Tag: Power Tools

My Own Personal Take on Hand-planes: Buying Recommendations to Use

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I use the bejesus out of my power tools.  I LOVE my SawStop, my Bosch compound miter-saw is scary accurate, and my band-saw is magic, but there is room in my life and in my shop for lots of hand-tools.  I am a child of both Norm Abram and Roy Underhill.  I watched them both on PBS every Saturday after cartoons as a small child in 1981 until I was 44 or so.  Their combined influence has made me value the old way of doing things without being a Luddite and I can appreciate modern cabinet shop/woodworking tools.  Case in point: I have a 3HP Powermatic 3520 lathe and would not even want to think about turning a bowl or platter on a pole lathe with a forged hook knife. On the other hand, while I have not given up a single one of by 5 routers, I found years ago that it is sometimes faster to grab an old wooden molding plane from a shelf and take care of an edge detail or piece of trim.  I can be done and dusted with the plane in the time it would take me to find the right bit an set up the router.

Because of my vocal love for hand planes, I get questions all the time from friends and acquaintances about what they should buy, where they should start, how to set something up, sharpening, truing a sole, etc…  I thought I would take a minute to go over those things, stand on my soapbox a little, and give the world my opinions concerning hand planes.

.. Ascending my soapbox…  Ahem…

  1. Buy a quality block and #4 smoothing plane – Lie-Nelson, Wood River,  or Veritas are great options.  Stay away from used hand planes or classics until you get used to how a hand plane SHOULD work.  Setting up an older Stanley or Bailey plane, sharpening, replacing parts and flattening the sole will drive you insane if you don’t know exactly what you are doing and will make you want to throw the thing and swear off hand planes forever.  Start with the known good and once you know how it should function, then you can pick up a  used #2 bench rabbit or a #8 corrugated bottom jointer and tune them sweetly – maybe.  I would go over any prospective purchase with a scornful eye and replacement the blade and/or chip breaker on an old plane is required about 50% of the time, in my experience anyway.  

Here is my list of the initial planes and accessories you will want/need ( I like the low angle but to each his own):

  1. Stanley Low-Angle Block Plane
  2. Shoulder plane
  3. Smoother plane 
  4. Plane chip-breaker Screwdriver  I swear to God you need this, really!  When you mare the screw an a $200 plane because you didn’t listen, it is your own fault for not listening.
  5. Sharpener: get two…
  6. Buy a nice set of Japanese water stones 1000 to 8000 grit.  Watch the videos and keep your blades sharp.
  7. Also, Japanese planes, like Japanese pull saws and water stones, are FANTASTIC.  They deserve their own diatribe, but for the purpose of this post I will stick to western planes with the exception of an edge-rounding plane.  I use mine constantly.

Nice to have once you get serious about using hand planes:

  1. Jack Plane
  2. Jointer planeSpoke shave  Get the flat first then the curved.  You probably wont ever need the concave one.
  3. This Router plane  but, if I were in the market for a new one, this Walke Moore version is the nicest I have ever seen!
  4. Scraper plane –  get the toothed blade
  5. A combination plane, but be wary of used Stanley Record #45/#46s.  They can be a beast to swap around and if they come with all the original parts they are spendy!
  6. if you are going to be doing a lot of drawers or insets, then both a Left and Right Plow Plane are really nice to have
  7. Wooden molding planes : See below…

Once you have been bitten by the molding plane bug, you will want to run right out and buy a 1/2 or full set.  Good luck.  There are not a lot of makers out there and the ones that are doing it have a long wait list and are not cheap.  Some people, like myself, invest is an older set.  My molding planes include a 3/4 harlequin cove and round set (mixed from various makers and time periods) that I have carefully built over the last 9-10 years.  The dates for my planes run from 1956 to 1930s to 1850s/70s and I have one from the 1790s that has an uncommon roman ogee shape that I use on boxes and 6-board chest lids. This collecting takes time as there has never been a set standard for what a #8 is, for instance, so there is a lot of variance in sizes between makers.  I have replaced a few irons as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I often defer to people that are smarter than me and Matthew Bickford and Chris Schwartz recommend a set of #4 and #8 and a set of #6 and #10 hollows and rounds as an initial starter set.  I would add that a 3/16 beading plane is a wonder to have as well if and when you start down this road.

