Shopmate Megan Fitzpatrick has watched me build 40 or 50 chairs during the last five years I’ve been working in my Covington workshop. As a result, she often jokes that she could probably teach chairmaking – even though she’s never finished building a stick chair.
So when she started checking over the construction drawings for “The Stick Chair Book,” she said something a bit alarming.
“Watching you build a chair makes it look easy,” she said. “These drawings make it look difficult.”
At first, I thought that perhaps my construction drawings were too detailed, too overwhelming or too… I don’t know. I looked them over and concluded that they were about right. They showed every important dimension and angle – no more. Plus, they communicated how the pieces fit together.
So what was the problem?
I think there’s a disconnect between how I build chairs in the shop and how I communicate that information to others.
Put another way: I could describe how to create an impressionist painting with information on brushes and paint mixing and approaching the canvas. Or I could give you a canvas with a paint-by-numbers scheme all set up for you – green here in area No. 12. And light blue in area No. 35.
Both approaches result in an impressionist painting. But which is better?
The answers is: I don’t know. For the last 25 years of my life, I have described to others how to build furniture using pictures and words – plus 15 years of teaching woodworking classes. And I have found that people learn differently. Some woodworkers need a detailed drawing that shows every relevant dimension and angle. Others need a rough sketch on a napkin with a few overall numbers.
In the end, both woodworkers can arrive at the same destination: A well-built piece with grace and beauty.
This book is an attempt to explore both approaches. The first 400 pages describe the operations involved in making stick chairs. For some woodworkers, this is all that is needed. Other woodworkers need to start with the mechanical drawings and then figure out the operations – the next 200 pages of the book. Neither approach is superior.
If you are bewildered by the mechanical drawings, skip them. If you are frustrated by the “that’s close enough” disclaimers, ignore them. Stick chairs can be built by engineers, potheads and pothead engineers.
So how does my brain work? When you take on the job of a translator, as I have, you have to embrace both sides. Accuracy and spontaneity are the angel and devil that sit on each shoulder. It’s a familiar fight in publishing. On one shoulder is the sober editor. The other has the drunken writer.
When I make tools, I can fuss over .0005”. When I design chairs, I wonder “does this rake and splay look like a jumping spider or a squashed squirrel?”
But I don’t expect (or encourage) you to become a human corpus callosum. Instead, take what you can from any book and leave the rest behind. Most of all, don’t get discouraged by the detailed measurements in the drawings or the vagaries in the text.
Or, as John Brown put it: “By all means read what the experts have to say. Just don’t let it get in the way of your woodworking.”
Before you can begin traversing with your jack plane, you should bevel off the far edge of the board with a few good strokes of your jack plane. This bevel reduces the “spelching” on that edge. (Spelching is the fun English word for “splintering.”)
The following is excerpted from “The Joiner & Cabinetmaker,” by Anonymous, Christopher Schwarz and Joel Moskowitz (this section is by Schwarz). J&C is a short book written in 1839 by an anonymous tradesman; it tells the fictional tale of Thomas, a lad of 13 or 14 who is apprenticed to a rural shop that builds everything from built-ins to more elaborate veneered casework. It was written to guide young people who might be considering a life in the joinery or cabinetmaking trades, focusing on how apprentices could obtain the basic skills needed to work in a hand-tool shop. However, this is not a book for children. It is a book for anyone exploring hand-tool woodworking. In it, Thomas builds three projects during the course of his journey in the book, and there is enough detail in the text and illustrations to re-create these three projects just as they were built in 1839.
In addition to the complete original text, you’ll find an historical snapshot of early 19th-century England by Moskowitz, chapters on the hand-tool construction of the three projects (a Packing Box, a dovetailed Schoolbox and a Chest of Drawers) by Schwarz and complete construction drawings.
Plus, there’s an audiobook available of the original 1839 text, read by none other than Roy Underhill!
