It’s easy to find lots of scolding about the hazards of using woodworking machinery.
I have seen some stuff. I have cleaned the interior of a jointer after someone else’s accident. I have seen a man wrestle a grinder (and lose). I’ve seen a guy try (and luckily fail) to cut off his finger with a jigsaw. Oh, and don’t forget the fine, cancer-making dust.
But what you don’t hear as much about are the hazards of hand-tool woodworking.
I have seen some stuff. Through-mortises in hands. Severed tendons in arms after a chisel poke. A dismembered finger from a Japanese pullsaw (one stroke). And sure, sharpening and axe gashes galore.
But this blog entry is not about the gory side of woodworking injuries. Instead, it’s about taking a reasonable approach to work that allows you to be creative into old age.
I started in hand-tool woodworking against my will when I was about 10 or 11. My parents were homesteaders building houses on our 84-acre farm outside Hackett, Ark., without electricity. This was not by choice; electricity had not come to Hilltop Lane in 1973. So it was all hammers, handsaws and braces at first. And it was work. Back in our house in town, my dad had a full machine workshop, but I wasn’t allowed to use the machines for safety reasons. So again, everything I did was by hand.
After I graduated college, I started taking classes in handwork at the University of Kentucky under Lynn Sweet, and that’s when I got the fire in my belly. I wanted to do everything by hand. And that deep dive into handwork coincided with my years at Popular Woodworking Magazine. I started at the magazine when I was 28 and ended my association with them when I was pushing 50.
For me, handwork has always been the best part of woodworking. And I do everything to maximize my time at the bench. When I make a chair, the whole process takes 16 to 18 hours. Only one of those hours is on machines. The rest is at the bench.
As I’ve gotten older, I have observed firsthand the toll that handwork has taken on my body. Because of ripsawing and planing, my elbows are not what they used to be. After a full day of planing, I cannot do another day of consecutive planing, or my body will revolt. When I saddle the seat of a chair, my hands are curled into claws the next day. I have to stretch them out.
I am happy with the cardio I get while hand-tool woodworking, but I am humbled by the repetitive stress injuries that come from brute-force jack-planing, mortising and ripping.
Let me put it another way. When I read about people who consider hand-tool work as exercise, I think about the exercise I have to do in order to do hand-tool work. Every morning my day begins with 30-45 minutes of stretches recommended by my physical therapist. If I don’t do these, I’ll end up on my back on a workbench, trying to work out the kinks in my back, shoulders, arms and hands. In the evening, a heating pad takes care of the muscles that are damn whiners.
I am not alone. I know other hand-tool woodworkers who have suffered repetitive stress injuries. (Sorry, no names to protect the crooked.) I have friends who can do only so much planing or sawing before their elbows give out. What caused their injuries? Planing and sawing. I know woodworkers who can’t hold a chisel or scraper well anymore after years and years of chopping and scraping.
So here is the personal confession: As I have gotten older, I’ve had to rely more on machines than when I was 20, 30 or 40. Don’t misread me: I love handwork dearly. But I love woodworking more. So any small crutch that can keep me making things at pace is most welcome.
To be precise, I have no interest in router jigs, CNC machines or any tool with a digital brain. Those things are cool (and yes, they are “authentic” woodworking). But they don’t suit my analog belt-driven brain. I am a simple machine guy, mostly band saw. Sometimes jointer and planer. Occasionally table saw and drill press.
I do not hide this fact, either. One of the other annoying aspects of handcraft publishing is watching some people do one thing and tell their readers to do another. After years of handwork, I can tell when a streak of dust from a handsaw has been faked (I’ve watched set directors do it). Or when material that has been machined is held up as four-squared by hand (i.e. they planed the already-machined boards). Not everybody does this, but it happens.
This legerdemain fools some beginners into thinking they should embrace pure handwork. I’ve met a lot of them who took the bait, became miserable, then bought a band saw or a planer. And they were much happier.
Since the 14th century, woodworking has been about simple machines, plus a small kit of hand tools. And it can still be that way in the 21st century. The best woodworkers I know use all the tools – hand and electric. And they are smart enough to know how to avoid ridiculous situations. Such as making a Plexiglas router jig to cut one butterfly recess. Or converting entirely by hand 300 board feet of rough lumber into a highboy.
