckoning. Today I show my woodworking knowledge and prove the goof to be dead wrong.

Well holy sh*t! The finish was perfect. Well, as perfect as I get finish. No bare spots, no fisheyes...just a smooth piece of finished cherry. Well.

Turns out you can use WD-40 in your woodshop. Turns out what I thought to be true wasn't. Hmmm...Just goes to show you that no matter how much you think you know, there is still more to learn. I don't mind being wrong, which is good because it happens often. I'm glad that I took the time to test this out because there really isn't anything better for rust removal than WD-40.

So all this time I've been searching out something to take care of minor rust when all I needed was good ol' WD-40....

V.

To understand, you must do.

The Proof is in the Pudding

This is my idea of time well spent in the shop.

Today in my shop, I realized that I was proving the point that I made yesterday about when I choose to use power tools over hand tools and vice versa. Today I was preparing legs and aprons for finish and I chose to do this with hand tools rather than power. 

Here is what I did:

• removed all the machining marks with a smoothing plane
• removed the arrises on the corners - effectively applying a 1/16" round over
• applied the first coat of linseed oil to all the parts

Parts are oiled and waiting for more. 

All of this took 90 minutes to complete. Now had I decided to do this with power tools things would have been different. The sanding alone would have taken 1.5 hours and I would have filled the shop with dust and noise. Not to mention the challenge of sanding narrow surfaces like the tapered legs without ruining the facets by rounding them over. If I used the router to put a round over on all of the edges, I would have had to set the router up, did some test cuts and then shape the edges - the whole time hoping that the router bit didn't rip out a huge chunk of wood that could ruin the piece. 

The legs are made from cherry with an edge band of hard maple seen in the shavings. Ever seen someone taking pictures of sanding dust?

This is why I do the last 40% of the work at the bench with hand tools instead of with power. It's faster and the surfaces are superior, letting the chatoyance of the cherry through - not to mention the lack of dust in the shop and the only noise was 'The Black Keys' coming from the stereo. 

 - To understand, you must do.

V