Terminology

I use some terminology that I’ve stolen (isn’t that what we all do when we learn from someone else?) and some that I’ve just made up. This page has definitions of relatively unique terms that show up in articles or posts on these pages.

Beginner’s Trap – beginner’s traps are things that get you instant success but in the end are terrible practice once you’re not a beginner. In reading terminology below, you’ll see Shop Nest Builders and Paint by Number. These all go together – learning the “right way” to do something from the start when that way will limit you. Overly heavy planes and focusing on long and prescriptive (often expensive) sharpening methods are beginner’s traps. It’s definitely OK to be a beginner. Constructive Laziness (below) will lead you away from beginner’s traps. Most of the advice that you get from forum members, and most of the strong disagreements where three fanboys of Sellers, Charlesworth and Cosman are attempting to get the upper hand with who is following the “real way” come from folks stuck in beginners traps. An example with planes – high angle single iron planes and bevel up planes. These are simple planes that you generally sharpen and insert an iron, and then they work. For someone who does little with hand planes, they may be the end point. For someone working entirely by hand, assuming that they’re efficient is a dead end. The leap from beginner’s traps to craftsman’s sense and efficiency can be temporarily painful. I don’t know Sellers, but I have a fondness for Charlesworth and Cosman (if you don’t, sorry). If you want to work entirely by hand, though, neither can give you much more than a series of beginner’s traps.

Brisk Walk Pace – have you ever seen article writers thrashing around red-faced slashing away at work, then putting hand tools down to work with something else? Hand tool work doesn’t require a whole lot of fitness. Your endurance is incremental, but it involves less “endurance” than you might think. You will do most of your physical work at a brisk walk pace with movements that are more subtle and look less effortful. If you feel like you can beat the system by pretending hand tool work is more about brute force and less about controlled force and accuracy, you’ll fade quickly. You’re probably not meeting deadlines in the next hour, so don’t work like you are. You’ll actually get more done if you consider the effort level should be like a brisk walk, and in the more physically difficult tasks, perhaps like a brisk walk slightly uphill. You can keep up a brisk walk pace for hours, even if you’re unfit like me for anything truly athletic.

Constructive Laziness or Doctrine of Constructive Laziness – as a hand tooler, you’ll feel a lot more than you would and notice a lot more than you would if you use primarily power tools. You can use this to your advantage when that feeling is conveying effort compared to the results you get. Simply put, if you’re half awake, you’ll want good results because you get to redo bad ones by hand, but you’ll also learn the way to do everything efficiently because laziness will guide you toward it. For example, laziness drove me to experiment with the double iron (which is essential for dimensioning) as dimensioning wood with single iron planes of any type in most cases is just torture.

Count, or The Count – this is a tool to moderate how fast you’re working, but it’s got a multitude of uses from preventing physical exhaustion and short shop sessions to preventing mental exhaustion or lack of examining work resulting in working past marks or lines. An example of this would be planing when you can’t just plane straight through for 2 hours, or filing bulk metal away. Instead of taking endless strokes and getting sloppy or exhausted, you find the number of strokes where you just start to feel the burn, and then stop and count an arbitrary number where you don’t do anything other than stand up straight and look at your progress and think. But not hard, this is part of the rhythm of making, and generally, the efficiency in assessing cancels out the pause, but the overall result is better/more accurate and you don’t become exhausted. It’s easy to want to rush through the finish of something and get tired, and go past a mark and then want to throw things, but discretion in building a rhythm that involves assessing and avoiding bad habits (like leaning on planes as you get tired or stooping over uninterrupted) is essential to doing work by hand and building your senses. Just a little pause can be enough time to come up with ideas that will make things easier or make things possible that you can’t otherwise solve easily.

Craftsman’s Sense – once you gain some experience, there is neural development in the regions where you’re controlling tools locally as well as in your brain. At some point, things become trivial in a verbal sense (you don’t think about them like you would form sentences) and you make decisions and changes in what you do to adjust to things big and small. These nuances are difficult to explain because they’re a gaggle of little or big bits that either you can’t verbalize well or someone else can’t duplicate if you describe them. But they’re critical to good work – perceiving and adjusting and refining without the drag of verbalizing or becoming overly literal. (Thanks to Warren Mickley for using this term or at least something similar).

