Make a Windsor chair, and you’ll find yourself mounting a lot of 2″ stock on the lathe. Mount a lot of stock on the lathe, and you’ll probably find yourself wishing for a fast and accurate method of marking the centers.
I’ve used several different methods for marking centers, and never found one that I considered satisfactory. If you have squared-up stock, you can mark an “X” across the diagonals to approximate the center. It’s quick, but more often than not you’ll find that your stock is somewhat less-than-square, in which case, it’s inaccurate. If you’re using riven stock, it’s not an option at all.
Another method that I have used is taking a small compass and guesstimating the center, moving the central leg about until I find the proper center point. This is more accurate, and it works even for riven stock, but it’s also slow – and you end up with multiple center points (though I always try to mark the “correct” point more deeply) which can be confusing. A better solution is in order.
I came up with this simple tool:
To use, just center the tool on your stock with your fingertips, and give it a good whack with a hammer. You’re left with a perfect dimple, right in the center, that makes alignment of your blank on the lathe a snap.
I assume the tool is pretty intuitive, should you wish to make your own. Just pop a blank on the lathe and turn it to a cylinder of the appropriate diameter (2″, in my case). Make sure the bottom is perfectly flat or slightly concave, so it will be easy to center on your spindle blanks. Then drive a nail into the center (the tailstock conveniently makes a dead-center dimple) and clip it off about 1/8″ proud.
I made mine pretty with some fancy turned decorations and a coat of oil, but a simple cylinder would suffice. I figure a pretty tool will be less likely to get confused with a scrap and tossed into the kindling bucket when it’s inevitably dropped in the shavings.
This is the quickest and most accurate center-marking method I’ve ever used. It works just as well with riven stock as it does with sawn, and it will tolerate maybe 3/8″ of variation in the thickness without much loss in accuracy. They’re so quick and easy to make, it’s not a problem to make another center marker, for say, 1-1/2″ stock or any other thickness that you commonly use.
The topic of plane soles – as in smooth vs. corrugated soles – is one that often evokes impassioned opinions. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem to crop on woodworking fora as often as other touchy subjects – like, say, sharpening or SawStops. Many users have no preference one way or another, but those who have formed a opinion typically view corrugated soles with a level of contempt normally reserved for laser-guided handsaws.
…corrugated soles grab shavings, especially super-thin ones that cling to the grooves of corrugated soles. Even flat soled planes do this. The problem inherent to corrugated soles is the grab and mush up in the grooves and on subsequent forward thrusts, damage the surface you are supposed to be smoothing. No craftsman I ever knew favoured these planes…It also damages corners and edges of wood when you start to plane angles such as chamfers or form bullnoses to things such as box lids, window sills and stair treads.
Yikes. Sounds like something I’d like to avoid. So what’s the point of the corrugations in the first place? Paul addresses that as well:
The corrugated sole was produced in Bailey pattern planes for a period with the intention of reducing the surface area of the sole to further reduce the friction of the plane on the surface being planed. Indeed it does do that…
Paul is actually kinder to corrugated planes than some other authors, who opine that corrugated soles do nothing to reduce friction, making them worse than useless. Well, I have been using the three planes pictured below for the past several years, so in the name of good fun, I would like to offer my contradictory assessment:
From top to bottom: Craftsman No. 5, corrugated; Stanley No. 6, smooth; and Stanley No. 7, corrugated.
Aside from the Stanley No. 4’s that you see peeking into the upper right corner of the photo, these three planes chew up the bulk of the shavings that are produced in my woodshop, and they have done so for quite some time. The No.7 is my most recent acquisition (from 5 years ago), while the No. 5 is my oldest companion (the first decent hand plane I ever owned, from 10 years ago).
So without further ado, here are a few unfiltered observations about the performance of these tools, with regards to the sole:
The corrugations do indeed drastically reduce the friction; I can easily use the No. 5 and the No. 7 without wax, whereas the No. 6 is nearly impossible to push once the wax wears off.
I don’t necessarily view the additional friction of the smooth sole as a bad thing. It’s just a gentle reminder to wax your stupid planes.
I rarely/never have an issue with shavings clinging to the corrugated soles. This is very likely related to the fact that I rarely/never make “super thin” shavings with my corrugated planes. The No. 5 is set up as a fore plane; it has a strongly cambered blade for hogging off meaty shavings, often cross-grained. The No. 7 is used almost exclusively as a jointer, for truing up edges; the blade is sharpened straight across, and it takes substantial shavings that curl up into neat, tight spirals. There’s simply nothing to get caught in the corrugations. None of my smoothing planes have corrugated soles, but I can certainly see how this might be an issue with their tissue-thin shavings.
