David Marks on sharpening

Re: David Marks on sharpening

jim reed @ tallahassee

>I caught that episode and liked it. I think sharpening skills are way too rare and I hope his program inspires and instructs others. He did cover the power tool thing with a comment that making furniture for a living required more power. I do not make furniture for a living, but also like to use power tools to give me a boost through projects.

Re: David Marks on sharpening

Jack Guzman from Maine

>Jim,

I also use power tools when they help to get the desired results.I just prefer the quiter way and will use it whenever I can.I also realize that David broadcasts to a much larger group. We are a minority.---Jack

Re: David Marks on sharpening

wilbur

>One thing to keep in mind is when a hobbyist who is enthusiastic about hand tools planes a board by hand, he is engaging in a soul satisfying process. When a furniture maker planes a board by hand, he loses time, and therefore, money.

I wonder how committed a hand tool enthusiast you'd have to be if every time you cut a dado by hand you had to burn a $10 bill.

Re: David Marks on sharpening

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

>He sharpens chisels and plane blades by hollow grinding with a hand cranked grinder with a white wheel,followed by freehand honing on water stones. I thought it was informative and easy to follow.I'm sure some will disagree with his methods(he uses no guides and made no mention of secondary or microbevels)

Hi Jack

I also caught this one a couple of months ago. The proof of pudding is in the eating, as they say, and the shavings David produces with his card scraper are second to none. I am not mad about his designs, and I have little interest in his methods of construction, but he is a very fine woodworker.

Incidentally, one would not be mentioning microbevels, and would also not be needing a guide, if honing hollow ground bevels. These are automatically microbevelled and the hollow serves as a guide.

Regards from Perth

Derek

$10 bills

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>You're not seriously suggesting that it's cheaper to use power tools, are you?

Pam

Re: David Marks on sharpening

Dean J in MN

>When a furniture maker planes a board by hand, he loses time, and therefore, money.

I wonder about this. I'm not a pro, however I've been in their shops and watched them finish sand a table top. I could have finished in much less time with a smoother, not using up sand paper in the process (which is more $$$ saved).

Of course it isn't this simple, the table was of a hand-plane friendly wood species. The employees would have to be trained to use planes, as well as sharpen. The "benches" were not well suited to hand work, and the list goes on. Not sure where the cross-over point it, but it isn't a simple: by hand = lost money. The cabinetmakers of yesterday - pre power tools - made a lot of furniture, made it fast, and were profitable.

-Dean

I would

Gary B

>I think the key was that wilbur was referring to professionals....for a professional, who needs to push a certain amount of product out the door every month to feed his family (not Studio Furniture Artisans, I'm thinking lower on the pyramid) it's cheaper to use power tools, strictly from a business standpoint. there are rare instances when hand tools are more efficient, such as a shoulder plane handy at the assembly bench, but these don't make up the bulk of a day.

Re: $10 bills

Warren in Lancaster, PA

>I have "thrown away" thousands of ten dollar bills. It has never once cost the customer ten dollars for a dado or a groove made by hand. Perhaps wilbur has a higher hourly rate or a slower pace in mind than I do. Whether it is cheaper with a plane or a tablesaw has a lot to do with the number of grooves and the skill of the worker.

Question for Warren re dados

Wiley Horne--So. Cal.

>Warren,

I like to make dados with wooden planes. But am slow at it, slow because I rarely have an efficient way to set up a fence. A typical case would be dados to house shelves in a bookcase. How do you do it, if I may ask?

Wiley

P.S.

Wiley Horne--So. Cal.

>I'm also slow if I use an electric router for the same job--and for the same reason. Haven't thought of a good way to mount a fence, other than make a fancy contraption.

Wiley

Re: Question for Warren re dados

Warren in Lancaster, PA

>I like to tack a fence to the inside of the case. I like a strip of hardwood about 1/4 X 1. You can reuse the strip many times and leave the nails in. The fence does not need to be real secure because once the dado is started you can remove the strip. I work from front to back of the case.

Re: $10 bills

wilbur

>Hi Pam,

As Gary said, I was thinking in terms of running a business, where efficiency will be a concern. Certainly a set of good hand tools will be cheaper than a bunch of machines, (unless you're talking about Chiyozuru planes). But in a business setting, if you turn out one piece of furniture when you could have made two, that's a monetary loss due to lost income. That's what I meant by my "burning a $10 bill" comment.

