giant Cypress

Today is Memorial Day, which is about so much more than grilling...

Mon, 28 May 2012 06:08:00 -0400

Today is Memorial Day, which is about so much more than grilling and cookouts. But the fact remains that there will be a lot of burgers being made today. Here are a couple of recipes to help you out.

Wilbur: [Woodworking on the internet] could be worse. We could be in the internet photographers and camera gear world. grin

Thu, 24 May 2012 06:38:00 -0400

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!!!!!!"

How to save 571,230,000 pounds of paper each year. Why is this...

Wed, 23 May 2012 06:28:00 -0400

How to save 571,230,000 pounds of paper each year.

Why is this important? If forests aren’t being cut down to make paper towels, that leaves more trees for us woodworkers to use.

onetinyhand: sulu.

Tue, 22 May 2012 06:38:00 -0400

onetinyhand:

sulu.

"The online woodworking community, though something of a Wild West, of course, is mainly about..."

Thu, 17 May 2012 17:28:00 -0400

“The online woodworking community, though something of a Wild West, of course, is mainly about support and help—basically—community. And my comments were neither supportive nor helpful. Though I was coming from a FWW editor’s perspective, someone who feels tremendous pressure to disseminate the best possible info, and was talking only about a small handful of my experiences online, I missed the point completely.”

- 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.

Chip Breakers

Thu, 17 May 2012 11:18:00 -0400

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 believe that it is well worth his time to learn how to use a double iron.

Even more impressively, in this article Bob describes how he came from a place where he did not like chip breakers to where he knows how to use them well. The impressive thing is that Bob had the cojones to talk publicly about how he changed his mind.

In my day job, where I am on faculty at the medical school, I know from teaching medical students how to have the insight to know when their previous ideas may not be entirely correct and to adjust their practice is one of the hardest things for someone to learn how to do. So kudos to Bob for being brave enough to say this in public. Many of us never learn this skill. And it’s a more valuable skill than knowing how to set up and use a chipbreaker.

Which I have to start learning how to do, myself. I’m also in the “chipbreakers are useless” camp. But probably not for long.

This is the full version of the video created by Professor...

Wed, 16 May 2012 06:39:00 -0400

This 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 more fully described, and the comments are directly from Professors Kawai and Kato, rather than my own guesses as to what was going on. I’m just happy that I wasn’t more off in my interpretations than I was.

This is fascinating, and the whole video is well worth the watch, even if you’ve already seen the excerpts previously posted.

(Thanks again to Bill Tindall for his role in obtaining a copy of this video and the permission from Professors Kawai and Kato to share it, and to Mia Iwasaki for her translating. And thanks to Professors Kawai and Kato for generously sharing their work.)

Shop Talk Live 5: Perfect Storm of Stupidity

Mon, 14 May 2012 07:38:00 -0400

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.

For Adam Yauch. How could I not quote this line? If you try to...

Fri, 11 May 2012 06:59:35 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

For 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

This is the last sequence from Professors Kawai and Kato’s video...

Wed, 09 May 2012 06:50:22 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

This 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 Tindall for tracking this video down.)

Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83

Tue, 08 May 2012 20:38:00 -0400

Maurice Sendak, Author of Splendid Nightmares, Dies at 83:

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.

This is the next sequence of from Professors Kawai and Kato’s...

Tue, 08 May 2012 06:08:20 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

This 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 captions are mine, I don’t know Japanese, probably could be way off in terms of the text, etc.

(Thanks again to Bill Tindall for tracking this video down.)

This phenomenal video of a microscopic view of what happens when...

Mon, 07 May 2012 06:48:00 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

This 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 the grain.

The captions in the video are mine, and are my take on what I am seeing in the video. I will fully admit that I don’t know Japanese at all, and so the captions should in no way be taken as a translation of the text seen in the video. In fact, I may be completely off in my comments compared to what the text says.

(Thanks to Bill Tindall for tracking this video down.)

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?

Sun, 06 May 2012 08:48:00 -0400

I have a sumitsubo, but haven’t played with it too much. A sumitsubo is an ink pot where the ink reservoir has a wad of raw silk. There’s also a wheel and a string that passes through the silk with a pin on the end. It’s used in two ways: either as an ink pot by dipping a stylus called a sumisashi in the ink held by the silk, or by anchoring the pin at one end of the line you want to mark, pulling the string through the ink-soaked cotton, and using the string much like you would a chalk line.

The ink is usually water soluble, so I have a hard time figuring out how you could jam your sumitsubo. Maybe adding some water to reactivate the ink will help loosen things up. And I would love to see a photo of your sumitsubo. Good luck.

SawStop and Swiss on rye

Fri, 04 May 2012 06:08:00 -0400

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, I’m a pediatric oncologist, and one of my responsibilities is to give chemotherapy to kids safely. As you might guess, this is a process where the results could be disastrous if a mistake occurs. It’s in this context that there is a lot of misinformation about SawStop technology.

Now, in this discussion I do not want to talk about nor do I care about the politics of SawStop. Here I am only addressing one thing: does SawStop make using a table saw safer?

A common comment that is made about SawStop is that having a safety device that prevents major damage from contacting the blade with a part of your body will make the user less vigilant, leading to more injuries, and that nothing can take the place of paying attention to what you are doing, which is enough for safe practice. This is a nice philosophy, with only one problem. No one who actually works with safety protocols believes this to be true.