To my own set, I have added some additional beading planes – up to 1/2″, tongue & groove planes for 1/4″ – 1″ stock, specialized profile molders, 1/4 rounds, scrapers, etc., but those is my own personal obsessive tendencies.

I failed miserably at finding a classic matched set of snipe-bills and half rounds (NEEDED for linen-fold panels).  I have resigned myself to buy new ones from Old Street Tools, but I have to warm my wife to the idea of me spending serious cash on blocks of wood and iron that I will use 5-6 times a year.  I have been working on her for 3 years and they are on my Christmas and birthday list every year.  No luck yet.

Read Bickford’s Moldings in Practice (if you have bled with me or we have swapped spit, you can borrow my copy) and take a look at the video of the same name before jumping in.  Molding planes can be sourced from the following, in no special order:

New  planes:

Classic:

…and now I will dismount my soapbox…

 

 

Using My Dad’s Tools

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

In 1982 or 1983 my dad made me a ball, bat, and glove rack for Christmas. I was super into baseball and it was cool to have your gear up on the wall ready and waiting for you to be able to grab it all and run out the door to a game at a moments notice. Getting the pocket for the ball cut correctly and rounding over all the edges and corners took him forever. He decided that he HAD to have a router and for that same Christmas, my mom bought him a Craftsman 1-1/2 HP, Model #315.17492 Double Insulated router. He was as happy as a puppy with a new bone and looked for stuff to round over, “ease the edge…” everywhere in our lives for months. He was so proud of that router and for years a wood project around the house wasn’t complete until it had been kissed by a 1/4′ shank bit, whirling at 25,000 RPM.

When my dad passed, I got all his tools and the router was part of the deal. I have used it for years and while it is a little funky to adjust and has a base that isn’t perfectly round, it still does a fine job of “easing the edge” on shelves and cabinets. For the most part I use a 1/2 or 3/4 round-over bit in it and use my trim router for 1/4 and 1/8 round overs. Technology has much improved since the early ’80s and I have other routers to do fancy stuff these days but, Daddy’s still gets used a good bit.

I few years ago I had a garage break-in and a bunch of tools were stolen. I lost a lot of Daddy’s wrenches, power tools, my grandfather’s chisels, all sorts of stuff, but the big funky router happened to be in the basement where I had left it sitting for weeks on a long undone project. I am thankful it didn’t end up in a pawnshop somewhere and I am still able to use it to do a little work and connect with my dad, all these years later, just by using the router that he so badly wanted. I used Daddy’s router today, while building a walk-in closet for my wife. I thought about my dad, his smile, his quiet manner, and his patient love for his small son.

Matt Talley_Dads router_2016_1

Some small projects around the house

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I have been swamped with work and travel for the last couple of months, so my shop time has been very limited. I have mostly been puttering around with my workbench, getting the last bits and bobbles done before calling it done and I have spent the off hour here and there on the lathe and doing stuff around the house:

  1. I had to fix a dishwasher leak and do some painting in the kitchen – still hate plumbing
  2. We did some re-arranging, so I had to fill some nail holes and then make new ones.
  3. Glued a cutting board back together after it split – craptastic glue didn’t hold, so it is back in the to-fix pile and will get some dowels this time
  4. Made a pot lid handle out of some scrap cherry.
  5. Tackled the jungle that was once my yard – twice
  6. Sharpened the lawnmower blade
  7. Turned the compost
  8. I bought a sheet of plywood and built a DVD shelf and a 8′ bookshelf for the lending library we run.
  9. There was been an oak log in my shop for months so I cut it in half and made a couple of stools for my office.
  10. Our puppies play a game called “run away from Mommy” when she takes them out, so I built two small fences to keep them in the back yard and away from the front gate.

I have do a few things in the shop just for organization and am working on a couple of little projects:

  1. We got a huge free wardrobe that I put in the GROP to organize non-tool/shop related items like climbing gear and life jackets
  2. My battery operated tools need a home, so I put together an organization center for them that mounts on the French cleat board
  3. I hung up my 6 heavy panel clamps to get them out of the way
  4. Made a Lathe chuck and tail-stock tool organizer for the French cleat organizer
  5. With a bonus from my J-O-B, I bought a few more molding planes, but they arrived in sad shape. I spent 6+ hours one Saturday cleaning, sharpening and fixing them.
  6. Started work on a blanket chest rebuild: cut here, snip there, new runners and new feet. Will get new milk paint finish when complete.
  7. Working on a copyist lectern rebuild. I made the base, pillar and other bits from some scrap beech left over from the bench build.
  8. Built a wooded top for the puppy Kennel so it blends better with the furniture in the Living Room.
  9. Putting together a 6-board chest for molding plane storage.  Will get re-purposed forged hardware and a Barn Red milk paint finish.

