Joel's Blog at Tools for Working Wood

Festool C12 Drills on Sale!!!! along with 150mm Sanding Discs

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:59:59 GMT

Now that the new Festool lithion ion drills are out the door Festool is clearing out the C12 Drills in preparation for the L-I version of the C12.It's a great chance to pick up a Festool drill with its offset, right angle, Centrotec and regular key chucks at 15% off!! ($301.75 for the basic kit and 399.50 for the full kit!) As far as we know the only difference between new and old will be the lithium ion batteries and unless you use a drill daily IMHO the longer battery life of the L-I drills isn't really important. We have used our C12 for years with no decline in battery life - we of course don't use it as much as a pro-carpenter but I certainly don't have an incentive to upgrade. The C12 batteries recharge in about a 1/2 hour, last a long time, and the closed handle drill is compact and protects the hand in use. Supplies are Limited!!!

In another clearance sale Festool has introduced the new "Multi-Jetstream" for all their 150mm/6" sanders which improves air-flow and dust-collection by the addition of another set of holes. This just applies to the 6" models. The new and old pads, sanders, and sanding discs are both backwards and forwards compatible. Over the past months we have now switched to the new parts but we still have a lot of the old sandpaper in stock. All the old stuff is now available at 10% off. If you own the older style sander this is a great time to pick up paper, and if you have the new sander or pads - the old paper will work just fine. With the old sanders when your pad wears out you can replace it with a new pad and get the full benefit of even better dust collection. Why Festool needed to improve their already great dust collection I don't know but they did and as a dealer we just go with the (air) flow.

The History of Mitre Planes - The Marquetry Plane - Part 1

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 23:59:59 GMT

The English mitre plane has been with us since the latter quarter of the 18th century. Older surviving mitre planes do exist but I only know of one English model, all the others are from the Continent. It is generally thought that before C. 1780 or so the extant metal planes were essentially one off designs or very expensive limited production. This all makes a lot of sense in the larger context of the industrial revolution and the English economy. We have hard evidence in the account books of Christopher Gabriel that in 1791 Gabriel was manufacturing mitre planes as part of his regular inventory. When the Gabriel mitre planes do arrive, the planes along with mitre planes by other makers, appear fully formed. You don't see the gestation period that you do with panel planes or smooth planes, both which took a 20 year period or so to mature in the 1830's and onward. However, and this is what I find puzzling - why was it called a mitre plane in the first place?

The purpose of these blog entries is to put forth a theory that tries to put all these questions in perspective and pose answers. What is missing is the smoking gun. I am hopeful that on reading this someone can provide that.

Several things bother me:
Shooting mitres and crosscuts in general are one of the most common operations in woodworking - yet mitre planes are pretty rare and the late 18th century and early to mid 19th century literature makes almost no reference to them. In Moxon's Mechanick Exercises (1683) Moxon carefully and completely describes the use of a strike block plane to shoot mitres. A strike block plane is a high angle wooden plane. Moxon's instructions for using a strike block plane to shoot mitres bothers me a lot. First of all it is the first reference of the word "mitre" in the context of woodworking, secondly if the mitre plane was an important tool for shooting mitres he would have mentioned it. The reason he would have mentioned it is that he knew all there was to know about metal planes. The illustrations for Mechanick Exercises were copied directly from a slightly earlier book Andre Felibien's Des Principles de l'Architecture and if metal planes were used in joinery Moxon would have mentioned it. We can make this assumption because Felibien mentions and illustrated a "mitre plane" - only he doesn't call it that. This is the first contemporary illustration (shown above) of a mitre plane only it's in the section on marquetry and is described as "a plane covered in iron". While it does look that the metal base might be screwed or riveted to a wood core in essence here we have all the elements of the mitre plane intact and ready for work.

There is no mention of metal planes in Felibien's joinery section but both he and Moxon would have known that a high angle bench plane works wonderfully for end grain. For normal work a heavy metal mitre plane isn't nearly as handy or as effective as a regular bench plane. However to level the surface of the exotic woods and materials used in marquetry in preparation for gluing or for final finishing you cannot beat a metal plane. What other type of plane would consistently be able to plane hard brittle materials with crazy grain such as fancy burls and ivory that are used in marquetry? The soles of regular wooden planes would be torn up very quickly by these materials. The fine mouth of a mitre plane would also do wonders on exotic woods to prevent tearout.

The next mention of a mitre plane is in the Diderot Encyclopedia (1751 - 1772). The encyclopedia is a compendium of all the knowledge the authors could find at the time and the metal mitre plane is illustrated and described here too. Again the description is in the marquetry section of the encyclopedia and omitted from the cabinetmaking and joinery sections. The description as a plane covered in iron is similar to Felibien.