The reason for this is the Swiss Cheese model, first developed by James T. Reason, a British psychologist, in 1990. This model is used to analyze procedures to see if they are safe, where they can be improved, and in the case of accidents, how they might have occurred despite existing safeguards.

In this model, slices of Swiss cheese are our defenses against an accident occurring. The holes in the cheese represent ways that an accident might get past each slice. For a woodworker in his shop making a cut on a table saw, one slice of cheese might represent his concentration as to what’s going on, another represents shop conditions, a third represents how well behaved the board is, the fourth is SawStop technology, and so on. If there are enough slices of cheese, and if the holes in the cheese are small enough, then the arrow might get through some layers, but will be blocked from passing through by another layer.

An accident happens when the holes happen to line up. Here the model turns a little surreal, because the holes are not fixed in position. Rather, they change size and move around over time. For example, over time the lighting in the shop gets worse as your fluorescent bulbs get older, or it gets messier as you get into your project. So the holes in that slice of cheese get a little bigger over time. You may decide it’s not worth putting the riving knife back for just one cut, so the holes in that slice get bigger as well. If you have a beer in your shop and then get back to work, more holes get bigger. Or maybe you decide to do one last thing late at night, when you’re tired. Bigger holes.

There’s no doubt that SawStop’s particular slice must have a very small hole in it. The data is not completely clear, but Highland Woodworking issued a press release in 2009 that over 600 cases of fingers were saved thanks to SawStop. There has never been a contact where SawStop failed to mitigate the damage that could have been done. And the fact remains that whatever the size of the hole in the SawStop slice of Swiss cheese, that hole is quite independent of the state of mind of the woodworker.

At work, we work very hard to try to eliminate the chance of a chemotherapy error happening to a kid by putting multiple layers of checks in the process. I have to write for the chemotherapy. The pharmacy double checks my dosing, my math, and the treatment plan for the kid. The nurses administering the chemotherapy also double-check these factors, and two nurses have to agree things are right before giving the chemo to the kid. The idea that we should prevent chemotherapy errors from happening by solely relying on the vigilance of the doctor is ludicrous. And I can promise that none of us in this process take our roles any less seriously because we know that other people are checking the chemo as well.

We’re not the only ones who use this model of safety. Airline pilots, firefighters, and nuclear power plants all use this approach. And there’s no reason why it can’t be applied to our shops as well.

This is why arguments like, “We don’t need SawStop technology because woodworkers being a little more prudent will fill the same role” simply are not credible. Prudence doesn’t fill the same role as flesh sensing technology. Neither do riving knives, better designed guards, or other alternatives that have been proposed. Flesh sensing technology has one job to do: prevent severe injury if a part of your body touches the blade. This is completely separate from the awareness of the woodworker. At that point, you’ve already gotten past all the other layers of cheese, including the personal awareness slice, so it will be a very good thing if it’s there. To say that you don’t need flesh sensing technology to be safe, now that the technology exists, is to say that we can remove a slice of Swiss cheese and be as safe as we were before. Again, that argument doesn’t hold water.

SawStop technology is sometimes criticized that it won’t prevent kickback. But it still is an additional layer for injuries due to blade contact. And it’s worth noting that SawStop table saws have always had riving knives, not splitters, as part of their standard equipment since 2004 — several years before the other manufacturers came on board.

Now, there are many reasons why a woodworker might not want to buy a SawStop table saw. If you don’t want to buy a SawStop because you don’t like the politics surrounding SawStop, that’s fine. And if you don’t have safety features high on your priority list for deciding on a tool purchase, that’s fine as well. But deciding not to purchase a SawStop because somehow it’s not really safer makes no sense at all.

Tapping Out a Western Plane Blade

Thu, 03 May 2012 06:59:24 -0400

Tapping Out a Western Plane Blade:

Japanese and western woodworking tools have nothing in common.

For Doug Berch, if he’s reading. Probably also applies to...

Wed, 02 May 2012 06:08:00 -0400

For Doug Berch, if he’s reading. Probably also applies to dulcimers.

Sentayehu Teshale is a woodworker in Addis Ababa: As long as my...

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 06:09:00 -0400

Sentayehu Teshale is a woodworker in Addis Ababa:

As long as my chairs last, my customers will remember me.

Not once does he mention the obvious aspect of his woodworking.

(Via Robin Wood.)

A field guide to the Koreas

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:08:29 -0400

A field guide to the Koreas:

I’m not sure one is necessarily better than the other.

(From The Oatmeal.)

Japanese plane five ways

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 06:18:00 -0400

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 blade runs across the width of the plane.

This plane gets its name from the fact that it can serve five purposes: left sided rabbet plane, right-sided rabbet plane, left grooving plane, right grooving plane, and a smoother, as can be seen in the following pictures.

The gotoku kanna does an admirable job in four out of the five functions. It cleans rabbets and trims side walls of rabbets and grooves on the left and right very nicely. But as a smoother, well, it really kind of sucks. As the plane takes a shaving, there really isn’t anywhere for the shaving to go, as it gets caught up under the middle of the plane. The shaving gets jammed up, and it’s a pain to get it out.

Four out of five makes it a B-minus student, or, one grade below an Asian F. But I have to admire the gizmosity factor in combining all of these functions into one plane.