If you take a pragmatic path – machines for tendon-destroying donkey work and hand tools for the joinery and surfaces – you might end up like me: an old guy still working every day at the bench. Still with all my fingers and still able to cut damn-good dovetails.
This is the balance I have found that works. You might experience a different journey.
— Christopher Schwarz
This makes a lot of sense to me. I’ve been basically 100% hand tool since getting started with woodworking about 7 years ago. But I also learned eventually that my hand tool woodworking is a lot more sensible and rewarding with a bandsaw and a planer. I use those mainly for milling. Getting things to shape. But as you say, and I think Krenov says in that book you published, I’m really about the joinery and the fine stuff. I don’t have to prove anything but hand planing a bunch of 2x6s to make a bench. (I have a smaller jointer but I’ve never gotten really comfortable using it.) On the safety front, I’m of course very very careful with those two machines. But the thing I tell myself and tell my family and which I feel confident is accurate is that of course you can injure yourself with handtools. Even badly. But it’s very very hard to injure yourself catastrophically with hand tools. The physics just isn’t there. Thank you for teaching me so much, Chris. Josh
Hey Josh, long-time Twitter follower and on-and-off TPM subscriber. I love when you post your project photos on Twitter from time to time. It’s a nice interlude in my feed that is mostly dominated by politics in such. Keep it up! 🙂
Thanks for posting this. I’m a pretty new woodworker still finding the best balance for myself between autopower and the wall socket… with a barn full of rough sawn lumber. So far, when I have been in a hurry, I have bypassed my own wood stock and bought S4S from the lumbermill. Pricey.
Bravo
Very good that you tell this. I thought for years that I was the only one who had to leave the furniture partnership because of chronic joint problems.
Sometimes hand tools are the most efficient way to get the job done, sometimes it’s not.
I use both but each method has its place. I can make dovetail drawers faster by hand but then again I’m not making hundreds of them. I’m not going to rough plane even 5 board feet of lumber by hand because my jointer and planer is a much faster method and much more accurate. Is it a lack of skill? Ok maybe it is but when it’s all said and done ( and all the machine marks are gone) who can tell the difference. Point is I still created something and didn’t buy it at IKEA.
Chris – interesting stuff. I was (and still am) lucky. At my old job, I was interrupted constantly, which gave me frequent breaks from my tasks. Through no great wisdom of mine, I developed a habit of varying my work through the days and the weeks. I almost never plane boards all day. I almost never do any one task all day. I break them up, heavy work in the morning usually then less-physically demanding work in the afternoon. And another way I’m lucky is most of the hardwood I plane is green riven stock – easier than those sawn boards you’re planing. Once they’re drier, I’m only doing some surface planing to clean them up. Recently I needed 30 or 40 turning blanks ripped from kiln-dried maple. I took it to a friend with a tablesaw…ripping oak or pine is one thing, ripping maple is another.
Use the right tool for the right situation. Still solid advice.
It depends on where you’ve been. My 40 years as a computer enginerd left too little time for abusing elbows and shoulders. Since retiring from that work, I’ve done a lot more sawing and planing and at 77 just completed building a new Anarchist’s Workbench completely with hand tools. I’ve been very fortunate health-wise, still enjoy handwork, and have enough Scotts blood in me to avoid spending big on power tools. It’s understandable that decades of handwork takes its toll on bodies, but I am incredibly grateful to mine for doing so well so far. Tho, if there had been a planer within easy reach…
There’s no shame in using power to allow one to keep doing what they love.
Like you I was too young to use power tools on the jobsite growing up. I am firmly in the blended woodworker category. I’m not sure if you originated that term, but your the first person I saw that wrote it.
I’m a professional and use hand, power, and even tools with digital brains. I choose the tool, or process that makes the most sense, or sometimes my mood. Almost always I go with the process that is the least aggravating. my joy of woodworking is the making, the learning, and the problem solving.
I’m not interested in the assorted “holy wars” we see play out across woodworking print, and social media. I find them rather silly, woodworking is a big tent and we can all fit inside it.