Shortly after the Diderot encylcopida was published Andre Roubo wrote L'Art du Menuisier ( The Art of the Carpenter) (1769 - 1774 ) which is 5 volume opus on all sorts of woodwork. Here for the first time we have an actual cabinetmaker writing and metal soled mitre planes are given a page of illustrations. But again this is in the marquetry section. (Please click on the illustration to see the entire page).

I am not aware of any surviving mitre planes that match the descriptions in these books. Metal planes of the period that have survived include mitre planes but they typically are more decorative than are illustrated in the books.

Finally a mere 20 years after Roubo metal planes show up in the inventory of Christopher Gabriel, a London planemaker. Lots of things can happen in 20 years.
In part two we will look at the early English metal plane makers and see how the marquetry plane became a mitre plane.

(note - due to a computer error I erased the original published draft of this article and have had to reconstruct it. Hopefully I haven't left anything out.)

It should not be this hard - We Discontinue Nicholson Patternmaker's Rasps Because of Quality Issues.

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 23:59:59 GMT

In general I don't like apologizing for bad tools. Since we pay return postage on everything if there is a problem with a tool that's not an anomaly we either get the manufacturer to fix it or we discontinue the tools.

So long Nicholson 49 and 50 Rasps!!!! you had a great run, we loved selling you, but since you moved production to Brazil I have had to apologize too many times.

In the background of the pictures is the edge of my own personal Nicholson 49 pattern-maker's rasp that I used for years. Since I learned about hand cut rasps such as the Aurious and introduced out own Gramercy Rasps I haven't liked the 49 and 50 as much but at half the price they reflected a really great value and they work great on their own terms. I used them for 20 years before knowing of any better.

With the move to Brazil quality dropped and we started getting them back. Look at the new Brazilian production in the foreground: The teeth are off center in the body, which means that teeth are partially punched unevenly on the edge of the rasp - which will scratch unpredictably, the teeth are crowded together and they will clog more easily, and the toothing on the edge is much larger than before and forms an unwelcome ridge.

As of now we are discontinuing these rasps until Nicholson, actually the Cooper Tools which owns them fixes the problem. This leaves us with a gap in the mid-priced rasp area which we will try to fill but for now I would rather not sell them then have the hassle of defects and returns.

PS - this isn't a single anomaly - we are returning boxes of these rasps.
PPS - A few years ago we used to sell Nicholson saw files - when quality on that dropped we switched to what we now stock - Grobet.

Advertising Rules!! (no - not that kind)

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 23:59:59 GMT

In my day if you want to impress a client you give them a pen, or a mug, or if they are really special a hat or t-shirt. In 1900 the t-shirt hadn't been invented so freebie gifts I guess were a little harder to come by. Now I don't know much about promotional tools but a few years ago I acquired a 12" 4 fold ivory rule. The rule was made by Rabone (the great English rule making company) - it's a no. 2435 and pretty expensive at 26/0 per dozen (wholesale) but it also has "C. W. S. Cabinet Works" "Pelaw" on it which was the shop that gave them out.

What I don't get is what kind of customer merited a rule this nice. It's cute, it's ivory, it folds down to 3". And the markings are all hand scribed on the ivory.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest it was given to some decorator or architect. It's too good to be used regularly in a shop but perfect for an architect to carry in their pocket all the time for occasional use like checking if the molding was the same width as specified in a plan.

The other two advertising rules in the picture were much less expensive, a lot more common and also pretty useful. I don't know the actual maker but the elegant wooden one was a rope maker's giveaway and reads in Inches only on the front and metric on the reverse. On the back of the smaller brass caliper (which reads in both inches and metric) is the name "Small & Parkes Ltd" of Manchester. This latter one is real handy even today.

Work Vs. School - Tom Brown's Schooldays

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:59:59 GMT

One of my favorite books growing up was "Tom Brown's Schooldays" written by Thomas Hughes in 1857 it is a fictional account of a boy going to Rugby, a boarding school in England, in the 1830's. It's a great entertaining read and has been in print since publication. I mention it primarily because it takes place when Thomas Arnold was the headmaster at the school and introduced a revolution in teaching that we feel today. Before Arnold elite schools taught mostly reading, Latin, rhetoric, and other lofty subjects of practical use to nobody. An academic education was a finishing cultural touch and had little to do with a profession or anything practical except the clergy. Arnold introduced practical subjects like modern history, math, and science and his influence began the shift to formal education in all subjects including teaching crafts and woodworking in schools.

Having children, especially boys, study woodworking in school - even if they were not planning to become joiners or cabinetmakers began in the 1860's, reached it's peak around 1900, and slowly disappeared from schools in the last 30 years or so. Probably the best implementation of this type of practical, craft teaching came with the Sloyd system of teaching which started in Finland in 1865 and spread worldwide to this day.

