I Done Killed That Dove....

I have never cut dovetails before. Now, I've been watching all those youtube videos where people hand cut dovetails in under three minutes, while talking to everyone, making witty remarks, and ending up with perfectly tight dovetails. What you are about to see took longer than three minutes, I wasn't talking to anyone, there was no wit whatsoever, and my dovetail is missing a few feathers.  

I started with some scrap Poplar, and simply cut the board in half (using my fancy new bench hook).  Then I marked one side of each board with the other board.  

I then started to draw out my dovetail lines.  I quickly realized that I have no idea how to lay out dovetail lines, I did, however know enough to know that I was doing it wrong.  So I did what anyone would do...looked at dovetails made by a competent craftsman, in this case, my dad.  

Now that I could see what it should look like, I marked my boards accordingly.  

That looks better.  Now...To the vise!  Once I get it in the vise all nice and cozy, I get out my magnificent Lie-Nielsen dovetail saw (it was my dad's) and start cutting to the line.  

As is turns out, I really, really suck at sawing.  I tried to follow the lines, but really had to focus on now holding the saw too tight.  It was hard, and it didn't turn out well.  But I persevered!  Next I hacked out the waste with a chisel.  I figured I would use a chisel for the tails and a coping saw for the pins, just to try each method.  

Next, I used a marking knife to transfer the lines to the pin board, got it in the vise, and started sawing before I took the time to think about what side of the line I should be cutting, and getting mixed up on what was waste and what was pin.  I stopped, figured it out, and then marked it.  

When all the pins were cut, I got out my ultra fancy coping saw from Lowes.  This falls into the "tool shaped object" category.  This is what happened:  

Yup, the handle came right off the frame, which housed the blade that won't turn correctly, cut well, or stay tight.  I decided to store this saw in my trash can from now on.  Back to the chisels.  


Once all the waste was removed, I tried to fit them together, and quickly realized that I really screwed this up.  They weren't even close.  

I used my chisels to fit them as best as I could, and finally got them started.  

Then used my monster wooden mallet to gently persuade them to come together.  Once they were together tight, I stopped to look at my world-class craftsmanship...

It is difficult to describe just how terrible this joint is.  It is pretty clear to me that I need to spend a lot more time on the saw to learn how track straight.  I am going to keep this joint, though.  In the seemingly unlikely event that I ever figure out how to cut a decent dovetail, I think I would like to revisit my first attempt, have a good laugh at myself, then eat a dove sandwich, because we all know I butchered this one.  

How to Sharpen a Dull Evening

This picture has nothing to do with this blog post, but I just wanted to show off my new Atkins #65 8ppi Rip saw.  Made in the 1870's, yeah, its awesome.  

Now, onto a more serious topic:  I have a confession to make.  I have been woodworking for over a year now, and have been using hand tools for the bulk of that time, and yet I had not (until last night) sharpened anything.  Now I know that it is important to sharpen your tools, and that sharp tools work better, but sharpening scared me.  I remember my dad saying things like "for years I thought I knew what sharp was, but now I realize I wasn't even close".  From this I gathered that sharpening was not just important, but also impossibly hard to do well.  So it scared me.


Oh, it gets worse; I actually bought a new plane iron so I could keep working on a box and not have to sharpen.  As I was planing some cherry boards for a run of boxes I am making, I kept getting tear out and the plane was leaving a really rough surface, clearly this cherry was defective....or the plane is broken...or my technique needs improvement...ok FINE!  I'll sharpen my dang tools!  Last night, my wife took the older girls to see Batman, and the younger girls were in bed, so I decided to sharpen an otherwise dull evening.


I gathered all the tools that needed to be sharpened, and staged them on the kitchen table, like a so...

Oh man, 8 hand planes, 2 chisels, and 3 extra plane irons.  I really should have done this earlier.  I knew this day was coming, and have been watching Youtube videos on sharpening, reading articles on WoodCentral, asking the guys at Woodcraft, and reading some of my dad's old sharpening books trying to unlock the mysteries of the sharp edge.  The first thing that struck me in all of these resources is that everybody is emphatic that their way to sharpen is the right way, every other way is wrong and will cause the world to explode, and everybody contradicted each other.  

