Thread: Going hand tools.

What did I start 58, no 59 posts to date. Lots of interesting and informative discussions. All my tools powered and the few hand lay idle. It’s too bloody hot in my tin shed. Sitting in my powered recliner with aircon on playing armchair woodworker. Searching the internet admiring all the lovely tools most with “no stock” on Aussie supplier websites. 9am is that too early for an afternoon nap?

Cheers Bucky.

You guys need to start digging your sheds into the ground a little bit. My shop is a garage, just a bit more than halfway under the ground. The front end of it says around 40F in the winter pretty much regardless of temp outside (if it's 40 outside, my bench is probably 43F. If it's 10F outside, the bench is 40F.

Similar stability in the summer, but closer to 75-80F and very humid - the dewpoint can approach 75F for some short stretches in summer, which makes woodworking and not soaking wood kind of difficult.

But this is a very workable range for temps outside of needing to move through a door into habitable area to glue sometimes.

Putting your shed even partway underground on the Eastcoast of Queensland would be asking for trouble in the wet months. Our rainfall is in the 2 to 4 meter range per year. I have had close to 1 meter of rain in a 24 hour period at my place. Our sheds needs to have a built up slab, and good drainage, otherwise things will get wet.

David, I think we are getting into concepts for which most of us just don't have the technical background to fully understand. We all go by personal experiences, which even for prolific woodworkers is very limited given the number of wood species & the often huge variability within species. It would take someone with a thorough background in both materials science & woodworking to really get to the nitty-gritty of what makes one wood more workable than another.

To my simple mind, there are a coupe of factors which make our "bad" woods so difficult to work by hand (& I'm thinking principally of plane & chisel work). Hardness is one, I don't think it's too contentious to state that the harder the wood, the more difficult it would be to get a blade of any given 'sharpness' to penetrate it. But once you get the blade entered, how easy it is to separate the fibres is what matters for planeability. If the wood contains lots of natural, even, cleavage planes (which is probably the case with bull-oak), then it's easy to shear off the shavings leaving a smooth & clean surface, and as long as you are planing in the 'right' direction things can go pretty well.

But lots (most?) Eucalypts (& I'll lump the Corymbias like jarrah & spotted gum in here) have rowed grain added to their extreme hardness, so cleavage-planes are all over the shop & very hard to control with anything other than ridiculously fine cuts. And it's not a simple matter of just closing the cap-iron up, at least not in my experience. In many instances, that results in worse surfaces because the hard, short fibres seem to find their way under the best-fitting caps if you try to take heavier shavings, and as you'll be well aware, plane performance goes to hell in a handbasket when that happens.

And as yet another insult, most Eucalypts and their allies contain prodigious amounts of gum (it's more apparent in Corymbias, which tend to contain large gum pockets as shown above), but even if the gum isn't obvious, it's there, and tends to build up on the sole of your planes, which increases friction to blazes. A "gum" tree that grows in my locality (E. tereticornis) is one of the worst I've struck in that regard. If you don't stop & clean off the gum after every couple of dozen passes, it builds up to the point the blade isn't engaging with the wood & you are expending a lot of effort to go nowhere. Waxing, oiling or whatever I've tried is helpful, but certainly doesn't eliminate the problem.

It's quite natural of you to ask why anyone would persist when common-sense would dictate you just give up & feed it to the fire?! Well, it is a rather attractive wood, with a density >1, & among other uses it makes wonderful, stable benches. This little 'portable' bench I made would walk all over the shop if it were a northern hemisphere hardwood, but is as stable as you could wish a small bench to be, and scrubbed-up ok after a bit of steady work. Twin-screw vise.jpg

So I guess for many reasons we will go on struggling with our crazy woods, and whinging about them all the while ....

Cheers,

Oz crazy woods makes us wish for more locally produced sweeties like Cyprus (Hinoki) and Cedars

Easy to cut. Nice to smell. Planes nicely. Straight. Splits beautifully. Resists rot. Doesn't weigh like lead. Grows quickly.

Compare that to literally everything here.... Not a straight stick in it. Hard as steel. Builds muscle to move. Gums everything up. Splits like a bastard. Planes... poorly.... burns like the surface of the sun.


Blessed is the carbide bandsaw blade!

I'll add one thing to this discussion, though it can be inferred from everything here.