Its interesting. I have been working in IT for over 22 years. I have repetitive stress injury from keyboard and mouse. My right hand is really bad. I do woodworking to “unplug” from computers and technology. And yeah there are some things with hand tools that hurt my right hand/wrist really bad. Although some things feel ok, for example sawing and planing where i can have my index finger outstretched. But i will usually do all my prep with my TS or bandsaw and thickness planer. Unless its a really small project.
Your sanity is also preserved by your way of work.
Out of the few books I’ve gotten so far about woodworking, be it minimalist woodworking or essentials about hand tool etc, the one I liked the most and always made the most sense was Jim Tolpin’s new traditional woodworker. Being able to plane a board flat or saw a line is important but letting machines do the heavy lifting so I can get to working the wood faster instead of preparing the wood to be worked.
Chris’s comments, a couple of other comments here, and my awareness of serious health issues hand to a long-time instructor of a woodworking school that I attended last year reinforces one of my theories.
Granted, this is totally non-scientific (I only play a doctor on television), but there might be something to my theory. While repetitive stress can take it’s toll (I have minor issues from sitting with a mouse at a computer all day every day), I think we tend to blame too much on aging and repetitive stress. Really what we are talking about is inflammation, and inflammation is not always fait accompli. Yes, sometime genetics and other age issues we don’t fully understand play a part, but I think the medical community is learning that many times, inflammation is caused by external factors: food, foreign pathogens, chemicals, stress. I am in my mid-50’s and have been running at least 20-30 miles for over 10 years. People have been telling me to stop, I’m getting too old, I’m going to ruin my knees, yada, yada, yada. Nonsense. I had issues the first couple of years as my body wasn’t used to that physical punishment, but have had virtually no problems physically for years now as far as running is concerned. I’m getting stronger as I age, not weaker, or more sore.
I put a lot of stock in dust as a culprit. The instructor I mention above has a woodworking studio and school that he has been running for over 30 years, and before that, he was a high school wood shop teacher. He is now facing the prospect of shutting down his shop and school, as he has developed serious arthritis to the point he can’t even bend over to pick up a pencil that has fallen on the floor. When I was in his school, I was awe-struck at the top-notch industrial dust collection system, which kicked in whenever a machine was turned on. But you know, I know, and everyone else knows, that even with the best dust collection and filtration, a lot of us eschew dust masks and we’re still going to get those fine particles inside of our biology. Besides cancer, I don’t think anyone will argue that this can trigger or cause inflammation.
I frequently scoff at my masks if I’m just making one or two quick cuts, but I can feel it in my sinuses: minor irritation after just a couple of cuts on the table or mitre saw. And if I’m really lax on the mask after many cuts, it feels like ragweed season — in friggin’ January.
Lately, I’ve been trying to develop a habit to put on my respirator mask no matter what I’m doing. One quick cut on the table saw: connect the vacuum, turn on the air filter, don my P100 respirator. Before I started running 10 years ago, I was smoking for over 25, so the least I can do is try extend my enjoyment of running and woodworking as long as I can.
(I’m still on the fence about needing dust protection when working with hand tools. Yes, when the sun is hitting the bench I can see the puff of dust when cutting board, but I’m sure it’s not even 25% as bad as machine generated dust. But maybe?)
Next, I need to get better about protecting those ears so I can enjoy music into old age….
Great post!
The only hand tool purists I know are felling/limbing/re-sawing by hand, hooking up the draught horses, working in a lean-to by oil lamp and open fire. After hunting for food, milking the cows and forging tools.
This woodworking stuff IS hard on a body.
Thank you for a really interesting and good article
Ditto experience due to dual carpal tunnel surgery. The machines do the drudgery and I do the pleasurable tasks.
So you’ve finally reached the point where you’re working the way the old guys did… The only difference is that your apprentices have tails where theirs did not.
On the safety side, I am reminded of the story about the shop teacher who took every new class to the butcher shop to watch them cut up whole sides of beef on their bandsaw, zipping through flesh and bone with equal dispatch.
On the hand tools vs. machines question, I think each person needs to find their own balance. And, wherever that balance falls, it’s fine, and should be exempt from criticism. Personally, I’m probably about 60% machine, and 40% hand tools. I don’t have the patience to rip much more than a small tenon, or a large one on a board that’s too long to safely work on the table saw or bandsaw. I have a lovely set of mortise chisels from Lie Nielsen, but when faced with doing a bunch of them to build my bench, I bought a nice Powermatic mortising machine.