Before traversing a panel, check the panel using the edge of your plane, which is a fairly good straightedge. If the panel is cupped across its width (typically on the bark side of a board), then the work should be fairly easy to accomplish. If the board is crowned in the middle (typically on the heart side of a board), you need to watch what you are doing. Sometimes traversing and diagonal strokes aren’t enough to flatten a crowned surface.
Flattening Panels With Planes With the glue dry, it’s time to flatten one face of all of your panels. Thomas begins with the jack plane then moves to the trying plane, yet the details of the operation are sketchy in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Early workshop practice was to use the jack plane (sometimes called the fore plane) across the grain of a panel. This operation, which Joesph Moxon called “traversing” in his “Mechanick Exercises” of 1678, allows you to remove a good deal of deal without tearing the grain too deeply. Working the grain diagonally in both directions allows you to get the board fairly flat – Thomas checks the board with a straightedge as he works, which is always a good idea.
Traversing is a powerful hand-tool technique. You can remove a lot of material quickly and make the board flatter than when you began.
Diagonal strokes, as shown here, allow more of the plane’s sole to touch the panel. After some overlapping, you’ll find the panel is pretty flat once you can take a shaving from every point on the board.
Note: When you work at 45° to the grain of a panel, you will typically see more tearing in one direction than in the other. This is normal. Just make sure you finish your diagonal strokes in the direction that produces less tearing. Determining when a board is flat can be a challenge. After some practice, you learn to tell by the way your planes respond when dressing the panel. The shavings become consistent in thickness, width and length all along the board. A straightedge can help. So can winding sticks, which aren’t mentioned in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Check the panel using the wooden straightedge. Look for light as you hold the tool diagonally one way, then the other. Work the remaining high spots using the jack plane until the panel is close to flat.
Winding sticks are two identical sticks that are longer than the board is wide. They are placed at several points across the width of the board and compared by eye. When the panel is twisted, the sticks aren’t parallel. And because they are longer than the board is wide, they exaggerate any wind.
Then dress the panel using the trying plane (sometimes called a jointer). I use diagonal strokes first. Then I finish up with strokes that follow the grain of the panel.
The author of “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” has a novel solution: Compare your panel to a known flat panel. If your panel rocks on the flat one, it’s in wind. Of course, the trick is getting that first panel flat. It’s possible to create two panels that are in wind but don’t rock on one another – the high spots of one panel nest into the low spots of the other and result in a false reading.
The top panel is flat. By placing it on top of the panel I am working and trying to rock the panel at the corners, I can test for wind. You do have to be careful here. Sometimes you can miss a problem when you have one low corner but the three other corners are coplanar. Keep a sharp eye.
However, once you get one panel flat, the method explained in the book works well.
Dressing Panels to Identical Thickness With all six panels flat on one face, it’s time to dress the mates to the same thickness. The exact dimension isn’t important (3/4″, 13/16″ etc.). What you seek is to get all the parts you are going to dovetail together (the sides and ends) to the same thickness. Then you want to get the bottom in the neighborhood of 1/2″ thick. And with the top you want to get it flat and clean. Then stop.
With your marking gauge set to the thinnest area on your sides and ends, scribe this finished thickness on all four edges of all four boards.
Any other work past this point isn’t necessary and will wear you out. Remember: Few people experience furniture through their dial calipers. If it looks good, it is good.
Gather up your sides and ends and look for the thinnest area on these four boards. Set your marking gauge to that thickness and scribe that thickness on all four edges of all four boards. Then use your jack plane (first plane across the grain then work diagonally) to work that second face almost to that scribed line. Then use your trying plane to finish the job.
To thickness the top and bottom pieces, simply find the thinnest area on each and scribe that thickness all around. This should be quick work because you don’t have to get four boards to agree.
Squaring Panels by Hand There are a number of ways to get your sides and ends to the correct length. They all involve sawing them close to the finished length then shooting them to their final length with a plane.
Rip teeth (at the bottom of the photo) are filed straight across and are fairly upright. The crosscut teeth at top have their front cutting surfaces filed at an angle (this is called “fleam”) and the teeth lean back a little bit (this means the rake has been relaxed).