Matt Talley - Projects 2015_06 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_11 IMG_3410 Oak stool 23-2015 (2) Matt Talley - Projects 2015_24 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_22 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_23 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_25 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_17 Matt Talley - Projects 2015_18 Matt Talley _ Drill Organizer _ 2015

A giant sealed dome over our place would solve most of this….

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

There are some days where I want to just drop everything I am holding, turn off the lights, lock the door, and go on an extended vacation involving a sugar-sand beach and copious amounts of fruit laden alcohol.  This Saturday was one of those days.

I decided to work on the kitchen cabinet doors, cut some plywood sheets down, and tackle a bench top while the sun was shining.  I opened the shop, brought out a plastic truck-bed toolbox to cut on (my 4 sawhorses are currently being used elsewhere), pulled 3 full-sized sheets of ¾” and ½” plywood out of the lumber rack and drug it all out into the backyard.  After marking the first sheet, adjusting my saw blade depth, lining up my rip fence, and checking for clearance – I started my first cut and immediately ripped a 6” long kerf-cut into the top of the tool box that the sheet was sitting on.  Dammit! I cut the rest of the plywood up without incident, but grumbled thinking about the mistake (I will fill and patch it with molten P-Tex plastic at some later point).  After stacking all the assorted pieces of ply back into my cluttered shop, I man-handled the 170+ pound beech and maple in-work bench top from the basement and placed it on the now-damaged toolbox – trying very hard not to either herniate a disk in my bask or tear what is left of my shoulder.

My Shop/Garage is pilled deep and high with lumber, hardware, undone winter projects, wood shavings, tools, sawdust,  flotsam & jetsam, etc….  I spent an hour trying to set up my router and in all the clutter and mess I couldn’t find a ¼” collet for one router and the other does not have an integrated fence, so using my big monkey brain, I improvised a fence.  All I really wanted to do with the top was to route channels for t-track and thoroughly sand it down before taking the beast back into the bowels of the basement to apply stain and a tung oil finish.  All was going as planned and my first cut was perfect.  The second cut went just the same, but at the very end of the third cut my improvised fence failed and the router wobbled – gouging the top that I had spent a month building.  Jesus H. Christ I was pissed! – Mostly at myself, but there was some vitriol left over for the machine in my hands.  I said dirty, hateful, vile things while resetting the fence and making an adjusted cut.  I moved on to make my last cut in the very front lip of the bench and while the fence held, I stood up mid-way through the pass and the router wobbled, making the bit chew into a section of wood where I did not want it to go.  I gritted through the rest of the pass and finished the cut, but the second I was clear of the wood, I wanted to throw the still running router on the ground and beat the electric life out of it with the pruning shears that were leaning against the garage wall.  I had to walk away, hand over my mouth, and just breathed deeply with my back to the offending router, my own incompetence, and the damage they had both wrought.  My moment of reflection was short lived because just as I turned, I felt the first drop of rain fall from what was minutes ago a blue sky that had ominously darkened while I was focused on my router-rage (I swear it happened just like that – strait out of a hip urban dramedy…).  SHIT!!  I ran for something to cover the bench top.  The only thing I could find was a pink tent fly and a sheet of cardboard.  I covered everything and retreated into the shop, right eye twitching with disbelief/confusion/anger.  I spent the next hour drinking coffee laced with sawdust and moving piles of crap around in my shop.

When my sweet wife got home she MAY have found me in the shop muttering to myself, pacing, covered in saw dust, contemplating the logistics of building a giant sealed dome over our entire lot.  She talked me off the ledge, helped me put the top back into the basement, patted me a little, told me I was pretty and smart and a good boy, put me in some fresh, sawdust free clothes, and took me out to see a movie.

I got up the next morning and after a yummy breakfast of flaky croissants, bacon, eggs and two cups of coffee, I went downstairs and chiseled out the offending screw-ups, then cut and glued maple patches in.   After calming down some and after a good night’s sleep, I felt better about the whole thing, but me and that router are still not on speaking terms.