I've known exactly three people who have ever made an entire larger project by hand, and then done it again, and sometimes over and over.....without the intention of writing a book, blogging, or doing something to try to make money off of the effort that has nothing to do with the actual making (for example, there's a guy with a manbun, can't remember his name, who makes a piece - very slowly, including dimensioning with bevel up planes, and then operates a website, classes and writes books about what he makes).

You don't want to be in the latter category if you're actually trying to make things. This is also akin to what Paul Sellers shows as "lifestyle woodworking". What he demonstrates doesn't include dimensioning by hand, often doesn't produce a usable result (the chisel in a 2x4 thing) and whatever he's throwing together in white pine isn't how you'd make anything fine in a hardwood. But Paul's business isn't making things, it's attracting subscribers and running classes.

Except for the people who have made things by hand and gotten into all of these effort economy things i talk about (which you'll likely never get into if you don't try to work entirely by hand), their advice for working by hand is crap. I find it kind of annoying, but it is what it is. Where it becomes annoying to me is getting emails or messages from folks about how to practically do things by hand, sharpen more cheaply, etc, and then the result is that I find they were polling 10 people and they conclude that Cosman provides the best advice, or Sellers does. But they're extracting effort from me to explain things, and just watching videos of other people more charismatic.

I'm not talking about things like cutting dovetails - anyone can provide that advice. Frankly, I don't know why cutting dovetails is more than point and shoot, but I guess needling away at paint by number things for it does draw folks in.

Back to the three folks I know who have made a substantial number of items by hand without subsidy or other income source - all of us work almost exactly the same way. And all of us live almost in the same area of the US where finding woods amenable to hand tool use is pretty easy. The two who work for pay (I obviously have no interest in getting good enough at working by hand to do that) have now, as far as I can tell, changed to power tools for bulk work (keep in mind, this is for pay and in the terms of the person who mentioned doing this, his customer list got too long and he couldn't keep up), and the second, as far as I know, has made most of his recent money doing repairs and taking carving work, with some restoration mixed in (like matching vintage sash, but having only to make sash for one window, otherwise the work would go to someone with a powered shop set up to make restoration sash - the difference is that someone using hand tools can make stuff matching for one window cheaper than a power tool shop can have tooling made, but things flip around when enough windows are made to cover the cost of the tooling).

The two defining things that I can think of for all three of us is not that we wanted to work just by hand, but that we like the part of making where the rough work is done by hand - that part is enjoyable, not just get it done.

But I've never seen anyone take advice from C. Schwarz, Paul Sellers, or Rob Cosman and make anything by hand - though 9 chances out of 10, someone will see a low production value video of mine and determine that any of those three are more credible for hand dimensioning advice. I'd embarrass any of them dimensioning wood in person. They'd embarrass me organizing a class. The simple fact that none of the above have enough experience to recommend double iron wooden planes for most of the work sets off anyone following them on a path to fast failure. Just as I would be doing if I did repeat over and over that you cannot work entirely by hand for long without making finding woods that work at least reasonably well by hand a priority. If that's not doable, then some other concession has to be made (if you like really hard woods, maybe you can make small things, carve, make instruments, etc. There's nothing about instrument making that can't be done by hand reasonably well, even thicknessing/scraping 1/8th guitar tops and sides. If you feel that you have to get good at doing it quickly and accurately, it will become a very small part of the total time of instrument making.

On something more simple, like a solid body guitar, I would venture to guess that my time cutting and shaping a neck by hand, and doing most of the work on a body by hand (flat top, not arch) and then using a template router to true the sides (the design was intended for that) or a drum sander - probably adds about 1 hour, but then that hour is gotten back by being able to hand fit all of the parts rather than relying on jigs. Or specifically, I can build a one-off guitar to a custom level for feel, fingerboard, profile, etc, faster than someone with power tools short of a CNC with a file can do it. The guitar that's been made by CNC will usually have some feel shortcoming in it, anyway.

This same discussion could be had with finishing by hand, etc. I applied finish entirely by hand to the last large cabinet that I made, including an artist pigment stain (which makes for an even color due to the tiny pigment particles, and it's lightfast forever no matter how much sun it gets). When I brought this up, it sounded like a novelty. It's practical to me. I could spray a finish faster, especially a toned finish. I have the equipment to spray, too, but I would rather apply the finish by hand. I learned something - now I can run with it. This is the bottom cabinet of that project while in process.

https://i.imgur.com/HQ83gho.jpg

The biggest hurdle that I had asking about prior experience with this is constantly being told by people that this had to be done another way. The beaded doors are made by hand, mitered by hand, the center panels are resawed by hand to 1/4" and then given what I'd call a 3/4th french polish after stain. "you're wasting your time - this would be done with alcohol-based dyes and polyurethane - no customer would care about a french polish".