Finally, I’ve never had much of problem with the corrugations damaging chamfers or bullnoses. For one thing, I would never use my jointer for this task (no use pushing more weight than necessary). And secondly, if I do use my fore plane (AKA No. 5), it’s only to hog off the bulk of the waste; I would inevitably follow with the smoothing plane set to a finer cut to tune up the edges.
In summation: Corrugated planes are fine for most situations. I think they’re particularly well-suited to jack planes/fore planes that take the coarsest shavings and can benefit from a little friction reduction. I would personally prefer a smooth sole for smoothing planes, but if I found a great deal on a corrugated No. 4, I certainly wouldn’t pass it up. For try plane/jointer planes, I don’t think it makes a nickel’s worth of difference either way. Just be aware that with the more massive smooth-soled planes, you’ll definitely need to keep the sole well-waxed, which is frankly a habit that you should get into anyway.
It’s been a long time since I’ve made any serious attempts to play the piano. When I lived by myself in a small brick house on a mountainside in North Georgia, I practiced somewhat regularly. My great aunt gave me an old perpetually out-of-tune upright that sat in the living room of my painfully outdated ranch house, and when I tired of painting bedrooms and laying tile and tearing out fake wood paneling, I’d pick out a song and sit down at the piano during the evenings, trying to teach myself to play it.
I have no formal musical training, aside from a couple years of abusing the trumpet in elementary school. I definitely wouldn’t say that I can read music. It would be more accurate to say that I can interpret music, in much the same way that I can interpret French, with the assistance of Google Translate. I just see five parallel lines and an oval with a tail and think “Every…Good…Boy…Does…A-ha! That must be a D. Now I can find middle C and count down one key, and there’s the D on my keyboard!”
I never developed that instantaneous recognition of the notes and the seamless connection between my mind and my fingers that is required of a musician. Learning to play a song was a long, slow process that relied on careful practice and memorization – essentially cutting out any vestiges of consciousness and eventually getting to the point where I could rely entirely on muscle memory to play a song. I don’t recommend this method – it’s a shitty way to learn music – but I will admit that it is a very powerful way to learn one specific song. Eight years later, I can still bang out a nearly flawless rendition of the intro to “Don’t Stop Believin'” whenever I sit in front of the piano.
I noticed an interesting phenomenon when I would teach myself in this manner. I’d practice for a couple of hours, making quick improvement but still fumbling through the difficult parts. Eventually, I would reach a plateau during that session, and any further attempts to push on would only result in regression. Reaching that point was my cue to stop.
The next day, I would sit down to play, and often my fingers would nimbly execute the parts that had given me trouble the day before. There was always a finite limit to the amount of progress I could make in a single session, but it seemed that a period of rest allowed my mind to subconsciously tweak its instructions to my hands and fingers to the extent that I often made more progress between practice sessions than within them. It was a strange, but reliable, phenomenon.
In general, I don’t know that this insight relates very well to woodworking. Unlike playing the piano (or any instrument), most woodworking processes are not inherently driven by tempo. If I’m planing a board, I can plane quickly or slowly – it only matters that the plane has enough inertia to plow through the cut. I can stop at any moment to check the board for straightness or twist, or to sharpen the iron, or to modify the cutting depth. Same with a handsaw. If I note that the saw is veering off course, I simply slow down, adjust my grip, or maybe change saws. As a hobbyist, time is not of the essence; results are.
For sure, frequent practice to build muscle memory plays an important role in your speed and efficiency as a woodworker, but the nature of our craft means that even the greenest amateur can achieve stunning results if they proceed slowly, with patience and attention.
In much the same way, I could easily play Chopin, if there were no requirement that I hit the keys with the proper cadence. I’d simply take a few seconds to ensure each note I strike is the correct one, and suddenly I’m a concert pianist, right? Of course, that’s not how music works (fortunately for the audience), but it’s not a completely inaccurate analogy for woodworking. The finished masterpiece is not time-dependent; all that you see is the culmination of hard-won proficiency and patient exertion. Greater proficiency requires less exertion, and vice versa, to achieve the same effect. How much of each factored into the piece can be difficult to quantify ex post facto.
I’m certain there are many exceptions to this dichotomy, but one that has become clearer to me in the last six months – around the time I began building Windsor chairs – is woodturning. Unlike many hand-tool processes, the rhythm of lathe work is strictly enforced by the spinning wood. This remains true regardless of whether the radial velocity is imparted by a tether attached to a foot pedal, or (as with my lathe) some distant coal-hungry generator attached to a diminishing series of metallic wires.
Attempt to violate the rhythm, and your work will suffer. When rolling a bead with a skew chisel (the hardest single process in turning a chair leg), the handle starts low and gets raised; the tool is rotated along its longitudinal axis; and the entire tool is slid along the tool rest. All at the same time, with precisely correct coordination of the movements. If ever there were a time-dependent process in woodworking, this is it.
