The basic premise...

So, this is the gizmo I've been working on. It's in a mostly-done state right now, still needing to be burnished and waxed.

What you're looking at is a stoutly made, fully enclosed vise, made with a veneer press screw. The entire top surface is reference-flat, and at 90 degrees to the inside surfaces of the vise. The purpose of this device is to assist in cutting co-planar tenon shoulders, regardless of the angle that's required. The basic theory is this: clamp the part to be cut into the vise, and align the shoulder scribe lines with the top edge of the gauge stick. The saw will then be used to cut the shoulder, sliding back and forth across the top surface of the vise. This will ensure that all shoulder surfaces are 100% in the same plane. In the photo above, the part being cut is at a simple angle. I will also make a pair of pivoting pads, so that parts may be set up for compound angles.

Why did I bother with this?

The tenon shoulder is the most critical, visible part of a mortise and tenon joint. If one of them is poorly cut, there will be a gap, or the specified dimension will be changed. On a table stretcher, for example, the distance between legs is defined by the distance between tenon shoulders. If you're just bracing table legs, maybe this isn't such a big deal. But if you're making another part that will form a drawer enclosure, that dimension is more critical. If you're making a dresser, and you have many such parts, you really want them all to be the same. When you're fitting the joint, mortise walls can be pared back, tenons can be trimmed and shimmed, but cutting the shoulder is a one-shot operation. It has to be done right the first time.

Cutting square tenon shoulders is a snap with a table saw, and it's not much harder with a hand saw. Cutting simple angled tenon shoulders is pretty easy, too, though grain direction on porous wood can throw the saw off track if you're not careful.

Cutting tenon shoulders at a compound angle is possible on a table saw, but it's a hassle, and it took some interesting jiggery to make it work when I was learning to make chippendale style chairs in school. Cutting a compound angle joint with a hand saw is probably easier with a hand saw in that regard, but even still, there's a lot of care required. I suppose in a production environment, and given reference faces, I should just use a Domino machine and have done with it. But in a home shop environment, how do you set up for compound angle joinery and make it easy? Well, the gizmo at the top of this post is the answer.

This isn't my design. This is something that was shown to me when I was in school, that was brought over by a french chair maker. There's a companion jig that provides a way to clamp a piece and plane a reference flat surface, which will then be mortised into.  That'll possibly come next, but for now, this seemed like it would provide more capability.

Department of Redundancy Department

This is a detail shot of the tenon shoulder cutting fixture. To make doubly sure that the thing is strong, not only did I use drawbore pins, but I also wedged the tenons. I took my time double checking things before the glue up, because nothing's gonna loosen this thing up now. Was everything 100% perfect when the glue up began? I'll leave that to you to ponder, I admit to nothing.

I'm leaving details on the operation hazy until the whole project is together and done, but I'm pretty happy with how it's gone so far.

Bringing the lessons home.

One of the topics that's been in the back of my head for a while is how to be more efficient in the shop, and part of that is figuring out how to be more space-efficient. I don't plan to be in the huge shop forever, and I'm in the middle of brainstorming some space-efficient ways to do most of the same work I do now, in a smaller space. (This isn't really such a feat: 3500 sq ft is a LOT of space.) One part of the grand plan is to build most of the fixtures in a movable way, so that setting up shop next time around won't take so long.

Investing some time in the home shop is another part of the grand plan. In short, I want to take the lessons I've learned from working in a 3500 sq ft space, and see just how much I can do with 35 sq ft. Long-term, (in a year or three) I'll move the rest of the big shop into a smaller space. But the point of the home shop is that even if the work I do by day isn't always exciting, I want to be able to do stimulating work at home. After writing the Space and Mind entries, I tore apart my work area at the shop (again) and it's been flowing a LOT more smoothly since then. The home shop is next.

My work space at home has been languishing. I set it up while Ariel was in the middle of nursing school, which proved to be a bad idea. Ripping drawer parts by hand while she's trying to study for a test? Yeah, not a great plan. But she's been out for a year now. In the meantime, the space has been collecting crap: Bike parts, unfinished projects, and a box of stuff that has yet to go to Goodwill. And the placement of the bench by the front door made it a de facto crap catcher.

Yeah. Not pretty. Since those photos, I've cleared it out, and I'm the process of making it into a more productive area.

One part of building up the home shop is to start making a few hand tool jigs that I got to see first hand when I was at school. We had a chair maker visit the school from France, and he showed us some of the jigs they used there to make certain tasks easier. The first of these will be a clamp that's used to help saw tenon shoulders. We were always taught at school that the easiest way to cut clean, square shoulders was to use the table saw. So when the Frenchman came by to show off his stuff, I was very impressed. And I think it's going to prove to be a good project for use at home.