In my basement shop, I don't need to be efficient, and it costs me nothing to be inefficient. In fact, efficiency might be a bit of a curse, because then I wouldn't have an excuse to hide downstairs when the kids are going crazy.

As an aside, here's a story from my residency. When I did ER shifts, which were 12 hour stretches, I would always scan the chart rack and grab any kid that had a bad cut and needed stitches. I did this because I really hated doing shift work, and by repairing a laceration (fancy doctor talk for stitches), it accomplished many things for me. I had immediate satisfaction that I actually did something, and I knew that I would be taken out of the ER craziness for about an hour while I put stitches in.

Unfortunately, I got really good at this, so that stitching a kid didn't take me out of the ER for as long as I would have liked. I figured this out one day when I had a kid with a deep scalp laceration, which required not just stitches, but multiple layers of stitches. When I came out of that room, the kid was fixed, and the family was happy. I wasn't, though, when I saw the clock and realized that only 30 minutes had passed.

But back to the issue of hand tools in a business setting and efficiency. I went to a Frank Klausz seminar at his cabinetmaking workshop this past weekend, where he was demonstrating joinery. Apparently he has this stunt where he bangs together a dovetail joint in about 2 1/2 minutes. He definitely is an advocate for doing dovetails by hand.

On the other hand, for his mortise and tenon joint discussion, he pretty much waved at a hollow chisel mortising machine and demonstrated his jig for cutting tenons on a tablesaw. So I asked him, "Everyone talks about doing dovetails by hand. When would you do mortise and tenon joints by hand?" He replied, "Never. It takes too long." And this is coming from someone who has a video on cutting mortise and tenon joints by hand.

In fact, he stated that he thought the best furniture being made these days is by serious hobbyists, because they had the luxury of spending a lot of time on a piece. He also said that very few people could afford a fully hand built piece of furniture due to the labor involved, but he was glad that the few who could knew how to find him here in New Jersey.

Re: David Marks on sharpening

Denis Ch�nard, Orl�ans, Ont.

> The cabinetmakers of yesterday - pre power tools - made a lot of furniture, made it fast, and were profitable

True, but they didn't have to compete with computerized machinery, or cheap east Asian labour...

Back then there was no Ikea (substitute your "favourite" retailer as needed), heck, there was no foreign trade to speak of.

I'll bet you that there were not too many Michigan pieces finding their way into New England in the early 1800's... Captive audience, goes a long way to secure customers, production efficiency is (or was) secondary...

DC

Re: $10 bills

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>Yes, I understood your efficiency point; but I disagree a bit. For one thing, a large capital investment to purchase a quality power tool requires that you sell n pieces for payback. Second, each large power tool requires much more space, another expense. Third, they require electricity, currently pretty cheap but getting more expensive. Fourth, one must maintain power tools, including sharpening that has to also be done for hand tools. Fifth, if one is a good salesman, one can charge much, much more for a hand made piece.

Pam, who wanted to be a surgeon but couldn't afford medical school before Pell grants and the like

Re: Question for Warren re dados

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>First I mark the lines, then use saws (love the Yataiki azebiki for this), chisels (mortising, paring, cranked), and, depending on the dado width, planes (router, dado). Generally I don't need battens.

Pam

Apples and oranges

Larry Williams

>"...True, but they didn't have to compete with computerized machinery, or cheap east Asian labour...

There's a difference. Can Konrad Sauer or Brian Boggs compete with Wal-Mart? I think so.

It reminds me of walking into a huge Wal-Mart a few years ago with a woodworking friend, Doug Stowe. He looked at me and said, "Almost everything in here will be in a landfill within six months."

A well designed and executed handmade product by a competent craftsman will be used and treasured for generations. The best that can be hoped for in the cheap products you're talking about is that they're, in part, made of something that will be recycled after an incredibly short lifespan.

Re: David Marks on sharpening

Mike Fitterling

>I don't want to speak for David, but he uses both handtools and power tools and is master of both. He chooses them depending on the situation. He definitely prefers handcut dovetails because of the ability to cut very thin pins, but often uses machinery to do them because of time and the type of project he is doing. But when doing them by hand, he gives himself one day per drawer. That drawer will be perfect, by the way. If the dovetails are a prominent feature in the design, I would guess he would do them by hand, where they are secondary, by machine.