I’m not sure that it’s possible to understand the complexity of this procedure if you’ve never attempted it, but Curtis Buchanan’s video above does an excellent job of breaking down the individual steps. The consequences of failure, depending on how you go about failing, can be as simple as cutting an ugly bead instead of a beautiful one, or as sudden and dramatic as a snake-bite when the edge suddenly catches the wood and slams it into the toolrest. (And that’s happened to me more often than I care to remember.)
Curtis Buchanan baluster leg detail
With woodturning, practice is more than just a useful thing that will help you accomplish your work more quickly in the future – it is prerequisite to the ability to even accomplish the work in the first place. I’m not saying that it isn’t possible for a beginner to walk up to the lathe and manhandle a length of maple into a familiar shape, but I am saying that you can’t simply scrape and sand your way to perfection. The difference between the work of a master is conspicuously different from the work of the less practiced hand. The fairness of the curves, the cripsness of the fillets, the proportions of the major and minor dimensions, and the way that the shapes relate to one another – to the critical eye, there is no way to feign mastery of these virtues. And I am far from a master.
So, on Monday, I walked into my workshop and fired up the lathe. I turned one leg in just over an hour. The second leg was going well enough, until I cut the cove 1/8″ too thin. (I broke that one in half – not in anger or frustration, but just so I wasn’t tempted to actually used it.) And the third leg took even longer than the first, maybe an hour and a half. With midnight approaching, I turned in for the night, a bit dismayed that I had regressed in the intervening month since I completed the last chair.
Then on Tuesday, I reeled off two more legs, each better than the first two, in 35 minutes apiece. It felt good to see real progress after a hitting a plateau the night before. It felt familiar.
Perhaps, with enough practice, my hands will simply remember what to do without the refresher. Perhaps one day I’ll be able to walk up to my lathe and crank out a baluster leg in 15 minutes. Perhaps, when that day comes, I’ll find a piano and play a little Journey to celebrate. You know, if I still can.
This is may be a mundane blog topic, but I hope some find it useful as well. On the rare occasions when I’ve used full-size patterns to cut out my furniture parts, I’ve typically relied on good ol’ spray adhesive to stick the patterns to the wood. It works, but it also sucks, for many reasons:
You only get one chance to orient the pattern properly. Don’t you dare try to slide it around or remove a wrinkle after it’s stuck.
Removing the pattern is a messy process that usually involves soaking the paper with mineral spirits and waiting a few minutes to peel it off. Then you have the pleasure of wiping off the adhesive gunk.
Do we really need another disposable aerosol canister in our lives? No, we do not.
Fortunately, there is a better way, and it’s already in your kitchen cabinet:
That’s right, all-purpose flour. Dump a handful into a bowl, mix it with water until you have a soupy consistency (it should be thinner than white glue), and brush a generous quantity onto the pattern with a paint brush.
Apply the pattern to the wood, remove any wrinkles, and re-position it if need be. It’s very forgiving, and you have a few minutes to work with it. I found that applying a coat of water to the pattern after it’s in place helps it adhere completely. Now just wait a half hour until the pattern is completely dry, and it’s ready to cut. To remove the pattern, brush it with water and it comes off easily after a minute or two, and the flour paste wipes off with a wet cloth.
Cheap, simple, effective, non-toxic, and you already have the materials in your home. Seriously, what’s not to love?
One final tip: I bought a huge roll of kraft paper from the hardware store a few years ago. I use it for everything: the kids color on it, it makes a snazzy heavy-duty gift wrapping, you can roll out a layer as a drop cloth for painting, and it of course it is excellent for making full-size furniture drawings and patterns. And I still have another five years to go before it’s all used up.
At least, that’s my experience. Maybe that means I’m not very creative. Actually, I’m quite certain that I’m not very creative. I am analytical to a fault, and indeed, many of my blog series (The Name of the Grain and Woody Wednesday, for example) as well as my job title (Forest Resource Analyst) reflect that. Perhaps that’s why I naturally gravitate towards historical furniture forms. There is something comforting about building furniture in a tradition that incorporates the evidence of a thousand years of failures and successes. Why re-invent the wheel when it’s already been refined by countless generations of craftsmen more competent in their trade than I can ever dream of being?
More often than not, when I find myself departing from tradition, it’s to accommodate a special piece of wood that simply doesn’t fit into the classical canon of furniture forms. Such is the case with my current project. My dad asked me to build an end table. He already had the wood picked out for the top – a slab of white oak 15″ wide, 40″ long and 1-5/8″ thick. It’s a lovely piece of wood, cut from a crotch with plenty of flame figure – but it also has plenty of defect.
The wood was cut in a manner that is opposite from the way that a crotch would normally be sawed. Woods like walnut, cherry, and birch normally display the best figure when the crotch is sawed, as my old friend Tom would say, “like a pair of britches lying flat on the floor” – with each fork representing a leg. Oak, on the other hand, usually presents the best figure when the wood is sawed perpendicular to the customary orientation.