The Cycle of Work – generally describing tools or efficiency of something in the context of work, and especially when you can test something in an ideal scenario and find that it doesn’t pan out in real work. An example illustrates this well – V11 steel. I tested a bunch of plane irons in 2019 and probably planed about 40,000 feet of edges. V11 steel has been identified on a blue background forum as likely CTS-XHP or something very similar. XHP has great wear resistance compared to O1. About 2 to 1. V11 lasted in my test exactly 2 to 1 vs. O1, so I purchased XHP and made myself a bunch of irons. The rest results were undeniable. But the test wasn’t real work, it was just planing an already smooth edge, and over time, I found that there is no real efficiency gain in the cycle of work, but there’s more time spent honing out more nicks in the irons, if for no other reason, simply because the steel abrades on stones half as fast, too. Make no mistake, if you just have to have something with “lots of carbides”, V11 dominates A2 to the point that there’s no practical use for A2 in hand tools. Both are preferential to manufacturers, but to an experienced worker, the gains seen in an idealized test just doesn’t materialize in the cycle of work because the abrasion resistance isn’t coupled with nick resistance, and honing out a 3 thousandths inch deep nick or group of them is torture. If it’s not, then you’re just leaving some of the damage, and that also doesn’t fare well in the cycle of work. There are probably hundreds of examples of this, that’s just one off of the top of my head.

Move like a Hand Tooler – if you do hand tool work scattered in schedule and sporadically, you’ll perhaps do certain things that wouldn’t fare well in continuous practice. For example, there are loads of power tool users who use hand tools sparingly and who want to explain the body mechanics of hand work. What they show isn’t what you’ll do. This fits in with the Doctrine of Constructive Laziness mentioned above. Ideas like locking down your entire body or crouching with bent knees to get behind a plane and push it make no sense when you have the body control to do something with a simple lean or a step forward and back while you’re upright. When you do lots with hand tools, you won’t think about stooping over work, getting low and thrusting with your knees (you can’t do that for long and what’s the point in the first place when you can take four strokes with a lazier motion that will get twice as much work done?). Moving like a hand tooler is a matter of being relaxed, making effort and feeling resistance in a way that’s only productive and leaning, turning, extending accurately with your hands and wrists generally manipulating things only as necessary.

Paint by Number – if you’re older than 30, you may remember getting paint by number books. I’m sure they were sold to adults before everything went to digital, but I was a kid in the 70s/80s and early 90s. They were plentiful. Paint by number used in the context of hand work means trying to come up with some prescriptive (often intertwined with dogmatic explanations) set of steps that you can follow to achieve success. It’s completely opposed to craftsman’s sense. How do you cut half blinds? It doesn’t really matter. If you have difficulty with half blinds, you need experience – it’s just exercise that you can complete at a brisk walk pace. If you only ever intend to do something like half blinds twice, you may need paint by number instructions, but filling your mind with unnecessary sequential and often inefficient-for-the-experienced schemes is avoidable. I may use the term in articles to describe disbelief that you can encounter if you say something like “you mark that, and then you make it while observing your making”. Much of woodworking is as simple as that. The marking is the hard part, and the doing is pleasurable – not prescriptive.

Shop Nest Builders – fitting out and keeping neat a shop can be a hobby on its own, and if it’s relaxing to you, then that’s great. I am fantastically disorganized, and my mind is abuzz with doing things – especially making things and experimenting while making. Shop nest builders will often extoll the virtues of having a perfectly organized shop, perhaps with kaizen foam and somewhere involved over decades are thousands of hours of work. The neatness spills over into shop cabinetry or utility-related items needing to look nice and stay clean, and suddenly, you have an auxiliary top for your bench so that you can glue or chisel or plane. It doesn’t have much to do with working, nor does having well used tools out of sight.

Sweet Spot – if you played baseball before bats were made in a way that they don’t ring your hands on a mishit, you know what the sweet spot is. This is a broad term in woodworking. O1 steel has a sweet spot around 61/62 hardness where it doesn’t gain much toughness if made softer, and loses a lot of strength. It’s relatively pointless to make it harder or softer than the sweet spot for anything other than the roughest of work. An example in terms of how things feel is setting the teeth on a saw (not with a saw set, but setting their geometry when filing). When a saw is in the sweet spot, it engages in a cut, feeds resistance back to you with a filing feel (rather than sliding or grabbing) and you end the cut with the saw not grabbing to an energy-sucking immediate halt. When the saw is working just right, it’s in the sweet spot. When you begin to need to bear down to get the saw to engage, or have to finagle the saw to keep it from grabbing, its time to either sharpen or relax tooth geometry, respectively. Craftsman’s Sense and Constructive Laziness will make it very easy to keep tools in the sweet spot.

