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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