Typical method for sawing oak crotch. Note that this is the opposite from the usual method.
The problem with this method is that it includes the pith in every flitch. Anyone who has ever sawed their own hardwood lumber is well aware of the problems with the pith. The juvenile wood immediately adjacent to the pith often has a life of its own, bending and twisting as it dries. And the nature of wood shrinkage means that the odds are good that you’ll have cracks in any board that includes the pith. My dad’s slab was no exception.
The slab of wood at issue.
Fortunately, the slab was large enough to salvage a sizable chuck of wood while completely discarding the pith. The result was an elliptical tabletop, 13″ wide and 24″ long.
Keep the best, chuck the rest.
The problem, at this point, was that I had very little historical precedent to work with for designing the base. Oval end tables – especially tables that utilize a piece this thick – are scarce. Now, this isn’t the first time I have found myself in “modern furniture” territory. I detailed my design process for my tripod kitchen table in the early annals of this blog. Basically, it involved typing some descriptive keywords into a Google image search, plucking out a few designs that I really liked, and modifying them to suit my preferences. In this case, however, Google was of no help, and I found myself starting from an empty slate.
So, I did the only thing a non-creative person can do in this situation: I sharpened my pencil and got to work. I started sketching stream-of-consciousness until I stumbled upon an idea worth pursuing. I’ll warn you, the process (or maybe just my sketching ability) isn’t pretty:
Most of the sketches belong exactly where they are: on the cutting room floor. But I thought that the sketch at the bottom right of the first page had potential, so I explored it further on a second page, playing around with the dimensions of the members as well as the horizontal and vertical proportions of the whole structure. I really liked the way the curves flowed through the joinery and the arch at the bottom reflected the ellipse of the top. I decided this design was the winner.
I’m too lazy for prototyping, but a full-size drawing is time well spent.
It was time to make full-size drawings – a step that I rarely take, but I felt that it was necessary to get a realistic idea of the proportions. My first iteration, with 3″-wide members, was a bit to heavy, so I revised the drawing to 2″ members. That looked right to my eye, and I was satisfied enough with this drawing to begin the painstaking process of animating the idea in ligneous flesh.
But as always, the ultimate question is not “Does it look good on paper?”
“The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.”
-George Carlin
I felt like a caterpillar last week. My latest project involves an oak crotch so riddled with cracks and shake that would have been better suited to the firewood pile were it not for the alluring flame figure of the grain. Just making the slab usable involved inlaying a dozen butterfly patches to stabilize the defects. Few people will look at the end result and understand the work involved, but it was enjoyable work nonetheless.
I’ve always found butterflies to be a bit tricky to make by hand. They are small and annoyingly difficult to clamp. The solution is to keep them attached to a larger block for as long as possible.
1) Mark out your cuts on a piece of wood that is quite a bit longer and wider than the butterflies that you intend to make.2) Cut a few kerfs down to the “waist” of the butterflies. You can also cut between the butterflies, or you can wait until after the next step.
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3) Using a chisel that is wider than your board, chop out the bulk of the waste, then carefully pare down to the lines, being especially careful to keep the sides of the butterfly perpendicular to its faces. Side note: Trying to cut these things using just a backsaw is a fool’s errand. You can do far more accurate work with a chisel, and it really doesn’t take any longer. Trust me, I’ve tried it both ways, and this is the way to go.4) Now you can free the butterflies from the blank. On the opposite side, cut another kerf to the waist and remove the waste with the chisel.5) Now your butterflies are ready to inlay. I made a variety of sizes to avoid a monotonous look. I can match the size of the butterfly to the size of the crack.6) To inlay the butterfly, begin by locating it on the crack and carefully striking a line around it. Deepen the line with a chisel, tapping lightly with the mallet. The outlining is the most critical part of the inlaying process, so keep your focus and do it right.7) At this stage, methods will differ. Some people like to use a router to remove the bulk of the waste. I would rather sell my first-born to cannibals than use the screaming-devil-spinny-tool when it isn’t absolutely necessary, so I opt for a cordless drill and a Forstner bit instead. I shoot for a depth somewhere between 3/8″ and 1/2″. It isn’t critical, as long as it’s consistent.8) The remaining waste is evacuated with a few chisels. Very handy to have a bevel-edge chisel with a bevel that actually goes all the way to the edge for this task. It’s nice to get the floor as consistent as possible, but more of your focus should be on getting the walls vertical and cutting right-up-to-but-not-over the scribe lines.9) Don’t spare the glue when you put these things in. Tap it in with a hammer, saw it flush, and level it off with a hand plane. Ahhh, that’s a nice fit. Ten more to go…
South Fork Timber 