Thanks to expert mousing and clicking of two readers, you can download free construction drawings of the 2008 version of the sawbench featured here last week.

Louis Bois, the draughtsman who prepared the construction drawings for the “Workbenches” book, and woodworker Mike Lingenfelter have both submitted electronic files that will allow you to easily build this sawbench. Plus, Louis’s file also has plans for a mate for the sawbench – I call it “Little Buddy” – that will nest under the “Skipper.”

Louis’s file is a pdf and can be printed out by a wide variety of free programs, most notably Adobe Reader. Mike’s version is a SketchUp drawing that is actually a 3D model, which allows you to take the sawbench apart and see how it goes together. SketchUp is a free program from Google and well worth the download.

SawBench2008.zip (11.85 KB)

2008-Sawbench.pdf (121.53 KB)

Today I put a couple coats of finish on the sawbench while I was finishing a blanket chest for the summer 2008 issue of Woodworking Magazine. When I cannot spray lacquer (I use an HVLP and solvent-based lacquer), I like to finish projects with a custom mix that is difficult to mess up.

I don’t know where I got the recipe for this finish. Several years ago finishing expert Bob Flexner mentioned in one of his columns that he makes his own oil/varnish blends and his own wiping varnishes – instead of paying extra for some finishing company to do it.

I tried this finish years ago and is has yet to let me down. I wouldn’t use this on a piece of furniture that requires a lot of moisture protection (such as a bathroom cabinet), but it’s great for most things.

Here it is: One-third satin varnish (any brand, just don’t use polyurethane varnish), one-third boiled linseed oil and one-third low-odor mineral spirits. Just pour them all into a mason jar and you are ready to go.

I rag it on and then wipe off the excess. Thin coats work best. If I want to make the surface really tactile, I apply it with a 3M gray pad. Either way, it takes only three or four coats to create a nice warm-colored finish that has a nice sheen. The linseed oil helps bring out the figure in the wood. The varnish gives the wood a little protection. And the mineral spirits makes it easy to apply with a rag.

I sand the finish between the second and third coats with lubricated sandpaper or a sanding sponge – something around #300 grit. Sure, it takes longer than lacquer. But in February, it sure is faster than waiting for a warm, sunny day in Northern Kentucky.

Speaking of warm days, next weekend I’ll be at the Lie-Nielsen Toolworks show in Oakland, Calif. If you want to stop by, I’ll be there only on Saturday (my flight leaves Sunday morning). I’ll be selling books and will give a lecture at 2 p.m. Saturday on workbench design.

As a bonus, you can meet my wife, Lucy, who will be helping me at the booth and offering counseling to any members of the “Wives Against Schwarz” who happen to attend the free (repeat free) event.

— Christopher Schwarz

I end up giving away all of the sawbenches I build to woodworkers who give me those wet, doe-eye looks that say, “I don’t think I can build one.” That’s ridiculous, of course, because these things are as easy to make as a box of brownies. But I’m soft, I suppose, like the resulting brownies (always undercooked, natch).

The downside to my sawbench charity is that sometimes I end up without any sawbenches in my shops, which makes me nuttier than squirrel poo. The upside, is that I get to make more sawbenches, and each generation gets a little better.

This weekend I built the sawbench that me and my students will be building during my handsawing classes in 2008. This example can be built from one 2 x 8 x 10’, and it took me about four hours to do – I machined all the stock flat and cut all the joints by hand.

This sawbench is a little different than the others because it’s designed to be a hand-sawing exercise. All the joints are entirely saw-cut. No boring. No mortising. No chopping.

Now if you’ve gotten to this point in the blog entry and are wondering “What in Moxon’s name is a sawbench?” then check out this old entry on my blog at Woodworking Magazine. Sawbenches are magical devices that make full-size handsaws really work (handsaws stink at bench-height, except for overhand ripping). Plus, I assemble carcases on them, use them as stepstools, plane table bases against the sawbench’s bird’s mouth, and eat my lunch while sitting on one.

I don’t have construction drawings drafted for this bench yet, but you don’t really need them. Here are the basics: Make the bench about knee-high. This one is 19-3/4” high. The legs are angled 10° off 90°. The legs are notched at the top at 10° to fit into mating notches in the top. All the stretchers are attached to the legs with half-lap joints. Glue and screws keep everything together.

