Thread: Hand tool virus. Is it terminal or do people recover?

It is not a disease, but rather it is the path to enlightenment and goodness. Welcome to the light side.

(Plus you can listen to the radio while you work )

Dom, most people don't fully recover, but you usually learn to live with the disease.....

In fact it sounds like you're already in the convalescent stages. There is certainly something addictive about the feeling you get when hand-tools start working properly for you. I can still remember the sheer pleasure of using a well-sharpened & properly set-up plane for the first time, or having a saw cut straight & bang-on the scribe-line. Preparing small pieces with hand tools is often quicker & safer than using machines, but there are other places where hand-tools offer the more practical way. We all need to strike a balance between "process" & "product". How much you do woodworking for therapy, & how much you do it to get something made, are the deciding factors, and for each of us, the proportions will be different.

I still get great satisfaction from using hand tools, and it has become easier as my skills slowly improved over the years. I have occasionally entertained the thought of going completely un-plugged, but when faced with the prospect of preparing slabs of Spotted Gum for a workbench top by hand or machine, I quickly recant! So after 50 years of woodworking, I think I've found my own balance between machine tools & hand tools. In my earlier days, time was always the enemy, so I used the machinery more in order that projects would get finished in reasonable time. However, one of the trade-offs is that the finished products often looked pretty bland, partly through my lack of skill, & partly because of the limitations of machines (you can only keep so many router bits in an average home workshop!).

Now that I'm retired, I can afford to spend as much time as I like or need using hand-tools, and can tackle more jobs that may be time-consuming, but relatively straightforward with simple hand tools. To do them by machine would require elaborate jigs & fixtures that just aren't worth the bother for an amateur. Making scratch-stocks for edge-profiling is a good example, the scope is virtually unlimited, and it takes surprisingly little extra time to profile a couple of edges by hand vs. machine.

And here's an example of something a router can't do, a quirked bead on the double-curve of these chair backs (I guess you could do them, and the carving, with a CNC machine, but there'd be no fun in that, for me ): Chair backs.jpg

Cheers,

Originally Posted by DomAU

Is a strong move towards hand tools before a recovery back to some middle ground normal? Or is this condition likely to worsen? Do I need help? Many of you must have gone through the same. Do I need help? 

Hmm . . . . . you're only at acquisition/use phase.
some folks do move onto the next stage i.e. start making your own hand tools.
A full blown infection is reached when you start making all the metal bits and milling the timber for the wooden components.

manky looking 100 year old apricot log
trunk.jpg

Most of it was in good shape
Aprigrain.jpg

Cutting tool steel teeth
cuttingaction.jpg

Heat treatment
scar.jpg

Finished product
setwithhandles.jpg

I can't decide if the help should be called

"power tool anonymous" or "Hand tool anonymous"

either way is normal. Sometimes the pleasure of working with your hands trumps all, other times the time saved ripping a stick into three with the table saw trumps all.



still tossing up between power and hand sanding

Ive had that and power tool virus as well. As a young guy in the UK with a house to renovate I started on building up a tool collection. Power tools were quite expensive back then and my only power tool was a black&decker drill. It was the drill that could take attachments so over time it got a circ saw and a sander attachment. Then power tools became reasonable and hand tools sort of faded away. This last 15 years or so I have been leaning back to the hand tools but I mostly like the old ones and get some satisfaction returning them to working order. Have to admit that I have more planes chisels and saws than I really need but if a rusty old plane crosses my path I feel the need to save it.
Running out of shed space and or money slows the virus down a bit. There is no real cure.
Regards
John

Originally Posted by BobL

Hmm . . . . . you're only at acquisition/use phase.
some folks do move onto the next stage i.e. start making your own hand tools.
A full blown infection is reached when you start making all the metal bits and milling the timber for the wooden components.

manky looking 100 year old apricot log
trunk.jpg

Most of it was in good shape
Aprigrain.jpg

Cutting tool steel teeth
cuttingaction.jpg

Heat treatment
scar.jpg

Finished product
setwithhandles.jpg

Haha 😅. Very nice! Maybe my illness is developing because I have started making my own, simple, tools....

