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Thread: Going hand tools.
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22nd February 2021, 12:42 PM #31
So .... next project is to make a new tote for your LN custom sized for yor hands, and then you will need a matching knob - I prefer knobs about 3mm larger diameter than LN and with a more flattenned top. You can probably cut out the tote with a jigsaw so you won't have to pull out the bandsaw.
Really liked the depth of thought behind the rest of your above post. Helps make this a great thread.
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22nd February 2021, 01:04 PM #32Originally Posted by Cgcc
Vic ash/Tas oak is not plantation grown. It is all old growth or regrowth from selective logging 50+ years ago.
The components of the Vic ash/Tas oak mixture are:
- Mountain ash (Eucalyptus regnans),
- Alpine ash (E delegantensis), and
- Messmate (E obliqua) - not included in Vic ash.
Though annecdotally very small quantities of many other gums get mixed into the cocktail.
The only eucalypts that I know that are grown in commercial plantations (not experimental) in the southern states in significant quantities are:
- Tasmanian blue gum (E globulus) - a different species from Sydney blue gum, and
- Shining gum (E nitens) - marketed as nitens or econo-ash.
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22nd February 2021, 01:55 PM #33.
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I ummed and aahhed for a long time about getting a SCMS but eventually I came up with a (rare) unused spot (well it was not unused it was indeed full of junk) for it, on a jack up trolley under the RHS wing of the table saw.
It doesn't look like it from the photo but it is totally tucked under the TS wing. The one thing that gets in the way is that red trolley pedal but that is easily removed and replaced.
Tuckedaway2.jpg
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22nd February 2021, 02:08 PM #34SENIOR MEMBER
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Hi David
I think the wood selection just mixes up the equation of how you go about things.
For example, although I think it is really practically unworkable by hand for me if it needs dimensioning, I have been partial to Karri boards for jigs or fixtures where weight and hardness is an advantage (like the fence on a mitre box, which you want to resist wear). At my current skill level with tools I have it's just not practical for me to dimension by hand to any great degree (saws excepted). I use an old wooden scrub plane and a Stanley 78 with a heavily cambered blade as scrubbers. Either can knock out 2mm of pine in a single scalloping pass (provided you don't hit a knot) but bounce off the Karri.
I do however get by smoothing Karri with a Stanley-pattern plane and scraping the tearout with either with a HNT Gordon plane (including with the blade flipped around in scraping mode), or a card scraper.
Also to Graeme - I stand corrected on tassie oak being plantation grown. I think I had misinterpreted the ubiquitous stickers about sustainability, in combination with observing how much there is!
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22nd February 2021, 02:11 PM #35
This has been an interesting thread to follow.
I think it would be difficult to be totally one way or the other. I reckon 99.8% of people would fall somewhere between the 2. You just have to find the spot where you are comfortable.
I love using hand tools, but I cannot see myself going 100% hand tools. The woods I work with are too hard for a start. Carbide and electrons certainly help.Brad.
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22nd February 2021, 03:08 PM #36
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22nd February 2021, 03:37 PM #37
This is my scrub. 100% adore it.
Its a chainsaw.
It took steel-hard mystery wood and chewed through the rough sawn exterior quick smart. Flattened it out with a few quick eyeballs and highlighting the high parts with a pencil... scrub scrub scrub and its flat.
100% recommend one now.
(apologies for the terrible pictures, my phone seems to be a bit ordinary in some conditions)
Attachment 490211 IMG_20210102_232545.jpg IMG_20210102_232520.jpg IMG_20210102_232255.jpg IMG_20210102_232240.jpg IMG_20210102_232235.jpg IMG_20210102_232602.jpg
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22nd February 2021, 03:45 PM #38GOLD MEMBER
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There's some room for improvement there, but if karri is like our hickory by hardness, it's limited. I think the wooden scrub planes are intended for wet wood - in something hard, they will beat you up.
A wooden jack would work karri, but the question is whether or not it's worth it. If my spouse wanted hard maple kitchen cabinets instead of cherry, I wouldn't have done the bulk of the dimensioning by hand, and maple is probably ...well, maple is the s__s to work by hand for its published hardness level. It's a tool bouncer in deep work (it smooths fine - actually it's quite "smooth" to smooth, but it's resistant to deeper cuts).
The tearout should be able to be mitigated with your stanley plane instead of going to HNT anything (and with less physical effort) and the work doable (but slow) with a 5 pound wooden jack....
BUT, I'd bet it'd be intolerable. American beech is at the top of my range for something I'd consider tolerable for hand tool only work, but even it is less tolerable than cherry by a long shot.
Once in a while a debate comes up on other forums about the easiest way to mitigate tearout, etc, and I go off about the double iron (it's far more efficient than any of the high angle planes when a shaving gets thick enough to have some thump bending - if the shaving isn't getting thick enough for bending resistance, then it should be there for all but the last pass with the smoother...but.....)