Here’s my materials list:

1 Top        1-1/4” x 6-3/4” x 32”
4 Legs        1-1/4” x 2-1/2” x 21”
2 Long Stretchers    1-1/4” x 2-1/2” x 26”
2 Short stretchers    1-1/4” x 2-1/2” x 12”

The only slightly tricky thing is cutting the feet so the sawbench sits flat on the floor. This is great fun to do once you know the trick. First put the sawbench on a flat and level surface. Then take small wooden shims and shim under all the feet until the sawbench is level on both its length and width.

Then take a small block of wood and cut an 11° bevel on one edge. Place this on your known flat surface and use the block to mark all around the legs of the sawbench (the beveled end allows you to make the outside angle of the legs).
 
Then clamp the sucker to your bench and saw the feet to your lines. This might seem hard. It’s not.

As always, I plan on keeping this sawbench until I retire. But that’s not likely to happen. Plus, I need to build another version that uses lapped-dovetails for one of the advanced classes I’m teaching in July.

— Christopher Schwarz

One of my early workbenches was more than 30" wide. At first, I was thrilled with this width as it allowed me more places to pile junk as I worked on a project.

Then one day I was working on a toy box for a nephew and I wanted to level the finger joints. After fussing and flailing around like a rooster in an empty henhouse I conspired to sleeve the carcase over the end of the bench.

Denied. The bench was too wide. Zut alors!

Lucky for me, however, the bench was a big solid-core door (it had once been the door to our building's cafeteria). So after 10 minutes on the table saw, my benchtop was 24" wide and the carcase fit perfectly over the end.

I like narrow benches for a lot of reasons. I can reach the tools on the wall. They allow me to clamp all around typical carcases right to the benchtop. But I really like a narrow bench when I have to level dovetail joints on a carcase or cabinet.

That is when the Roubo really shines. Today I was leveling some finger joints on a blanket chest and just slapped the thing onto the bench as shown in the above photo and went to work. In the photo I'm knocking down the end grain with a Shinto-rasp (it saves me sharpening time on my block plane when I start with the coarse tool).

Heck, even the 16" overhang on the end of the bench contributes to my bliss. Most carcases are stable with that amount of support, and the legs below the top help brace the work as I flail away on the end grain.

When the carcase is a bit small, like this blanket chest, I have to switch to an outrigger platform (shown below) to work the ends. But I'm still working against the entire benchtop – the top, the right leg and the stretchers. Having them all in the same plane reduces the amount of clamping I have to do to secure my work.

— Christopher Schwarz

There is something deeply and dangerously engrained in our culture about the expression “going with the grain.”

Not to get philosophical, but I consider that expression to be the embodiment of our civil culture. That is, if we cooperate with the other people around us, then everything will be OK (taxes get paid, kids go to school, wooden boards get smooth). And If you go “against the grain,” then bad things happen (cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, tear-out).

Here's why this thinking is dangerous: It assumes there are only two ways to accomplish things - either you work with the grain or against it. That's ridiculous.

Some of a handplane's most awesome powers can be unlocked by working across the grain of the board. Working across the grain - what Joesph Moxon calls “traversing” - allows you to easily remove the cup out of a board. Think about that for a second. If you take a cupped cabinet side and plane it “with the grain” all across the board then you will end up with a nicely planed cabinet side that is still cupped.

Working across the grain has another amazing and distinct power: It eliminates tear-out. Working cross-grained means that your cutting edge is not going to lift up the grain, lever it upwards and tear the wood fibers ahead of your cutting edge (that's the long-winded description of how tear-out occurs). Instead, working across the grain simply severs the fibers. They don't get lifted.

Now, the resulting surface isn't ready to finish. It looks wooly and dull. But it isn't torn out. And your board will be flat.

That's an ideal place to be when you are working difficult woods. To understand why, let's look at how I worked the slightly cupped front of a curly maple blanket chest this week. First, let's plane this board “with the grain.”

