How People Get Dumb – Stay Dumb and Mislead Others

I stopped posting on the UK forum January 1. There’s just no chance for anyone to learn there because there is too much opposition there by people who really don’t care about getting better at anything, or perhaps who are missing the nerve endings or bandwidth or ability to discern things.

However, I have learned something over time. If you are better at something than someone else is, a few people will notice, and they will imitate you. I’ve always hoped that enough people would work by hand that fertilizing the idea would lead to other people telling me things I didn’t know. This happens once in a while, or perhaps it results in someone pointing me to an old published source of something I’ve backed into just out of laziness, and the source provides more background and confirms what I’ve found and perhaps adds some resolution that gives some incremental improvement, that’s great.

There’s one individual that I gather from discussions and exasperation has failed at most things in life. They refuse to offer helpful advice, and constantly rail about things that don’t exist or aren’t occurring with an undertone of being cheated out of appreciation they deserve or that everything is part of a lifetime of hard breaks that they got and nobody else did. These kinds of people are a waste of time, but just like with negative news, they have some ability to convince other folks that they will offer some kind of reward. That is, if you are not having success at something, you can rely on someone else who implies that they are much more experienced to confirm that the failure is certain and then you don’t have to feel the obligation to do something better.

I can’t post on that forum as I’ve asked to have my ID ghosted. In the past, I would’ve had the urge to jump on such a forum and disprove (not difficult) or provide an exercise of some sort in a project or as a side by side comparison to make a point. One or two people would do it. There is something fundamentally wrong with enough others that prevents them from being able to get far enough to prove themselves wrong, or actually prove me wrong (I like this when it occurs – if I am proven wrong, I adopt something better).

Of course, as the nature of forums go, the original poster just asked a separate question – can you round off only the corners of an iron and get something useful out of it. Sort of, but you can do the same with a square iron, just a little better with rounded irons. You can use a square iron and plane a track free surface by biasing the lateral set just a little bit, getting a surface flat and then carefully taking overlapping strokes with a plane in the direction that favors the bias. That is, if you’re working from the right to left edge, the bias will be the opposite of the left to right. It’s not practical, and the original poster will have no idea, nor will anyone else on the thread (I can guarantee) have the experience or capability to give that answer. There are probably dozens or hundreds or thousands of people in the world who could actually give this answer, but the forum nature drives them away.

What you Will Get

I’d guess the chances of someone taking advice and attempting it in a way that they’re determined to get good at it is less than 5 percent. The chance that they’ll succeed is well less than that, and the chance that they’ll avoid discussing it because of the collective comforting incompetence of everyone else is very high. Everyone gets dumber and stays dumber. There’s a steady state, and it is unfortunately a bar that someone working a couple of hundred years ago would’ve passed in a matter of months. Everything related to better work in the past (design, sawing, planing, basic efficient sharpening) suffers and all that is left in the wake is people firing paul sellers, tage frid, rob cosman mortars at each other. Relating actual experience and describing it in resolution is mostly off the table because it leads to someone telling you what you’re doing wrong. People who despise someone else who is better at something than them are going to have a huge problem with this. People who are good at one thing and not that good at another tend to freely admit what they don’t do or fail to do well. If they can’t do that, it’s something to work on.

I don’t build a lot of furniture. I’ve perhaps burned through about 1500 board feet of wood on furniture in 15 years. It’s not stimulating, it’s a hobby and it’s hard to find an end user for what you make. Most forum members don’t make much of it, either, and the folks who do it for pay have trouble admitting that there are things they aren’t good at, especially if, for example, they’re selling to clientele who wouldn’t be able to spot fine work in the first place.

So, that’s all fine. Here’s where I get pissed off. When incompetent people attribute statements to me or deny reality. Here’s an example:

“David denies that higher angles can prevent tearout”

Say what now? I’ve literally never said that. Of course increasing angles can prevent tearout. However, now that it’s in print on a low-wit forum exchange, I suppose it will become fact. Is it intentional? I don’t know, but it’s stupid. What function does this perform? It shows someone who sees that statement and who can tell they reduce tearout with a higher angle that somehow my advice on cap irons is unreliable because that statement wouldn’t hold water. However, the problem with this chain of events and conclusion is that it’s false because the assertion that it starts with was never made in the first place.