By the way, he can get a tool edge very sharp using his techniques.

Cheers,

Mike

Got to agree with Wilbur...rambling a bit though..

John in NM

>For one dado maybe it'd be slower to set up the TS, but for a bookcase there's no comparison. There's also scant difference in the finished product, and though there is the occassional customer willing to pay more for the psychological satisifaction of purely hand made, they're too few and far between to support most professionals. At the moment studio built furniture is enjoying great popularity, but that may not last. Craftsmen like Klausz have been working for decades and have successfully weathered at least one slow period -- one of the shops I worked for is gone due to slow sales and lack of profitability, the other two have enjoyed sufficient popularity to have a bit of immunity to local economics. It always amuses me to see comparisons to Ikea and Wal-mart. A more apt comparison would be to Ethan Allen or Thos. Moser, as that's the price range that the customers come from for studio and small shop furniture.

Back to the point... there are some operations where a skilled worker can acheive superior results with hand tools. Dovetailing, surface finishing, fitting of parts, etc. Though it may take lots of money to buy machinery, it generally takes several years to aquire the skill needed to efficiently compete with machines in these areas. Many people learn these skills while working other jobs, just as they often save their money and buy machinery while working other jobs.

There are many operations I do with hand tools that would be more efficient with power, but I choose to use the hand tools. Having done this for a living for 5 years or so- when geology work dried up for a while- I really enjoy NOT doing it for a living now, and being free to use tools I like to use rather than some that may produce faster results.

Anyhow, thats my 5 cents worth (too long to be 2),

John

And for stopped dados?

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>

Re: $10 bills

wilbur

>Pam,

Maybe you're a wood surgeon now? :@) There might be a link between surgeons and woodworker's brains. I almost decided to do surgery in medical school before I went into pediatrics.

All the points you make are good ones. However, one of the benefits of living in a capitalistic society (and here I'm speaking as an ex-Marxist) is that people will find the cheapest and most efficient way to do things. The fact that there aren't more commercial hand tool workshops out there tells me that even though hand tools have the advantages you state in terms of cost issues, those advantages are outweighed by the increased efficiencies gained by power tool use in a commercial environment. Of course, the cost issue would be different for a home workshop.

This is, of course, a completely separate issue from whether hand made furniture is more/less desirable than furniture made from powered methods.

I just remembered a seminar I went to given by Ernie Conover. He was speaking on methods of work, and he said that he dovetails by hand, and mortises by machine, primarily because he found it more efficient to do hand cut dovetails compared to a dovetail jig and a router, but found that the mortising machine and tablesaw tenoning jig was more efficient than cutting the joint by hand. This is pretty much exactly what Frank Klausz said this weekend.

Thank you very much, Warren,

Wiley Horne--So. Cal.

>gotta get used to the idea of nail holes. Lessee, they're small, don't hurt anything, out of the way.....

Wiley

c'mon Pam....

John in New Mexico

>Wouldn't it be kinda insultingly pedantic to start listing the multitude of ways of making stopped dados with power tools?

Suffice it to say, once the jigging is set up, machine methods tend to be faster and take less skill to get good results. Setting up the jigging usually takes about as long (for me) as cutting one or two of whatever it is by hand. Many of us prefer to use handtools basically because its very satisfying to develop a skill and exercise it.

John

Re: Thank you very much, Warren, *LINK*

mikew

>One can also use holdfasts to secure the batten. Which is what I do most of the time. About as fast as small nails if there are only a couple to do.

One thing I like about nails, though, is that I can simply add a few battens secured with nails for the dadoes needed if there is room. Then cut all the dadoes at using a dado plane, moving to the next position when one is finished.

Also, like on Adam's blog, if the carcass is short enough or the carcass is narrow and tall--like book cases--you can lay the sides next to each other and cut dadoes on both sides at one time.

Take care, Mike


Adam's blog on dadoes

Re: c'mon John...

Pam Niedermayer - Austin, TX

>Hey, I just think there's a good financial case to make for using hand tools, that the assumption that power tools are more efficient in a professional shop may be faulty.

Pam