A sound piece of wisdom, thanks for sharing this.
Chris I’m so glad you made this post. As a soon to be 66 year young chair and furniture maker recovering from shoulder surgery, I absolutely love hand tool work. Like Peter most of my chair work is in greenwood and fairly easy still on the body. However, with my most recent shoulder issue I too am having to look at easier ways to saddle a seat for instance. I have been a “blended” type wood worker for the most part from the get-go. To me it always made sense to do the grunt work with a machine and save the hand work for the more precise requirements of the job.
Chris, I agree with your thoughts on injuries. I am 79 years old and I learned over 30 years ago, while still working, the excellent muscular and joint benefits of regular visits to a Licensed Massage Therapist ( LMT) They were able to greatly help my severe muscular and neck and back issues, related to my many years as a surgical pathologist looking through a microscope for many hours a day for 35 years. I recommend an LMT who is very experienced in rehabilitation of muscular and joint issues. Make no mistake and confuse these highly trained professionals with a “massage parlor”. The LMTs work in close conjunction with orthopedists and other physicians who refer patients to them. They are experts at finding trigger points and other muscular issues of which you were unaware. I still go to an LMT twice a month ( for over 30 years) who really keeps my old muscles and joints flexible and pain free. At my age I still have to be judicious in how much work I do per day both with my woodworking and outside yard work. I highly recommend LMTs therapy, and suggest you go for several initial hour long sessions, a week or two apart, to locate your muscular and joint issues and slowly correct them, then do maintenance visits on a regular basis. ( A warning, these sessions can be painful briefly as they find trigger points etc.) You can ask friends, who may use LMTs, to help you locate a very experienced one that they like, and who has a practice which addresses work and sports related issues.
Cheers,
Michael W. O’Brien
the use of power to rough cut then hand work. I do have a worm drive skill saw at the school for long rip cuts.
So true. The older I get, the more balance makes sense. Thanks for sharing this.
Thanks Chris. I very much enjoy hand tool woodworking as a hobby. I’ve wondered how long my body will allow certain repetitive operations. Luckily, as a hobby woodworker, the hours per day aren’t that much. I do notice aches and pains if I spend a lot of time hand mortising or making long housing dados. I have been saving for a band saw, dust collector, and lunch box planer. I can certainly do it by hand but it’s not fun and take a long time relative to the hours per week I can woodwork. What I have been doing the past three or so years is buying S3S or S4S wood as a starting point. It costs double or triple what I can get the rough saw wood for but it saves me a lot of work. Even after getting the machine tools, I still may purchase S3S wood. Luckily I am at a point in my life where I can afford this expense.
Related and unrelated to this, I have been using my shotgun weekly for the past 15 years to shoot clay targets (trap, skeet, sporting clays, etc). It’s a lot of fun and I am in a league (stopped bowling leagues in my 30s as my hand would hurt too much after three games and I couldn’t find a way to alter the ball, etc to stop it hurting). Up until about two years ago I was using my inexpensive reliable pump shotgun and I was competitive with it and I really like it. I started having pains in my left elbow and I thought it was an ergo issue from changing jobs and the new desk set up. After about a year or more of working with ergo expert at work, my doctor, and eventually a physical therapist, we figured out it wasn’t the work set up but rather the weekly repetitive use of my pump shotgun. I had reached an age where I simply couldn’t use it week in and week out anymore. I was very sad about this. Not because of the expense but having used that one shotgun weekly for 15 years, it was without a doubt my favorite “tool”. I personally think what makes something our favorite tools is frequency of use and a deep familiarity of the tool. I ended up switching over to a semi-auto shotgun. The older fellas in the league (in their 60s and 70s) all chuckled. They had the same thing happen to them around my age and that is why they were all shooting either semi-autos or over unders.
Your point about people passing machine prep off as hand prep reminds me of a particular well-known woodworker. He doesn’t say that he preps by hand (he buys his lumber S4S), but his attitude toward hand tool usage could easily lead to many people in his audience believing that he does.