When Thomas built the Packing Box, he used a handsaw to cut the boards to length and a smoothing plane to dress the ends square enough for a rough box. However, here Thomas uses a large backsaw to make the crosscut and guides his plane with a shooting board, one of the essential jigs in a hand-tool shop.
Let’s talk about these tools and jigs. Thomas employs a sash saw to cut the sides and ends to length. Despite the name, sash saws weren’t used only by woodworkers who made windows. The sash saw, as described by Charles Holtzapffel, has a sawplate that is 14″ to 16″ long and has 11 points per inch.
Of course, a modern woodworker with some knowledge of saws would ask: So is it a rip saw or a crosscut saw? The answer isn’t simple. Woodworking books of the early 19th century don’t make distinctions between saws with ripping teeth (zero rake and zero fleam) and those with crosscutting teeth (15° rake and 20° fleam is typical).
In one corner are woodworking historians who say that if fleam isn’t mentioned, it didn’t exist. So they sharpen all their saws for ripping and have to jump through a few hoops to make clean crosscuts.
In the other corner are woodworkers who say that fleam likely existed. In my mind, the evidence of this is found in the shop. If you work only with rip saws, you end up preparing the line you intend to cut by adding a trough made with a chisel. This trench prevents tearing. However, preparing the work with a chisel isn’t mentioned routinely in the early texts. So either they had some other unmentioned way of dealing with spelching created by a rip tooth, or they were smart enough to add a little fleam to their saws to make them cut more smoothly. Or perhaps they just planed away the torn-out areas, which is what Thomas does in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker.”
Or perhaps the hand-filing created a little fleam that made the saws cut a little cleaner. No matter how hard I try, I can’t file a saw with zero fleam – it always gets a little fleam as a result of hand sharpening.
For this book, I worked with both sorts of saws. I have a sash saw that is filed rip and one that is filed crosscut. Both are hand-filed. So the rip-tooth sash saw actually has a little fleam and the crosscut tooth has a little more fleam.
This British-made sash saw has 11 points and is filed for crosscutting. It does a superb job that requires little clean-up on a shooting board with a plane.
In truth, if I had to have only one sash saw I would be hard-pressed to choose its configuration. When it came to crosscutting parts to size, the crosscut sash saw really shined. The cuts were clean and required almost no clean-up. The rip sash, however, was much easier to use when cutting tenons (a joint that comes up in the final project). The rip sash tracked better in a rip cut, and it was faster.
Here is the result from using my crosscut sash saw. I worked only to a pencil line (you can see it faintly on the top of the board). This cut will require only one or two strokes with a plane to true it up and there is almost no raggedness left behind. One last detail: Part of this is skill, so if your cuts don’t look like this from the get-go don’t blame the saw. A steady hand and a smooth stroke contribute a lot to the result.
If I had to make a recommendation on what sort of saw to buy, I’d buy a rip sash saw with about 10 or 11 points. And I’d buy a 6″ double extra-slim-taper saw file and a Stanley 42X saw set. Then use the saw for both crosscutting and ripping and get to know it. Then try sharpening it with a little more fleam and relax the rake until it does a fair job for the work you do. This saw might not be optimized for ripping or crosscutting, but it will allow you to use only one saw.
By the way, this is a common compromise in the realm of the power saw – the carbide teeth of combination blades are ground to handle both crosscuts and rips and do a passable job. There’s no reason you cannot find this same middle ground with a hand-powered saw.
On the Shooting Board Shooting boards mystify beginning woodworkers. These workshop appliances are much like a bench hook for sawing. They have a fence that you brace the work against. They have a bed for supporting the work. They usually have a hook on the front edge of the appliance that hooks over the front edge of your workbench. And they usually have a track that your handplane runs in.
The bench hook and the shooting board are so similar that I sometimes use my shooting board for sawing. There is one primary disadvantage to this approach – you can see a little more tearing on the underside of your board when sawing – but this is minor.
