Month: December 2023

I finally started putting videos on Rumble. I think I already watched the four other videos on the site that aren’t tinfoil hat stuff, but it’ll serve it’s purpose. I’ve only uploaded one video so far but will slowly get others uploaded. I use an adblocker, but I think Rumble, you upload videos and unless they are family only, there are ads. I expect to make a quarter this year (like $0.25!!). I also hope people use an adblocker watching my videos.

FWW

When I first started woodworking, the only cheap magazine was Woodcraft’s magazine. It may have been called Woodcraft Magazine or something. It wasn’t worth the cheap price.

The guy who got me into woodworking had Fine Woodworking from way back and probably still subscribes. If the brand did anything, they created a dedicated subscribership starting in the doldrums of the 70s where apparently hand tool woodworking was mostly dead prior. I’ve heard it all from folks who talk about how great it was when you tell them you don’t take it on any other magazine because of what it is now.

I think what it was probably has to be held in context. You can find things like Nicholson’s mechanic’s exercises on archive.org and download them. Nothing in the magazines is close, unless you are just trying to figure out what to buy, or you like the periodic day the magazine shows up. I subscribed to Pop. wood and Fine Woodworking for a time, but the excitement of the magazine showing up is gone when you’ve leafed through it in 10 minutes and found little of interest. And then you look through it later when you’re not in a hurry and find out that you weren’t wrong.

And then you look closer, and you start checking up on the writers. Are they really shop owners who are just doing a few articles to try to make ends meet or promote their real work? And is their real work something you want to take in style-wise? Probably not for both. So, if you’re looking for sort of group-ism type stuff or light reading, it’s OK. it wasn’t for me, and when the topic came up recently that FWW sold and there’s a lot of hand wringing about it, I’m surprised that most of the magazines still exist. The series of transactions probably hasn’t improved the whole group of magazines, but without one interested party, maybe they’d have been run into the ground.

If I said something about the articles I read that I apply every day now, I’d be lying. If I said something about the finishing book that I read that I apply when finishing things, I’d be lying. They are a retrenchment medium, something people who have always subscribed stay subscribed to, and transient everything else, or perhaps like a family reunion for some to read – to see the in memoriam articles about a long famous teacher-maker, or the 47th article about a crosscut sled and articles using the terms like “a real workhorse” , a “game changer” or “turning everything you knew on its head”. Or whatever else you see that must be in some formulaic magazine writer’s text book.

We are what we make in terms of woodworking, or usually toolmaking for me. And getting more than your toes wet will take seeking information elsewhere.

I don’t hope the magazines go away, it’s a matter of indifference. Want to get the basics of French polish? Nicholson or Holtzappfel, it’s right there. Legitimate information on sharpening? Same. It isn’t overwrought information, but it’s precise and accurate. You may not be able to get a turkish stone, but you can look up what it is, and the fact that the articles don’t have some brand that you can buy will prevent you from coming back five years later after dumping $500 on Nanawa Choseras saying “they’re all cracking and the seller says it’s my fault”.

I think we’ll see most of the magazines disappear from print soon. The guy who got me into woodworking is 70, and the demographic of the subscribership probably doesn’t look that great. the authorship seems to have changed from people like Phil Lowe who did make things, and plenty even in the older ones who weren’t accomplished, to folks who have taken on writing in magazines with little experience. Even I had an article published, but in full disclosure, someone else distilled it from the Unicorn article, because clipping information out of something that’s free to put it behind a paywall in less substantive form doesn’t make any sense.

The few years I was reading magazines, also in fairness, I wasn’t really ready to get into the hobby very far. Little thought about what to make came into my mind, and maybe the magazines would provide ideas. Little thought on how to make things came into my mind, and so I had a big bandsaw, a tablesaw with a caster base and a 50″ fence, and little output.

I do feel a little bad for the regular occasion when you see someone who has carefully saved and preserved 45 years’ worth of fine woodworking magazines only to find out that almost nobody wants them. The magazines may not have more than a dollar an issue value now, and perhaps to someone who also won’t have them for long, but the lesson about assuming something will be valuable and taking consuming your time preserving that something, that’s a valuable lesson.

Year-End Slowness – This Picture is Already out Date

I don’t technically have work today, and I’m off the rest of the year. I’ll work in the mornings because there is stuff that can’t be on my plate after January 1 when work is busy for several months. It’s reality in salaried work. I can think of 10 ways I could’ve gotten it all done during the year, but didn’t. At least most of it – some is last minute due to other folks. Growing kids and that has equated to a lot of short time in the shop and getting little done. It’s going to sound like more than it is.