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Originally Posted by ian

I can't decide if the help should be called

"power tool anonymous" or "Hand tool anonymous"

either way is normal. Sometimes the pleasure of working with your hands trumps all, other times the time saved ripping a stick into three with the table saw trumps all.



still tossing up between power and hand sanding

You are right in that all of us are sick, it's just the particular mix of strains that differs, or flare ups of one dormant strain vs the other over time... or both simultaneously . Also I find myself hand sanding more than power now as well. But a Mirka deros may change that.... No... must... control.... desires... .

But seriously, I was curious if many go further and further down the hand process path once getting started along it.

Originally Posted by DomAU

Haha . Very nice! Maybe my illness is developing because I have started making my own, simple, tools....

Yep - well underway I'd say.

This reminds me of the time time I added to the size of my shed and the new floor was being laid. Ivan the concerto needed a tool of some kind and we went into my very crowded old shed and looked around and said what do you make and I pointed to all the hand made tools hanging up and he said" What's your problem? haven't you heard of Bunnings"

Originally Posted by ian

...... still tossing up between power and hand sanding ...

I avoid both!


Cheers,

Hi,
I remember Norm Abrams in the New Yankie Workshop series... he hardly ever used a hand tool ... So I started woodworking by gathering lots of machines and power tools because I thought that was the way to go ..

Then I discovered a pommy called Sellers ... Paul Sellers.

I just admire that Sellers bloke.. he uses planes and handsaws, and chisels to do things that I use thousand of $ of equipment to do .. and not nearly as well as he does.

If I had spent the money I spent on power equipment ... to buy planes, saws, chisels etc .. I would have a damn fine collection.

Its all about the the circle that turns ... discovering the simple pleasures .. being a craftsman rather than a machine operator.

Good on you .... forget the cure ... enjoy yourself in the old fashioned way

Regards

Rob

There's only one thing for it ...

take a bex and have a lie down!

I definitely consider myself a serious hand tool user, and, for me, there's usually an obvious line that I know I don't want to cross.

Things like long rip cuts, thicknessing by hand, flattening large boards, chopping out mortises, and a few others are immediate no-go's.

I recently built a bed which utilized some shaped rebates as embellishment. Becuase the rebates were all contoured or stopped, I couldn't use a rebate plane or a moving fillister. I had a LOT of material to remove by the time you added up all of the rebates, but I was determined to do it by hand. I even went as far as to make a pair of dedicated scratch stocks and buy a V-shaped carving tool.

But after one of them, I was done. It just reached a point where I knew that I would literally be saving myself a week of my life and some significant joint pain by just mechanizing it (i.e. using a router).

That's the kind of fairly obvious practicality boundary that I just won't cross. If we're talking about saving an hour or two by doing it with electrons, then I'm probably out. But when days of hand work are staring me in the face that can be turned into minutes...

And to answer your question, no, it never goes away. Just be sure you don't ever get the "collecting" bug. Then you're really in for it...

Cheers,
Luke

Originally Posted by ian

still tossing up between power and hand sanding

Originally Posted by IanW

I avoid both!

sometimes there's little choice. e.g prepping a plywood panel for a finish, or working on a surface curved in 3 dimensions

When initially started I was like a fish out of water. I picked up some machines and then went the hand tool path. When I was looking at completing a task time was the factor that determined how much I got done, it is strange now as I find that I enjoy using hand tools. AND no I have not been bitting by the collecting bug.

Something that I found out by testing with my normal speed was between using a hand powered drill(egg beater) and a powered drill. I found that I could work faster drilling 3mm holes using the egg beater as to using the powered drill. It involved every step from getting the item out of the cupboard, attaching the drill bit drilling the holes to the correct depth and then returning everything back to where they lived. The powered drill required two extra steps, get the drill out of the box and connect the power, so if I have a couple of holes the hand powered drill will be used.