Rough Wood

Hi folks! Sincerest apologies for not having posted much lately. Lots of stuff has been getting in the way of woodworking lately. I have several things in the oven and will get back to the regularly scheduled programming asap.

One of those things has been the next version of The Woodshop Widget, and I’m very happy to say that it’s live! What’s new, you ask? I seriously have to go look at my list. It’s massive.

First off, the database has been expanded to 288 species. This now includes “common names,” specific gravity (density), Janka (hardness) and shrinkage information in varying amounts. This information comes from verifiable sources, primarily the USDA Forest Service. So you might find some holes here and there, and that generally means that the information only showed up in one place, and is not verifiable. There’s a lot of misinformation out there folks, be careful!

Comparison
Thanks to the new range of info, there’s a fun new tool for comparing species of wood based on these attributes. You can walk through sets of wood in 2 selectors that live side-by-side, and let the Widget tell you which is “better” based on hardness, shrinkage, etc. It’s fun too! As with everything else in the Widget, in the web version you can copy a URL for specific comparisons, and share that with others.

The image shows the iOS version.

Species
A new tool for walking through all of the species in the database, which also lists the common names and the technical info in plain English.

Updates
- The design of Decimal to Fraction has been reworked to be cleaner and clearer, and it now translates whole numbers in both directions
- “Board Feet” is now “Board Volume” and works in metric!
- Squareness has much greater precision
- Various visual design improvements

iOS
All of this stuff has been added to the iOS version, and some deep design changes in that flavor make it much more efficient for walking through lots of different variations of wood. The new wood selector is much more useful, showing scientific names and common names. The graphics have been updated to work with high-resolution displays, and I am told that it looks “sick!” It still works on older iOS devices as well.

The image show the new Wood Picker in use.

There are more details on the iOS-specific changes in the iTunes store. Due to its hugeness, the iOS version is now $3.99. The iOS update is free to paid users, so have fun!

The Wood Whisperer
After discussion of the past and future of the Widget as it relates to TWW, we have decided to remove this stuff from the Widget. I am still a Guild member, a TWW fan, and an admirer of Marc’s impressive t-shirt collection… and Marc will still be using the Widget. It just made sense for both of us; all is well.

All that said, have fun and let me know if you have any questions or issues. There’s more in the works!

Behold, the formerly vast expanses of my desk.

It’s pretty cool to sit here, toiling away, and glance over at my planes, thinking of what I’d much rather be doing. It’s a bit torturous at times, but it’s better than carefully stuffing my beautiful toys into a box. I consider it character.

I’ve bought and made a lot of stuff. I am on the verge of having too much stuff, partially because of my space limitations. While I’m not naive enough to think that there won’t be more stuff in the future, I’m not… you know… on the prowl anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, I likes the tools. I want one of each kind of hand plane that I could stand to maintain. I want at least one more size of combo square. I want every chisel that Lie-Nielsen makes. I want a lot more clamps. I want a spill plane in case I’m ever lost in a cave without any batteries for my flashlight—and happen to have one in my backpack, along with some scrap wood.

I’ve spent a lot of time perusing catalogs. I’ve seen lots of funky and interesting one-off tools, and jigs a-plenty. For a while now, it has been a constant barrage of Stuff. So many options, so many colors—I must leave here with something.

But I really don’t need any of it.

Maybe my enthusiasm is on hiatus because I’m so busy. I like to think it’s because my space limitations have helped me to think in terms of compactness and multi-purpose-ness, to plan ahead, and to set my stuff limit much lower than most. As it stands, I have a decent, yet humble, arsenal. Everything else just increases efficiency.

Then again, maybe I just ran out of space and my subconscious is taking the high road.

When working with something round, in this case dowels, clamping/holding is always a weird proposition. Round stuff doesn’t like to be clamped. More accurately, clamps don’t like to work on round stuff, at least without resorting to a clamp with rigid grips. In that case you’re likely to crush the dowel at the clamping locations. You can make a frame of some kind to hold your round in place, but then you’ve covered up the areas that you need to work on.