I usually end up saying something like "I guess if smoothing is done after a machine planer, does it really matter that much, I guess not".
I'm hard core on the double iron and efficiency because everything tied together is what makes hand woodworking tolerable. Take away the double iron, I'm out. Take away the medium hardwoods here, I'm out. Take away the wooden planes for the first two steps, I'm out. I may be hand tooling on a house of cards!! I got to this point by experimenting. I wouldn't even want to go back to waterstones now that I have a good handle on oilstones, which means that I will choose plane irons and chisels based on what works well with synthetic and natural oilstones (and don't forget the buffer).
If someone spends 10% of their time smooth planing and removing tearout, then my suggestions about efficiency are about as useful as someone telling me how to get more accuracy out of my portable power tools. I'm sure there are tip and trick videos about it, but I don't use them enough to justify learning more about them.
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22nd February 2021, 03:51 PM #39GOLD MEMBER
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(we did have someone here on the american forums who claimed to work a lot of hickory entirely by hand. He also claimed to have a preference for really heavy planes because "i'm a big guy" kind of thing. I never saw anything that he made and he disappeared like a fart in the wind, as they say in the movies here.....
as far as combinations of things, I still use power tools sometimes, so even I'm not in the 100% hand tool category. I can only think of one person who says they are, but they're not very forthcoming about a whole lot.
I even have tiny little department store router table with a big flush trim bit on it for template routing power tool bodies. I made the first three entirely by hand before thinking about what I was making (fender style guitars). Those guitars were made to be made cheaply on a pin router - it makes no sense to try to make a smooth curve 90 degree edge by hand. As long as I make guitars, I will have at least some power tools for template routing and binding channels.
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22nd February 2021, 04:09 PM #40Originally Posted by D.W.
Karri is a bit harder than hickory, as measured by Janka hardness:
- Hickory - Carya Ovata - janka 8.36 kN,
- Karri - Eucalyptus diversicolor - janka 9.03 kN.
My experience with hickory is fairly limited except for tool handles, and from what I have seen the big difference is that it has far less interlocked grain.
... I think the wooden scrub planes are intended for wet wood - in something hard, they will beat you up...
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22nd February 2021, 04:10 PM #41SENIOR MEMBER
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Thanks David
But I'm not sure I follow the part about HNT Gordon being more effort. They're mostly wooden other than the brass wear plates so they are much lighter than a Stanley-pattern. The "scraper mode" also means you can run it in any direction without issue - almost like a cabinet scraper that improves flatness. The A55 trying plane I have is a gem as it's almost as long as a No 7, but weights about what a No 3 weighs.
At my experience level I usually just grab a card scraper / cabinet scraper when the tearout is really bad and I want to get something finished rather than try and reconfigure the plane. I hope to gradually get closer as I develop.
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22nd February 2021, 04:19 PM #42SENIOR MEMBER
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Hi Graeme
Yes you just get those big sections of karri where the grain just knots up into a rock. It's almost the worst of all worlds because you might get a promising section that planes okay, but then you just get a section where your plane either just won't cut or tears out.
I will never forget an afternoon I was trying to fix up one edge of a small cabinet in Karri, after a glue-up. I couldn't get it held very well and couldn't plane it because the force needed to cut meant the cabinet moved before the plane moved. I went to a shinto rasp to get the bulk off, it just bounced off some tightly-knotted sections. I tried chiselling the bulk and just bluntened 3 sharp bench chisels in a row (this was pre-unicorn method). I thought, "Oh well", and grabbed a belt sander. After minutes I couldn't see any progress.
It was then that I mentally categorised it as demon wood and vowed to never use it again unless I could use the as-is dimension, or until I get machines could do almost all of it.
(This is all relative to my poor skill level of course, I am not suggesting that others may not be effective with it.)
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22nd February 2021, 05:07 PM #43GOLD MEMBER
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I'd imagine a lot of the wet wood being planed was riven/quartered and maybe softwood. The answer to why you'd do it is two things:
1) it works a lot easier. A LOT easier. Turn something green on a lathe or hand saw wet wood and then dry of the same thing to get an idea. The effect varies a little bit, bu
2) A lot of wet wood doesn't lift as easily ( so you can peel off layers wet and not have it tear out or split as much).
I don't think anyone (or many) does this at this point as it's unsavory and not permitted in some cases to sell green untreated wood, or transport it (bugs).
hickory can be nice and straight like handles, but all that ever grew in our woods was stringy and knotty. I don't know where the handle wood comes from - maybe trees that are from mature forests. It's a b___ to split.
Karri is probably worse, though. Nothing around 1750 - 2k is really nice to work with the exception of indian rosewood, which is nice to plane, but often full of silica.
