Democratising Handwork in Wood

The isolation of my early handwork prepared me for the hard slog going against the ever-advancing tide of machining wood that almost rendered craftwork dead. You might not know this fact as the reality of the day, but handwork in professional realms was actually gone and in amateur realms it was hanging on by a shaving. In magazines and colleges, the demise took a mere decade to disappear, but they kept a token nod to the past by offering a 5%. Today, that's no longer demise, but real future for the real woodworking we almost lost. My work reestablishing hand methods enabled me to meet the unknown need of future. We paved the way for others, and though it certainly wasn't without great cost in time, financial expense, and so on Other costs were incurred; I spent months travelling away even to other continents, leaving my home and family. Today, we have recharged the world of woodworking with hand methods that defy the world of plugged in only woodworking. Did you know that we own Unpluggedshop.com? Worth mentioning, I think. It's enabled hundreds of other bloggers to put their name out there.

I have to say something here, though. There is this strange belief in the saying that "you get what you pay for." and i question how many are just paying through the nose far too highly, hence my last blog post speaking about the Democratising Workbench Logic post. What we want and what we need are often two very different things. I want a workbench to work and to actually work well as soon as possible because I want to hold, support and work my wood solidly using hand tools and hand tool methods and not only as an assembly point for machined wood parts. If I don't have one, I just make one, and I go the most efficient route to making certain I can make and make quickly. A workbench with a good vise is both the third hand and the anchor to which my worklife is so far irrevocably hinged. My workbenches, I have made about fifty of them for students in my hands-on classes through the years, have stood firm in the face of fancy and overkill status pieces depicting something intended to be more symbolic or to give some kind of validation to the woodworker. I have used a couple of these fancier workbenches and have found them somewhat lacking because of their clunkiness. None of them were a match for my basic bench. Believe me, twenty studs gets you there and a couple of good days sweat-equity means you will be in a machine-free woodworking saddle.

Other things strike me as democratising too. My theory of working with ten hand tools and three woodworking joints to make almost anything from wood is a truism. In the last ten years, I have built well over a hundred full furniture pieces without machining beyond a bandsaw for resizing. My long-term plan is to never touch a power router again. It's foolish to call it a power tool anyway you look at it. 98% of users use it to mould their stock with classic moulds and rounded corners. The rest of their time is making jigs and more jigs. By using bench planes, I eliminate 85% of all sanding because to sand would be to sand rough and not sand smooth. That's a new way of looking at things, isn't it?

Hard to imagine the flack I got stating that Aldi chisels back in 2010 were as good as it gets, but I did, and that's because I took the risk. Sixteen years on, I have yet to find and use a chisel that exceeded the quality of my then four-piece set. In fact, they were so good, I bought another set to resize for the in-between sizes I felt were missing like 3/16", 5/16" and 5/8". Of course, being at that time in the EU, the chisels were all metric so 6mm, 10mm, 12mm, 19mm and 25mm. Would I ever pay £100 for a single piece of any kind of chisel? Most likely not. A fancier and more expensive chisel will not make you anya better woodworker. Restoring or reshaping and reworking a chisel probably will, though. The self disci-line of doing such things is never a waste of your time, and you learn so much doing things like that. When I paid £10 for four chisels that I still use every day, I see no reason to spend over £400 for a set that does no more. And then there is this The chisels I bought from Aldi are made with highly substantive tangs that will never turn loose, bolsters that totally and firmly absorb and support every type of work, and they have indestructible hornbeam handles no other wood can beat. I cannot understand anyone using beech or ash, bubinga and so on.

So why speak of what you can no longer buy? Well, they did stock them for several years. But I have also run MHG chisels that are made in Germany. These chisels have also proven to be excellent value for money and whereas they offer some of their chisels with hornbeam handles, they also offer more finely polished versions with ash handles. In my view, hornbeam beats ash hands down. Several years ago, I bought their six-piece chisel set because they had everything I wanted in a chisel. I have also used all of these in the everyday of my life and cannot fault them. What is great is that they also offer 2mm and 4mm sizes. These are lifetime chisels, they take a keen edge and hold their edges too. A boxed set of six pieces, sizes 6, 10, 12, 16, 20, and 26mm costs £99, and you can add in the 2mm and 4mm along with other sizes if you want to. These cost only £10 or so and are very hand chisels for several tasks.

Deep or shallow, hardwood or softwood, my chosen chisels have yet to fail me. My nudge back in the day meant Aldi sold out in every one of their stores here in the UK. Unfortunately, they had to stop stocking them. So why do I say what I say? Well, the sellers of hand tools go to much trouble reasoning out why you need a set of chisels for this kind of work and then another type for that. 98% of them you just do not need, no matter the work, the shape or the size of it. The men I worked under as a boy apprentice through to a journeyman, two different companies, seven years in all, had a half dozen bevel edged chisels on the benchtop, never pulled out a massive mortise chisel for the deeper pockets, never used square edged firmer or registered-pattern chisels, and they got along day in and day out throughout those years just fine no matter the task nor the wood. These men democratised in their day in the same way I do now. The cost of my working chisels over a hundred years come to 00.oo2083333333r of a penny or cent a day.