The only thing they all had in common was the definition of sharp:  when the two planes of an angle meet at a zero radius.  I started there.  Now, what type of sharpening equipment to use, some use machines, others use sand paper, lapping film, diamond stones, water stones, oil stones, dragon scales, or mermaid teeth.  In the end, I just had my mom send me what my dad used: water stones. I soaked them in water for about 10 minutes, then I started sharpening for the first time.  

Step one was to get the angle set on my sharpening guide (some guys do this freehand and get perfect results, but I am confident they aren't really human) to match the blade bevel.  Most of my irons have a 25 degree bevel, one has a 35 degree bevel, and one has a 30 degree bevel.  Once the guide was holding the iron at the perfect angle, I used a trick I stole from Youtube, and marked the distance from the edge to the guide on a piece of scrap wood:

This makes it easier to repeat the angle in the future (you know, next year, when I sharpen again). Once I had the lines marked, I glued more scrap on it to make it more robust.

The one labeled "Mortice" is the distance for my morticing chisel, and also happens to be 30 degrees for a plane iron.  The second step was making sure the back of the iron was flat.  I first marked the back with a pencil, then worked the back until all the pencil was gone, thus ensuring that the back is flat.

Once the back was flat, I used a thin metal ruler to put what is called a 'mirco bevel' on the back of the iron.  I have no idea what this is or what it does, but the Youtube video on the lie-Nielsen channel recommended it, so I'll go with that.  Now it was on to the actual bevel.  Most of the planes were not that bad, so I started on an 800 grit King water stone, then moved onto a 1200 grit King, and finished on an 8000 grit Norton stone, moving to a new stone after I could feel a uniform bur on the edge.  The end result easily dry shaved hair, which was always how my dad demonstrated sharpness, so I guess it's a good standard.  I wonder if I could use my #3 to shave in the morning...

This process went pretty fast, and I was feeling really confident, finishing plane irons in no time...until I hit my Try Plane.  The iron in this guy is bit rough (hey, it's from the mid 1800's), and I did not want to damage the stones, so I had to first take it to the grinder.

Hand-powered grinder:  Pretty cool, huh?  Well after I had it cleaned up, flattened, and a reasonable bevel on it, I took it in side.  This time I started on a 220 grit Norton stone, and followed the same steps as before.  But this time it took FOREVER.  This old steel is really hard...

But those old big, fat irons are fantastic.  It took over an hour, but I got my beloved try plane back up and running.  By the way, the second hardest iron was the Hock iron that is in my dad's Stanley #5, that took significantly longer to sharpen than my Lie-Nielson, or vintage Stanley irons did (But that edge has lasted a lot longer, too).

At this point, things were humming along nicely.  I only had one plane left, it was my Stanley #5.  I have two Stanley Jack planes.  One was my dad's, and the other one I bought.  My plan has always been to leave my dad's set up the way he had it; with a tight mouth and a flat iron.  Mine, on the other hand, would be set up like a traditional jack plane, wide open mouth and cambered iron.  I took it apart, moved the frog all the way back to open up the mouth, and then looked at the iron.  It was flat.  I remembered that Chris Schwarz said to use an 8" radius on the jack plane (this is from an episode of the Woodwright's Shop he did with Roy Underhill, one of my favorite episodes).  I promptly got two more pieces of scrap wood and made a jig to mark out an 8" radius on my iron:

Radius marked, nerves steeled (pun intended), and off to the grinder.  It took a little bit of work (it is not easy to use a hand-powered grinder) and a lot of luck, but I managed to get the iron radius-ed, and beveled.  Now...To the stones!  I looked at my round blade, and my flat stones, and immediately recognized that I have a problem.  I started with the back, that was easy, except that I did NOT use the micro-bevel ruler trick, cause that would have been dumb, not that I am opposed to dumb, I actually use it all the time.  The bevel, I had to do freehand.


In the Woodwright's Shop episode, Chris locks his wrists and elbows and used his hips to guide the bevel over the stone.  I figured I would try that.  If my wife were home, I would have had her take a picture of that because it must have looked pretty stupid.  It sure felt really stupid.  Unfortunately, it worked, so I will most likely be using that sweet dance move in the future.


In the end, I got all of my planes sharpened, and my mortice chisel and my bench chisel sharpened as well.  It only took me five hours.  But I learned two very valuable lessons:  First, sharpening is not really that hard, just pay attention and make sure you are consistent.  Second, when pushing the iron on the stone, don't put your finger tips on the edge of the blade.  It won't hurt, but it will cut you.