Step one will be to break this big hunk of 12/4 hard maple into 3"x3" billet stock...

We now return you to your regularly scheduled...

...whatever?



I've been plenty busy in the shop this month. Not too busy to write, but busy.

I spent the past month and some watching the virtual world go by. Safety week came and went. Chris Schwartz is building campaign furniture, which I've been interested in for years. (Just not interested enough to buy the $500 coffee table book.) And a stink was raised over FWW daring to suggest that bloggers were scum who should require a stamp of approval.

I agree with FWW. Information overload on the web continues, and anyone with a web cam or an iPhone can document their path to novice-dom with ease, and upload it instantly. And so much of it is redundant. I've read entries defending the online woodworking community, and some of them make valid points about crowd-sourcing and so on, and that's nice. But so much of it is exhaustive coverage of old ground that it kills me. I agree that there should be a registry of recommended bloggers or podcasters, because the Internet is only a useful tool if you have a way to discriminate, and weed out the useless or pointless crap.

I think it's ironic that FWW would be the ones to try to sound the call for Quality Control of some sort, given that their own publication isn't what it used to be, and that it's becoming redundant, too.

Meanwhile, I still wasn't writing. At some point in April I hit a wall, and it felt like the only reason I was writing was to maintain a presence in a community that I didn't feel connected to anymore. And I'd be damned if I was going to add more virtual drool to the puddle.

I like to read about techniques and projects that are above and beyond what I know, which is why I like the OLD FWW issues. I like this sort of content, because I believe that you have to get out of your comfort zone to get better. Practicing the same novice skill set ad nauseum will only make you a really well-practiced novice. And I have no interest in that.

I'll be writing again soon, but I'm going to start making a point to seek out more interesting objects and techniques to talk about, predicated on the notion that you have a bench, and a box full of basic tools and skills to work with. I'm sure that means I'll be writing less often than twice per week, but hopefully the results will justify the extra time.

The sysiphean task on keeping the shop clean

"We accumulate all kinds of things that are functional when we obtain them, but they lose that functionality over time. When they reach that state, though, they don't throw themselves away. Crap self-generates but it doesn't self-destruct."

-David Allen

Kreg fence micro-adjuster

This is another gizmo that has been a game changer for me.

Kreg makes a lot of gizmos and other bits and pieces to go with their L-shaped T-track profile. They use this profile for miter gauges, production fences, and even a band saw fence. I like the simplicity of their system, and of the stops that they've come up with. And I like that it's modular, because that makes it easy to modify things

I figured out a while ago that I could make a long miter bar by using a 4' hunk of Kreg's production fence and bolting it onto the miter head in place of the 2' section that it came with. The reason I wanted to do this was simple: I wanted a quick and easy way to cut things accurately to length. The only real problem with this is that the miter bar that hooks onto the head is aluminum, and it's a bit flimsy when you're working with a 4' miter fence. Bah. Eventually I made my cross-cut sled, and that helped.

That said, I still worked with the four footer on the miter bar for a while, and in my quest to find a more accurate way to adjust the stop block, I decided to see if I could re-purpose the micro-adjust that they offer for their band saw fence. I drilled a hole in an inch of t-track, slipped a square nut into it, and hooked it onto the micro-adjuster, and voila, it worked. It's not perfect, but it makes minute adjustments to the production stop a lot more accurate than doing it by hand.

I used to use Kreg's adhesive scale on the fence. But eventually I started making cuts on both sides of the blade, and I found that it gave an illusion of accuracy that wasn't really there. It was good for quick work, but parallax gets in the way, and my ability to micro-adjust rendered it a moot point.

At some point I want to get a steel bar made for the miter head, with a dedicated, non-adjustable 90 degree head. Once I have that, I'll take the time to dial in my setup a little more. For now, this has enabled me to blur the line between accurate and precise work in the machine room, both in terms of my ability to cut stock, and my ability to cut joinery on the table saw.

My Tranny Problem

I don’t know where the term ‘transitional’ plane comes from, but the type of plane it describes is basically a wooden bodied plane with an adjuster. There’s a wide range of planes that fit this rough description.

I really had a thing for the Stanley versions when I was first starting out at North Bennet, because I was convinced that I would be able to restore them and turn them into better, more functional tools, with fancy new soles that were as long as I wanted. The venerable Stanley #8 tops out at 28” long. But in theory, I could build myself a 3 foot long, wooden bodied jointer plane. I have no idea why I would really need such a long plane, let alone a wooden one, but I still had a lot to learn about using planes at the time. Truth be told, I think I just wanted the satisfaction of having the longest tool in the bench room.

