Powered fret saw for dovetails?

Re: Powered fret saw for dovetails?

Derek Cohen (in Perth, Australia)

Eliot, I do not consider anything “sacrilegious” as such. Just preferences. There are many who use table saws and bandsaws to do cut the side walls. I do not see much difference in using a powered fretsaw to remove the waste.

Personally, I enjoy the freedom from power tools to exercise my hand skills with joinery, especially dovetailing. For a brief while I tried using a router to remove the waste from sockets. Not only did I dislike the noise and dust, but I missed the intimacy of a chisel. Clearly, this view is not shared by those using power tools.

Regards from Perth

Derek

Re: Powered fret saw for dovetails?

Clint Searl

The Zen of Dovetail requires hand work only.

Re: Powered fret saw for dovetails?

eliot feldman

Derek, I see just what you say: sort of like preferring vinall to digital. (I don't even have a powered fret saw.) But the idea seems reasonable, and they seem friendly and quiet. AND... Claudia ordered me a (supposedly) superb Blue Spruce fret saw for my birthday(along with the Veritas chisels). Should get them in May. Perhaps I can do dovetails with less difficulty when I get them! Can you believe this fret saw i made with ball bearings?

Re: Powered fret saw for dovetails?

eliot feldman

Do your repair motorcycles too?

Re: Powered fret saw for dovetails?

Warren in Lancaster, PA

It is faster to do the work with a coping saw while it is already in the vise than to walk over to the power saw.

Becksvoort's

Bruce McCrory

... power belt sander on the final drawer cleanup, after making dovetails using only hand tools, is a shock to most aspiring woodworkers.

If you can include a Power toothbrush in your handmade dovetails so much the better. So grab the power cord.

Re: Powered fret saw for dovetails?

Chris Scholz

If you do this for a living you want to be as efficient as possible, except of course your customers pay for 100% made with hand tools, then a powers tool would be cheating.

If you do this as a hobby, choose whatever method leases you. Sometimes it’s a Zen kind of thing, other times it is good to get it done (in a happy wife-happy life kind of way…) Last time I checked there was no dovetail police.

Re: Powered fret saw for dovetails?

Paul Rao

I think you hit the proverbial nail on the head in contrasting hobbyists with professionals. Becksvoort addressed belt sander use in "Don't Fear the Belt Sander," in _Fine Woodworking_#277, Sept/Oct 2019 and in his opening paragraph he addresses the questions of process vs product.

Dissenting experience

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

Anyone that says they can fit a drawer faster with a belt sander than a hand plane hasn't mastered a hand plane, and I would add, has acquired skills with this machine that few will achieve. I regard a belt sander as the most difficult machine in my shop to use successfully. It can ruin a piece of furniture with lightning speed.

It is not just me that has come to this conclusion. When working in the Headley shop we had occasion to visit the attic storage. There was a Porter Cable 505 belt sander retired from service. It has been years since I used mine. I used to think it was the solution to rapidly removing controlled increments of wood. I don't any more.

There was the time the belt broke and dug a divot in the table top. Another when the cord snagged with the same result. Or the less expensive machines that leave divots at the ends of travel. And other painful memories........

That said I am fond of my air driven random orbital sander for large surface refinement.

Re: Dissenting experience

Clint Searl

One can master the belt sander just as one can master the plane.

Re: Dissenting experience

William Duffield

I've "mastered" (depending on your definition) many woodworking hand tools, power tools and machines. OTOH, there was a Porter Cable 4 x 24 belt sander in a shop where I used to work. It gained the name "Cujo" and ate up several table tops before we retired it, and replaced it with a very civilized Performax (which is also a belt sander). Somehow, the master of the shop had learned how to make the PC behave (but at what cost?), but no one else could.

How was he with a plane?

Add me to the belt sander craftsman league

Dick Coers

Been using one for 45 years.

Re: Excaliber fret saw

TomD

I wouldn't fit drawers with a belt sander, but they are great for large expanses of wood like table tops. Not saying one can't fit drawers, just would not be my choice. I have never made drawer sides with highly figured wood, where tearout is inevitable. If I did, fitting with a belt sander might be a good option. People will say you can use a plane for that. I think I know more about planes. I can just say that when you get to that point, and you have expensive wood, and labour in the bag already, it is better business to use belts. I would reference guitars where there are jobs that can be more efficiently done with hand tools and less jigs, but you only have to loose one piece of wood that cost 2000 dollars and can't be replaced at any cost, to make sanding seem more reasonable.

I have used my Excaliber saw for joinery. Most notably on one desk where the apron used the wood from the apron as the drawer fronts. I did the rips with a kind of circular saw, dropped in. But I cut the ends free with the Excaliber. It allowed me to better see any drift off line. Worked great.

One can use them for regular dovetails, except that I don't accept that generally that is faster than chopping. And unlike a hand held fret saws, that I also don't use, you can't as easily deal with the angle of the pins. When doing large expanses of pins, it can be faster to cut the waste, but only if I am using a saw where the cut is so clean it needs no additional work. That isn't me on the Excaliber.

Re: Dissenting experience

Warren in Lancaster, PA

Anyone that says they can fit a drawer faster with a belt sander than a hand plane hasn't mastered a hand plane,

I agree; this was my thought exactly.

It is very upsetting for people to hear that someone who is supposed to an expert doesn't know how to use a plane, but this appears to be the case.