There, I confessed.  I promise to sharpen more regularly, and to never buy a plane iron just to avoid sharpening ever again.  By the way, the sharpened planes now leave a smooth, tear-out free finish on my cherry boards.  All is well in the shop.

A Shooting Match With my Nemesis

So I finally decided it was time to make my shooting board.  I've needed one for a while.  So I bought a two 4'x2' sheets of Baltic Birch Plywood, one in 3/4" and one in 1/2".  But using "sheet goods" (typing that makes me feel dirty) meant that hand tools were out.  So I had to use my old nemesis, the Man-Eating Shop Monster (Table saw).  I took a deep breath, set my fence, raised the cold, vicious teeth of the 10" Woodworker II blade to one inch above the table, and pressed the start button.  Nothing happened, that was when I remembered that I leave the thing unplugged so it can't sneak into my bedroom at night and try to kill me.  So I plugged it back into it's 220v power source and pressed the start button.  The motor came to life, and the song of the blade echoed through my shop.  Nervously I fed the sheet of 3/4" ply into the blade, hoping it wouldn't reject it and spit it back at me, or decide it needs to taste human flesh.  Luckily it didn't, and the base of my soon to be shooting board sat on the table next to the blade.  I pressed the kill button, and realized that I had been holding my breath.  This was just the first of many cuts....

I figured the short cut off from this would make a great hook for the bottom of the shooting board, to hold it to my bench, So I set it aside.  


Next I cut a piece of the 1/2" plywood about 4" shorter than the base, this gives me a plane ramp wide enough for the wood-stocked plane I am going to build specifically for shooting, with enough left over room to build a track so the plane stays flush to the work piece.  More on that in another post (the anticipation is killing me, but since I'm not only the writer of this blog, but most likely the only person who reads it I have a pretty good guess as to when the next post is coming).  

So, I laid the 1/2" piece onto the 3/4" piece, and drew a pencil line along the ramp to make it easier to line them up, then I took a scrap piece of 1/2" plywood for the fence at the far side.  Being the brilliant man that I am, I got out my square, and made sure that the fence was square to the ramp, like a so...

As soon as I got it square and marked with a pencil line, I realized I was not that brilliant.  It is far more important that the fence is square to the PLANE than to the ramp, so after looking around to see if anyone saw my blunder (it seems like there is always someone to witness the screw-ups, but never the achievements), I got one of my jack planes, and set it by the fence.  Despite all it's shortcomings, the table saw is pretty accurate.  I ended up not having to move the fence at all.  

So, now it was time to attach the ramp to the base.  I decided to use screws AND glue.  That way the cockroaches can shoot good miters after the nuclear holocaust.  In digging through my hardware cabinet, the shortest screws I had were 1 1/4", now doing math....one three quarter inch piece under one half inch piece, minus the countersink distance, carry the six, divide by 10, and take the square root of negative two, and I get a screw that is just a smidge too long.  Poop.  It's midnight, and the only store still open is Walmart, which I hate, plus I have a recently acquired hernia so I really don't feel like driving, and we get a stroke of brilliance....I cut a piece of 1/8" plywood and glue it to the bottom of the 3/4" piece!  Now I have room to countersink!  So I drill, and drill, and drill.....

Ok, so gluing three sheets of plywood together, and then adding 24 screws was overkill, but hey, this is America, anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.  After the great screw fest of 2012 was over, I re-checked the fence for square, and screwed it down.  I didn't use any glue for the fence because I want to be able to take it off.  While I was drilling one of the holes, I felt the fence move just a tad, so I re-drilled it.  I really need this thing to be perfectly square.  It can be (and is) ugly, but it has to be square.  

So the shooting board is done.  Now its time to make the donkey ear.  I use the 3/4" plywood and again go back to the table saw.  Now, I don't have a zero clearance insert that works when the blade is angled on the table saw, so I make my cuts without one.  For this I use a miter gauge that clamps the work piece, and a big dose of stupid.  I make the ramp for the workpiece to rest on, then I make two supports to hold it perfectly angled to the plane.

  
Again I did not use glue, partially because I wanted to be able to take this thing apart if needed, and second, I was fresh out of overkill at this point.  In setting the donkey's ear up and getting the edge flush with the ramp, I noticed that it wobbled ever so slightly.  I added a machine screw to the back corner so that I could adjust it until it sat perfectly.  