The fence of a basic shooting board needs to be at a right angle to the track that the plane rides in. Also, I think it’s best to have the fence about 1″ thick; that way you’ll be able to dress 1″ stock without tearing out the far edge. Finally, the fence should not be slick. At the least, don’t apply any finish to the fence. At best, cover the fence with some sticky-back sandpaper (the specific grit is irrelevant). You will be surprised by how this makes the shooting board easier to use.
The bed of a shooting board should be wide enough to handle the stock you typically deal with (and then some). My bed has about 14″ of working surface. This allows me to deal with 12″-wide stock and have some room to start my handplane on the track without it tipping. I don’t apply finish to my shooting boards (except to the track), but it won’t hurt to apply a coat of boiled linseed oil to the bed if you please.
The shooting board’s hook is fastened below the bed. It doesn’t have any special characteristics. Usually I just use some of the same size stock I used for the fence.
The track, however, needs special attention. It needs to be wide enough for the sidewall of the handplane you plan to use for shooting – my track is about 4″ wide. The track trips up a lot of first-time users because they don’t understand how the plane won’t eat up the edge of the adjacent bed.
A typical bench plane for a shooting board (which is a jack or a try) has some metal by the side of the mouth aperture that’s usually about 1/8″ to 3/16″ wide. It’s this little land of metal that prevents the plane from chewing up your shooting board into oblivion. The first time you use the shooting board, your plane will rabbet away a little bit of the bed, then you’ll never cut the bed again (unless you increase the cut of the plane).
I think it goes without saying that you should never use a rabbeting plane or shoulder plane on a shooting board. Those will indeed eat your bed for breakfast.
I apply a little paste wax to the track to keep the planes running smoothly. It’s the only maintenance required – except for occasionally confirming that the fence is true.
Using a Shooting Board Before you trim up your panels for the Schoolbox, I recommend a little practice on some scrap pine first. Shooting boards require a little skill to use. Here is how I do it to get good results. First realize that the far end of your cut is going to get a little spelched. That just happens. You have three ways of getting around this: You can chisel a little 45° bevel on the far corner to prevent the spelching. You can plane that far corner first with a few short strokes on the shooting board to relieve that area. Or you can plan for the spelching – leave a little extra width so you can remove the spelching with a couple long-grain passes on that far edge when you are done.
A shooting board and a sharp plane result in a square, ready-to-finish end-grain surface. Plus, you can adjust the length of your boards in .001″ increments. Try that with a chop saw.
Position your board so that the knife or pencil line is right on the edge of the bed and allow the waste to hang over the track. Press the work against your fence with your off-hand. Then grasp the plane’s sidewall with your dominant hand. This hand has three jobs: Hold the plane against the track, push the plane forward and keep the plane in the cut.
This is where the skill comes in. You need to find the right combination of down, forward and inward forces to create a straight edge. The hardest part is figuring out how much pressure you need to apply to hold the plane in the cut. Too much force and your work will slide away on the fence. Too little and the plane will skitter across the end grain without cutting.
That’s why I like a plane with a sharp iron and lots of mass for shooting. Those two characteristics make it easier to keep the handplane in the cut.
Keep moving the plane forward and back until it stops cutting. Check your work. If you hit your line, you’re done. Otherwise, move the board a bit and shoot some more.
What is interesting about the description of shooting in “The Joiner and Cabinet Maker” is that Thomas starts shooting with a jack plane to remove the roughness of the saw. Then he follows up by shooting with his trying plane.
I have two theories here: Either Thomas has a rip sash saw that has torn out the grain, or Thomas isn’t all that good a sawyer yet. If the latter is true, Thomas had better start making some more practice joints because the next section has a good deal of sawing in it.
Hand-carved letters. These are way more work than routed letters, but so graceful and elegant. The craftsman’s touch is clearly in evidence.
The following is excerpted from “Shaker Inspiration,” by Christian Becksvoort.