Working with the grain: First take your jack or fore plane and work the high edges down so the panel is fairly flat. Working with the grain on curly maple will produce some tear-out. Then work the panel with the jointer plane to remove the rough surface left behind by the fore plane. Working with the grain will continue to leave tear-out behind over the entire surface of the board. Then take your smoothing plane and remove the tear-out and tool marks left by the jointer plane. If the tear-out is deep, you will typically need to make 10 to 15 passes over the panel to get most of the tear-out removed. Deep patches will have to be scraped or sanded.

Working across the grain: Flatten the panel with cross-grain strokes of your fore plane. No tear-out will be left behind. Now follow up with cross-grain strokes with your jointer plane. Begin to work diagonally across the grain, but take care not to work at an angle where tear-out appears. Again, done correctly, you will have no tear-out. Then follow up with your smoothing plane and plane “with the grain.” Because there is no tear-out to remove, you only have to remove the hollows and high spots left behind by the jointer plane. With my tools, that typically will be four or five passes over the board.

Working across the grain reduces the amount of work I have to do on a board and it reduces the amount of sharpening I have to do on my smoothing plane. Both are good things.

Now, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the two disadvantages of working across the grain. First, you will splinter the far edge of your board or panel. To remedy this, you can plane a small 45° bevel on the far edge, or leave your board over-wide and rip it to final width after planing. The other disadvantage is that working cross-grain tends to dull your tools faster. But this isn't as big a deal because you are dulling the fore plane and the jointer plane, which don't have to be hair-splitting sharp anyway.
 
In addition to working across the grain, here's the other weapon you should consider: a small high-angled smoothing plane. Tear-out can be localized on a panel. If that occurs, you have several choices: Plane the entire panel some more to remove the tear-out (laborious), scrape or sand the torn-out area (then you'll have to sand the entire panel to make the panel look right), or plane out that small area by working localized.

Short and narrow smoothing planes allow you to sneak into these areas without a lot of extra work. I like to use my little Wayne Anderson high-angle smoothing plane for this job (it's about as big as a block plane). You don't have to invest in a beautiful plane like this one to do the job, however. Any low-angle block plane that has been sharpened with a high angle and a curved cutting edge will work wonders.

— Christopher Schwarz

This week I’m deep into reading Joseph Moxon’s “Mechnick Exercises” – the first English-language treatise on the craft of joinery. Published in 1678, the “Exercises” cataloged the tools and practices of the blacksmith, joiner, house carpenter, turner, bricklayer and those who make sundials.

For the modern reader, the book can be a horrible slog. The printed English word of the 17th century seems convoluted. Sentences run on for far longer than we are accustomed to, and the sentences are interrupted by asides that wander a bit. Then they’ll insert a reminder of the original point of the sentence and swoop in on the end of the phrase.

Truth be told, you get used to it after a few pages. Then the hardest thing becomes the occasional unfamiliar word – for example, “dawks” means “hollows” – and the odd tool. My favorite example: the pricker. The pricker is a marking tool that perhaps resembles a square-shanked awl. But in Moxon’s glossary he says the vulgar term is “awl” and instead the proper word is “pricker.”

So as of today, the filthy word “awl” has been banished from our shop in favor of the much more polite “pricker.”

Every time I read Moxon I learn something interesting and useful. But what is most fascinating is how little has changed in 330 years. The tools and the methods are familiar – once you strip away the “shall yets.” Except for one important difference.

What strikes me during this reading of Moxon is his affection for the fore plane – a tool that is typically 16” long, which is shorter than jointer plane and longer than a jack plane. The fore plane has a blade with an obvious curve and is used to quickly remove material.

Moxon spills more ink on the fore plane and its use than he does on any other single plane. He discusses how it is used with its iron set both rank and fine. How it is moved across the board. How it trues faces and edges. The jointer plane gets some discussion, but not nearly as much as the fore.

And then there’s the discussion of the smoothing plane. Here is the entire entry on the smoothing plane (cleaned up a tad):

“The smoothing plane marked B 4. must have its iron set very fine, because its office is to smooth the work from those irregularities the fore plane made.”

That’s really about it. There’s no protracted discussion of the smoother and wispy shavings or strategies to reduce tear-out (though Moxon suggests that high planing angles are important in one part of the book).