I have alcohol dyes and polyurethane on my shelves already - and crosslinked WB finishes, and lacquer, etc. That wasn't the point. What I ran into was a small number of people who could actually do the finish work produtcively the way I wanted to. Everyone else was wrong about how long it would take (it didn't take that long) and how it would look (I think it looks great - I don't have a finished picture after this - some of the parts here haven't been done yet and the top is mid-process).

What was the point of doing this rather than rushing it through? The sensation, the optical stimulation, the watching and doing is divine compared to anything I've ever done with dyes and lacquers. I would guess it probably took about 50% longer than it would've taken me to do similar with more common process and power tools, but I didn't have to clean the shop and because i liked the way it felt to do it, i got it done much faster.

This is the draw of working entirely by hand. If you can't get over the humps to work toward figuring out how to make working by hand a positive stimulating thing, then that's where you'll stop doing it. For me, using power tools is a negative - boring, hard to pay attention to, messy. Almost everything that I've learned to do by hand I've walked into because there are so few people who can tell you how to actually do it productively. I left behind the instructional videos about a year after starting, because most of the talking heads can't tell you anything other than what they've read or heard from other people. It's not good enough advice to just follow and actually do anything.

Originally Posted by Ironwood

Putting your shed even partway underground on the Eastcoast of Queensland would be asking for trouble in the wet months. Our rainfall is in the 2 to 4 meter range per year. I have had close to 1 meter of rain in a 24 hour period at my place. Our sheds needs to have a built up slab, and good drainage, otherwise things will get wet.

Thanks for the explanation. The sandy soil south in the US here is much the same. It's hot, but if you tried to build below grade, you would end up with wet feet. The rainfall is at the low end of your range, but the water table is the critical matter, there.

We also have people with outdoor sheds here - a friend of mine has a huge shop. Totally unheated - 40x30 feet with a second floor. In the winter in a cold snap it can be -15C in it in the morning and -5C midday. There is no way to make it a nice place to work, so he loses out on that time.

Anybody seen or heard anything of Bucky since post #11? He's probably in the shed, you know, doing some woodwork.

Originally Posted by aldav

Anybody seen or heard anything of Bucky since post #11? He's probably in the shed, you know, doing some woodwork.

Nah, he was doing post #62 above?

Originally Posted by GraemeCook

Nah, he was doing post #62 above?

I thought I'd been following this thread pretty closely Graeme but I missed that one. Bloody Queensland! who'd live there.

Originally Posted by woodPixel

Oz crazy woods makes us wish for more locally produced sweeties like Cyprus (Hinoki) and Cedars

Easy to cut. Nice to smell. Planes nicely. Straight. Splits beautifully. Resists rot. Doesn't weigh like lead. Grows quickly.

Green Marri smells like a fresh Corona Beer. One downside is if there are bees around they will settle along the sap wood line and suck away.
Most chainsaw mills use chainsaws that have forward facing exhausts which blasts the bees away but my bigger chainsaws are different so the bees don't move much when the mill goes past and before you know it you could be surrounded by a small swarm. I've often though of adding a bit more oil to the mix to see if that drives them away.

Originally Posted by aldav

I thought I'd been following this thread pretty closely Graeme but I missed that one. Bloody Queensland! who'd live there.

It may be a tad warm in summer but I work in shorts and T shirt in winter. Who would live here? Half of NSW and Vic have been trying these last few months. QUEENSLANDER

Cheers Bucky

Originally Posted by BobL

I've often though of adding a bit more oil to the mix to see if that drives them away.

The newer big saws apparently hold their breath so to speak and burn some of their exhaust gases more leaving cleaner exhaust. This can't be good for mosquito and bee control. A change in the muffler may allow the saw to run a little cooler and spit more stink out at the same time.

Originally Posted by Bucky

It may be a tad warm in summer but I work in shorts and T shirt in winter. Who would live here? Half of NSW and Vic have been trying these last few months. QUEENSLANDER

Cheers Bucky

Yeh. We raised the drawbridge and wouldn't let them across Bass Strait, so where else could they go when they abandoned ship?