There is a misconception among some woodworkers that working with hand tools only is better, or downright holy, while power tools are pedestrian, not real woodworking, and should be avoided. Not so. It depends on what your aim is. Is this a hobby, or are you doing this for a living? (More on this in Chapter 8.) I think that the British craftsman, professor and philosopher David Pye best puts it in more understandable terms. There is a sharp distinction between what he calls the “manufacture of risk” and the “manufacture of certainty.” The manufacture of risk means that a tool, guided by hand, whether powered or not, introduces risk. It is totally dependent on the skill of the user. On the other hand, the manufacture of certainty guarantees an identical outcome each time. When I carve cherry chair seats, I use an electric grinder with carbide cutters. The depth, proportion, shape and symmetry of the seat are determined by my hand-eye coordination. One slip and the seat is toast. Using a scorp is also the manufacture of risk, only slower, with less chance of making a major mistake.
To all you smug woodworkers out there: Not all hand-tool work involves risk. Some actually involves the manufacture of certainty; the results are guaranteed to be identical, each time. When using a straightedge and knife to make a cut, the cut will be straight every time (unless you let go of the straightedge). There are even folks making hand-cut dovetails and using clamp-on, magnetic dovetail guides. Come on, who are you fooling? Each cut is pre-determined and will be identical. Where is the fun and skill in that? Freehand is cheaper – no jigs, templates or gadgets. That’s where skill and practice lead to craftsmanship. Dovetail jigs are merely a crutch.
I think that one of the best examples is carving. There are still lots of carvers who use traditional carving chisels. All hand work – the manufacture of risk. However, more and more carvers, especially in the competitive world of bird carving, are using electric hand carvers, wheels, burrs and diamond bits. It’s still hand guided, and one slip results in disaster – also clearly the manufacture of risk. The source of power, be it muscle or electric, is inconsequential. I couldn’t run my business without my jointer, planer, drill press, lathe (although I used to turn knobs on the drill press before I acquired a lathe), mortiser or table saw. Ripping 40′ (12.2m) of cherry moulding with a handsaw is not my idea of a good time, therapy or craftsmanship. To me, that’s monkey work. If you get off on that, more power to you.
So what makes craftsmanship special? I maintain that it is evidence of the human hand. Yes, there will be mistakes. No one is 100-percent perfect (that’s why I own a SawStop). The Navajos professed that there is no such thing as perfect work, and all their rugs and pottery had an asymmetrical error of one sort or another. I’ve never turned out a perfect piece, yet I strive for perfection each time I come into the shop. What constitutes evidence of the human hand? Small mistakes, certainly. But they have to be nearly invisible. Large mistakes are just another growth and learning opportunity. They need to be fixed, rectified or replaced. Examples of the human hand? Hand-carved letters will never be as perfect as routed ones, but they are by far more elegant. Chair spindles, tapered with block plane or spokeshave, reveal minute facets but appear round. Chair seats, carved with grinder or scorp, will always have slight irregularities. Hopefully, they’re not noticeable, but they are present. Pins or through-tenons that are trimmed with a chisel are not perfect. I’ve even had the surprising pleasure of restoring a Shaker desk only to discover that the tenons were slightly chamfered, hidden inside of a mortise. That, ladies and gentlemen, is craftsmanship.
A few random thoughts on tools in general. Buy the best, and buy only once. Early in my career, I had a set of those blue-handled chisels, six for $39. When I started working full-time, banging dovetails all day, I discovered that I had to re-sharpen at least once or twice a day. At the end of a few weeks, that’s four to five wasted hours (I got to be really good at freehand sharpening, though). Even at a reliably low per hour shop rate, at the end of two weeks I could save enough to afford a set of Lie-Nielsen Toolworks chisels. Now I can do two or three large cherry case pieces before having to pull out the waterstones. What about used and antique tools? Those can be a real find and a real bargain. On the other hand, if it takes two or three days of shop time to fix, restore and tune a bargain plane to get the rust pits out, it might be better time-wise to buy new. If you enjoy fixing tools that’s one thing, but if you’d rather spend time working wood, then choose the other option.
It has also been my observation that a skilled craftsman with minimal and humble tools can do a much better job than someone with no or minimal skills and great tools. It’s all in how your implements are used. I recall that when Brian Boggs started making chairs, he cut his mortises with a sharpened screwdriver. His chairs were, and still are, masterpieces. Incidentally, he’s the only woodworker I’ve bought furniture from. His chairs are the perfect combination of thoughtful design, ergonomics and meticulous craftsmanship.
