May 2012
17 posts
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Wilbur: [Woodworking on the internet] could be worse. We could be in the internet photographers and camera gear world. *grin*
Marc: worse yet….gaming!
Wilbur: HAHAHAHAHA!
Marc: i dip my toes in that arena quite often and I have the scars to prove it. :)
Wilbur: Internet ww'ing would be so much more fun like this: "LV p0wns all!!! Woodcraft is teh sux0r!!!!!!"
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“The online woodworking community, though something of a Wild West, of course, is...”
– Speaking of stepping up when you didn’t quite get things right, Asa Christiana in a post on the Fine Woodworking website. Good for him.
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Chip Breakers →
Bob Strawn, in an excellent article about his take on the Kawai-Kato video:
For an occasional craftsman who dreads taking a blade out or adjusting a plane, a top iron is horrid. For a craftsman who has a hundred planes on the wall, a top iron may be just another thing to fiddle with while trying to do work. For a craftsman with less than a dozen planes, or a craftsman who carries his tools, I...
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WatchThis is the full version of the video created by Professor Yasunori Kawai and Honorary Professor Chutaro Kato at Yamagata University, as part of their research in the role of cap irons in planing. Mia Iwasaki did the initial translation of the audio and captions in this video, after which I edited the translation and added subtitles to the video.
In this video, the setup of the experiments is...
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Shop Talk Live 5: Perfect Storm of Stupidity →
As I tweeted last week:
Shop Talk Live #5 starts with critique of ww’ing bloggers not being experts, ends with advice to check “internet chatter” for DC info.
Tom Iovino has a more coherent, less snarky analysis on his excellent blog, Tom’s Workbench, today.
WatchFor Adam Yauch. How could I not quote this line?
If you try to knock me you’ll get mocked I’ll stir fry you in my wok
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WatchThis is the last sequence from Professors Kawai and Kato’s video on planing. This segment shows what happens when the angle of the cap iron is steepened to 80º. To my eyes, at this point the plane blade is acting very much like a scraper. Tearout seems to be further reduced.
One last time: my captions, no knowledge of Japanese, could be way off in terms of the text, etc.
(Thanks again to Bill...
Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares,... →
Maurice Sendak has sailed off through night and day and in and out of weeks and almost over a year to where the wild things are.
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WatchThis is the next sequence of from Professors Kawai and Kato’s video on planing. This segment shows what happens when a cap iron with a 50º bevel is placed at varying distances from the edge of the plane blade when planing against the grain. The cap iron does mitigate the tearout seen in the previous video, although it looks like it has to be very close to the edge for optimal results.
Again, the...
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WatchThis phenomenal video of a microscopic view of what happens when a plane blade cuts wood was created by Professor Yasunori Kawai and Honorary Professor Chutaro Kato at Yamagata University, as part of their research in the role of cap irons in planing. This segment shows a plane blade without a cap iron, planing with the grain, then against the grain, and finally taking a thinner shaving against...
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Anonymous asked: hey, i have build a traditional sumitabu. the first run was great but the ink got dried and jamed the whole thing. do you know how maintain this tool?
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SawStop and Swiss on rye
It’s Safety Week again. Among woodworkers, there’s probably no more volatile subject when it comes to safety than SawStop. And there’s probably no one more unqualified to talk about table saws than myself, since I have very little experience using one, and I don’t even have a table saw in my shop.
On the other hand, I do know a lot about safety procedures. In my day job,...
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Tapping Out a Western Plane Blade →
Japanese and western woodworking tools have nothing in common.
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April 2012
18 posts
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A field guide to the Koreas →
I’m not sure one is necessarily better than the other.
(From The Oatmeal.)
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Japanese plane five ways
Most Japanese planes have some sort of western counterpart. There are Japanese versions of smoothing planes, jointers, plow planes, chamfer planes, and so on. This is a Japanese plane that really doesn’t have a western equivalent. It’s called a gotoku kanna, or five purpose plane, according to the translations I have read.
The plane has a body that looks like an inverted T, and the...
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Making Kumiko →
The first in a series of really nice write-ups on making kumiko by Geremy Coy, a furniture maker in Washington, D.C. It looks like he’s using western tools, which makes me feel less bad about using Japanese tools to make western woodworking projects.
WatchFor Levon.
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Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 6
(Originally written Jan 26-29, 2009)
I was thinking about working on the legs for my workbench, and realized that I had made a tactical error. This bench is going to be a Roubo, and I was planning on using 4x4s for the legs, which would wind up being slightly less than 3-1/2” sqaure. Problem is, the plans I’m working from call for legs that are 5” square. At first I thought,...
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12 Lighthearted Questions for Tom Iovino of Tom’s... →
Terrific interview by Chris Landy with Tom Iovino, woodworking blogger extraordinaire and all-around great guy. Except:
9-Red or White?
Red. Big red. Zinfindel. Shiraz. Boooyah…
I would have thought that woodworkers would have taken that as a question on which type of oak they prefer.
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lego-for-life asked: Nice.
