Rough Wood

You come home from a long day at work. You go into your shop and close the door. Maybe you don your hearing protection (you do that, right?) and power up a machine and make some dust. Maybe you grab your favorite chisel and chip away at something until it’s just So, or tweak your favorite hand plane. You’re there by yourself, and are perhaps the most relaxed and peaceful you’ve been in days. You lose track of time, and 5 hours later it’s time to get ready for bed. Turns out, it was a good day anyway.

There’s something inherently asocial about this—going off to your private corner and doing something just for yourself. Sure, you might have the kids in the shop on occasion, or hang out with a neighbor, but it seems that most woodworkers consider “shop time” to be their private time, and space.

It might be said that most similar creative endeavors are introverted by nature. Picture the classic portrayal of an artist enthralled in the act of creation. I suspect that fewer woodworkers are fueling political coups, drinking themselves to death and alienating family, or abusing relatives and deliberately disfiguring themselves, but you get the idea. One simply wants to be alone sometimes, to make stuff and to escape.

That’s not to say that we’re asocial people. On the contrary, you may be involved in forums, or clubs. You may travel for trade shows. You may hang out in chat rooms to soak up some woodworking vibes. But the act itself is generally done in solitude, and enthusiastically discussed later.

This distance might partially explain the need for many of us to hook up with like-minded people on the web, to rub elbows and chat at the web water cooler. But I’m inclined to think that the act of woodworking, at least not in a professional capacity, is asocial. It’s a very personal journey, even when undertaken while having access to such a great online and in-person community.

Or maybe it’s just me.

[update] Please see the latest on the completed workbench, which went through some redesign.

First things first.

Before I tackle my tool cabinet project, I need a workbench upgrade. I’m definitely on a plateau in regards to my collapsible bench. As my upper body strength has developed I’ve been flexing the Workmate more, and my patience has worn thin. It’s an interesting observation—I had read that one can’t do proper planing on anything but a nice solid workbench, but I did for almost a year. That worked because I was not physically capable of hogging as much wood as I could have, and as my ability to cut deeper and deeper has increased, so has the amount of force that I can exert.

That, or my bench is flimsy and is finally giving out. I prefer to think the former.

So I’ve taken some cues from my knock-down saw bench project and have been working on a knock-down workbench. I am still working out some details, like how exactly to make the temp/knock-down joints for the legs the most stable, with the least fuss. Here’s where I am so far. It looks simple from the top:

It looks a bit like a”real” bench, except it’s 36″ long and 24″ wide. There’s an apron, but the top panel is on top of the apron rather than being inset in rabbets like many workbench designs. This is purely due to portability and wanting to keep as much of the thickness as possible in the structure. I’d also like to be able to swap the top out once it wears. Tan geometry is 2×4, darker stuff is hardwood.

By design, it fits under my bed when disassembled. Yes.

I researched vises and am leaning towards making my own with a thick, solid piece of wood that is guided by thick hardwood dowels, with a mechanism based on wooden screws. The metal flavors are heavy and unwieldy for something that needs to be portable, not to mention the damage that they could do to my floors…

I’m sure this all sounds flaky and bizarre to those of you who have the space for a solid bench, but when compared to what I have now, it will be like winning a low-grade lottery. Some day I’ll have my hands on the big bucks.

A great deal of attention has been paid to basic structure, knocked-down size, clearance for the vise (whatever it ends up being) and accessibility. I actually had a design that folded nicely, and used keys to lock the legs in place, but didn’t like not using the longest axis of the bench for the vise. I have also struggled with having enough clearance for dog holes near the edge, so I can put a planing stop on the end and do face planing of longer boards. In this design they are as close as 1.5″ to the edge.

In this most recent design, there are various parts which help to provide a solid base into which the legs fit. It would be supported on all sides by wood, except for the attachment face (the outside). The legs themselves have cross members which help to keep them from rotating in the joint. The last element to work out will be the mechanism for cinching the legs to the main body, and at this point I’m considering tightening knobs like the saw bench. The leg stretchers also provide a spot to rest a foot, for keeping the bench in place when things get hot and heavy.

Determination is my friend, friends. At least I now have a saw bench for the cuts.

As promised.

The first of what I hope to be a series of satirical/comic vignettes. If you’re a power tool person, don’t think I’m just laughing at your expense… “Ultimate Hand Tool Guy” is next…

I am a bit romantic about this hand tool thing, but I am not driven by dogma. That’s a highbrow way of saying that I use a cordless drill. For now.

While I use mostly hand tools, I admit that my current situation is not entirely of my own doing. If I had been a garage owner when my woodworking roots started taking hold, I probably would have jumped into the same pool that the average hobbyist woodworker swims in—using power tools, with hand tools for touch-ups and the occasional organic work. I’m mostly glad things turned out this way. Mostly.

The up side to this is that I have spent my time working on discipline, on getting my hands functioning more precisely on command, and on getting my head around the way wood works. People refer to it as being “Zen” a lot, but for me it’s more like hand/eye yoga for now. I am not a production woodworker, so I have little reason to complete a table over a weekend, other than wanting to just get it done. What would I do then, make more shop furniture? I will probably make 2 tables for myself in my lifetime, so I’m in no hurry to fill up my house with efficiently-created experiments.

This opposition causes a few problems for me. While I have projects that I need to complete, I have a lot to learn and would like to try and enjoy the process. Along comes the tool cabinet…

I’ve begun designing a standing tool cabinet, to replace an old chest that is literally stuffed with woodworking shrapnel—and tools that deserve a much better home. Above you can see the rough current design, which requires 2 drawers and a central shelf on the left, and clear vertical space on the right (with a bottom shelf eventually). In order to be able to build it with hand tools, I’ve worked on a traditional frame and panel design. As it has congealed, it has become clear that there would be 28 mortises cut by hand, just for the legs. If I were more experienced at this, and had any shop space to stretch my legs in, that number wouldn’t sound so weird.

On the flip side, if I were to build the same cabinet using newer materials and techniques (all dados, grooves and rabbets), it would be a bit more like this:

Note that the drawers would likely use drawer hardware, rather than the traditional kicker/runner/glide structure, hence the empty hole in the drawer area.

So you may wonder: why not do it the easy way and go have a beer? I contend that it’s not always the easier way. Referring again to my shoplessness, in my situation I’d have to buy a circular saw—to ensure straight cuts, as cleaning up a 3′ long hand saw cut in plywood would be miserable. I could try the jigsaw with a clamping guide, but there are always tear-out and wandering concerns there. Those cuts would be edged with edge banding, so they’d have to be perfect. Then comes the groove/dado routing. This doesn’t sound like much fun, outside in the yard, annoying the neighbors and suited up for the apocalypse.

Here we cross a familiar threshold—buying tools for specific projects, and considering what your current tools were actually designed to do. Since I am just as new to circular saws and cutting rabbets in plywood, why not take the more deliberate route and do it by hand, without the added expense and inherent danger?

I also have a lot of residual cheaply manufactured plywood-and-MDF furniture in my house, and am trying to slowly replace it with stuff that doesn’t rack, stink, peel or eventually fall apart when the screws strip out…

This project will dominate my woodworking (and probably my blog) for a while. It’s a good testbed for developing my SketchUp skills, my traditional and modern design skills, and my patience. At this stage I’m leaning heavily towards the traditional approach, but with plywood panels throughout. I could hand-cut the panels with a ryoba since the edges don’t need to be made perfect due to their being in a groove. It’s either that, or make 7 or 8 glued-up panels and go to town with the plow plane and router plane.

That’s the best, and worst, of both worlds.