Chair spindles shaped with block plane and spokeshave. These reveal subtle signs of the handmade. The spindles are air-dried and rived, so the grain runs top to bottom.
CNC & 3D Printing It seems that our world is awash in consumer glut. Gadgets, products and devices that were once considered luxuries are today available to the masses. Decades ago, portable phones were naught but a pipe dream. Now, two-thirds of the population on this planet use and enjoy them. And in two years, they will be obsolete and need replacement. Mass production, on a scale never imaginable, has made it all possible. I agree that every human should be able to live a satisfying life, but where does it end? Walk into a big box store, and most everything you see there will be in the landfill in about five years. Is that sustainable?
Where exactly does craftsmanship end and mass production start? Anything perfectly reproducible, be it one, 10 or a million copies, is mass production. That’s where I see 3D printers. Some schools used to have craft areas, but now the latest is a “maker space.” Many of these don’t actually let you make anything; instead gadgets can be re-built or re-purposed, and the latest widgets are spit out by a 3D printer. Granted, the future of 3D printing is unfathomable, especially in science, medicine and machinery. But in crafts? Yes, coding and programming are skills, but you are not making an object. Press a button and the machine makes the object. Is that craft? The same can be said for CNC production. Every piece perfect. Every piece identical. It’s the ultimate manufacture of certainty. It’s just the ticket if you’re making kitchen cabinets, or have a line of furniture that you want to sell, but not make. Every piece identical, with no sign of the human hand. Just mass-produced. Is that why we are woodworkers? Is that what craft is evolving into? I suppose the same gripe was aired when Linotype machines cast lead letters as you typed. Who remembers Linotype? We’ll see where it all leads us.
One place that it’s led us: The word “custom” is now completely meaningless. You order your new Mercedes, in that beautiful metallic pearl color, with the engine size you specify, the sound system that you desire and a few other trendy options. That’s custom, right? Yup – there are 2,384 cars identical to your baby out on the road. In a world of increasing conformity, however, I think there will always be a perceptive and discriminating few who will in fact value the individually handcrafted piece. In my business at least, I know most of my clients value having something handmade, by me, that no one else has. They appreciate the finer things: art and craft. Let’s face it – only one person (or institution) can have the original “Mona Lisa,” but anyone can have a print. What’s the difference? You decide.
Please note that I’m not bad-mouthing mass-production. All of humanity needs a place to sit, a table to eat at and a bed to sleep in. Individually built furniture will never fill that need. The axe I’m grinding concerns those folks who buy pre-turned chair legs, pre-turned spindles, have their chair seats CNC-carved, then have the whole thing assembled by a minimum-wage employee, and sell the finished product as a “handcrafted” chair. Does that pass your straight face test? Is that your definition of craftsmanship?
In the long run, you decide what type of business you’ll operate, and exactly how you’ll make it work. And consumers will decide what they want to purchase: a big screen TV or a hand-made cabinet.
Last week we made a short (14 seconds!) promotional video about “The Anarchist’s Workbench” for Facebook and Instagram. In the video we mentioned the bench required only about $430 in construction lumber.
When we posted the video this morning, the first comment out of the gate was about how our price was wrong because the price of lumber has skyrocketed.
No, the $430 price is correct – using Home Depot prices from May 2021.
The bench requires:
Nine 2 x 12 x 8’s for the benchtop. Each 2×12 is $25.12. That’s $226.08
For the undercarriage, you need three 2 x 12 x 12’s and three 2 x 10 x 10’s. The 2 x 12s are $41.45 each ($124.35). The 2 x 10s are $19.13 each ($57.39).
Add up the subtotals, and you get $407.82. I then threw in another $20 for good measure.
Yes, lumber prices have gone up. Those 2 x 12 x 8’s were $8.81 each when I built the bench in 2020. But the bench is still a bargain to build, especially when you compare yellow pine to maple.
