Renaissance Woodworker Hand Tool School
How do you go about learning new woodworking techniques? In the “good old days” you’d sign on to be the apprentice of an accomplished woodworker but those days are no more.
When I got into woodworking there was no Internet and there wasn’t anyone around to teach me. So, I bought books… lots of books. I still buy woodworking books regularly and feel they’re great value.
While books can tell you about techniques, that’s not the same as seeing and/or doing a technique. Doing is, by far, the best way to learn something but doing without knowing what you’re trying to do can often create bad habits and be very frustrating.
Some are fortunate enough to live where they can attend courses in woodworking. Such courses can be expensive and are particularly so if you have to pay for travel and hotel bills. You can easily drop $1000 learning how to make a drawer if you have to travel to the course and rent a bed as well as a slot in the course.
The Internet is, by far, the best place for actual courses/workshops on woodworking. Time is not limited as it is when making a TV show or DVD. You can actually show people techniques in real time rather than trying to explain them in print giving the viewer a sense of time requirements and just how properly fettled tools interact with the wood. The most important thing, however, is that you can spend time talking about WHY things are done the way they are done.
And if you point the camera at someone who 1) knows the subject really well, and 2) is a very good teacher, who knows what needs to be explained, you end up with THE BEST solution to learning woodworking techniques. Marc Spagnoulo, The Wood Whisperer, is the best example I know of this. He simply has a sense of what people need to know about using power tools, designing furniture, or what finish to use. A membership in the Wood Whisperer Guild is worth its weight in gold for a woodworker.
And it’s finally happened. Shannon Rogers, The Renaissance Woodworker, has launched his Hand Tool School. Shannon has demonstrated not only his abilities to use handtools to improve the quality and enjoyment of his woodworking but he’s got that “attention to detail” skill of an excellent teacher.
The best part of Shannon’s school is that you get to come to school anytime you want. There’s no time to show up. No tests. I won’t say there’s no homework but Shannon makes the point that he’s going to cut through the jargon and rhetoric and deal with the doing of woodworking so the homework will be fun.
Becoming a member of The Hand Tool School will cost you far less than any other form of education and if you’re interested in hand tool use it will give you more bang for your buck and time than any other way of learning. I encourage you to watch his intro video below and then to go to The Hand Tool School and watch the first lesson, that he makes available for free. It’s simply amazing. See you in school.
The Importance of Marking the Show Face
It’s been a week since I’ve written anything here. Sometimes these pauses are because I’m off doing non-woodworking stuff and have nothing to show you or talk about. This time the problem is that what I’m doing is, well, err…it’s just plain boring.
You see, I have these Adirondack chairs. They need paint. Painting them by hand is a pain in the butt. Too many cracks – too many edges. To make matters worse, we got rain just as I was planning on taking them into the backyard for a marathon painting session. And so it’s been a slogging good time, painting, waiting to dry, flipping chair over, waiting to dry…etc., etc.
In my small shop this really ties up the limited real estate. I’ve shot these quick shots to show some of that congestion. You can see that I’m holding my table saw down with a drop cloth and chair. I call this my paint studio. I’m marking the path into/around the shop with light blue chairs. This gives me a 12″ wide walkway into the shop. How much more do you need, after all? And, my saw bench and shop bents are holding my vanity cabinets, who patiently await their mirror faces, which are laying on my router table. And as there’s usually some wet paint in the shop, making a lot of dust isn’t something I can do even if I could.
But you know how it is if you haven’t cut wood in a while. You get itchy fingers. You need to do SOMETHING. And this is where working with hand tools is so accommodating. Just “playing” with hand tools is ok, even useful as helps to hone one’s skills. I’ve never used a power tool just to have fun.
And so it was, as I stood in the mess I decided to cut a set of dovetails. I grabbed some scrap, drew a line down the middle of it, and cut it with a handsaw. I quickly marked out a couple tails and cut/chopped them. I marked the pins from those tails and cut/chopped those as well. Then I tried to put them together. They didn’t fit at all.
And it turns out, I created an example of something I avoid… normally, and being a blogger I thought it an opportunity to show you the reason why you need to mark the show faces of every part you’re working on. I did a post called Marking Reference Faces that shows how I use blue tape to do this, but I didn’t do it with this practice set of dovetails – it was just practice.
The reason my dovetails didn’t fit together was that I hadn’t marked the faces that would form the outside of the joint corner. When I marked the pins I oriented the tail piece such that the show face was on the inside of the joint, not on the outside. Thus, when I oriented the boards properly, the pins were backwards to how they needed to be. I flipped the tail board around and everything fit together nice and tight.