I'd make smaller and more meaningful things if forced to use wood that hard but make things by hand.
I wouldn't use hickory, but am biased (I think it's ugly, and it's not even a great firewood due to the large amount of ash compared to oak, but it does make a lot of heat).
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22nd February 2021, 05:16 PM #44
RB, a discussion about a scrub plane is a great way to explain where and how a dedicated hand tool only approach fits in with a combined hand-power use. Please note that this is just my view.
Back in the day, when jointers and thicknessers (planers) were a rarity among professionals (never mind amateurs), rough sawn boards would come along from the sawyers, where they had been air drying for a year. Or, one might cut down a tree of one's own (yes, Ian?) and air dry this. Even when carefully stickered, the result was predictable in that wood moves, and so cups and twists would be expected. Just as a contrast, today we mainly get kiln dried timber, and the results are far better - still movement, but far, far less.
A scrub plane would be used to take off the high spots of a twisty board as the first step to flattening it. The typical arrangement for a plane like this is a 9" long woodie with a 1 1/2" - 1 3/4" wide blade, which has a 3" radius curve. This allows the cut to go deeply, which is a far more efficient use of time than using a smoother to take wispy shaving when doing the same thing. Once the high spots are removed, it requires planes with less degrees of curvature to smooth out the dogs breakfast that is generally left behind. The next plane is usually a jack plane (15" long with a 10-12" radius blade), followed by a fore plane (moderate radius), followed by a jointer (mild to minimal radius), and then the smoother (very fine radius). It made a lot of sense to omit planing those areas which one could not see - such as underneath a panel - since who needs to do extra work?!
Back in the day, I was heavily involved in sport, both high grade squash and competition windsurfing. I was very fit and strong. It was not just the muscles that were strong; it was the regular workouts (several times each week) that hardened my muscles and sinews. I imagine that a woodworker who prepared their work pieces from scratch day-in and day-out would have developed this level of fitness. It takes years to get to this level. Along with this is technique, of course, where we find efficient ways to complete various tasks. This is day-in and day-out fitness, not the weekend warrior type - such as myself. I have the know-how and the fitness but at my age not the toughness to do this type of work over a full weekend, never mind for days or weeks on end. Not unless I want to develop RSI or worse.
In todays woodworking, the scrub plane has been replaced with a jack plane. Remember, the jack has a wider blade with a larger radius. I still have and occasionally use Veritas scrub. Before that I had a modified ECE woodie from a time it was a needed tool (I did spend 20 years without a jointer or thicknesser). I have two jack planes. The one I turn to is a woodie I made. This has a 12" radius - a shallow cut, but then it comes out when areas need to be flattened, not whole boards. The other is a Stanley #5 (actually a #605), and this has two blades, one similarly radiused and the other straight. This is a plane I take to woodshow demonstrations as it is versatile (but relatively heavy, which would be fatiguing if used all the time).
The other issue with using the scrub plane-only path is that there can be a lot of wasted wood. Taking a board down to a thickness vs sawing away the waste. I am not arguing that this is archaic, just that there is a reminder that it is not about a scrub plane alone; there is manual re-sawing that may be needed. That leads to a related opportunity ..
Is there an alternative to a jointer-thicknesser set of machines? Yes - flatten one side with a hand plane or jointer and then use a bandsaw to re-saw the board. I much prefer this to the often-recommended use of a thicknesser to joint and thickness since these bloody bench top ("lunchbox") machines wail like a banshee in heat! When I did have one of these diabolical devils, it lay unused as I feared that the neighbourhood would rise up and evict me, if the family did not do it first. A jointer, however, was relatively quiet, and flattened the board without a lot of effort, leaving the other side to be hand planed to thickness. A bandsaw could come in at that point as well. This is an argument I wrote an article for and published by Popular Woodworking some years ago. Today I use a Hammer A3-31 with spiral blades, which are truly "quiet".
At the end of the day, there are so many strategies to flatten board in preparation for building whatever. I have not found machines limiting in any way whatsoever - they do not dictate the designs of the pieces I build, David. Those designs - with flowing curves - are what I sought to create. I have no interest - zip, nada - in ornate furniture with intricate curves and mouldings. In any event, by the time I get to the design stage, I am onto hand tools. The curves may be started with a bandsaw, for example, but they are completed with spokeshaves and scrapers.
Enough.
Regards from Perth
DerekVisit www.inthewoodshop.com for tutorials on constructing handtools, handtool reviews, and my trials and tribulations with furniture builds.
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22nd February 2021, 05:20 PM #45Karri is probably worse, though. Nothing around 1750 - 2k is really nice to work with the exception of indian rosewood, which is nice to plane, but often full of silica.
Regards from Perth
DerekVisit www.inthewoodshop.com for tutorials on constructing handtools, handtool reviews, and my trials and tribulations with furniture builds.
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