The Stanley and Sargent versions were fairly simple, with the adjuster and frog sitting flatly on top of a beech block. My experiences with them weren’t very enjoyable. More often than not, they clogged. The totes also loosened up pretty regularly, and the adjuster was hard to get to. And in general, they were really only good for rough work. Part of the problem was that while the mouths were pretty wide, the throats were really tight. (See photo) If you get a good look, you'll see that the throat is tightest around where the chip breaker is, so anything that curls off of the iron will fill the space, and clog, and jam the plane. And if you look at the allowed space to get fingers, etc in there, you'll see that it's a losing battle. Too many times I had to pull the lever cap, iron, and everything out to clear a jam.

But I really wanted them to work, and I went to pretty extensive lengths. I bought an aftermarket blade and chip-breaker from Lie-Nielsen, which was special ordered, because they had to mill a second hole in the chip breaker to work with this kind of plane. (They did the mod for free. Times like that I really love Lie-Nielsen.) I patched up the mouth to make it nice and tight, figuring it might help.

When that didn’t work, I chiseled out the patch, chiseled out most of the throat, and installed a new patch, that was thin, and beveled at the mouth, to allow shavings to pass more easily. There was enough room with the chiseled out throat for me to get two fingers in there to clear out the shavings that would inevitably pile up. But no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the damned thing to do precision work. Eventually I decided that if it was really only good for rough work, that I would just go with it, and use it for rough work. I cambered the iron pretty heavily, and it works well as a jack/fore plane. And I decided to stick with iron planes for high quality work from then on.

At one point, I picked up this little smoother, which was built by a company named Gage. The adjuster’s accessible, the iron bed goes all the way down to the sole... and in fact, part of the sole is iron. Basically, there’s an iron box that goes down through the block to the sole of the plane, to allow (I’m assuming, I never really committed to the plane) for more precision style work to be done. But making a new sole meant piercing it to precisely fit the iron box, and then I’d need to flatten the sole to get it to be co-planar with the iron box. That’s not a job for a power jointer, and it would be really tedious work with a hand plane to keep assembling and re-assembling, so that I could safely plane the block down until it was close enough to sand down to finish dimensions, with the iron throat installed... and hope that the wooden sole remained stable. I never got around to tuning it up, and eventually ebayed the thing. I hope it found its way into more interested hands than mine.

More recently, I’ve been playing with a nice wooden bodied A55 try plane from HNT Gordon, which works much more easily, and precisely. Truth be told, this is the plane that makes me understand the appeal. The wooden sole just glides. And the surfaces it leaves behind look almost burnished. Once I replace the split wooden lever cap with a brass version, I have a really good feeling that this will be my new favorite plane.

And no less an authority than Karl Holtey has tried his hand at making a (Really, *gasp* REALLY) nice transitional plane in recent years. So it’s clear that they can work.

A recent discussion on the topic of wooden planes in general  caught my eye, (specifically pertaining to Krenov style planes, but very relevant to the current topic) and it got me thinking about transitional planes again.

It’s really annoyed me. I gave up on this particular kind of masochism years ago. But I was reading a comment from David Charlesworth on the topic of chip breakers in wooden planes, and he pointed out that if the chip breaker was angled too extremely, then the chip would curl directly into the forward part of the throat, and the plane would clog up. Larry Williams pointed out that (for similar reasons) high angle woodies disappeared with the advent of the cap iron. A high angle blade will break the chip on its own, a standard pitch plane with a chip breaker will launch the shaving right into the wall of the throat, instead of out the top, and the plane will clog. This was exactly the kind of behavior I’d tried to cure in the transitional planes I was playing with 7 years ago. And the HNT Gordon plane (55 degree pitch, no chip breaker) clears shavings just fine.

My experience since then has taught me two things: Wedged, hammer-adjusted wooden planes aren’t hard to make or use,  and iron planes aren’t hard to tune up and use. And either will work incredibly well. But their offspring are another matter entirely. Transitional planes as a breed are intriguing, but some designs are better than others, and the Stanley versions seem to suck with a suckiness that I can't begin to describe in a way that doesn't suck. It's no wonder that some folks resort to treating them like witches. (What do we burn, besides witches? MORE WITCHES!!!)

But there are TWO of those misbegotten nightmares in H. O. Studley’s chest. And he clearly knew a thing or two about how to use a tool. So maybe there’s more to these planes than meets the eye? I can't figure out this particular puzzle for myself, and it vexes me. Appeals to a higher power have been made, but answers will not be forthcoming for a while.

I don’t know how to kick the obsession. I'm a geek, and a mechanical problem solver by nature. But I have too much on my plate these days to really feel like chasing this down.