” I am humbled by the repetitive stress injuries that come from brute-force jack-planing, mortising and ripping.”
Working with sensitivity instead of brute-force (No benefit to nail the chisel in the mortise).
Sharpening very often. Letting the saw do the work.
Alternating tasks as P. Follansbee suggest.
Reconsidering the workbench height. There is an interesting study:
Google “The ergonomics and design of an inclusive best-fit solution to workbenches”. The second part addresses able bodied persons. It examines pain not only in the back but also neck, elbow, wrist, shoulder, …
I often forget to do it, but making stretching exercises after the effort is also helping to avoid “having pain in every part of the body” the next day.
What did the studysay about bench height?
about 15 cm under elbow height (with shoes on)
Oh yes, the sore elbows. Just hand planed a couple of workbenches tops a few days ago, and thank god I made them out of a spruce, pine, fir mix. Even then, it hurt for a day afterwords. I’m glad I have machines to do the milling work, and then I enjoy doing the fine joinery with quiet and satisfying hand tools. Good post.
Machinery is not limited to stationary “boat anchors” like jointers and tables saws. There’s also a bunch of hand held power tools like the Fein multitool, Makita ribbon sander, Arbortech turbo plane, Festool joinery, and more being used by woodworkers. The technology is impressive and the innovations never cease. I don’t know if using these tools cheating? or a just way for tool companies to market the latest gizmo. What ever the case, it’s a growing market and something to consider when choosing your tools.
Fantastic Post Chris! As a professional violist and teacher, I deal with repetetive stress injury every day. String instruments are repetetive stress injuries waiting to happen. The way we use our bodies woodworking vs playing an instrument are different, but the principles are the same. Here are some rules of thumb that so far have kept me from having any serious repetetive stress injuries. 1) Take frequent breaks: 5 minutes break per 20 minutes of work. Don’t go over 1hr 30 minutes without taking at least 15 minutes break. There’s a reason most union orchestras require at least a 15 minute break be taken no longer than 1 hr 15 minutes into the rehearsal. 2) Look for the most natural ways to move and position your body. 3) Stay in the middle range of motion. Joints are like hinges. They have a range of motion. Your wrist has 2 axis. One with about 180 degrees and the other about 20 degrees. DON’T use your wrist sideways (20 degree). Middle range of motion for the wrist: put a straight edge on your forearm that will touch your knuckles, wrist, and elbow. 4) If it hurts, you’re doing something wrong. Experement and look for another way. 5) Watchout for excess tension in your body (usually gripping tools). We often hold things far tighter than necessary. 6) Get gravity working for you, not against you.
I don’t doubt anyone’s accounts of aches pains or injury but I get a bit confused because it seems that the assessment of bodily damage can depend on the context. So if somebody works in construction they may perceive the physical strain as doing cumulative harm to their body, while somebody who works in an office but spends an hour or more per day at the gym will see that physical stress as adding to their fitness. I would really like to read about what ergonomics and physiology experts have to say. Also what do some of the more renowned hand-tool purists like Follansbee or Underhill have say about this?
B. Howell: The biggest difference is the amount/hours spent at the same activity and your ability to take breaks when you want/need. An hour 3 or 4 times a week at the gym, playing an instrument, or woodworking as a hobby is very different from spending 4-10 hours doing the same activity over and over again day after day. As an example, a string player (violin, viola, cello, bass) can easily move their arm back and forth 10,000 times or more in 1 hour of playing (not an exageration). Now multiply that by 4-10 hours and you’ll see why it’s called “repetetive stress injury.” In principle, working out at the gym, or the construction site, or the workshop is the same given the same length of time. A pro has a need to get the work done to eat. A hobbiest can go do something else at the first sign of fatigue.
Hello, I’m a retired Operating Room Nurse. If I had a nickel for every OR case of a mangled limb as a result of terminal stupidity (“Don’t bother me! I know what I’m doing!!”) I could take my wife (“She Who Must Be Obeyed”) out to dinner once a month until she puts poison in my morning coffee. By the way, I managed to transect my Left Radial Artery when a circular saw kicked back on me, and yes, I was using it incorrectly. DONT BOTHER ME! I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!!