What is important from a woodworking standpoint is how learning woodworking switches from a few basic techniques that you could learn on the job to a myriad of complicated formula that needed to be emulated in a class. The goal of an apprenticeship as described in the Joiner and Cabinet Maker was to take a kid who demonstrated some aptitude or interest in working with his hands and make him a pro over the period of a few years. The goal of the academic approach was (and is) make it possible to train any kid (or adult) in the class no matter how ham-handed and at the end of a fairly short period of time have some benchmark for measuring progress. The benchmark might be a simple project or a test in various techniques.

I've been reading "Our Workshop: being a Practical Guide To The Amateur in The Art of Carpentry and Joinery." by Temple Thorold. Published in 1866 it's one of the first books about teaching woodworking using a typical classroom approach. I kind of stopped reading it by page 32 when he gave really erroneous information on how to use a marking gauge. "The point should not project more than one thirty-second part of an inch , or it will make a deep unsightly mark." (If you can't control the pressure on the gauge no matter how long a pin the gauge has you really don't know what you are doing and you shouldn't be writing about it - click here for the normal way of using a gauge. )

In any case what struck me about this book, and just about every succeeding book for schools or amateurs on the subject of woodworking is how removed the instruction is from actual shop practice.

"The Joiner and Cabinet Maker" (1839) tries to teach by describing what went on in a real joinery shop. While some have taken issues with some of the details here and there in the book it's pretty obvious that one skill builds on another, and there is no attempt to teach theory. There are no lessons in the book per-se, just joinery jobs of increasing complexity. Practice makes perfect. Tools are purchased carefully and only as needed. In "Our Workshop" we first get a huge list of tools one must have, followed by detailed examinations of operations from a theoretic standpoint. Dovetailing is described near the end of the book, and it's implied that instead of being a standard quick joint of the professional apprentice, it's something tricky and needs careful attention. In the J & C Thomas does his dovetailing pretty easily after learning to saw straight and lay out things accurately. Here we get a very modern approach that might be great for teaching a class, but pretty useless if you need to earn your living at a bench.

I hinted earlier on the reason for this change in attitude. Books written for amateurs or as teaching guides need to impress people with the breath of subjects covered - Giving exhaustive detail on a technique is a way of showing the writer's or instructors depth of knowledge. A teacher isn't supposed to just say - "it's easy, you just need to practice". The technique needs to be dissected. The second reason for the change is that unlike a joiner who needed to show they could earn a living the goal in the classroom was instruction that guaranteed success at the expense of fluency. The student went away happy if he could sharpen a chisel or cut a joint. It didn't really matter how long it took or even the cost of the tools, since there was no economic balance. I do think that now we get carried away with the minutiae of a process, not the practice that builds dexterity and memory into our muscles. There is an argument that older people don't have the time to spend learning by repetition, and modern techniques make it easier to achieve success. That is certainly true, but I also think we sell ourselves short. It may take years to be a master craftsman but most basic skills can be learn pretty fluently with just a modicum of practice.

Our Workshop: being a Practical Guide To The Amateur in The Art of Carpentry and Joinery." is currently being reprinted by the Toolemera Press. I cannot recommend it as a good course in woodworking but I can recommend it as an important window into how woodworking was taught to amateurs in the 19th century. The author was a well known woodworking writer. Of course if the style of writing appeals you can still learn from it and if I didn't already own a copy I would be ordering one now.

Coming Round the Mountain

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 23:59:59 GMT

Months after we first showed our new 14" sash saw at Woodworking in America last October I can finally say we have the first batch of saws done. Above is a bunch being laid out for final testing and inspection. Testing these saws is pretty involved because these saws are filed so that you can use them either for ripping or crosscutting. So we have to test them in both configurations. It takes time.

The reason for this fairly complicated filing (5° negative rake, 7° fleam) is because we learned for several historical sources including the Joiner and Cabinet Maker that a single sash saw was the general go-to all-purpose joinery saw of the early 19th century. You might think that this type of filing would be pretty harsh in use but like most hand filed saws (and the saw is of course hammer set and hand filed) the action is pretty sweet, especially as the saw breaks in.

I'll have more details and more background information and some sample pictures of the quality of the cut when we officially announce the saw - probably next week (I need to take a decent picture of the saw first). At the same time we will add it to the website for ordering. I can tell you that the introductory price will be $219.95 for the first month with the regular price after that being $239.95.

For those of you who placed an order at Woodworking in America we will of course charge you the introductory price.

ps - the coding on the brown paper in the picture is the way we keep track of which tests have been on each blade.

Tools as Art

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 23:59:59 GMT

Before I was an iron monger I did a lot of things including fine art photography. I had a few exhibits but I never sold enough to make a living at it. It was an important creative outlet for me. Most of the photography I do for TFWW is commercial and directed to show a specific product or technique. So please indulge me for a few seconds. Here is a picture I took purely because I liked the image.
If you like this image please let me know and I will post some more.