Our obsession with smoothing planes might be thoroughly modern. Or perhaps there’s another way to look at this (bear with me, I know this is getting long).

Recently we had Matt Grisley from Leigh Industries in our shop to demonstrate his company’s new dovetail jigs. During our day together, he made an astute observation about hand work. I wrote it down after he said it. And it went something like this:

“What’s interesting to me is how woodworkers who love hand tools also love the heavy machinery – the big planers, jointers and table saws. And they don’t seem to have much affection for the power hand tools, like the router and biscuit joiner.”

And he’s right. I am deeply indebted to my planer and jointer. I would get rid of five of my smoothing planes before I got rid of my jointer and planer (don’t worry I’d still have at least five smoothers left).

I am obsessed with my heavy machinery like Moxon’s workmen were attached to their fore planes. For these are the tools that get the brute work done, that make woodworking possible. The finesse work stands on the shoulders of the fore plane and machinery. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to the shop to fiddle with my square, saw and pricker.

— Christopher Schwarz

If the trees or the squirrels ever get their act together, I’m certain that I will be one of the first people on the planet to wake up with a horse’s head in my bed – courtesy of the maple mafia.

Not only do I work for a magazine that encourages 220,000 other people to slaughter spruces, but I personally have a lot of sap on my hands. Since we moved into our house 11 years ago, I have ordered the killing of three trees (a fourth died at the hands of a wind storm, I swear). And I’ve also taught a few trees “a lesson” by having a few branches here and there snapped by arborists-for-hire.

Last week, I ordered the ash tree in our front yard be taken out. This was a hard call to make. For the tulip poplar in the back yard that I had dismembered seven years ago, I had no love. That deciduous demon chucked a branch through the windshield of my beloved Honda Civic.

But the ash tree was a loyal shade-giver that had gone bad. Recently, it started chucking loose limbs – first at dogs that soiled its trunk, later on at neighborhood kids walking up the sidewalk. So I made a call (actually, I had Lucy do it). I had them do the job while I was at work.

After the body was removed, I volunteered to clean up the piles of sawdust with a rake and shovel. It was no small task, and I scurried around the stump scratching furiously at the dirt and weeds.

After a few minutes I started laughing. Not because I was dancing around like a ground squirrel on Bugger Sugar, but because I wouldn’t (or couldn’t) step on the stump itself as I worked.

There’s a lesson in here, somewhere, really.

Here it is: Senior Editor Glen Huey and I were talking this week about all the stupid things we’d done when learning woodworking. We agreed that the single-most idiotic thing we had both done was avoiding making cabriole legs for years and years too long.

Cabriole legs – the Queen Anne equivalent of a hitchhiking cartoon fox sticking out her shapely leg to stop a car – seem hard. They are, however, quite simple to make. And once you make one, your reaction is: Huh, that’s it? That’s what I was afraid of all those years?

It’s not just cabriole legs that woodworkers fear, it almost everything new. We recoil at anything with curves, inlay or angles other than 90°. (Ever wonder why Art & Crafts and Shaker are the two most popular furniture styles in woodworking magazines?)

With this thought, I dropped the rake. I stepped up on the stump. I looked around.

The neighborhood looked different from that slightly elevated point. In fact, I almost could see the trees forming a lynch mob at the end of my street.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I was designing (i.e. ripping off the plans from a deceased German tool merchant) my Holtzapffel Workbench, my intention was to have the screws of the face vise in perfect alignment with the holdfast hole in the bench’s right leg.

My plan was thus: I could put a huge George Nakashima-style plank in the twin-screw vise and it would come to rest on the shaft of a holdfast stuck in the right leg.

I bet Charles Holtzapffel wished he’d thought of that, I muttered as I drafted this up.

Months passed; I built the bench. And I really mucked that detail up. As built, the holdfast hole in the right leg isn’t lined up with the top edge of the vise screws. Far from it. That hole is about 2” from being in the same plane.

When I first realized the error, I beat myself up pretty badly (no bag of oranges was harmed during the self-flagellation). But before I started going all “prairie dog” on the bench and drilling holes everywhere, I decided to take my own bitter advice: Try it before you burn it.