Thank you Chris. I didn’t get into WW until about 25 years ago and at 78 I just can’t do (physically) what I could 25 years ago. I have been a follower of yours since you time at PWW and enjoy every moment of watching your hand wood work. Forget trying to use a handsaw (24, 26 inch) but I love and endure a good back saw or Japanese saw for small cuts. Most of my work is on machines because as you say I love working with wood and am humbled by the result regardless of the method. Thank you for helping me to validate my machine work.
Things aren’t supposed to hurt all the time? I can’t remember what normal knees are supposed to feel like.
I’m up for pretty much anything woodworking related. But those magnificent bastards that use treadle or spring pole lathes can keep them. I’d rather pull my own teeth than use one of those things.
My daily grind is mostly topping cardboard boxes, and occasional breakcase pallet jack picking in a warehouse… long ago I had a bout with my tendons in the ol’ canal tunnel… carpels adjacent sibling. I found my long-term solution in reducing the heavy impact and over aggresive tearing motions of literally ripping the boxes open … turning to a more refined safety razor technique which eventually skilled up to matching the speed, if not overtaking the former method. The key is to keep the razor sharp. (The short-term solution was a brace to limit motion, and nsaids to reduce inflamation… which took 6 weeks to fully heal.) If your plane isn’t sharp… you are asking for trouble. Be mindful of that blade… feel it all the way through… you can tell when it’s dull.
The back still gives me trouble in my neck of all places… massage therapist when it doesn’t get better. Tore up a rib planing a couple years ago… not much you can do about that.
Hello all, it’s not just power tools that can cause medical problems. I was always ready to lend a hand to friends for DIY projects. Most of the time it involved rough, as opposed to finish carpentry…framing hammer. I started developing numbness and tingling right hand 4th and 5th fingers. Long story short, Right Ulnar Nerve Compression. Right Ulnar Nerve Decompression. Surgery under local, missed 4 weeks work. I don’t know of anything that would mediate the problem… maybe use a nail gun (as an Operating Room Nurse I once had a case where a guy shot a nail from a nail gun through his foot.) Sometimes there is no easy solution. Common sense helps, though.
I love the idea of hand work and for small projects that provides a modicum of exercise and a great deal of satisfaction. But when needed the machine speeds things up because I do not have to struggle physically with the demands of the hand tools. At 77 I’d rather use whatever means necessary to do the job than be defeated by a silly desire for hand wrought perfection.
Yes, I sure sometimes wish I had space for machines in my tiny carport workshop. I have a little Dewalt table saw I sometimes pull out for long rips — like for my anarchist’s workbench I built last year (and then I skipped the thicknessing step altogether and used Elmer’s Wood Glue Max to laminate the parts). But ironically the Dewalt couldn’t handle the 8/4 red oak I used for a long sitting bench and I ended up ripping it with a 4 tpi kobiki!
I guess I must be the old guy he describes. Still in the shop every day, 45 years later. The litany of aging body issues that goes along with a lifetime of timber framing, log building, and cabinet and furniture making is ridiculous, from sore back to hands so cramped up I have to use one to open the other in the morning. My machines are all old, unisaws from the 1950’s, powermatic joiner from the 40’s…. Shaper, planer from about the same time, etc. They become after while familiar old friends and maintaining and repairing them is almost as much fun as building a walnut buffet. I guess if they can keep cutting, so can I. Still have all my fingers, still cut damn good dovetails, and still look forward to getting to the shop in the morning. I have a grandson coming along now. Who knows, maybe he’ll have sawdust in his veins too. There are a lot of things in this world worse than that
Chris: I thoroughly enjoyed the relating of your history with wood working and the effects on your body. I have quietly followed your WW for the past 20 years plus (with the exception of sending you a joke at PWW), which gave you a good laugh at the time. Equally informative and enjoyable has been the feedback from readers on the physical issues they have experienced and how they dealt with or avoid experiencing them. When we think of repetitive strain injuries (RSI). few of us connect these with our “non work” activities, however we need to remind ourselves that whether at work, enjoying our sports activities, or woodworking, we can still suffer from RSI if we do not take into consideration the long term effects of these actions on our bodies and make the time available to
take the steps necessary to avoid suffering them.
