After ripping fifty feet of 6/4 Southern yellow pine by hand the other day I sat down to give my arm a rest and I snap a picture for social media. It wasn’t long before a friend commented on my post that there is, in fact, such a thing as electricity these days and I was welcome to use his table saw. Curiously, I had no urge to take him up on it. I’m the first to admit that my shop is hand-tool centered, but not exclusive. I have a few machines for specific purposes - a powered lathe, drill press and bandsaw. The lathe and drill press I make no apologies for. I love them. I am sometimes tempted...
Mike and I have resisted for a while now (too many commitments already) but finally feel able to commit to periodic podcasting. You can listen to the first episode above and look for future installments here on the blog or at our SoundCloud page. Feel free to offer your feedback below. We’d love to hear your thoughts. In this episode, we talk about the shipping out of our new Issue (#3) as well as the new book in our store: Zachary Dillinger’s With Saw, Plane & Chisel as well as two new stickers (one of which is soon to be revealed). We then discuss the progress on our new timber frame workshop. Links mentioned: http://www.theenglishwoodworker.com/plane-build-video/ https://www.instagram.com/blackthunderstudio/ Books mentioned: “Country Furniture”...
Because of a wind storm that knocked the power out this week (stalling progress on the Tables video edit), Mike and I have been working on sheathing the shop the past few days. We are just about finished with the first floor and we have one of the gable ends upstairs complete. This part of the project has been fun as we are able to work to carpentry tolerances rather than furniture tolerances. This is no normal carpentry job, though. Choosing the right board for each spot has definitely made this a slower process because we’ve got all kinds of random lengths and widths (often tapering) to work with, not to mention the waney edges and ragged ends. We are...
Mike and I just posted a new installment of our YouTube series: “Ask M&T”. In this video, we cover one of the most frequent questions we get online or at shows: What is a fore plane? Mike recounts his early struggles with hand tools using a little block plane to remove bulk material and eventually realized he was using the wrong tool for the job. What he needed was the coarse roughing tool called a fore plane. In this video, we explain why we believe this tool is absolutely essential for every hand-tool woodworker. We then touch on the history of the terms “fore” plane, “jack” plane, and “scrub” plane and explain our preference for the wooden version. There...
A little while back, wooden planemaker, Jeremiah Wilding contacted me to get some feedback on a plane he was developing. He had been fine tuning a “Yankee” style fore plane and wondered if I could give it a test run. This plane was a joy to use. Because of the precision of his workmanship and the lack of warpage (from a century of neglect) this plane adjusted easily and predictably—a luxury not every antique plane offers. Wilding explained that the “Yankee” style planes lacked carved eyes and had rounded edge chamfers and flat end chamfers. It’s a simple and classy look that I quite like. The plane Jeremiah sent me was made of maple and was 15-3/4” long with a...
We’ve got a brand new book in our store! Although we don’t typically carry other publishers’ books, Zach Dillinger’s “With Saw, Plane & Chisel” is so in line with the vision of M&T, that it would be crazy for us to not to stock it. Many of you read our interview with Zach in Issue Two in which we discussed period furniture reproduction and authenticity of craft process. This guy’s approach to woodworking is uncannily close to our own. Every time I think about writing another book I imagine how I’d describe period techniques and tolerances. I would show what amount of tear-out is acceptable and in which areas. I’d walk through the construction of different forms to show how they...
Click, drag, cut, ripple delete, cross dissolve, fade to black. Look out the window, let your eyes focus on the horizon. Get another cup of coffee. Stretch that mouse arm. As I've been wrapping up the editing of our upcoming Apprenticeship: Tables video, a few observations have jumped out repeatedly. First and foremost is the irony of the fact that I can split firewood for hours with an axe, or rough out carving projects with a hatchet, and feel no ill effects - but a few days of making subtle little gestures with a mouse and keyboard can cause the most excruciating elbow pain. Lesson learned - workspace ergonomics are important! Shavings, shavings everywhere. A project like the table Joshua...
As someone with a few completed pieces of functional furniture under my belt, I've found that I've developed a chronic condition that causes me to look underneath every dining room table, and around the back of every sideboard to see how they're made. The other day at a wedding I even found myself waiting for an old lady to vacate her ladder-back chair just so I could turn it over and look for tool marks. Maybe madness is setting in, but even this madness has its method. I do this (compulsively now) because I find that I'll often learn a thing or two about how another craftsperson came up with an ingenious solution to the same problems I encounter. Sometimes,...
In a recent blog post I mentioned how our content editor, Jim McConnell, and I have agreed to engage in a friendly discussion on the blog about metal-bodied and wooden hand planes. In that post, Jim explained some of the reasons that he prefers metal-bodied planes. We aren’t here to make this topic controversial and adversarial. That’s the stupid kind of stuff that happens on forums. This is just plain ol’ honest discussion. Here's my take: I was trained on metal-bodies planes at the luthiery school I attended. We learned the setup, adjustment, and use of these high-performance tools. Even though my introduction to planing was with new high-end examples, after I graduated from the program, I fixed up a few...
This afternoon, Luke and his partner, Sara, came up from Vermont to deliver the 200-year-old 1-1/4” thick wall sheathing. About half of the load was from this frame originally but Luke threw in a bunch more of the same vintage and region to fill out the rest of our sheathing needs. We hauled the boards into the frame and loosely organized them by length and width. We have a whole pile of boards that are up to 20” in width and other piles in the 12”-14” range. They are between 7 and 12 feet in length and all the boards have sash saw mill marks and beautiful patina. These will be applied to the outside of the frame as...