Thanks to WoodCentral

Bill Tindall, E.Tn.

But first a look at the big picture. Suppose we are mentoring a new woodworker whose goal is to build fine furniture. They have a budget for $300 (just some arbitrary number, don't get hung up on this detail as some are inclined to do.)

Choice A- buy a quality belt sander. The only one I ever had any success with out of 4 is the Porter Cable that looks like a diesel locomotive...505 or some such) Learn to use it.

The problem is the machine appears simple to use and invites use without mastery. Applying it to a piece of largely finished furniture one finds it is not so easy to use and the result can be a disaster. But in skilled hands it levels panels effectively and quickly. Personally, I think it a poor choice for fitting a drawer, and useless for fitting furniture parts.

Choice B- Buy a quality hand plane. Learn to use it. Let us assume there is someone available to mentor using the hand plane.

For a multitude of reasons Choice B is by far the best. But it presumes someone to mentor sharpening and use. This limitation is a significant problem. This simple looking tool is not so easy to learn from the Internet. How do you describe sharp in words? Hence, few beginners will choose this route and stick with this choice until success is achieved.

I was motivated to learn to use a hand plane upon seeing its use to aid fitting furniture parts at College of Redwood. Misguided information was an anchor that held back my progress for years. I wasted effort building wood planes, wasted money buying a LN 4 1/2, wasted time and money on sharpening stuff, and the list goes on. Half a day hands-on, with say Weaver, would have been equivalent to 5 years struggle on my own.

I would never have got to where I am at, advance novice stage, without Wood Central. I don't know how those that never go here achieve success. It sure isn't from reading Fine WoodWorking. To that end, when the opportunity arises, WC needs to be a place that aids learning to use a plane. Nothing rivals its versatility for building fine furniture. (a sharp chisel could be second)

Re: Thanks to WoodCentral

Eric

Adam Cherubini used to say something akin to "a plane was just a chisel with a different handle."

Re: Competent

William Duffield

He has been the master of the Hay Shop a decade before.

Re: Quote of the Day!

William Duffield

I don't know how those that never go here achieve success.

Re: Dissenting experience

TomD

Who says they can do that? I would like to see that done. I could see how it might be faster. For one thing, no sharpening, no tear-out ever, maybe easier to train an employee. Plus these days we have much better sandpaper, than that brown stuff.

The more vexing question is who in a production setting fits drawers.

I don't particularly take pride in not being able to do things, whether it involves planes or power sanding. sanders have relatively unlimited geometry, so they are great at carving and working curved surfaces, and flat surfaces seem relatively easy. Gang cutting scarfs would be one situation where precision and flat are an advantage, and it is regarded as the easy method.

I can't think of too many occasions where I have used belt sanders for cabinet type work, one cherry table I have, had quite a lot of black epoxy in it I remember belt sanding it. That was way back in the 80s, when things could go: hand plane; belt sand; scrape; etc.... Just throwing the kitchen sink at things while learning.

I always figure that if people can make stuff like this with a belt sander, flat surfaces on tables or even drawers ought to be relatively routine:

Re: Thanks to WoodCentral

TomD

I learned from Fine Woodworking, and Krenov books, as best as I can remember. Probably Odate for wetstones. If I had had to wait for David Weaver to get up to speed, I would have lost 30 years of woodworking. It was frustrating to be so called self-taught, before even video came along. I never had anybody to show me how to do anything. Nominally my grand father was a joiner, and a house builder, probably worked on the Titanic woodwork. However he died before I was born. My dad was a better than average, non-technical woodworker, who never learned to sharpen or set up a table saw. So it was basically Fine Woodworking, or Kodansha.

Re: Thanks to WoodCentral

TomD

"I was motivated to learn to use a hand plane upon seeing its use to aid fitting furniture parts at College of Redwood. Misguided information was an anchor that held back my progress for years. I wasted effort building wood planes, wasted money buying a LN 4 1/2, wasted time and money on sharpening stuff, and the list goes on. Half a day hands-on, with say Weaver, would have been equivalent to 5 years struggle on my own."

Don't CR and DW both make and use wooden planes?

I was looking at some new "imported" planes at Busy Bee the other day 300 bucks. Or, you can make your own wooden plane with a blade and 45 minutes. Assuming that in either case you need someone like Weaver who can fill you in for success. I can see a crack in the door for wooden planes there.

The brochure for those planes has gushing prose on how you can really soup them up by lapping the frog and other parts, by hand. So for 300 bucks it is still a kit. I will give LV and LN that much, you aren't buying a kit, they even sharpen the blade for you these days. At the end of the day you are still stuck with a metal plane, particularly retread Stanleys. I remember when buying new Record planes in the 80s that they needed extensive machining. So those beauties are still hiding out there in the second hand market. Maybe nobody ever gains entry without a struggle. If so, it is not hard to imagine why people like power tools where all you do is flip a lever and slide a belt on.

Re: Powered fret saw for dovetails?

onemanband

Anyone can use whatever tools they want to make a piece. If they needed to explain to justify the use of a belt sander or whatever, it told me that such use was indeed questionable.

Using a belt sander on a handcut dovetailed drawer is simply a vulgar act. End of story.

Re: Add me to the belt sander craftsman league

onemanband

to complete a dovetail joint? Or just using a belt sander in general. If the former, please don't label yourself a craftsman.