Here is the huge surprise about twin-screw vises (you ready?). They are monsters, with almost unlimited clamping power. Several months ago, as we were preparing to film a short video about the bench, I bragged that I could clamp an 8’-long board on edge in the twin-screw vise and plane its edge and it would be rock solid.

Eyebrows were raised. Uncomfortable coughs were emitted. Senior Editor Bob Lang, I think, pantomimed that I had been drinking alcohol.

So I went to the wood rack to get me a 1 x 12 x 8’ hunk of something. We didn’t have any 8-footers. The only 1 x 12 stock we had was 10’ long. Yikes. Suddenly I wished I’d had been drinking in order to increase my courage/foolhardiness. A 10’-long board is 4’ longer than the bench itself.

But you know what? The twin-screw vise held it without complaint. So the support in the right leg isn’t really needed. But if you do want to modify your plans to match my original plans, shift all the dog holes in the right leg up 2”. That will do the trick.

Photo credit: Katy, my 6-year-old daughter, took these photos today while I was working on a cursed Chinese plywood bookcase. As you can clearly see from this photo, I still don't have a butt.

— Christopher Schwarz

I keep a short list in my head of what I like to call “The Woodworking Mysteries” – things that I pretend to understand but are really just outside my grasp.

One of the mysteries is how a tree can pump water and nutrients from its deepest roots to the furthest reaches of its branches. We have many clues as to how it works, but a complete picture eludes me at least. Another mystery is about how yellow glue (polyvinyl acetate) actually works. Again, I’ve never read a satisfying explanation.

A third mystery relates to handplanes and basic geometry. One common strategy for reducing tear-out in a board is to skew the plane as you make the cut. This strategy was beaten into my head by all my teachers dead and living. It’s repeated on the Internet by people I deeply respect and trust. And I do it myself in my work.

But if you do the math, you will quickly see how this strategy doesn’t make much sense on its face.

Let’s start with a fact that we do know: The higher the angle of attack when you plane a board, the less likely you are to experience tear-out. This is an almost immutable truth. It’s why we have high-pitch planes and scrapers in our arsenals.

Now for another fact: Skewing a plane in use reduces your angle of attack. Mike Dunbar, the founder of The Windsor Institute and a personal hero, explained this to me in the clearest way possible. When a shaving encounters a plane iron, the angle of attack is like a hill that the shaving has to walk up. If you walk straight up that 45° hill, that’s a lot of work. When you skew the tool, it’s like the shaving is walking up the hill at a lower angle. Or put another way, it’s a bit like building a road up a steep mountain. You don’t make the road go straight up the mountain, you build switchbacks so the vehicles can actually make it up the incline. Skewing reduces the amount of work required – both to plane a board and to climb a hill.

How much does skewing reduce your angle of attack? John Economaki, the founder of Bridge City Tools, published a brilliant chart that explains this on his web site page that promotes his variable-pitch plane. You can see the chart in full here (scroll down to the section titled “Skewing the Plane.”) You can look at this chart and see immediately that skewing a 45°-pitch handplane by 30° will reduce your effective angle of attack to 40.9°.

So here’s the problem: If high planing angles reduce tear-out, and skewing a plane reduces your angle of attack, then how can skewing the plane reduce tear-out?

Here’s a hint: The answer is in the branches.

Planing with no skew resulted in no tear-out on this ash board.

To explore this seeming contradiction, I did a little experiment in the shop on Saturday. I took a short piece of ash with pronounced grain direction – that is, there was no question about which way the grain was traveling in the board.

I cleaned up one face with a smoothing plane and then turned the board around so that I planed against the grain, which is when you are more likely to encounter tear-out. Then I planed the board with a bevel-up block plane, the Lie-Nielsen 102. This plane is bedded at 12° and the iron is sharpened with a 35° micro-bevel, so its angle of attack is 47°. The mouth on the plane is wide open, so it’s not much of a factor. The tool is set to take a shaving that is about .002” thick.

Planing with a 30° skew created this ugly patch of torn grain.