And the book itself is still a bargain. The pdf is still 100 percent free. Go here, and you’ll find a link to download the pdf. You don’t have to register, give up your email or anything. Just click and download.
The snarky comment on the video didn’t ruin my day. It had already been ruined by the bird that crapped on my shoulder when I went outside to fetch the morning paper.
Above is all the wood in mid-prep for seven “Anarchist’s tool chests.” The lid panels and carcase front/back and ends still need to be cut to final width and length. I’m excited to soon be teaching again…but just looking at this picture makes me tired!
I don’t make many unequivocal statements, but here’s one: Some non-stringy species of white pine is the correct wood for a tool chest. And if you can get it, choose sugar pine or Eastern white pine. These are lightweight woods that are easy to work with hand tools, and they are typically less expensive in the U.S. than any hardwood, with the possible exception of poplar. And while poplar will work for a tool chest – as will any wood, really – it’s heavy and harder to dovetail than pine. And that will make your tool chest heavier than it needs to be.
Fully loaded, a sugar pine “Anarchist’s Tool Chest” weighs in the neighborhood of 200-225 lbs. (The hardware and choice of wood for tills and other interior bits will affect the weight, as, of course, will the specific tools inside.)
And while I’ve never weighed a pine Dutch tool chest fully loaded, I used to work out of a poplar one while teaching on the road, and I had a heck of a time lifting it in and out of my car. So I’m keeping one of the pine ones I’m building right now to make my peripatetic woodworking life just a little easier.
For the tool chest classes I teach here, I do my best to source beautiful, clear sugar pine, which is typically available in wide widths – the fewer pieces in panel glue-ups, the better. But every once in a while, someone will ask if they can prep their own wood for a class – and it’s usually for the anarchist’s tool chest class – the one for which the wood prep is the most demanding and most critical that it be good. I say sure…but you darn well better do a good job of it. A) I won’t have time during the class to fix any out-of-square edges for you and B) I won’t have on hand matching stock to replace a piece should something go terribly wrong. C) I don’t want to help lift your full-size oak or purpleheart tool chest into your car at the end of class.
But if you insist on bringing your own, below are the steps to follow (some of which are pretty basic…but you never know what people already know).
The flatter the wood, the easier it is to prep – and the more plain the grain, generally the easier it is to dovetail. I don’t want any points of cathedrals or bird’s eyes in my pins and tails (or knots, or course). So the first thing I do is to lay out rough cuts to avoid anything problematic. I start with the largest pieces (above, that’s the front and back of the ATC), and try my best to have all my glue-ups be only two pieces (you can see above that I typically have to use three pieces in at least some of the carcase and lid panels).
So first, I mark out all the pieces, and if they’re longer than 14″ or so, I rough cut them about 1″ overlong at the chop saw and about 1/2″ overwide at the band saw (or I joint one edge then cut them overwide at the table saw). For pieces that are shorter than 14″ (and therefore can’t safely go through the planer), I keep them attached to another piece until after the surfacing is done. You don’t, however, want to leave the pieces much longer than they need to be. The longer a board, the more likely it is to be twisted – the less of that you have to take out, the better. Because the more you have to remove from one surface to correct twist or a cup, the more will go into your dust collector.
In order to run the wood through the planer to get it flat (and all of it to the same thickness), you need one flat face; that face registers on the bed of the planer. If you’re good with a jointer plane, you may not need a jointer. If you’re decent with a jointer plane but have to prep wood for seven people and have three days to do it, you definitely want an electric jointer.
If you have a helical head on your jointer, you don’t have to worry much about grain direction, but run the stock in the correct direction anyway; it’s a good habit to adopt. The grain should be running downhill. And if there’s a crown in the board on one face, there’s probably a cup on the other. When you run the wood across the cutters, you want it supported as much as possible at the outside edges, so the cupped face should face down. If you’ve already arranged it with the grain running correctly but the cupped face up, simply flip the board end for end, before jointing it. (Odds are pretty good that the heart side will be facing up.)
