Webinar Time

Tags

furniture, furniture construction, woodworking tools

coming this Thurday at 8pm est

Setting up a shop with Hand Tools.

go here to check it out:

http://www.popularwoodworking.com/tools/woodworking-hand-tools/setting-shop-woodworking-hand-tools

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Tags

jigs and devices, woodwork, woodworking tools

For all my woodworking fans, my new woodworking book, published by Popular Woodworking at F & W Media hot off the press:

Looking forward to premiering it at the American Woodworking Show in Winston-Salem in September — hope to see you all there!

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My new Woodworking Book

Tags

furniture, furniture construction, furniture design, old tools, woodworking tools

Finally, a quality paperback edition of my last labour of love about designing and making furniture to delight and last…

Side snipe to the rescue

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contradictory goals, dadoes, shelving unit, side snipes

Never one to work hard for the sake of hard work, I’m more than happy to take the shortest, easiest route to my goal. Of course, sometimes it’s just about the journey and not the goal, but if what I’m looking forward to is completion, Ill use the best available tool. This is where the difficulty comes in. ‘Best’ implies not only the tool that results in the best finished product, but also the tool that is most fun to use. Balancing these two — often contradictory — goals can be tricky. But it pays to keep an open mind rather than proceed out of habit or assumptions. For example, I much more enjoy using a handplane than a power sander; on the other hand, the machine can sometimes produce a quicker and maybe even better result. If I’m already plugged in and forging ahead with tablesaw and router it is easy to overlook the plane sitting on the shelf. Similarly, if I happen to be in a handtool frame of mind it can be a leap and a lurch to put down the handtool and go and get dustmasks, earplugs, and googles, etc.
This dilemma happened the other day when I had finished routing some dadoes for a custom shelving unit that needed to get finished in a hurry. The dadoes had ended up just a tad too narrow, and it took me a while to realize I was wasting a lot of time — annoying, finicky, unpleasant time at that — trying to re-rout the dadoes. And then, when I was almost done, thinking how much more pleasant — if slower — it had been in the ‘old’ days when I cut all this kind of thing by hand, I remembered my side snipes. Ah! efficiency AND pleasure!

Another bit of the past for sale

Tags

old tools, side snipes

Busy listing yet more tools for sale, and it occurs to me it’s always been about the process rather than the result for me. Each extra tool I have decided to sell in an effort to streamline my shop grabs at me as I photograph and describe it. There was a reason I acquired it in the first place, often having to do with the pure pleasure of holding it in my hands and, in the case of many older tools I have picked up over the years, a feeling of connexion with the past — not that I have any false romantic notions about the past which for many woodworkers was a hard, very unromantic life. This feeling of connexion and continuity is grounding and reassuring in today’s lightening fast constantly changing movie.

Tool control

Tags

old tools, woodworking tools

Posting new items for sale on my website ‘handtools for sale’ page, I am struck by the irony of using today’s hi-tech methods to nourish a more fundamental human need: the impulse to make something directly, by hand.The moulding planes, hollows and rounds, rabbet planes, and other items that represented the leading edge of our tool technology a hundred or two hundred years ago are still capable of fulfilling the same purpose, namely to create something individual, well, and lasting, without the nagging feeling that if the power (to say the least) goes out, all will not belost.

I love these old tools because they connect me to to a feeling of accomplishment and — dare I say it? — control, that is all too frequently missing from the experience of sitting down at the computer and wondering if pressing the wrong key will erase everything.

Old versus New

It often strikes me as ironic that I employ the latest technology to further my addiction to a mostly traditional craft: that I need a high-powered computer and cell phones and video cameras to be able to saw wood by hand and carve a shell with a chisel lacking any hint of motor or computer chip. It may be a comfort to know that when the power goes down — as it does frequently here in the northeast winter — I can continue to work, rather than finding myself dead in the water like so many of my totally power-dependent friends, but I remain grateful for new advances. The secret is to enjoy the best of both worlds by keeping an open mind to what may be good about both the old AND the new.

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…still better than sandpaper after all these years.

Parting with Tools

Listing more tools for sale on my website (blackburnbooks.com) is such sweet sorrow. I only hope they find good friends, who will pass them on when the time comes. Like dogs, they need to work.

The older I get the more I learn — duh!

Years ago I had a small router plane with a screw adjustment that controlled the depth of cut. It’s been long gone (hopefully in somebody else’s toolbox), and I replaced it with one of the small Stanley 271s. A useful little tool — I use it a lot for flattening the mortises for mouthpieces in wooden planes — but annoyingly difficult to adjust depthwise. You loosen the screw and unless you are holding the iron you loose any reference to how deeply it was just set, which makes resetting at a slightly deeper setting very hit-or-miss. Suddenly, after years of frustration doing it this way, I realised that loosening the screw with the underside of the cutting edge resting against the edge of the plane’s mouth both prevents the iron from falling and allows me to deepen the setting with absolute control. Duh! How much longer am I going to have to live to figure out all these little details? Or is this the fun of the whole thing?