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I've been taking woodworking classes from a fine furniture for about 6 months total now (2 different classes, just finishing it up). There's a lot of value in h

I've been taking woodworking classes from a fine furniture for about 6 months total now (2 different classes, just finishing it up). There's a lot of value in having power tools, but some hand tools just do a better job in so many areas. I love mixing both, and there is something very satisfying of doing a rabbit plane or using a low angle block plane that isn't felt when sanding. Smoother surface and better cuts too if you sharpen 'em.

tharkun__ 4y ago
If you're in it for quick results, absolutely agreed. If I had to earn a living making furniture or any kind of carpentry, I'd definitely use power tools. Even Paul uses them. I.e. as far as I know he does the rough cutting and planing for projects using machines but finishing is done using hand tools. Something I totally forgot until your reply made me remember. Paul Sellers actually made a piece for the president of the USA. He used to live in Texas. https://paulsellers.com/2020/11/a-white-house-design/ https://paulsellers.com/2020/11/a-white-house-design/ That's not what we're talking about here tho if you ask me ;) The point is to to do something that is not easy. Something that takes time. Skill. Mastery. And do it badly lol! I sympathize a lot with the OP here, i.e. in software, I make a boo boo and I force push a `git commit -a --amend` and (almost) nobody is gonna notice. In any case I squash it all before merging, whatever may have happened "in between" in the course of "getting there". This is quite different when physical things are concerned. It's much, much harder to hide your mistakes when woodworking. It needs more knowledge and skill to hide the mishap when cutting that dove tail :)
- ltbarcly3 4y ago
  Stop gate-keeping woodworking. It doesn't take any more skill to use hand tools, but it does take more time and physical exertion. It's not more pure, it's not better in any way. Wood is not a material you can treat with precision, it changes and moves with the seasons, with power tools or hand tools you can make cuts that far exceed the precision that can be maintained with wood. It's not even cheaper, a router and a table saw can do cuts that would take hundreds of hand tools to accomplish. You can't tell in the end how a cut was made or how a board was processed, you are going to eliminate any evidence with a scraper or by sanding! Unless you are making very square hyper-modern furniture out of planks you need so many specialized hand tools. Even doing something as simple as jointing and planing a board requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars of hand planes, or else months of searching for them in very rough condition and then the know how to refurbish planes. A Stanley hand plane costs about $150 each if bought new, and will probably still be almost unusable without a few hours of setup. A knockoff Indian plane will cost $70, but it's quite possible that no amount of effort or setup will make it usable. You need at least 3 different hand planes to plane a rough board. An electric planer costs $300 to $500, it makes absolutely no sense to buy $500 of hand planes unless you specifically want to spend 500x the effort and time. At that point, why do you even allow yourself a set of planes? Why not literally sand the board like they did in Mesopotamia with another board and a bucket of sand? Why allow yourself a Stanley type cast iron plane, why not limit yourself to a 1700's style wood plane and a poor iron that can barely keep an edge? Why not limit yourself to a bronze hatchet? It's beyond arbitrary to decide that there is some kind of magic in choosing the most modern thing you possibly can that isn't motorized, something that can only be manufactured using the same sorts of technology that you are avoiding by using it. They were never flattening cast iron planes by hand, they aren't rolling the steel for the plane irons by hand, and they never did. They do it with giant machines in giant mechanized factories. These planes were only ever bought because the kinds of mechanization they had available in the factory wasn't available in the locations people needed to shape wood at that time. If you want to fetishize the process or experience the history of woodworking like a worker at Colonial Williamsburg, or you are Amish, then by all means concentrate on the tools and the process, and by all means your personal experience and the value you find is fine, but don't tell people there is something lesser about the tools they use to build the things they want to build. I promise you, all those thousands of workers who spent their days sweating over their work without air conditioning or power tools would throw those hand tools directly into the trash if they had a choice to use modern tools. Which they largely did when those more modern tools became available. I am certain they would find it funny and ridiculous, if not unbelievable, that anyone would ever decide there is something spiritual and desirable in doing the sorts of physical labor they went to great lengths to minimize and which over time wore out their bodies. It's no different than insisting on digging a ditch for fiber optic cable by hand because it requires so much more time, skill, and mastery of various kinds of shovels.