Here’s what “David said”. If you want to do more than smooth wood that comes from a planing machine and you limit yourself to controlling tearout with tight mouths and high angles, individually or in combination with other methods, you are on a dead end trip to dimensioning wood. I learned this the hard way. I guess there are a lot of people who can’t do the learning part on their own and will refuse it when it’s shown to them. There is an imaginary world where you can still get perfect old growth wood that is all down hill. If you can find it and it isn’t $25 a board foot, you’re ahead of me. With cherry, maple, beech, anything I could find, relying on high angles while trying to dump power tools was a no go.

Eventually, someone will repeat this, perhaps a lot of times – the false statement that is – or a question will come to my inbox as to why I think high angles don’t work. Or scrapers or whatever else. But it won’t come from an origin that had the potential to help anyone learn. It’s only coming from people who intentionally or unintentionally will lower the level of discussion.

If you run into anyone who makes a statement like this, feel free to ask them to locate where I actually made it or tell them that I didn’t. The last thing I’d want to do is have an argument so weak that it relied on making false statements about other methods. So, I don’t do it.

Here’s Another one thinly veiled and shot at me:

Real Craftsmen only Look at Surfaces and Shavings Don’t Show Anything

It’s not hard to disprove this. I learned to use the cap iron in a vacuum. It seemed like there should be a way to just plane material, at least reasonably, and even if it’s so bad (like dried up Louro Preto) that you will probably have to sand some, anyway, you can limit the amount of dust in the air by a factor of ten. Let alone not have to create some ninny thin plywood rack with a neatly piled assortment of sandpaper and constantly run and buy sandpaper and try to figure out when you should stop using it. Just avoid that. When i’m forced to sand something, it’s generally with one grit, manually and linear. There needs to be something really worthwhile to get out an ROS (the worst of woods bordered by a moulding, for example – even that can just be scraped and burnished). I have two ROS sanders. I always have the feeling of regret using them about halfway through because the tease of 2 minutes with them turns into 20 and changing paper and then checking to make sure there are no swirls or uneven parts left.

So, I used the shaving to discern what was going on. If the shaving coming out of a plane changes just a little bit from curling up or coming out torn, and it’s continuous, the cap iron is set well. Laziness brings you to this – how else are you going to figure out how to get through wood planing faster and safer – create an app and a measuring device? The historical basis for this exists (it’s nice to find confirmation later) in Nicholson talking about what will happen with the jack (the chip will break), and Holtzappfel (starting page 475 in the 1875 edition on google books) showing a very intentional diagram of a straighter shaving feeding through a plane in a picture, and describing that when a steep angle also shows modifcation of a chip, it will be polygonal more than curled.

There is information in the shavings. You have to be smart enough to use it to discern things, and the bar to figure that out isn’t very high. You can figure it out long before you see any texts, but not actually using planes much or staying busy trying to get more paul sellers or rob cosman mortars to load in a wobbly artillery piece won’t get you there. If you can read the older texts (pre 1900 when planing efficiency would’ve been routine), and take the very compact discussions and make them work rather than believing “oh, that guy is just an author or editor, so he probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But Chris Schwarz does!”…well, i’d bet you’re ahead of me. I had to figure it out by feel – which is actually easier. At least, i think it is. I learned of the historical precedent in text by people asking “are you saying this?”, and found the holtzappfel entry a little less than a year ago. It is sublime, discussing specifically that the polygonal shaving from a steeper angle will mean something, and then very accurately going further to state that the cap iron will instead achieve the same thing but just holding the shaving down while severing fibers at an unmodified angle. This is better.