This picture is a little old. All but three of the chisels are completely finished, one of the eight still needs hardening and that and the two not ground need their bevels. I’ve made two extra due to superficial cracks on two of the chisels in this picture. Use of the cam hammer allows one to work very sectionally and keep going for perfect a little too long. Use of a hammer swinging will send you back to the forge a little early every time – which probably explains why i never saw cracks there. If you’re swinging a hammer, you lose interest in trying to move steel at all if it’s not at a temperature where it moves well.

I’ll handle a few of these the next few days.

My son also is setting up an HO train layout, which really amounts to me doing more of it. At first, we were going to make one out of 2×4 sheets of plywood that could be folded, but gave up on it, which meant building legs for the roughly 4×6 layout table, and then assembling things.

And I made three knives.

So in the scheme of not being in the shop much the last couple of months, I remember my beginnings where I felt like I was in the shop more than I was and sometimes built nothing over a period of months other than a stroll to the shop now and again to experiment with a plane or just do something else pointless.

Retirement isn’t for at least another 10 years – which creates the dilemma. I want to learn now what I hope to put into play at 58 or 60, for fear that whatever energy is lacking now through the course of a day vs. age 25, probably the same amount again will be gone by 60. We’ll see. you can plan for things in life but assuming they’re a certainty is just a good way to become discontented.

I often make a comment that I’m going to make or build something, and that I won’t have much time, and then beg borrow or steal time from just about everything around me. Never abandoning kids’ events or anything but popping my head up upstairs to find if the kids have finished their evening routine. If not and I’m not working late, I sneak to the shop.

I mentioned about two weeks ago that I was going to build a set of chisels for myself. The shop is sort of rearranged to have most of the metalworking junk in one corner now and I hung a furniture blanket. Those are flammable, by the way! So anywhere hot tools could touch them, I’m hanging a welding blanket. Fortunately, the moving blankets aren’t nitrocellulose guitar pick flammable, and my shop now has several buckets of water in the area, a garden hose and a fire extinguisher right on the other side of the shop door.

I want a set of 8 bench chisels. They’re this far:

Actually, they’re a bit further along- this picture is from a few days ago. All but the thin chisel have the bolsters ground and are heat treated. Scope creep brings three parers into the equation, something I don’t need, and doing these all at once lets me see some differences that I wouldn’t have noticed. For example, the 7/8 and 1″ chisels wanted to come up a little short on hardness. They’re in the range of 61/62 after hardening, so far from being unusable. the full hardness length is a little shorter in them, probably 1 1/2 inches, which most people would never get through – one would have to build a very joinery heavy group of about 100 hand made pieces to get there, or maybe 200 or 400.

I have to think about what I’m intending to do – sell the odd set in the future at a legitimate full price to a target market. I think I posted that already.

The quirk with the wider chisels hardening a little less comes to mind because I could see the center of the chisels staying orange in the brine longer. This first part of the hardening – the first two seconds or so, is critical. Then there’s another part to complete in about two minutes. It’s not a question of making a useable chisel, but rather one of ego, I guess. Can I get full hardness to be identical within less than a point across the range, and to the same length on a chisel. if the chisels are made more thinly than these just below the shoulder, the answer is an easy yes.

For the longer term, I haven’t made too much of a decision yet. Earlier firmer chisels were fairly thin with Nicholson describing what I prefer, anyway in older texts – a relatively flat stretch of chisel with only slight curvature and then increasing past the midpoint up to the shoulder of the tool. This curvature is obviously missing from tools made now, and somewhat uncommon even on tools in the late 1800s.

But slow progress it is – still better than using the “too busy” excuse and not going into the shop at all. That’s a disease of inertia that people get into once they think they have their shop built out, making it seem like a monumental task to get in the shop and do anything at all, whereas at least doing something makes keeping things going pretty effortless. I started with the inertia just like a lot of people do – it’s part not knowing what you want to make and part work demand and whatever else, and also a big part of everything seeming difficult with icing on the cake sometimes being the realization that all you worked on for a full Saturday morning is crap and has to be binned or burned.

I still have a hole in the door transitioning from garage shop to basement from those days. the door is a skinned entry door and not solid and guess what will go through the outer veneer – rigid shop vac parts if you throw them hard enough.

I expect, and hope that through the end of the year, I’ll get three knives made and about 15 chisels. That’s about a month and a half’s worth of spare time stuff starting from the last post, and it seems like not enough. There are lots of underlying reasons, but some of them are work related and I’ve got some decisions to make in life. If one of those being viable was making tools full time, I’d already be doing it. Unfortunately, as a primary earner, that’s probably far off.