First I planed the board against the grain without skewing the tool. This cleaned up the board just fine with no tear-out. Then I skewed the tool by 30° (which lowered my effective planing angle to about 43°) and did the same operation. I tried skewing both to the left and to the right. Two areas of the board tore out grotesquely.

Then I cleaned up the board again and tried skewing the plane at 20°. Tear-out occurred at the same two places but not as badly. So I tried skewing the plane at a variety of angles. And without fail, the more I skewed the plane, the more tear-out occurred.

So how can skewing reduce tear-out?

You have to remember that trees are not manufactured items. They are giant cones made of fibers that grow in different directions as the tree responds to its environment: a hill, a disease, a wind storm. Then we slice them up into shapes suitable for building things, regardless of how the fibers are traveling through the tree.

In some boards, grain can change directions on you a couple times. And the grain can be at odd angles – you cannot assume that all your boards will have grain running from one end to the other – the grain may be traveling at a 20° direction along the face of the board and 10° along the edge. And the grain might be in the shape of a shallow wave.

So there are times when skewing the plane puts the edge in the right position at the right time to deal with that patch of grain.

Planing at a 20° skew created a little tear-out.

In my example board above, the two places where the tear-out occurred were at places where the grain rose quickly. So how did I deal with this board? As I encountered the areas that tore out, I straightened out the tool – no skew. When I worked the areas that didn’t tear out, I skewed the tool to reduce the effort required for planing.

So the trick with skewing takes us back to the No. 1 way to reduce tear-out: The best strategy is to select the best woods possible and learn how to read the grain so you can begin to predict how your tools will behave. Sometimes, the best strategy is to not skew the tool.

Or put another way: Because grain is irregular, sometimes skewing the plane allows the blade to encounter the grain at a non-skewed angle – and to therefore plane it without tear-out.

This is the end of my series on planing. I hope that some part of it was helpful. Next week, we’ll probably return to the topic of (surprise!) workbenches.

— Christopher Schwarz

If you follow the conventional wisdom for setting your chipbreaker, you will hate your handplane.

What’s the conventional wisdom? According to Charles Holtzapffel’s seminal work on the cutting action of tools, you should set your smooting plane’s chipbreaker .02” from the cutting edge of your iron (other respected sources say to set it even closer than that) and to have an extremely tight mouth. The illustration shown on page 478 of Vol. II of  Holtzapffel’s “Construction, Action & Application of Cutting Tools” shows a plane with a mouth as tight as one could imagine.

This, Holtzapffel says, prevents tear-out.

This, says your neighborhood blogger, makes your plane choke like a starving man at the Chicken Bone Buffeteria.

Chipbreakers do more harm than good in a handplane. Whenever I’m having trouble with a plane (especially if the plane is choking or refuses to cut), the first place I look is the chipbreaker. Whenever I fettle a new or vintage handplane and the bugger won’t behave, the first thing I’ll do is swap out its chipbreaker with another plane that has a working chipbreaker. In almost all cases, this solves my problem.

So what is the purpose of the chipbreaker? My cynical view of the gizmo is that it became widely used so toolmakers could use a cheap, thin steel cutter and reinforce it with an inexpensive iron or soft-steel plate. This is supported by the odd names given to chipbreakers. Some early sources call them cap irons, double irons, break irons or top irons. In other words, not everyone agrees that they were designed to break chips.

Early planes had thick irons and didn’t have chipbreakers, even during the age of mahogany, which has irregular grain that tends to tear-out.

In my view, the chipbreaker’s only real purpose in a modern plane is to mate with the tool’s blade-adjustment mechanism and to aid in chip ejection. Oh, and it exists to frustrate you.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Professor Chutaro Kato at Yamagata University did an interesting study of chipbreakers and how their shape and their position on the iron reduces tear-out.

You can read the entire study here. But here’s the quick summary: The chipbreaker actually did its job when it was located .004” from the cutting edge. I have tried to set a chipbreaker on a smoothing plane to this position (using a feeler gauge as a guide), and it doesn’t work well if you have a tight mouth on the tool. My planes just clogged because there wasn’t enough room for the shaving to escape.