With thick wood, you can get away with jointing it only enough to create flats at the outside edges to register on the planer bed. But the planer rollers will flatten thin wood…which will spring back after it exits the planer. So for 3/4″ (or thinner) stock, I always run the stock as many times as necessary across the jointer to flatten one face completely. And because I think it’s unsafe to have to push too hard, I’d rather make several light cuts than one deep cut; I usually have the cut set to no more than 1/16″
The knives are to the left of the wood; note how the grain is running “downhill” – when the cutters spin clockwise into the wood, they’re moving in the same direction as the grain is running out of the bottom of the wood. If you run the cutters against the grain, it can lift it up and tear it.
The crown of this board indicates that the other face need to go against the jointer bed. Were I to run it over the cutters like this, the board would rock.
After the final jointer pass, I stack the boards atop the planer, flat face down, with the last end that went over the jointer facing toward the planer mouth – that’s the way they get fed in (last off jointer, first in planer). Though again, if you have a helical cutter, it’s not (usually) that critical.
Stacked and ready to feed, with the jointed faces down. As I pull a board toward me for the first pass, the end that needs to go in the planer is the end already facing in that direction.
I follow the same steps every time I use the planer; that way, I never get turned around. As I pull pieces off the far end, I stack them back in the exact same orientation as they were run through the machine. Then if I have to run them again to get to a certain thickness and the first face is flat, I flip them end for end as I feed them into the planer for the second pass. And repeat. That way, I’m removing wood from both faces, and hopefully equalizing the moisture exchange. (And if I have someone catching for me, I make sure they don’t flip the boards as they stack them.) Same steps for the operator every time. And if the first face isn’t flat after one pass, the board is in the right direction without flipping it to simply run it through again.
And here’s the critical part for classes when it comes to thicknessing: I run all the wood that has to be the same thickness at the same time. I would never run, say, the front and back of a through-dovetailed carcase then come back three days later and run the ends. In order to avoid problems, all the pieces must be the exact same thickness – your best shot at achieving that is to do it all at once. I don’t care if the pieces are a hair over or under 7/8″ – I just care that they’re all the same.
Once all the stock is flat and to thickness, I joint one edge in preparation for cutting it to final size (even if I’ve already jointed an edge to cut a piece to rough width, I do it again, in case it got bashed up), and mark the jointed edge; that edge will run against the table saw’s fence.
This curlicue mark on the jointed edge helps me quickly know which edge is straight and flat.
But it’s the table saw work that scares me the most in folks prepping their own stock; if the pieces aren’t square, the person’s class experience is doomed – and I don’t want that. But if I have to take the time to correct problems, the other students in the class suffer. So at least one person (in addition to me) is going to be unhappy.
So I am ultra careful at the table saw to make sure my cuts are square. First, I rip the pieces to final width, making sure I keep the wood tight to the fence. Then I triple check that the crosscut fence is dead square to the blade, and before we got a reliable slider, I clamped like pieces together to make sure they were the exact same length. (Now I trust the stop on our slider. But I don’t trust the stop on your slider.)
As long at I don’t jam the workpieces against the stop, I am confident that our slider will cut multiple pieces to equal length. (But as you can see from my tape measure, I don’t yet trust the tape on the fence!)
So after setting my stop I raise it, then crosscut one end square (with the jointed-edge mark against the fence), then drop the stop, flip the board and cut it to length. Boom – two square ends, and the right length. Repeat.
Once all the pieces of that length are cut, I reset the stop and cut the mating pieces. And so on with the rest of the stock.
Before we had a sliding crosscut fixture, I used this shop-made sled. If the pieces were longer than the sled, there was no way to set a stop. So I crosscut one end of each like pieces, then carefully…so carefully…clamped them together to cut the final length of both at the same time. It was the only way I felt confident that the pieces would exactly match. And I also had to then make sure each pair stayed together.
Note that all of the above assumes no glue-ups. Throw wide panels into the mix and you add glue-ups to the prep. I’ll write about those in a few days.
My class prep cutlist for the Anarchist’s Tool Chest.