To the left is an appliance/jig that came to me a few days back, for use in cutting a groove with a plow plane. The groove will hold a small strip of hardwood and act as a spring for the dog. More about that later. The appliance is a 1.5″ x 1.5″ chunk of doug-fir with a 3/4″ hole bored into the end. A little less than half of that hole is sawn away, leaving us with a projection of a semi-circle that is just slightly more than half of the circle. This cross section is just right for working with a 3/4″ dowel, as the dowel literally snaps into place from the top, and doesn’t need any more vertical support. As long as the pressure applied is downward, the appliance keeps the dowel from spinning.

At the far end you can see where the hole is stopped. The idea is to saw the shoulder at a depth that more closely matches with the bottom of the hole. This saw cut was a bit low, but it still worked, so I didn’t need to make another.

What we end up with is a channel for the dowel and a clean top (and side) for a plow plane to register against. A groove is cut down the center of the top of the appliance, providing a path and support for the skate of the plane (and the blade) to follow. At this point, lining up the plane with the channel in the top and pushing it against the side of the block allows you to cut a clean groove right down the center of the dowel. I’m sure that a jig can be created for doing this sort of thing with routers and other wood erasers, but doing it this way is downright pleasant. Your mileage will definitely vary.

Once the groove is cut, you can spin the dowel around in place and clamp it down to the block, as shown at right. This works because the block is providing some friction too.

Cut a cross-grain kerf at the depth of the holding area of the dog and use a shoulder plane to nibble away the waste. I didn’t bother with perfect registration for the plane in this example. In fact, I angled the plane to the left a little to undercut the holding face for better support. I recommend that you consider doing this at about 90 degrees around the dowel from the groove, rather than on the direct opposite side, so the spring doesn’t completely compress when you use the dog. It’s not a deal-breaker, but the dog will more quickly shimmy its way into the hole in this configuration.

My grooves are about 1/8″ deep, and about 1/4″ wide. After ripping a 1/8″ thick strip from a 3/4″ thick piece of scrap I had 3 springs all lined up and ready to be freed from their siblings. For tiny stuff like this I like to use a marking gauge to make cuts. It’s clean, accurate and a lot less fiddly than anything else that I’ve tried. It’s also much, much less dangerous than using machines for small work. Just set the depth of the gauge to 1/4″ and drag the gauge as if you were marking a line. Do this repeatedly, and with more pressure than you might normally use with a marking gauge, and the little wafers will eventually slip right off.

After cutting, the strips are sized and trued a bit using a block plane held upside down in a vise. This is a bit dangerous, but as long as you’re careful you should manage to keep the skin on your knuckles. After a bit of cleanup on the strips, they’re almost ready to glue into the grooves.

The only task remaining is to cut a slight facet at the end, which will be the portion that is glued into the groove. This angle determines how much the spring protrudes from the side of the groove, so it shouldn’t be too severe. Keep in mind that springs are not a part of the clamping operation of the dogs, they really just keep the dogs from falling through the holes in the bench. I placed a sheet of sandpaper on a granite block, tilted one end of the strip up about 15 degrees, and sanded a facet on the end that is about 1/2″ long. Time for glue!

After a bit of glue-up, the extra bit of spring is trimmed from the end, and voila, bench dogs.

The process is really quite simple with the right support. I quickly made a bunch of dogs for the surface of my bench, and a few half-height versions for my vise, as the holes do not go through the entire face. At the worst I will find a flaw in my process and have to build more, but at about 25 cents each, I can quickly, easily and inexpensively do some experimentation.

My wife was an amazing cook for many years, and was in a chef program for about 6 months—finally turning her experience into a career. We found some interesting parallels between woodworking and cooking, the most notable of which is that both of these pastimes involve the use of very sharp tools—and extensive hand skills. Literally 1 minute before the end of her final presentation for school, having never cut herself with a knife in decades of heavy knife use, she cut her left index finger and ended up in the ER.

