Rough Wood

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.

I am blessed with tons of scrap, thanks to a local cabinet shop. In keeping with a developing interest in making my own tools (mostly for practice) I have finally made myself a sliding bevel gauge. The blade is a bit short, but I only expect to use it for marking dovetails and such. Should I ever need a longer one, I’ll just replace the blade without fear of angering the Fine Tool Gods.

The fun thing about this guy is that the body is hewn from a single piece, rather than being a glue-up. I ripped the waste out with a saw, then cleaned it up as best I could, using chisels. The blade and body edges are parallel, with a roughly .002″ divergence, as measured with my digital calipers. Once I get past my tools’ capacities for making corrections for variance, there’s not much point in agonizing over it.

What you can’t see is that I broke the blade while cutting out the through mortise. There’s just not much structure to support the fibers as you cut them out. I glued it back together, tweaked it a bit to confirm that the sides were parallel, and moved on. I hope to get much use out of this little guy, but it will at least remind me of lessons learned, and look nice on my desk until I move on to the next project.

I have on occasion thought that on the day that I have the space for a real shop I may actually shed a tear. Today, however, I am thankful for not having a shop.

It’s odd, I know, but it’s true. I have been in the process of making various tools for myself, and had an occasion to shape a handle for a marking knife. On this particular day, I did not want to drag out the various implements of my temporary/breakdown shop, and sat myself on the floor with a length of 3/4″ square cherry and a spokeshave. The freedom of not relying upon a workbench, stops and dogs, and all those fun things in woodworking that we all take for granted, led to a much more organic process. I wondered if we have become a bit institutional with all of the hardware, micro-adjusters, RPMs, jigs and precision.

It was definitely less precise, but for something as delicate and curvaceous as a tool handle, that was a good thing. How would you go about shaping such an irregular thing while it’s clamped or stopped, without a lathe? Maybe you wouldn’t, and maybe when thinking about this you’d flash back to seeing your grandfather sitting on his porch, whittling to pass the time or to enjoy his new (to him) pocket knife.

So there I was, sitting on the floor, whittling with a spokeshave in a one-handed fashion, wishing I had a porch but enjoying myself nonetheless. Maybe it’s not so crazy after all, because I have a cool new marking knife, and all I had to do was vacuum the floor afterwards.

In a way, it was also a bit like playing with my new toys on the floor, except with very shiny and sharp toys. That’s even better.