Woodworking Magazine Weblog

This morning I stumbled on a cool movie from 1940 that explains the types of woodworking jobs available at the time and has some really fun shots of veneering, furniture-making and patternmaking. If for some reason your browser won't display the movie, scoot on over to archive.org and you can choose from a wide variety of video formats.

My favorite part of the video is where they show the vocational students attacking some boards with tools. One of the students is planing a big old hollow in an edge. Then it shows him checking the edge to ensure it's square. Though you cannot hear the student, I'm sure he said something like, "Jeepers that edge sucks eggs."

If you have 10 minutes to spare, I think you'll enjoy this little flick.

— Christopher Schwarz

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Looking for More Woodworking Information?
• Sign up for our newsletters to get free plans, techniques and reviews HERE.
• Looking for free articles from Woodworking Magazine? Click HERE.
• Like hand tools? Read all our online articles on hand work HERE.
• Want to subscribe to Woodworking Magazine? It's $19.96/year. Click HERE.

Handplanes with corrugated soles vex many woodworkers. If you find them on a vintage plane, should you grab it or should you shun it? If you order a bench plane from Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, should you spend the extra $35 to get a corrugated sole or is that money better spent on some Lehman Brothers stock?

Corrugated soles started showing up on planes in the late 19th century. Craftsmen noticed that their newfangled metal planes were harder to push than their old-fashioned wooden-bodied planes, according to period accounts and patent papers.

So manufacturers began to mill corrugations in the soles of their planes. For a peek at their reasoning, check out this 1869 patent by E.G. Storke:

“…(E)xcessive friction was caused by their exact and even faces (of their soles), which were not materially varied by use or atmospheric changes.

“When used on very level surfaces, there were so many points of contact that the friction was troublesome, and the adhesion was further increased by atmospheric pressure, as partial vacuums would thus be formed.”

In other words, the planes were sticking to the work when the boards became really flat. I’ve encountered this when working with closed-grain woods, especially poplar and maple. In fact, if the board isn’t too large, I can occasionally lift the board off the bench because it is stuck to the tool’s sole. It’s a neat trick.

But is the plane harder to push if it doesn’t have corrugations? Many pointy heads I’ve talked to about this are dubious. Friction, they explain, is a function of force – not the surface area of the sole.

I have planes with both smooth soles and corrugated ones, and if there is a difference in effort required to wield them, I cannot discern it.

But there are some practical differences you should be aware of:

1. Corrugated soles on vintage planes are easier to flatten because there is less metal to remove. So if you have an old sole that needs work, corrugations are a plus.

2. The corrugations hold paraffin or wax. This wax wears away completely during use, so I assume it is lubricating the sole.

3. Corrugations on some sizes of vintage tools are rare. So if you are a collector, keep an eye out for them.

So here’s my bottom line: Corrugations don’t change the function of the plane for better or for worse, so it doesn’t really matter either way. I wouldn’t spend extra money to have them added, but I wouldn’t kick them out of bed for eating crackers, either.

— Christopher Schwarz

As a woodworking blogger, I try not to "overshare" when it comes to personal information. I try not to talk about my exotic skin lesions, what I had for breakfast and the wide array of annoying personal habits of my co-workers.

But today is a sad day here in the shop. It's time to let go of the "woobie."

The woobie is actually a rag (there, I said it) that has been soaked with the lubricating juices of many plants, animals and petroleums. For more than a decade, the woobie has wiped down every tool when I put it away. It has wiped every plane sole to make it easier to push. It has cleaned off every edge after sharpening.

But today I think the woobie goes in the garbage.

Here's the problem: I think the woobie has been contaminated by some sort of abrasive grit. Here's the evidence: My handplane edges are deteriorating more rapidly.

One of the indicators that it's time to resharpen a plane iron is when the shaving from the plane's mouth isn't intact across its width. It comes out as several smaller ribbons. What's happened to the iron is it has suffered small nicks or fractures in its edge that prevent it from taking a full-width shaving. Plus, it leaves little plane tracks behind at these fractures.

I've noticed that my smoothing plane iron at work is now deteriorating much more rapidly than my smoothing plane at home (which is where I keep "son of woobie").