I don’t think I’ll ever get to those repetitive injuries, as a weekend warrior. IMHO it’s a good practice to make some stuff from scratch at least once, it’s a great excercise in planning and planing ahead. But ever since I got an access to some big and beefy planer of a friend (a real woodworker) I can simply… make more stuff, with any wood species.
Thanks for this. When I first read The Anarchists Workbench I admit I was temporarily put off when you said I should use a power planer and jointer to prep the stock, not for romantic reasons but for financial ones. I wanted to believe I could enjoy building things out of wood with the few hand tools I found on eBay and I was reluctant to “waste” limited funds and shop space on machines I didn’t love using. Well, I still don’t love using my power planer but I do love that it saves me from doing time consuming and exhausting tasks that keep me from the parts of woodworking I most enjoy. Best purchase I could have made.
I am a professional gardener and am starting to rethink how I do that kind of work as my body ages, so I appreciate that you’re thinking about the same for your work and how your example impacts those of us who are learning from you. This is a really important thing for us to be talking about.
I’m with you here on the mixed-handtool-and-machine, but I’ve gotta toss out a counterexample: the cupboard that Peter Follansbee wrote today he has finished. He started about 13 months ago with oak logs and did all the work in a shop with no electricity.
https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2022/03/12/now-what/
As much work as that was, I don’t think his project counts as a “ridiculous situation”. I’ve certainly enjoyed following it, as I expect you have. It’s also less ridiculous because he got paid to do it that way…
I learned a new word today and that I am not the only one suffering from “planers elbow.”
Chris,
This post resonates more than usual with me for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, I really appreciate your refusal to declare your own choices the one true path to woodworking happiness, and instead see them and present then for what they are: your choices; while acknowledging that for others the equilibrium may be found elsewhere on the machine/hand tool continuum. For as long as I can remember, no matter what the subject, it has always grated on me to hear people (trying to) justify their own choices by dismissing those of others. And I just love those inverted commas around the word “authentic”, a concept that (almost) always makes my mind itch because, when push comes to actual shove, it is basically meaningless.
And even though I have many (many, many) miles less than you on my woodworking odometer, though three years your senior, I alas already know to my cost that hand tool work is not necessarily kind to ones body. About a year ago, a ten-day period of very intensive conversion by hand of rough lumber into S4S stock for the legs of my workbench left me with a low-level but chronic inflammation in the joints of both hands. A couple of different treatments has gotten it to an acceptable level, where I can still use my hands fully and freely, including for playing an instrument, but it certainly brought home to me the importance in taking care of my body if I want to be able to go on using it for as long as possible (and I sure do want that!).
So while I’m still at the stage where I do much (most) stock processing by hand, because I do not (yet) own the machines to help me out (and have found the ready-milled lumber easily available to me to be of insufficient quality to be worth the extra cost), on my shopping list is most definitely a larger (than my current 10″ one) bandsaw, a planer and in all likelihood also a jointer. Not only will these save on personal wear and tear, they will also save time in a way that will make it considerably more likely that I will actually get to build at least a fair proportion of the projects that I have lined up in my mind.
That said, I am also happy to acknowledge that the many hundreds of hours of processing stock by hand that I have put in over the last couple of years have indeed thaught me a lot, and although I still see myself as too much of a neophyte to be entirely comfortable with applying the term skill to my efforts, it has at least made me rather more skillful than I was – and that I do indeed enjoy, even if my hands need a bit of warm-up in the morning!
Cheers,
Mattias
Great article Chris. I feel your pain. After 40+ years as a carpenter/woodworker, building homes and various commercial buildings, the muscles don’t want to work like they used to.
A personal question…do you still have the Libella I made for the Secret Santa swap several years ago? If so, would it be too much trouble to ask if you could send me a photo of it? Thanks.
In my late 20s I spent four years working on guitars, all day, six days a week. Some things you just can’t use power tools for. After two years of replacing frets, sanding fretboards and finish touchups my hands were claws. Every night I slept with my hands palm down on my chest to keep them open. I feel your pain. Oh and making custom plexiglass router templates ‘just in case I need one like this again’ is pretty much obligatory 🙂
Consider your machines to be your apprentices and have them do the grunt work.