  - endominus 4y ago
    > It's not even cheaper, a router and a table saw can do cuts that would take hundreds of hand tools to accomplish... Unless you are making very square hyper-modern furniture out of planks you need so many specialized hand tools. Even doing something as simple as jointing and planing a board requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars of hand planes, or else months of searching for them in very rough condition and then the know how to refurbish planes. This is not true. The YouTuber Rex Kreuger[0] has a series where he explains how to get started woodworking with mostly hand tools, making very much not-modern furniture with relatively cheap tools. While he does advocate buying and restoring tools from second-hand sellers, he also does a lot of his work with relatively new tools (such as this video[1] about using a disposable DeWalt saw for joinery) and shows how to use limited tools in historical ways to make a large variety of cuts, applicable to any woodworking you'd want to do. In fact, he specifically says that he only uses 3 planes for the vast majority of the work he does, and that should be enough to make fine furniture. > Stop gate-keeping woodworking. I would argue that demanding an investment of many hundreds of dollars and large amounts of floor space (that a router and table saw would require) is more gatekeeping than recommending hand tools. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/@RexKrueger https://www.youtube.com/@RexKrueger [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQBz4QHn7u4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQBz4QHn7u4
    - ltbarcly3 4y ago
      I sponsor Rex Kreuger on Patreon and have for a couple of years. He has a top of the line Saw Stop table saw and he rents a small commercial building to do his woodworking in. I think he has a wide interest and doesn't ever shame people or make out like he is more pure somehow, he is very practical and puts a lot of effort and intelligence into understanding the process for our benefit. Rex is great. Watching his channel and his explanations would help anyone improve as a woodworker regardless of how they hack chunks off of boards. Another thing Rex does is try to make the tools himself (sometimes this is a disaster, like his lathe, but even then you learn a lot about what makes a lathe the way it is). He is above all practical, and when he says you can make furniture with some cheap tools he isn't claiming it's better or demonstrates more "mastery", it's just a way you can get started cheap. I think if you can make a tool by hand from garbage or whatever, and then you can use that tool to build other things, that is somehow very different from just bragging about how you use hand tools 'because mastery and time'. Buying a plane that was made in a huge industrial factory around the time of WW1 and then using it 100 years later to act cool is very different than being able to demonstrate that you can 'get by' without spending thousands of dollars. How to build the tools and how they work and building those tools by hand from scratch is also interesting in itself. I think it depends what you mean by 'fine' furniture. He has shown how to make some very simple colonial stools and boxes using simple techniques and hand tools. But more to the point, he is interested specifically in the history of woodworking and understanding how craftsmen were able to make things with the limitations they were under. If you want to help preserve that history I support it, but there isn't anything special about doing woodworking that way, any more than there is anything special in doing anything in an archaic way. By all means if you have more fun doing work by hand then do it by hand, what I take issue with is the claim that it is somehow closer to some ideal and other ways of doing things are not as desirable somehow. Watching that guy in Australia build up from being naked in the forest to smelting iron tools is incredibly interesting and valuable, but I don't recommend it as a strategy, and there's no shame in not. Anyway, my point was that a router and a table saw can take the place of hundreds of hand tools. If you look at a cabinet makers tools before power tools you will see dozens and dozens and dozens of planes for all the patterns they will want to cut. Cutting a panel for a cabinet door is amazingly complicated without a table saw and requires many specialized tools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_ZACHmBMJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_ZACHmBMJo). Doing the same thing with a router and a table saw requires skill but doesn't require any other tools (maybe some chisels and of course clamps). I'm not saying "there does not exist furniture you can make with 3 tools", I'm saying modern tools take the place of hundreds of hand tools that would cost far more than their modern (more general) replacements. Besides, you can't buy those tools anymore and they haven't been made for over 50 (80?) years, you would have to find antiques. So yes, you can make some stuff, but you can't make a lot of things with hand tools anymore because the tools aren't made and can't be found reliably for any price. Where would you find this pattern again: https://ebay.com/itm/165789909012 https://ebay.com/itm/165789909012 or these: https://ebay.com/itm/175492072722 https://ebay.com/itm/175492072722 Even if you cut a pattern in an iron and manage to temper it you would have to cut the same pattern into the wood, I have no idea how you do that or it requires a negative of the iron? Do you cut them at the same time using some kind of jig to keep everything perfectly aligned? It would be interesting to know how they are made, but I don't want one, and I certainly don't want 50. I don't want another one to cut rabbets, and I don't want any of the rest of them. You can collect a few hundred of these things or have a router table and a carbide bit set that costs about $100 and you can buy at any big box store or on amazon.

