Is 5-thou on a 10" TS blade OK or too high

Scrape the hair off your face, and go to work.

Steve D, CT

Or...

Leave the hair on your face and grab an extra snooze cycle.

I vaguely remember razors from 1985. Don't miss them.

Re: something is going on... Identical objects.

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

Power tools mostly make stuff that started out as hand tool work, like household furnishings. So power tools are at a disadvantage because they are trying to do stuff that was hand tool based, and largely don't have their own vocabulary.

Tom, another view is that power- and hand tools are used together and complimentary, rather than being seen as either-or. This approach, which I take - and imagine that Mark does as well - is to use both hand and power tools interchangeably ... playing to their strengths. There is no downside here.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Yes on the shop...

David Weaver

..it's more size than it is where it is, though. I have the space to have a large organized hobbyist's power tool shop (not 40x40 separate building large, but 25x30). And fortunately, even though it's below ground, I have a ramped driveway and a double-width garage door (which is nice to avoid having to go hyper with dust collection).

It's really about buying things that I'm not interested in and taking bad advice ("you can't make anything and dimensioning is dumb work"). If we're hobbyists, everything we do is pointless, and the things that I want to build are generally not sped up much with power tools unless they're made in sets of 10 or something of the sort.

I (and some others probably would) get a different feeling walking out of the shop after being more physically involved. It's improved for me. Once in a while, I will do something (like daughter's bed last year) where I have to go to the shop and spend an hour or two running cheap stock through a planer then cleaning up the chips that get away from the planer - it's just not something I like much.

The guy who got me into woodworking revels in checking his woodworking stuff to the thousandth and comparing it to an autocad plan. It's what thrills him, and he's convinced that he could never do something reasonable by hand. I never gave him the internet treatment "you have to ____" (usually followed by have certain power tools, do joints a certain way, not do joints a certain way because it's too primitive, etc. ). I can't get into telling someone else what they should enjoy or what should motivate them - it's nice to be involved in whatever you like and not be concerned with comparing it to what other people are doing (unless, well, that's what you like - and a lot of shop organizers and consensus builders love that).

I don't disagree with any of that...

David Weaver

..if you're building high end to educated customers of certain things, they'll expect hand work. If you're making a $22k violin (which is the starting point for one of the preferred makers of the symphony musicians here), nobody is going to want to walk into the shop and see a CNC machine doing the final sizing and someone at the end sanding.

The same may be true for other things (though the market for furniture buyers that the public is exposed to wouldn't care. If I built a case entirely of solid wood and someone else built something similar with power tools, it would likely look a little different and be a little bit more blocky with less edge treatment, but very few will care. someone who wants to do the details with hand tools after power tools, or even with a smart and flexible power tool setup can come up with the same).

Collings is my good example - collings does a combination of hand tool and power tool work. They tend to do a lot of the fitting with sanding jigs and the guitars have an arch that's obviously designed to be CNC cut. They're around $6k for a solid archtop electric guitar. I don't care how they make it because of the other things they do.

If someone was commissioning a $50K archtop, they might be a little less flexible about what they want - the guitars that are carved tops - hand carved -are actually better in my experience, but someone is carving them to an acoustic result, and they're more resonant than something like an L-5. Even the relatively moderately priced eastman 910CE is much stronger than an L5 without any stability consequence that I can see. There's a guy at eastman who carves the tops by hand - the construction is different than a guitar that would be made in a CNC-led factory.

But the "internet argument" gets built on "two people build bookcases, one planes the wood by hand, and 'yours isn't better' - that's always directed at me because I say that it's possible to build the case by hand and I'd be glad to explain how to do the hand work efficiently if someone is willing to discard most of what they learn from the internet gurus"

false dilemmas are presented as to why that's not OK, or mother-in-law type herding "well, that's a stupid way to make things". The desire of the person asking the question is lost.

I ran into it with heat treatment - I haven't yet found a single person who said "you can get good at that by hand if you stick to steels that tolerate it". You can, of course. But I've run into gobs of people who hardened a few things and are professional makers who have told me not to bother because a shop heat treated iron will just be usable but never good. It's just advice given out of lack of experience and lack of desire.

I have the lack of desire with the power tools and don't like to build things out of obligation when they can be found somewhere else cheaper than the materials would be to build the same thing new.