A Blast from the Past

Well, this is actually still here in the present and may be an indication of how little I look at what’s around me.

A friend of mine got me into woodworking, either in 2005 or 2006. I was working at a desk job and it was a more than full time job and I was visibly unhappy. She asked if I would like to try woodworking with her husband because he was as twisted as I am with the same sense of humor and lack of obligation in regard to some of society’s meaningless rules, like being nice to people who don’t deserve it and who try to take advantage of your manners.

So, she called him at work, while we were at work, put him on the speaker phone, and he proceeded to say something that would get you canceled these days. Said “you are on speaker phone!!!” and he responded with an “OK” sort of response to that and they were both over it quickly. Let’s call him The Englishman, though he’s lived in the US for a long time.

You may recognize these pictures to some extent – they are from 2007 when I was starting to acquire hand tool knowledge, and I’m fairly sure they were drawn with Autocad. The Englishman had some LN planes, but was wildly interested in working wood like a machinist would work it. Accurate, spartan of compound curves or anything like that, and….did I say accurate? Accurate on top of that, and with machines if possible. Hand tools vexed him, and on the other side of things, I felt like I couldn’t tell what we were doing most of the time because the Englishman is an accomplished mechanical engineer, and test pieces and autocad-laid-out plans were the norm. When you work entirely by hand, there really aren’t any test pieces. But i didn’t know that at the time.

More than 16 years later, these pieces of paper remain on the wall behind my bench not more than about 6 feet from where I stand when working wood, and sometimes metal. And every several years, I see that it’s there and never give it a fully conscious thought.

The chart outlines David Charlesworth’s sharpening method. I had nobody to learn hand tools from, at least not who was competent, and I realize now most people who talk about hand tools and build mostly with power tools aren’t competent. It’s a different universe when learning to get good at sharpening, or cut a dovetail vs. using hand tools entirely. All of those separate things, cutting joints, mortises, etc, all melds together if you rely on hand tools for everything. There is marking, cutting and adjusting and that’s about it.

It took a while for me to get away from power tools as the main means of working. In the shop, the power tools were OK – an 18 inch jet bandsaw similar to what’s available now, and a large hybrid table saw. I just hated it, anyway. The bandsaw was risky to use for critical work, and the table saw as a delta hybrid – just not a very good saw with a ton of runout at the arbor. I could fix both of the issues now, just not the way people would think you should. The bandsaw had a wheel that was almost a hundredth out of round. I really don’t get how this happens on a round cast iron wheel that is machined on the outside, but I guess it could’ve been seasoning afterward instead of before machining – which violates the laws of maker’s nature.

At any rate, I was sort of in limbo – it was easy to do some things but hard to figure out how to do most things that weren’t those “some”. It doesn’t seem as hard now, but I’m not viewing through the lens of a router table, a couple of saws and a whole bunch of template jigs and test pieces.

In 2010 or 2011, I started making tools, trying to acquire and make foolproof hand tools to work entirely by hand. Of course, one of those was a steep single iron infill smoother, and the jointer that I found was an early 1800s pearl made by JT Brown. I used them while making the infill (which took 80 hours!) and by late 2011, was making a shelf and dabbling with freehand sharpening – perhaps that was a little bit before – but the shelf was cherry. And single iron planes were terrible, even with it. The middle plane I had was a panel plane with a mouth of .012″, and the infill smoother .004″. That was my foolproof method. The jointer had never been used, at least not to any extent as there wasn’t noticeable wear on the sole. How big is the mouth? i don’t know for sure, but probably not a whole lot bigger than the panel plane.

Glue two panels together, and those planes were still crap. The jointer and infill plane both skipped through cuts, tore out and needed constant sharpening, and repairing whatever tearout there was with the infill smoother was a pain, too. The iron didn’t seem to stay sharp long and it could only take a 2 thousandth thick shaving or so before the resistance of the shaving at the mouth was a problem.

In january 2012 or something, i was about to give up the idea of ever doing more than tinkering, but had a pair of wrong ideas about what Warren Mickley had done, and I, like some others, didn’t know whether Warren was “real” or not, but he won a bunch of WIA contests, which was relayed on the forums, and I thought one was with a stanley 3 (turns out that was a BUS – he managed to beat people planing with a plane he wasn’t famliar with – it wasn’t his). And an argument from Todd Hughes also stuck in my mind – why would someone in the late 1700s go to the trouble of making a double iron plane at such increased cost and complexity. That part, what history chose, I just couldn’t ignore. I gave myself two weeks to learn to use the cap iron or stop and it only took 1 before every single operation that I did before was bettered a much cheaper set of planes. And soon by far.

I’m in the throes of tool making now, but will get back to working wood more sometime in the next year or two. I don’t feel like I have to figure much out other than what it is I want to build and what it should look like.

The measurements on those printouts have experienced lack of use probably since about 2010, but at least for my shop, the paper remains fantastically clean because it’s hanging vertically and no airflow goes in that direction with much wood or metal dust. It’s humorous looking at that – when calculating how much projection is needed with an eclipse style jig, you have to account for the thickness of the iron until you wise up and make a wedge shaped jig that you just shove the iron and guide into and forgo the projection measurements entirely.

I still have the infill smoother, and the mouth is still tight – it might be even a hair tighter due to creep or movement of some sort. The mystery was solved on the iron last year thinks to the new hardness tester. The iron was one that Brese offered as parts, if I recall, made by Hock. Somehow, it’s 56 hardness. Single iron planes need sharpening after a fraction of the wood volume that a double iron plane will get through, but 56 hardness really puts it to you a step further.