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Anonymous asked: How can there be translation confusion between cypress and oak? Do Japanese Zen masters just prefer oak for landscaping?
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Ten Commandments →
Greg Ross:
In 1928, theologian and mystery writer Ronald Knox codified 10 rules of detective fiction:
[…]
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
That’s why they’ll never catch me. Never!
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John Reed Fox: The Uncompromising Craftsman - Fine... →
John Reed Fox:
If you want to have the hand skills that it takes to do this, you have to do it a lot. There’s just no other way. You have to spend a lot of time at it. The way to learn how to cut dovetails is to cut dovetails. The way you learn how to sharpen is to sharpen.
Rather than being intimidated by this, I think there’s comfort in the fact that practice is all it takes.
...
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Woodworking in America 2012: Midwest and West... →
This is a really impressive lineup of speakers and classes. Roy Underhill, Mary May, Christopher Schwarz, Yeung Chan, Adam Cherubini, Jim Ipekjian, Curtis Buchanan, Don Williams, noted Japanese saw aficionado Ron Herman, Jeff Miller, David Marks, Chuck Bender — this is an embarrassment of riches.
I’ve been staring at the class list since they were announced on Monday, and the only thing...
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Inserts for a Japanese plane sole
I ran across this plane at one of the booths at the Somerset Woodworking Show back in February. It looks like a Japanese plane, with two important differences. First of all, in this plane, the chipbreaker acts as a wedge to keep the blade in place, unlike Japanese planes where the blade is held by wedge-shaped side abutments cut to match the taper of the blade. Although Japanese planes do have...
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Veritas® No-Fuss-Tool Shroud →
New from Lee Valley:
This revolutionary planing accessory not only makes planing faster, it ensures the cabinetmaker’s focus remains directed solely towards the surface being produced, and not on the “quality” of the waste generated.
If only there was a version for these planes:
(Photo from いらっしゃい )
March 2012
22 posts
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Anonymous asked: I've been working with douglas fir recently and have had no success squaring up the end grain. When I try to plane it, I get massive amounts of tear-out and splintering. Any tips? Thanks!
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Wedges and froes →
Britton, from his blog Something Worth Knowing:
No, but seriously, I’ve never understood Jennie Alexander’s love of wedges. A good froe does wonders. Actually even a bad froe is better than a couple of wedges. While I don’t see that there’s any discernible difference in, say, accuracy of the rive, the froe is simply more ergonomic a tool, due to generations of refinement, which generally means...
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Overcoming The “User Designer” Disease →
Although this article is about web design, there’s a great analogy to woodworkers and tools in here somewhere.
Becoming a user designer starts innocently enough. You learn how powerful these great tools are and you start to build a dependency on them. You start to realize that these applications can do so much that you start to toss away your sketchbooks and notepads. Anytime you have a...
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When we picked up the red oak logs for our joint stool project, we also found a large beech log. The outside was spalted, but the center part seemed useable. Bob Rozaieski and I split up the log. I took the outside, and Bob took the middle to see if there was enough wood for planemaking.
Bob: Watch your pieces of beech. I split the center open. Ants.
Wilbur: No ants that I found in the spalted beech chunks that I can see so far. Maybe the mold kept them away.
Bob: Yeah, maybe they were just eating at the pith. The rest seemed solid but split terribly. I just put it on the firewood pile.
Wilbur: Sometimes it's better to be a woodturner than a toolmaker.
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New DVD from Jay van Arsdale: "Japanese Hand Tools... →
Available for pre-order. I pre-ordered my copy.
No affiliation, etc.
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WatchSplitting a red oak log section from an eighth to a sixteenth. So easy that the second wedge goes down by itself.
As you can see, this is a completely impractical method of working wood, suitable only for the 17th century, and not for the average woodworker. I had to go all the way to the local borg to get the tools needed for this operation.
And as far as whether the average woodworker can make...
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Building a Roubo workbench rerun - 5
(Originally written Jan. 23, 2009)
I finished flattening the bottom to the degree that I wanted to. Again, it went much more quickly than I expected. Only 30 minutes with a jointer plane, and the bottom of the benchtop was flattened to the point that I couldn’t identify any twist or wind with winding sticks. (Actually, I used a four foot level at one end, and held up a yardstick at the...
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Planet Hong Kong →
If you’ve never seen a Hong Kong film from the last 25 years or so, you’re really missing out. This is a great place to start, from my favorite film blog, Observations on film art, by Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell.
If you’re wondering why you should check out a Hong Kong film, consider this from David Bordwell:
I take comfort in learning just last weekend what...
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User made maebiki saws from France, part deux
Bensonlook Son was kind enough to send me a followup on making a maebiki. For this saw, he used a 2.5 mm thick by 10 inch wide plate. The teeth were cut at 2 points per 2 cm (about 1½ ppi). He was able to grind a taper in the blade so that it was narrower at the top compared to the toothline. This must have been a labor of love since it took over 10 hours to complete, and required a...
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The Work Magazine Reprint Project →
Why would I add an RSS feed to my reader nine days before any content has appeared? Because Joel Moskowitz told me to.
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