Articles to Come – Unicorn and Cap Iron (and probably Dimensioning)

Twice in the last ten years, I wrote articles that are usable and unique. Not that they are discoveries that didn’t exist, but they are topics that were not taught or discussed in a way that’s usable.

First, was the cap iron article, and second the unicorn article. I’ve taken a lot of crap over the 11 years since the cap iron article went up about it’s not new or everyone knew it, and quite a bit about buffing the tip of a tool. Publicly from people I have shipped things to for them to respond that a basically initial cowboy buffed edge was “really sharp”. You can’t stop losers or nutballs any easier than you can make me a person with verbal brevity.

Those articles are on woodcentral, which has become a somewhat delusional site, at least the ownership is delusional. I thought it would be the right place to publish them because there is no paywall, but the unicorn article is now gone and I can’t refer anyone to it, and the cap iron article is linked as to have been written by “Barb Siddiqui”. I have no idea who this is, but it may be someone who was on the forums when they were transitioning from newsgroups.

I wrote the cap iron article early on in my discovery because after starting with it, I began to get suggestions to go and look at what Chris Schwarz said about it. His and the discussions from other gurus were tending toward trying to make the cap iron paint by number, which itself is a stupid idea. The last thing people need is another jig to try to set some item that has a wedge shape end. In the three months or so that I had been using the cap iron by that article, I was relatively confident that I had a great feel for it, and that was the case. That illustrates its practicality. The only thing I’ve done since then is learn a lot more about various shapes and that just points back to why things were the way they were historically – namely, why a lot of the good quality caps irons are rounded and steep right at the junction with the iron and then become less steep quickly. It makes sense if you work by hand.

To summarize what I’m getting at here – I wrote the article not because I wanted to, but it’s my opinion that the Schwarz types who like to write about something they learned two weeks ago are excited, but they have a great chance of giving such bad advice (that become dogma) that the few who will actually try what they read will be doomed. The cap iron was too good to allow that to happen.

If you prepare taxes all day and run wood through a planer in your spare time and sand it or have retired from housewright work and just like to argue, maybe it’s not as easy to grasp why it’s so useful. Every person I have met who does a lot of work by hand (warren, who had a handle on it long before me, then Brian Holcombe, and then a user named Custard on the UK forums) won’t be confused by what’s valuable and what’s not. You can tell when the cap iron is valuable very quickly unless you’re not actually doing end to end work.

Time has gone on, and all of the forums are in their death throes, in my opinion at least. This includes wood central, which requested I not talk about making tools so that the big number of people just waiting to talk about hand tools could do it and it would become lively again. The owner is an editor, and he shopped a brief article about the unicorn bits and it was picked up by a woodworking magazine. I got a little bit of a clue as he expressed that with a reference to the site, things could turn around again. There was a bit of Uncle Rico flavor in all of it – if they would’ve let him start, his football team would’ve won states and things wouldn’t be the same (in Napoleon Dynamite, of course, it looks like he’s living in a high top van). Saying this a different way, the average age of the user on the site is probably in their mid 70s. I’m in my mid 40s – it’s a struggle for me to even find people my age and I despise facebook, instagram, or other app based intrusions that are really designed to interrupt you and get some kind of revenue from data profiling. I can accept the latter, but the meaningless constant intrusion is just a frontal lobe thinning exercise that someone with attention deficit doesn’t need. But that is where woodworking has ended up.

I thought the pop. wood article for unicorn was a bit campy, but they like that kind of stuff. It was distilled from my long article, and I reviewed it, but even my daughter saw the first sentence and said “you didn’t write that, did you?”. I said “no, I wrote something probably 15 pages long that has a brief but not happy summary and then a whole lot of detail and then proof”. At the time, my daughter was 10. Of course, she had no trouble believing the latter. Artices for magazines pay, at least some of the time. Those of us mentioned allowed the revenue all go to woodcentral. I have some oppositional thought to taking money for what I write in the first place, but I really at this point wish I’d have just taken it and donated it to a charity instead.

I think in the case of both of these topics, I can do something that is more usable. The unicorn article can be rewritten to separate all of the testing from the main article – I control this site now and can lay it out and organize it that way.

And I can do the same for use of the cap iron. The forums have been a waste of my time for a while, and they’re obviously a waste of time for people who are more interested in doing things or joining a group of people doing things vs. just being sort of a social hangout. At least for hand tools. And the latter is fine, it’s just not what I’m looking for online and lends itself to the situation that the UK woodworking forum is in with a couple of dud users responding to everything without providing any good advice. Often intentionally just disagreeing with whatever is said. A terrible way for beginners to get advice, and ultimately nobody hangs around wrong and the few that do, when you see what they attempt, you can tell the odds were against them. That’s a shame.

And I think the quiet courtesy that we’ve given forum owners over the long term is misplaced. As if the efforts were for our benefit – sometimes they may be, but often they’re not.

There is a pleasure working entirely by hand that is not helped by the magazines or the forums, and I aim to go not just from crabby articles like this to actually making this more sort of here’s the concept and details later. For example, it’s probably not intuitive that perhaps the angle used on the try plane doesn’t need to be as steep in effective use as that on the smoother. I would anticipate that this dynamic is probably a 10-20% difference in effort when dimensioning wood after the jack plane. These things should be explained somewhere and I guess nobody else is going to do it.

So lots of articles?

No. I typed my fingers numb for years thinking that I had some ability to convey something to people who were interested, but giving advice is like throwing an unskilled pass to a wide receiver playing football the first day, and against a professional defense. The reality is it’s so rare that someone asking the question actually is looking to seriously parse the information and own it.

I’m done with that and won’t be writing well summarized accessible stuff. I don’t like compliments – it’s a personal flaw – but matter of fact feedback, especially if it proves what I believe (there’s always room for improvement), that’s great.

These two topics are enough of an exception that I will tie the electrodes to my loins (that’s what writing clearly feels like to me) and take the shocks so that they are properly documented.

A treatise on all dimensioning work may also be useful. I do it well and I am lazy. if I can do it well and be lazy, that means it’s not hard. There’s a gaggle of things in hand tool woodworking that are easier to do neatly and quickly – both together, vs. how they’re described.

This is Better than a Niche Area, Though

Before setting up a blog, I was concerned that without some discussion, I would lose the combination of things that make for the fire to press on. That’s turned out to be far off -I’m making more things and posting less. I still like to read forums sometimes as there are just a couple of unique people that I really like. Some maybe for reasons people would find unsuitable, but I’m an oddball and I like people who are unique, too. I think day to day, the world operates based on conscientious folks who follow the rules and do what they learn. But nothing new comes without the oddballs. Compare Jamie Dimon and Elon Musk. Jamie wants to be custody of your assets the same way 9000 other places can do it, and Elon Musk has us doing things almost the way the US used to innovate in the first two and a half quarters of the 1900s. Like him or not, we have boosters landing on end like a broomstick and can get to space cheaper than the Russians and Chinese – which is really saying something. Probably none of us are either Dimon or Musk, but I’d rather be the poor man’s .000001% of Elon Musk than the person who shows you 400 jigs, things to buy and how to clean your shop.

If you like those things, the jigs and the shop cleaning, I also have zero interest in convincing you otherwise. I’m looking to share information with the people who think you first go to the shop to make things and figure things out and then everything else is after that.