tharkun__ 4y ago

If you're in it for quick results, absolutely agreed. If I had to earn a living making furniture or any kind of carpentry, I'd definitely use power tools. Even Paul uses them. I.e. as far as I know he does the rough cutting and planing for projects using machines but finishing is done using hand tools. Something I totally forgot until your reply made me remember. Paul Sellers actually made a piece for the president of the USA. He used to live in Texas. https://paulsellers.com/2020/11/a-white-house-design/ https://paulsellers.com/2020/11/a-white-house-design/ That's not what we're talking about here tho if you ask me ;) The point is to to do something that is not easy. Something that takes time. Skill. Mastery. And do it badly lol! I sympathize a lot with the OP here, i.e. in software, I make a boo boo and I force push a `git commit -a --amend` and (almost) nobody is gonna notice. In any case I squash it all before merging, whatever may have happened "in between" in the course of "getting there". This is quite different when physical things are concerned. It's much, much harder to hide your mistakes when woodworking. It needs more knowledge and skill to hide the mishap when cutting that dove tail :)

ltbarcly3 4y ago
Stop gate-keeping woodworking. It doesn't take any more skill to use hand tools, but it does take more time and physical exertion. It's not more pure, it's not better in any way. Wood is not a material you can treat with precision, it changes and moves with the seasons, with power tools or hand tools you can make cuts that far exceed the precision that can be maintained with wood. It's not even cheaper, a router and a table saw can do cuts that would take hundreds of hand tools to accomplish. You can't tell in the end how a cut was made or how a board was processed, you are going to eliminate any evidence with a scraper or by sanding! Unless you are making very square hyper-modern furniture out of planks you need so many specialized hand tools. Even doing something as simple as jointing and planing a board requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars of hand planes, or else months of searching for them in very rough condition and then the know how to refurbish planes. A Stanley hand plane costs about $150 each if bought new, and will probably still be almost unusable without a few hours of setup. A knockoff Indian plane will cost $70, but it's quite possible that no amount of effort or setup will make it usable. You need at least 3 different hand planes to plane a rough board. An electric planer costs $300 to $500, it makes absolutely no sense to buy $500 of hand planes unless you specifically want to spend 500x the effort and time. At that point, why do you even allow yourself a set of planes? Why not literally sand the board like they did in Mesopotamia with another board and a bucket of sand? Why allow yourself a Stanley type cast iron plane, why not limit yourself to a 1700's style wood plane and a poor iron that can barely keep an edge? Why not limit yourself to a bronze hatchet? It's beyond arbitrary to decide that there is some kind of magic in choosing the most modern thing you possibly can that isn't motorized, something that can only be manufactured using the same sorts of technology that you are avoiding by using it. They were never flattening cast iron planes by hand, they aren't rolling the steel for the plane irons by hand, and they never did. They do it with giant machines in giant mechanized factories. These planes were only ever bought because the kinds of mechanization they had available in the factory wasn't available in the locations people needed to shape wood at that time. If you want to fetishize the process or experience the history of woodworking like a worker at Colonial Williamsburg, or you are Amish, then by all means concentrate on the tools and the process, and by all means your personal experience and the value you find is fine, but don't tell people there is something lesser about the tools they use to build the things they want to build. I promise you, all those thousands of workers who spent their days sweating over their work without air conditioning or power tools would throw those hand tools directly into the trash if they had a choice to use modern tools. Which they largely did when those more modern tools became available. I am certain they would find it funny and ridiculous, if not unbelievable, that anyone would ever decide there is something spiritual and desirable in doing the sorts of physical labor they went to great lengths to minimize and which over time wore out their bodies. It's no different than insisting on digging a ditch for fiber optic cable by hand because it requires so much more time, skill, and mastery of various kinds of shovels.