But there was a problem. When I cut dovetails I’m very concerned about the saw cuts on the show face but I’ll often cut just beyond the line on the inside face. It barely shows on the inside of the joint and, in fact, it’s an indication that the dovetails are hand-cut. Because of my error, those cuts beyond the line are on the outside of the joint and quite visible. Interpretation: high yuck factor. But if you’ve got lemons, make lemonade and thus I present this lesson on the importance of marking your show faces.
Cheers — Larry
Fitting Cabinet Doors
I’m closing in on the end of construction of my vanity cabinets. With the cases assembled I was faced with the task of fitting the doors. I tried to think of a way to show this process in a photo sequence but, I’m afraid, I failed miserably. Most of the process is mental and my camera doesn’t do well at recording that stuff. And so I’m left with some babbling that will have to suffice. Apologies in advance.
I prefer to build the doors first when building cabinets. I figure if I can get square and true doors, and build to those doors I’ll end up with a decent cabinet. I know others who prefer case first construction and they don’t suffer for it. But when I build my doors, I build them just a wee bit wider and taller than the cabinet they’re going to fit. “Wee” is defined as 1/32″ to 1/16″ wider/taller.
And so, because these particular cabinets have top and bottom overhangs, the doors don’t fit into the space once the cases are assembled as they’re too tall. So, I start by planing the bottom style so that 1) the door can be scrunched (technical woodworking term invented by Moxon I think) into the space, 2) that the hinge side of the door aligns with the cabinet, and 3) that the door bottom is parallel to the bottom of the cabinet, like this:
This generally shows me what must be done on the top of the door to get the top to fit. Below you can see where the door is hitting the top of the cabinet (circled).
Because the bottom and hinge side are in proper alignment, it’s easy to mark what has to be removed to achieve proper top/bottom fit. The resultant top gap should be twice the desired gap as this gap represents both the top and bottom door gaps.
Doing this with hand planes is really easy as you simply mark the area to be removed and plane down to the line you’ve drawn. Because you must plane across the end grain of the rail a sharp blade and a fine cut are required.
Here are the cabinets in their current state. It’s an example of “Clients – you can’t live with ‘em and you can’t live without ‘em.” In this case, the client is my wife, Chantal. She’s been fairly passive about this project thus far, mostly because most times, when I show her something I’ve built that isn’t a shop thingie, it has left our house and resides elsewhere.
I think I caught her by surprise to finish something to stay in our home. When I wiped down the cabinets with mineral spirits so she could get a feel for what they’ll look like, she got excited…i.e. involved.
“Wouldn’t it be neat to have some engraving on the mirrors?”, she said.
“Sure, remember the SketchUp drawings and the trim pattern I proposed? Maybe we could have it engraved on the mirrors”, I said.
“I was thinking more like flowers and leaves”, she said.
“Oooookay… the only requirements for that are that you give me 1/4″ perimeter around the mirrors that will be hidden behind the door frame AND, that you negotiate whatever you want with the glass company.”, I said.
And the cabinets sit in the corner of my shop. She has all the dimensions and the cabinets I’m waiting for their flowery faces as she investigates the possiblity. I’m pondering my blue tape approach to hinging and latching. It may not hold up.
Cheers — Larry
Roll Out The Barrel, or Hogshead, or Pip
I suspect that most who follow my blog also follow Kari Hultman’s Village Carpenter blog. On the chance that there are a few people who don’t follow her great traditional woodworking blog, you’ve just GOTTA to read her latest post. It’s a masterful explanation of coopering (making casks, buckets, etc) and presentation of Ramona Vogel, a cooper who works at Colonial Williamsburg.
Go to Kari’s site immediately…read. You won’t be disappointed.
Cheers — Larry
A Quick Look At My Vanity
Yes, it’s true. Carly Simon was singing about me and my vanity problem, or rather my vanities project. Get it? Yeah…horrible pun. But I’m old – have some mercy.
I decided that before proceeding I needed to check the fit on my vanity carcase pieces and mark the joinery locations prior to drilling dowel holes. This short blog post is the result. Ho-hum at its best. Always do your best even with ho-hum.
Fortunately, this turned out to be a good surprise day as everything squares up nicely on both cabinets. The doors are just a bit longer than their eventual resting place, so I can fit them once the carcase is glued up, but I could use them to verify the width dimensions. Sorry this post is not more exciting for you to read but these results sure made me happy.
“You’re so vain….you probably think this song is about you.
You’re so vain… you think something you did made this happen.
You’re so vain…”
Isn’t that how the song goes?
Cheers — Larry
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