I had just sharpened the knife for her.

About 10 months ago, as partial justification for spending money on sharpening gear, I had offered to start sharpening her knives. The knife in question is pretty serious—it is ice tempered to a hardness of around 58-60 RC. That’s tough chisel territory, and is almost as hard as a Lie-Nielsen A-2 plane blade. It took an amazing edge, which didn’t budge for quite a while.

As my tool sharpening skills improved, so did my ability to sharpen her knives—quickly and to an absurdly keen edge. I kicked myself for providing the means for her to literally remove a piece of her finger—through fingernail.

Fast forwarding to the ER, when I arrived and she was waiting for a doctor. I wanted to see the wound so I could reassure her of whatever the results might be. There was a clean, oblique slice, which removed about 1/3 of the nail, and a lot of nail bed. I mentioned my self-imposed guilt trip to the nurse, and she reminded me that sharp is actually better. If you are cut with a dull blade of any kind, which has more of a rough serrated than a rounded edge, the wound is much rougher—and the cut does more damage. These cuts take longer to heal, and are more prone to scarring.

It was a rough night, and she was heavily medicated, but she was fine. She wasn’t able to use that finger for a while, but the doctor was confident that it would heal ok. Ironically, the cut happened when she let her guard down, rather than being due to her nervousness. Upon having realized that her presentation was almost over—and that she was in the home stretch—she stopped concentrating on the cutting.

There are two huge lessons to be learned here:

1. Considering that a knife is just another kind of hand tool, this is proof that even hand tools can really, really mess you up. Hand vs power is no excuse to slack on safety. Always be careful. Always.

2. Though it may seem to be more dangerous, sharp is better. You don’t have to force the tool to do what you want (as much) and if you are cut, you have a better chance of healing.

Just saying. Be careful out there folks.

It’s true.

Though lately it seems that I only think about, dream about, speak of, write blogs about, read and watch videos about woodworking, I actually did some woodworking last weekend. I’ve been crazy busy with work, and had a huge render going. I was captive for a few hours, so I decided to knock out a plane adjusting hammer.

I had searched for solid brass rods at various hardware haunts, and wasn’t having any luck finding something thick enough to drill a useful hole through. I thought it would be excessive to special-order a 3′ rod, only to use a few inches of it and have the rest sitting in a corner for the rest of my life. So I went with an all-wood solution.

The 2 woods are beautiful, though a mystery to me, considering that they were retrieved from a scrap bin. The handle has some really wild grain, and a beautifully creamy sapwood accent. The head is extremely dense. I could barely make a scratch in the end grain with sandpaper. Punny! It weighs in at 5.2 ounces (3 for the head), and is 8¼” long overall. It works like a charm.

As I’ve come to realize since I first picked one up, I love spokeshaves. I can’t imagine shaping something like a tool handle with a spindle sander, or, as I like to call them, wood erasers. I suspect that these kinds of things are mostly left to large manufacturers and boutique companies these days, which is a shame. Using a tool that you’ve made for yourself is something special. It’s amazing what you can do with a pile of scrap.

I did briefly long for some auto-wood-shaping-device—or at least a dowel plate—to help me with the round tenon. It was my first round tenon, and was shaped with chisels and rasps. It’s definitely not perfect, but the wedge should keep it snug for many years. If I ever need to do this again, it’ll probably be a dowel plate occasion.

On another tangent, I used my BCTW dozuki to cut the wedge for the tenon. I love this saw; it’s like a laser with a handle.

I do enjoy the process of making these random tools—and the results. Maybe some day these trinkets will be retired to a drawer, after I’ve made newer and better stuff, or disfigured them beyond recognition. Then again, maybe they’ll be with me forever. Another mystery.