- endominus 4y ago
  > It's not even cheaper, a router and a table saw can do cuts that would take hundreds of hand tools to accomplish... Unless you are making very square hyper-modern furniture out of planks you need so many specialized hand tools. Even doing something as simple as jointing and planing a board requires hundreds and hundreds of dollars of hand planes, or else months of searching for them in very rough condition and then the know how to refurbish planes. This is not true. The YouTuber Rex Kreuger[0] has a series where he explains how to get started woodworking with mostly hand tools, making very much not-modern furniture with relatively cheap tools. While he does advocate buying and restoring tools from second-hand sellers, he also does a lot of his work with relatively new tools (such as this video[1] about using a disposable DeWalt saw for joinery) and shows how to use limited tools in historical ways to make a large variety of cuts, applicable to any woodworking you'd want to do. In fact, he specifically says that he only uses 3 planes for the vast majority of the work he does, and that should be enough to make fine furniture. > Stop gate-keeping woodworking. I would argue that demanding an investment of many hundreds of dollars and large amounts of floor space (that a router and table saw would require) is more gatekeeping than recommending hand tools. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/@RexKrueger https://www.youtube.com/@RexKrueger [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQBz4QHn7u4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQBz4QHn7u4
  - ltbarcly3 4y ago
    I sponsor Rex Kreuger on Patreon and have for a couple of years. He has a top of the line Saw Stop table saw and he rents a small commercial building to do his woodworking in. I think he has a wide interest and doesn't ever shame people or make out like he is more pure somehow, he is very practical and puts a lot of effort and intelligence into understanding the process for our benefit. Rex is great. Watching his channel and his explanations would help anyone improve as a woodworker regardless of how they hack chunks off of boards. Another thing Rex does is try to make the tools himself (sometimes this is a disaster, like his lathe, but even then you learn a lot about what makes a lathe the way it is). He is above all practical, and when he says you can make furniture with some cheap tools he isn't claiming it's better or demonstrates more "mastery", it's just a way you can get started cheap. I think if you can make a tool by hand from garbage or whatever, and then you can use that tool to build other things, that is somehow very different from just bragging about how you use hand tools 'because mastery and time'. Buying a plane that was made in a huge industrial factory around the time of WW1 and then using it 100 years later to act cool is very different than being able to demonstrate that you can 'get by' without spending thousands of dollars. How to build the tools and how they work and building those tools by hand from scratch is also interesting in itself. I think it depends what you mean by 'fine' furniture. He has shown how to make some very simple colonial stools and boxes using simple techniques and hand tools. But more to the point, he is interested specifically in the history of woodworking and understanding how craftsmen were able to make things with the limitations they were under. If you want to help preserve that history I support it, but there isn't anything special about doing woodworking that way, any more than there is anything special in doing anything in an archaic way. By all means if you have more fun doing work by hand then do it by hand, what I take issue with is the claim that it is somehow closer to some ideal and other ways of doing things are not as desirable somehow. Watching that guy in Australia build up from being naked in the forest to smelting iron tools is incredibly interesting and valuable, but I don't recommend it as a strategy, and there's no shame in not. Anyway, my point was that a router and a table saw can take the place of hundreds of hand tools. If you look at a cabinet makers tools before power tools you will see dozens and dozens and dozens of planes for all the patterns they will want to cut. Cutting a panel for a cabinet door is amazingly complicated without a table saw and requires many specialized tools (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_ZACHmBMJo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_ZACHmBMJo). Doing the same thing with a router and a table saw requires skill but doesn't require any other tools (maybe some chisels and of course clamps). I'm not saying "there does not exist furniture you can make with 3 tools", I'm saying modern tools take the place of hundreds of hand tools that would cost far more than their modern (more general) replacements. Besides, you can't buy those tools anymore and they haven't been made for over 50 (80?) years, you would have to find antiques. So yes, you can make some stuff, but you can't make a lot of things with hand tools anymore because the tools aren't made and can't be found reliably for any price. Where would you find this pattern again: https://ebay.com/itm/165789909012 https://ebay.com/itm/165789909012 or these: https://ebay.com/itm/175492072722 https://ebay.com/itm/175492072722 Even if you cut a pattern in an iron and manage to temper it you would have to cut the same pattern into the wood, I have no idea how you do that or it requires a negative of the iron? Do you cut them at the same time using some kind of jig to keep everything perfectly aligned? It would be interesting to know how they are made, but I don't want one, and I certainly don't want 50. I don't want another one to cut rabbets, and I don't want any of the rest of them. You can collect a few hundred of these things or have a router table and a carbide bit set that costs about $100 and you can buy at any big box store or on amazon.