Idle Hands Do The Devil's Work

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 23:59:59 GMT

After a mention in Chris Schwarz's blog we had a big rush on 18tpi coping saw blades. So we ran out. We buy them in bulk and repackage them in dozens. It's a lot of mundane work. With just about everyone working flat out on other equally important stuff I realized that if I didn't repackage the blades myself they would not get done for days. So whenever I feel I don't have the patience or will to start a new task I pack a bunch of blades. It's easy work but the blades are entangled in the bulk packages and your hands get scratched up. After a few hundred dozen you get pretty good at counting to twelve.

The best part of doing this is that it gives me a chance to think and I realized this is what our ancestors meant about idle hands. Not every job we do is hard, skilled, or even interesting. But lots of little jobs need patience and reliability. The time to do them is when you need a break. Once I am in the flow it's pretty relaxing to do it. Apparently there is even some scientific research that suggests that repetitive mundane tasks like this lower you levels of stress. There is also a great sense of accomplishment because it's a task that nobody really has the time for or really loves to do. But it must be done if we are going to fill orders. And it's certainly more useful than pretending I am working by surfing the Internet.

How does this pertain to woodworking? Take a look at the annoying tasks you do. Like putting things away in the shop. Cleaning. Try to look at them not as a chore at the end of the day, but a useful, relaxing diversion while you collect your thoughts for the next good job. And what's really key is that as long as you don't seethe at the annoyance of doing the task while you do it, it really will be a "useful, relaxing diversion while you collect your thoughts for the next good job".

The Joiner and Cabinet Maker - Limited Edition Bound in Leather.

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 23:59:59 GMT

Up until a couple of weeks ago, when Chris got his copy, I was possibly the only person on the planet with a leather bound version of The Joiner and Cabinet Maker. My copy is from 1845 or so and has seen better days. The original book was cost a shilling in a cheap paper binding, and Charles Knight, the publisher, really believed in inexpensive books that were affordable to anyone. While that's an admirable goal - which I certainly agree with, you can't beat a leather binding for "hand feel" and a sense of history.

We took some extra copies that were not bound at the printer and had a custom binder bind 26 copies, one for each letter of the alphabet, in leather, signed by both Chris Schwarz and myself, with a sleeve glued in the back for the included DVD. I should mention that after signing all 26 copies I got a chance to compare my signature to Chris's. As you can see in the photo Chris signs his name with sure, angular lines, as befitting an accomplished writer and editor. My signature is rounder, more juvenile, you can sort of picture me signing carefully with intense focus and my tongue handing out - which is not far from the truth. And of course while Chris's handwriting demonstrates fluency, my handwriting telegraphs surprise that I seem to know ALL the letters. But fortunately Chris assigned the letter sequence to the books so my fluency isn't being tested.

You can read a lot more about the edition here on the Lost Arts Press website, and about the bindery here.

As it happens when Chris first announced that these books would be available we got enough inquiries so we are largely sold out of this edition. I regret I didn't post this blog entry earlier but with the holidays I have been both swamped and exhausted, and have neglected the blog for a few weeks. Also I didn't have the books until yesterday. We probably should have used a language with a larger alphabet but as of now we are basically sold out. Send me an email if you are interested and I will look around. Regular, cloth bound editions are of course available here and as always I am happy to inscribe your copy if you wish.

-joel

How To Select The Correct Color Dye Stain For Your Project Part 1

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 23:59:59 GMT

I don't know. Really, I don't. I get asked this question at least three times a week and for someone like me who pretends to know everything it's really frustrating to tell people that I don't have a clue.

I don't. Here's why:

How the color of the dye is perceived works is a function of the color of the dye, the strength (dilution) of the dye, the underlying color of the wood underneath it, the texture of the wood and how the sheen of the wood reflects light, the color of the topcoat over the dye, the lighting on the piece, and the color of the piece next to the dyed piece. I might have left out a few criteria but that's the gist of it. Look at the following examples:

All the examples use the same walnut dye at the same strength. Of course you can vary the strength of the dye and the intensity of the color just by diluting the dye.

Same dye, same strength, on two different types of bare wood (poplar and pine)

Same dye, Same strength, on poplar. Top coated with blond shellac on the left, no topcoat on the right.

The previous samples were photographed under natural sunlight near a window. This picture is of the same wood but under regular fluorescent lighting.

Here is a walnut stain sample surrounded by a dark or light border.

Do you see what I mean.

In part two (which may or may not be the next blog entry) I'll talk about things I discuss when in spite of my ignorance I try to help people get the
color dye they want.

Note: Due to the way I like to photograph things the pictures are redder than they are in real life.