Holtzapffel also states that the plane will be harder to push. It will. This ignores a hidden variable for someone who wants to conclude that means “don’t do it”. Weigh the shavings and notice all of the other variables. You’ll only need to do it once. If you’re above examining an outcome for a couple of minutes so that you can remain in the dark for an entire lifetime, I’ve got little to offer. But you’ll find that every aspect of planing improves in the case where that effort is warranted – the shavings will be heavier, the surface and planing more even and controlled and overall, the effort far less. The sharpening interval will lengthen. This may not be taught in tax preparer’s class or on a router outing dvd, but it is fact.

It doesn’t matter if it comes from me or nicholson or whoever else, you can observe it for yourself. Because there is one other pure fact – I am better at observing things than a lot of people, but there are many better than me. However, my inclination to do things, especially repeatably, if they are tediously difficult is tiny. There is absolutely nothing that I do that is reliant on it being me doing it. You can do every bit of it, and if it’s useful for you, you will figure that out on your own.

One Other Shaving Observation – In the Shaving, On the Surface

If you are good at planing, you will finish something planing generally straight down the length of whatever is being planed, and if there is a moulding, you may need to skew the cut somewhat to avoid creating a mess. When you finish plane something, or even try plane, you find out that you are done and on to the next step when overlapping shavings through the length of a board are continuous. If shavings are discontinuous, the surface is probably not in plane. This is obvious. What should be obvious but seems to be elusive is if the shavings are not continuous when they are coming out of the plane, something is discontinuous on the surface of the work.

It could be a knot or a defect from a prior step (or if you like power tools, from a planer, but vertical or elusive to see because of the light). The shaving will show you that it’s there by having little holes in it, gaps or whatever else. if the shaving is not continuous, what would give someone the idea that magically down the length of the surface, all of the irregularity just came out in the shaving and the surface left behind is perfect?

Even if you are a sand-a-holic, you will learn that certain things in shavings mean departing from the as-is condition work will lead you astray. Sanding tiny fractions of an inch off of a surface, isn’t that big of a deal. Sanding a surface to get rid of three sheets of paper of tearout depth, and your surface will look like mushrooms are trying to emerge from various spots. And you will have wasted a lot of time and created a lot of dust to get there.

What is True

I have said less than flattering things about the idea of using someone like sellers as a single source or believing that in year 12 of your enthusiastic woodworking career, there’s more to come learning. I feel the same way about cosman, or anyone else similar.

If you are going to make your own way and get to the point that you can discern things, you learn what you need to learn to get started and then go out into the wider world.

To say something like this, or to refer to the focus of the above not being fine work, but a narrow view of what’s out there will get you fire from people who have determined that online personalities are their friends. Because they have spent money and had a one-sided relationship that is an alternate curated slice of “it’s not real” reality.

This comfortable familiarity and wanting to avoid dealing with finding out what your hero is not good at is a low ladder. It’s about as dangerous as finding out that you’re not good at something (I’m terrible at freehand drawing – I’ve seen George Wilson do it and it looks like a 25 year old walking the way he does it – it’s so easy looking) and then deciding that you’ll not venture out and try to be good at anything else.

In this case, Paul and Rob may be very good at something they’re not showing because it’s above the level of the audience. I don’t know what it would be. I’ve seen some of both, not just guessed at what they present. It’s strange to me when there is someone who just loves Paul and hates Rob or the converse, but that kind of stuff pops up, too. In my opinion, they operate the same business and present the message differently.

I learned basic sharpening and basic planing from David Charlesworth. Instant success because I followed what he said. It would be hard for me to say without the guilt of lying that I didn’t pass everything that David teaches with planing, but I was able to do it because I got a start with his stuff. I have some adoration for the late David Charlesworth because the early success gave me a basis to work from. I didn’t want to stop at what he presents. None of us should be bound to that. If you can learn something from what I do and then you progress past it, by all means, please share and prove and think about how you can help someone else.

And be smart enough not to make false statements or get emotionally involved in thinking about your own failures and somehow making me or anyone else responsible for them.

And one last thing – I don’t post under anonymous or alternate IDs in comments or on forums. Ever.