My original plan was to leave the donkey's ear like this, and use two dowels to keep it lined up.  I used my brace to drill the holes for the dowels, then carefully marked the shooting board to drill the receiving holes for the dowels.  When I tested it....I was off a little.  So I did what any professional would do...I got mad and called it a Cotton-Headed Ninny Muggins.  Then I changed my design.  I filled in the poorly drilled holes, and then I made a bottom for the donkey's ear.  In the long run I am glad I did, it makes it a lot stronger and less prone to accidental re-dimentioning.  I was then able to drill through the bottom and into the shooting board, so the dowels lined up perfectly.  

Next, I made a fence for the Donkey's ear.  I grabbed a scrap piece of 3/4" plywood....and then remembered that the fences need to be REAL wood because the plane iron will hit them.  Poop.  After this project I may have to re-evaluate my brilliance.  In my defense, it was about 1:00 am, and I was on narcotic pain killers (insert witty quip about excuses here).  So I found a scrap of white pine, carefully mitered the ends in my super dangerous no insert table saw rig.  It was like staring into the bowels of hell, dark, dusty, huge blade that wants to eat me.  Anywho...I again used my jack plane to square up the fence, and screwed it on.  

And, recognizing my folly, I also replaced the fence on the shooting board with one made of white pine.  I cut the fences so that the surface the work piece touched is end-grain, hoping this will help prevent slipping.  Last thing was adding a little wax on the plane chute, then testing it out.  I grabbed a couple of pieces of pine, and started planing...

The end result is an absolutely perfect miter.  So beautiful, oh how long I have desired you, perfect miter...sorry, got distracted.  So....up next is a purpose-build shooting plane to match the shooting board.  Here is a sample of what I am looking for:  My try plane is acting as a stand-in...

It slides so perfectly.  oooooh, goosebumps.  Anyway, despite using the big, nasty, man-eating table saw, I managed to make a dimensionally perfect and aesthetically nauseating shooting board with a donkey's ear.  I am glad I have one now, and I am glad I still have all my fingers.  And yes, I did unplug the table saw.  

The Plane Truth About Freedom, Marksmanship, and Dovetails.

When it comes to really expensive hobbies, woodworking is my second love.  My first love is as a gun guy.  Now, as a gun guy I spend many years as your typical amateur.  I bought the guns the magazines said I should and I really wasn't that great of a shot, I mean, I was ok, but not great.  That all changed several years ago when I started shooting in earnest.  Now I am an NRA Certified Instructor, and a military Firearms Instructor, and was a professional gunfighter until an injury motivated me to change jobs.  And I know how to shoot.  Like "I can score a head shot on a moving target at 25 yards with a pistol while advancing on the target" know how to shoot.  

Over my time as a professional gun guy, I have learned self-reliance, focus, discipline, and the spirit of accomplishment that comes from knowing a skill well.  This was satisfying.  So, what does this have to do with woodworking?  I think quite a bit.  Woodworking tools make great weapons, especially the table saw.  I am currently working on a holster and a really long extension cord for my table saw....just kidding; keep reading.  

I was watching an episode of The Woodwright's Shop with Roy Underhill, who has become one of my heros, and he had Chris Schwarz (another one of my new heros) as a guest and was talking about sawing techniques.  As they described the prober way to hold a dovetail saw, I had an epiphany.  A dovetail saw wants to cut a perfectly straight line, if it fails to do so, it the sawyer's fault.  Likewise, a gun wants to shoot in a straight line, if it fails to do so, it's the shooters fault.  

As it turns out, it is all about how you hold it.  Here are the proper grips for a pistol and for a dovetail saw, let's see if we can see any similarities.....

hmmmmmmm.  Very interesting.  So here is the rest of my epiphany:  Many of the same physical traits and body mechanics you use for shooting apply to woodworking, and woodworking also builds the same sense of self-reliance, and the same focus, discipline, and the spirit of accomplishment that comes from knowing a skill well.  So I found that woodworking fulfills in me everything that shooting did, but the huge difference is that woodworking also fulfills my need to create.  In the woodshop, I am a happy man, I am an artist, I am a craftsman, and I am fulfilled.  

Even though shooting may be my first expensive hobby love, woodworking is now for me so much more than a hobby, it is part of my identity part of my soul.