Sharpen Like a Hand Tooler – If you work entirely with hand tools, sharpening will be so often that you’ll do it freehand, understand it well and do it very quickly. You’ll also sharpen your tools and use them in a way that they don’t become damaged (save a few that are used when you’re unsure of the stock). Sharpening like a hand tooler is opposed to the paint by number mentality in that there’s no hard and fast rule. You sharpen in a way and as often as needed to make the work more pleasant, more productive and easier. For example, if you read tutorials online about saw sharpening, you may come across jointing, reprofiling, quintuple setting instructions. These are the kinds of things you’d do on a saw that was in terrible shape, and you’d do them once – they’re arduous enough that they’ll lead you away from sharpening (just like jigs or stones that need constant flattening or honing processes that involve 6 steps when 2 is plenty). In reality, if you’re dimensioning by hand, you’ll sharpen a rip saw in about 3 to 5 minutes (at the most) and probably choose to do it at the outset of every large project. You may set a saw occasionally and if you sharpen accurately (less is more – why waste time and files to get no real improvement in results), and you’ll likely never joint a saw a second time or need to unless something damages it.

Tool Preservers – tool preservation seems to be a big thing on the woodworking forums, but many of the participants don’t think they’re involved in it. If you find yourself in the shop of a tool preserver, you may feel their breath over your shoulder as they ask you to try their tools, and suddenly hear them telling you how to push a plane, to lay it on its side, or on a test piece, and avoid putting it somewhere that it might get a scratch. Shop nest builders often love tool preservation (constant waxing of tools or power tool tables, questions about tool care items and total removal of minor surface rust (just hit it with a deburring wheel and get on with it) and covering bench surfaces with “auxiliary tops” instead of just building a brute of a bench that can be refreshed on the surface if and when there is damage. Tool preserving is the act of having something, and denying yourself the ability to use something unrestricted like a tool. One of the reasons that I got into making tools is a completely irrational sense that I can make a tool nicer than I can buy but have the freedom to beat it in the cycle of work instead of worrying about whether or not it will be damaged in a way that can never be restored. When your good vintage tools were made, they were intended to be used. They’re generally only going to fail from the abuse of unskilled users who don’t know they’re abusing, or sheer carelessness, like dropping.

Tycoon – this is someone you’ll meet on forums or once in a while in real life who really has lots of opinions about what real woodworking is. The original knots forum was full of tycoons. Tycoons are often people who have spent their entire life reading about woodworking and doing relatively little of it, or they’re folks who claim to have done woodworking for a living but have failed at it and most things they’ve done in life. You come to learn that, they don’t offer it. When you’re learning and experimenting, they’ll be the first to tell you nothing good or pepper you with questions distracting you from the fact that they are not accomplished. Tycoons have nothing to offer you if you’re going to try to do something meaningful – nobody really knows what they’re trying to gain. Tycoons often claim only furniture or architectural work is “real making” and often contradict themselves over time – something that doesn’t happen when talking with a group of makers who actually make things.

Working in Rhythm – every good hand worker ultimately works in a rhythm. The work itself is consideration (not that much) and then “do”. Experience is what gets you to working in rhythm, whether it’s sharpening a saw, sharpening tools, ripping wood, resawing a board, carving an element or filing steel to a mark when you’re making tools. The rhythm frees you from deciding if you should speed up or slow down all the time, and it keeps you working. A good rhythm allows you to work and observe and make only adjustments needed, but to also focus on things like keeping the tools in the wood and working efficiently. I read an account once years ago about someone who visited a Japanese maker where the idea of hands-on work is still a treat. The maker was elderly but upon leaving, the writer said that the maker’s spouse grabbed him and said “please, whatever you do, work in rhythm”. It seemed odd at the time, but the longer you do the physical work by hand, the more you’ll realize that rhythm is efficiency and slowing down to ponder doesn’t yield better results and speeding up to rush will ultimate lead to less work done – often in the near time frame and always in the longer. The trick is to gain enough experience to be able to do it and then think about far fewer things – only those that affect outcome.

You’re the Robot – there are certain things that a machine does really well. A saw filing machine is great at going down the toothline of a saw and doing the same thing to each. When you do things like sharpen a rip saw, your objective is to be consistent, to Work in Rhythm and to do the strokes sharpening the same from end to end. This is why you’ll probably never joint a saw twice once you’re good at sharpening. In almost everything you perfect, you become the robot. But it’s not an unpleasant and rigid thing, it’s part of learning that you can do accurate repetitive work in a way that’s stimulating and not risky or tedious.