Many woodworkers get into hand tools because they are drawn in by the joinery: dovetails, mortises and tenons, etc. As they continue building pieces in their shops, some begin to wonder if it’s possible to “cut the cord” even further. What would it be like to build from scratch without any machinery whatsoever? How would one start with rough boards and end with a beautiful drop-leaf table without ever firing up the dust collector? In this latest episode, Joshua and Mike discuss these questions in light of Joshua’s forthcoming book, Worked: A Bench Guide to Hand-Tool Efficiency. Joshua makes the argument that “engineer” woodworkers and “monastic” hand-tool-only woodworkers operate on the same strange assumption: that hand tools are supposed...
Your eye is the standard of tolerance. And over the years as your hand skills develop, so will your sense of visual discernment. Dovetails that you were happy with at the beginning of your journey will undoubtedly make you wince a few years into your growth as an artisan. That’s not only OK, it’s expected. It’s called maturation. But as you grow in the craft, don’t ever forget that it’s just woodworking, reader. Although the joinery of the past was intended to be as gap-free as possible, the tolerances of our furniture-making ancestors were much closer to those of house carpenters than those of space engineers. Efficient craftsmanship is caring deeply about everything that matters and being disciplined enough to...
We have now opened the pre-order window for my brand-new book Worked: A Bench Guide to Hand-Tool Efficiency. This prequel to my last book, Joined, focuses on the way hand-tool-only woodworking actually gets done without fuss. We’ve all seen the painstaking planing procedures and the convoluted workholding setups that attempt to simulate machine work with hand tools. They’re unwieldy and cumbersome. And they give hand tools a bad rap. But this is all a misunderstanding. Hand tools are efficient when used the way they were intended – with “sensible” tolerances. Worked was written to show you what that actually looks like. It was written to reclaim the “hand” in “handcraft.” We’ve got two ways you can pre-order this book: You...
It’s been said that woodworking is little more than marking lines in the right places and cutting carefully to those lines. While simplistic, there’s something refreshing about the aphorism. It is true that knowing where and being able to cut wood is the heart of most woodworking operations. At the same time, in the shop, we are nothing without our tools. And our tools are nothing without a way to secure the stock being shaped. Having a firm grasp on workholding methods is an essential component to artisanal development. Beginners struggle to find a way to hold their stock for comfortable work, and this struggle greatly hinders the cutting action of their tools. But anyone who’s been around for any...
I’ve become convinced that if we are going to successfully revive pre-industrial tools and techniques, we are going to have to understand and come to grips with pre-industrial tolerances. We need to know how square our “square” ought to be and exactly how smooth is “smooth.” When a machinist’s square is placed on the surfaces of period furniture, one is hard pressed to find anything we moderns would call “flat.” Even discounting instances of warpage from the ravages of time, the surfaces of rails, the flats of tapered legs, drawer faces, and even tabletops display a refreshingly human workmanship. It no longer surprises me to find that the undulations on a “flat” drawer face allow even my thickest feeler gauge...
This week, I am putting the finishing touches on a book manuscript I started working on last year. The Dispatch followers have been hearing some about it for some time, but other than that I’ve kept it largely under wraps until now. This book follows Joined: A Bench Guide to Furniture Joinery in the Bench Guide series. Teaching joinery in this way seemed like a good introduction to a pre-industrial craft mentality, hammering home the significance of primary and secondary surfaces, “sacred” lines (as I called them), and pointing out what actually matters and what doesn’t. Modern approaches to joinery can get unnecessarily complicated because they depend on machine-perfect stock (think: scribing tenon shoulders with a marking gauge referenced off...