If you read Professor Kato’s study carefully, you’ll note that he had better luck with a chipbreaker that had a radical forward-leaning angle – 80°! This 80° breaker worked better even when positioned back a little on the cutting iron. I have yet to try this setup on a plane because the numbers don’t add up. Professor Kato is working with a bevel-down plane bedded at 40°. Do the math: Putting an 80° chipbreaker on an iron bedded at 45° with a tight mouthseems madness. (If anyone has tried this, let me know. I also used to think that $8 for a six pack of beer was madness.)

So in what position should you place your chipbreaker? I set mine back about 3/32” in a smoothing plane in most cases -- sometimes even a little further back if the mouth is really tight. All I’m really trying to do is to prevent clogging.

Which begs the question: Why did I list a chipbreaker as one of the ways to reduce tear-out? Well, I did mention one use for the chipbreaker in a modern Bailey-style plane – it mates with the tool’s depth-adjustment mechanism. This mechanism allows you to easily set your tool to take the finest cut possible, which really will reduce tear-out.

— Christopher Schwarz

Thanks to the maturing of my two daughters (and the waning of the “Days of Dark Diapers”), I’ve decided to teach two more rounds of handsawing classes in 2008 – two one-day classes in Sterling Heights, Mich.; and a one-week intensive class at the Northwest Woodworking Studio in Portland, Ore.

As of now, there are spaces available in all of these three classes. Here are the details and link to the schools where you can register:

Hand-cut Dovetails
Saturday, March 15
Woodcraft, Sterling Heights, Mich.
To register, send an email to: sterlingheights-retail@woodcraft.com or call 586-268-1919.

Learn to saw dovetails by hand while building a cherry Shaker silverware tray with through-dovetails. You'll learn to lay out your dovetails so they look nice, saw them accurately, chisel out the waste quickly, and fit them right the first time (plus, how to hide any mistakes). This is a great class for first-time dovetailers or anyone who has struggled to learn this classic hand-cut joint.

The Forgotten Art of Handsawing
Sunday, March 16
Woodcraft, Sterling Heights, Mich.
To register, send an email to: sterlingheights-retail@woodcraft.com or call 586-268-1919.

In this class, you'll learn to use handsaws and backsaws to track a line like a bloodhound. With a series of special exercises, you will learn to make the three different classes of sawcuts: rough cutting for dimensioning stock, standard cutting for final sizing of casework pieces and fine cutting for precision joinery. You'll learn the proper stance, grip and body motion for accurate sawcuts and receive the instant feedback and corrections from an instructor that will make you develop your skills quickly. You will also build a basic sawbench - the most important workshop appliance for handsaws.

Handsawing, Handsaws and Sawbenches
July 14-18
Northwest Woodworking Studio, Portland, Ore.

In a traditional shop, sawing was reserved for the most skilled cabinetmakers on the floor. Most anyone could use a plane or chisel, but it was the sawyers who transformed the timber into furniture with rips, crosscuts and joinery.

And though we now have accurate power equipment in our workshops, sawing by hand is still a tremendous skill that – when done properly -- can save time and effort. That’s because handsawing can be done without jigs or guides and without regard to the angle of the cut or its bevel. In short, if you can see the line, you can cut the line with a handsaw.

Honing this simple skill allows you to easily cut compound angles, angled joinery and cuts that might take hours of jig-building and test-cutting on a table saw. And, as a bonus, learning basic sawing trains your hand, eye and mind to cut any sort of dovetail joint you can imagine.

In this class, you’ll learn to use handsaws and backsaws to cut joints as precisely as any power tool. With a series of special exercises, you will learn to make the three different classes of sawcuts: rough cutting for dimensioning stock, standard cutting for final sizing of casework pieces and fine cutting for precision joinery.

You’ll learn the proper stance, grip and body motions for accurate sawcuts and receive the instant feedback and corrections that will make you develop your skills quickly. During the first part of the class you will build a basic sawbench – the most important workshop appliance for handsaws – and a bench hook – the most important appliance for wielding a backsaw.

With your appliances built and your handsaw skills in place, we’ll dive into dovetails during the second half of the week. We’ll explore both English and Continental styles of making this joint (both are valid) so you can find the approach that is right for your work. And at the end of the week we’ll build a simple dovetailed Shaker silverware tray.

— Christopher Schwarz