I started selling my excess of hand tools to put the now unused back in circulation. These were the ones I used in my hands-on classes, and then those you just can't pass up. I posted a very nice Stanley #4 1/2 on eBay for £25 and had no takers. I was surprised but hey ho. I did at one time go to the wider #4 1/2 and #5 1/2 planes. I realised that people were copying what I did, and that for 90% of those new to woodworking, these were too bulky and prohibitively heavy for them. Even before that, though, I found myself reaching for my #4 Stanley almost every time. That small width difference of a mere 5/16" makes a big difference in both weight and sharpening to a man working full-time and making 98% by hand only. I'm a machineless woodworker, aside from a single bandsaw. A #4 weighs in at 3.68 lbs pounds and a #4 1/2 at 4.8; that makes the latter about the same as a Lie Nielsen #4 BedRock, that's not so small an increase, and it would make a huge difference, and especially to those not used to upper-body work for long periods.

You do not need weight, but you do need sharp!

The Stanley #4 is a light in weight in some measure, but it's no lightweight in performance in any way. The fact is this: this plane, not the BedRock version but the Leonard Bailey common-or-garden one, is not just iconic but the most perfectly designed of all all-metal versions through the last century and a half bar none, and that's for a wide range of tasks. Beefier bulldogs might like to persuade you otherwise but that's the difference between riding an Arabian stallion where you can twist, turn and flip to task in a heartbeat as opposed to plodding along on a heavy draft like a Belgian draft or a Clydesdale. A kayak can flip, roll, twist, twitch and switch on a sixpence or a nickel, but an oil tanker might take a good half day or more to even stop, let alone turn end for end. So even within the same overall size, the copycat BedRockists of our new era, new generation bench planes made by plane makers now makes even a #4 size heavy-metal plane prohibitive and of little if any intrinsic value. So I weighed three modern-day versions made by so-called premium makers and compared them to my now 61-year-old Stanley, the current one I have been using every single day over my ten-hour day days, and the weight difference between an average of these and my basic, non-retrofitted #4 Stanley makes them quite, well, sluggish. You see, metal soles on wood do stick more than their wooden counterparts, enough to feel about ten times heavier. The heavyweights make that feel like twenty times heavier, I can tell you, and that is what makes them less versatile.

Another issue that is never mentioned, so I will do it here because makers never do and owners don't even know it: The advantage makers and users extol is that you can adjust the mouth opening without removing the cutting iron assembly as they say you must do with a Bailey-pattern frog in the common Stanley's, but you actually don't. . .read my book Essential Woodworking Hand Tools. 1. You rarely if ever need to adjust the throat opening on a bench plane. I never alter this setting, and that's because with a sharp and well set plane you DO NOT NEED TO. 2. If you do that on a Bailey pattern, you do not alter the cutting depth. Now on a BedRock pattern plane, when you are advantaged by not having to remove the cutting iron assembly, you are then majorly disadvantaged because the depth of cut is changed, and you have no idea by how much. So, for around £20 you can buy a secondhand Stanley #4, spend an hour fettling it and bringing it out of hibernation because it went dull, and you have a lifetime plane. And think about this; if I have used my #4 every single day for 61 years, gone through six cutting irons yet I don't grind them of grinding wheels, how long would it last you using it for a couple of hours a week?

The three heavyweight BedRock #4's averaged 4.7lbs, whereas the Stanley comes in at 3.6lbs. That's what I call refinement with the user in mind. Nothing prissy about a plane that works for a man like me for six decades of daily making with hand tools, I'd say. These makers could learn a thing or two about listening to their customers rather than telling them what they need. It mightn't seem much but believe me, those heavyweights would translate into many a dozen tons over a 61 year daily-use span of someone like me.

My initial concern is prohibition. As a new woodworker starting out would I want to spend £400 on one tool that only planes wood after I have learned to sharpen and set the tool up. For a new woodworker starting out, it is but a temporary benefit to buy a plane that might be ready to go out of the box. Within an hour, they must resharpen and set the tool, and therein lies the issue. Why not just put your boots on and get in the saddle straight off at one twentieth of the cost. A Stanley number 4 will cost no more than £20.

And then I see some of the dumb things elsewhere too. Imagine anyone, people woodworking, spending upwards of £150 for what is no more than what we once called a "toffee hammer", 4 ounces of metal that is. The supportive comments matched the weight of the hammers I looked at. My best shot is the pretension of it all. One author started out saying, "You really don't need one of these..." and the pretension all went downhill from there. I use a couple of cross-pein hammers in my day to day, A 12 ounce Warrington version by Stanley gets me there on all types of plane iron adjustment, including tightening wedges and shocking them loose in wooden or metal planes. My 12 ounce drives panel pins and metal parts. And then there is my 6 ounce "toffee hammer" made by Stanley here in Sheffield.

These hammers are clearly winners for me. Nothing wrong with using a steel hammer to set your plane irons with or adjusting wooden plane iron depths on moulding planes either. The wide face of the hammer head has nothing prissy about it, and the cross pein fits in to the tight corners right where you need it. Oh, and did you know that the cross pein enables you to drive 1/2" pins between your forefinger and thumb no problem?

The cross-pein Warrington in different sizes is available as a vintage version secondhand on eBay. This remarkable cast steel hammer is a lifetime tool, and I have three sizes that I have used throughout my daily work life.

For adjusting all of my planes, moulding planes, cast metal and wood versions and so on, I use this 6 ounce Stanley Warrington hammer. I bought this one new in 1965.