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...
Imagine woodworking with no boundaries.
Imagine having all the tools you need at your fingertips with a gesture.
Imagine being able to transcend the struggles of difficult grain, dull tools, sticky glue, and a deficient skillset.
Today we are announcing the next chapter in woodworking.
The future is going to be beyond anything that we can imagine.
-Mike
The Mortise & Tenon Apprenticeship Program's Spring Term is sailing along and just might finish before spring weather actually arrives. As we pass the halfway point, the Apprentices have mounted numerous personal successes, from free-hand sharpening of their plane irons and chisels to resuscitating antique hand planes to employing these tools of the trade to create traditional handmade joinery worthy of the finest pre-industrial furniture. They're gaining the proper experience in efficient workholding, marking, and layout, body positioning for optimal tool engagement, mindfulness in employing hand tools, reading stock, and resharpening when necessary. The group dynamic is lively and encouraging as everyone tackles and posts their weekly assignments and many get started on Journeyman Challenge projects. Already we've seen lots...
In the early 1990s, I began my woodworking journey with a couple of vintage Stanley bench planes and a Fine Woodworking book on hand tools. I dutifully followed the book’s instructions on setting up and sharpening my new planes, and everything was going pretty well until I came to the section on setting the cap iron (also known as the chipbreaker). According to the author, for difficult hardwoods I was supposed to set the edge of the cap iron “as close as possible” to the cutting edge. So I did, and disaster ensued. I could barely push the plane; it shuddered, shook, and quickly came to an unceremonious halt, the mouth hopelessly clogged with balled-up shavings. I moved the cap...
It’s been a wild ride working on the 1810 house project. We’ve been planning the rubble trench and granite block foundation, cleaning up and selling my double wide home (gone first week of June!), setting up the cottage for moving into (building railings for the loft, digging a water line, running wiring, etc). Anyway, there’s been a lot going on around here. But in the midst of it all, Issue Twelve arrived! Our printer, Cummings Printing, has done a top-notch job, as always. We moved to them a few issues ago and have been so impressed with their consistency and quality. And the page spreads in this one are fun to flip through because the photographs are so captivating. I...
It’s maple sugar season here in New England. When the days are above freezing but the nights are still frosty, the maples (Acer spp.) begin sending copious amounts of sweet sap up the trunk and into the limbs, readying the buds to leaf out when the time comes. We tap a few of our trees every year – rarely more than a dozen. A decent-sized maple can put out more than a gallon of sap per day, per tap, and all this precious liquid must be gathered, cooked down, and finished into syrup or (better yet) maple sugar. It might be the best stuff on earth. Larger producers use food-grade vinyl tubing to pipe all the trees in their “sugarbush” together,...
…A winning wave, deserving note, In the tempestuous petticoat; A careless shoe-string, in whose tie I see a wild civility: Do more bewitch me, than when art Is too precise in every part. -“Delight in Disorder,” by English poet Robert Herrick (1591-1674) I recently started making a new table. And, as is often the case when I buckle down and start something that requires attention—whether it’s a tricky piece of furniture or a short story or a diplomatically worded response to panicked student email sent to me in a Mountain Dew-fueled haze at 2:30 the morning before a due date—I thought of an old joke. It goes like this: “How do you make God laugh?” “Make a plan.” (Rimshot.)...
Mike U and Mike C assemble a railing for the cottage. Well… spring is officially here. Not only have we passed March 20th, but we’ve had our seasonal soggy mess (mud season, we call it) and freeze/thaw ground heaving. But also around this time, things begin to come to life. This year is no different. This 1810 house restoration project has been progressing steadily but slowly over the past few months as we’ve been finishing off our small timber-frame cottage for living in during construction and coordinating untold details and people to get everything lined up where we need them to be. Friends and family ask me how the house is coming and I’m embarrassed to not be able to show...
Analyzing our data pools, it became apparent that handmade furniture doesn’t remain within its average tolerances the way machine-made furniture does within its level of precision. This 0.01" mechanized range is an absolute boundary, and for the most part there are simply no outliers beyond it. Straight and parallel are predictably regulated by machines, and are in fact necessary for the industrial manufacturing process. CNC machines, for example, rely on unmovable benchmarks that must be established to function properly. Throw a piece of tapered, warped, rough-cut lumber on the worktable, and you’re asking for trouble. However, the measurements we took from our pre-industrial examples were rife with outliers – areas of noticeable, often radical divergence from general tolerances. It is...