More evidence: When I was teaching at Kelly Mehler's School of Woodworking in September I left my woobie at home. And after crouching and whimpering in the corner a bit because of my forgetfulness, I noticed that my edges were lasting a long time again, even though I was loaning my planes to the students.

Hmmm. The woobie sees a lot of abrasive when it wipes off my tools from sharpening. And it sits by the drill press, where there are metal filings and other nastiness. The woobie could be the source of the problem. Embedded grit could be scratching the irons when I wipe them off.

I could launder the woobie, but I want to stay married. So here's what I'm going to do: I'm going to put the woobie at the bottom of my now-empty garbage can, start a new woobie and monitor the longevity of my plane irons. If my edges improve I'll let the woobie go to the dump with the next load of trash.

And judging by how quickly we move here, that should be about Christmas.

— Christopher Schwarz

A lot of people ask to see my tool collection. I tell them I don't have one – I'm a user, not a collector. If I say that again, however, I'll be a liar.

Somehow during the last few months I've started acquiring edge-trimming planes. I've owned a Lie-Nielsen version – a right-handed copy of the Stanley No. 95 – for many years, and that was all this woodworker needed.

But this spring I heard Thomas Lie-Nielsen tell the story of how he got started in the plane-making business in the 1980s to a group of students at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking. I'd heard the story before: Lie-Nielsen began making the edge-trimming plane after picking up the business from machinist Ken Wisner.

This time, the story was different because one of the students at the school (Jeff Skiver) brought one of the Wisner planes to the class to show. (You can read about his plane in a blog entry I wrote in April.) As I held the little sucker, I thought it would be cool to own one of these Wisner planes as a piece of modern planemaking history.

So I started trolling eBay with little luck. Meanwhile, we got the new Veritas versions of the edge-trimming plane in iron, and (mystery of mysteries) those ended up in my tool chest. Then I stumbled upon an AMT version of the tool for sale that I couldn't pass up. The AMT version is, by the way, a complete piece of dung. Its red velvet bag is nice, however.

I knew I had crossed over when I started regretting not buying the stainless steel version of the plane that Veritas offered but is now sold out.

And this week, I finally got my Wisner.

Thanks to some help from Skiver, I found an eBay auction for a Wisner plane and snagged it for a fair price. When it arrived, I was thrilled with it. Not only is it well made, but it is the first used tool I've ever bought that came perfectly sharp and ready to go. That's the good news.

Here's the bad news: My Wisner plane has an iron body with a brass lever cap. So now I'm going to have to look for a Wisner with a bronze body. And the Veritas version in bronze.

And that stainless Veritas plane. Curses.

— Christopher Schwarz

Getting all the bits of hardware to match on a project is a critical detail for me. I go to great lengths to ensure the hinges, pulls and other assorted metal bits look like they came from the same family.

For example, for the blanket chest on the cover of the Summer 2008 issue I wanted to get the brown steel stays to match the black iron chest hinges. I ended up painting the steel stays black, then lacquering them and rubbing them out until they looked like the powdery black iron.

This might seem excessive, but every time anyone (even my kids) opens the chest for the first time, they comment on the cool hardware. It's definitely worth it.

One of the biggest problems with getting your hardware to match is dealing with shiny brass. I really dislike the way it looks for some reason. So I usually end up aging all the brass bits until they look like they have seen about 100 years of use.

Here's how I do it. First I strip any lacquer off the hinges. I'll pour a little bit of lacquer thinner into a Mason jar, drop the hardware in and shake the jar for a few minutes. Usually the thinner gets a little tinge of color (sometimes green).

I discard the thinner, dry off the hinges and clean out the jar. Then I drop the hardware back into the jar and add a tablespoon of liquid gun blue (I use Perma Blue made by Birchwood Casey). I shake it around until the brasses and screws are colored. Then I pour the gun blue back into the bottle and pour cold tap water into the jar.

After rinsing the hardware, I'll dry it off and let it sit out awhile. The instructions say you should allow the stuff to cure overnight. I haven't had any problems installing the hardware almost immediately.

I really like the color that gun blue imparts. It's always consistent, never streaky and doesn't look like a dye job.

There are other ways to go about this process. You could install the hinges and wait 100 years. You could use ammonia, which is the process Senior Editor Robert W. Lang uses. And I'm sure there are even more out there. If you have a favorite one that you think is even easier, post a comment below.

— Christopher Schwarz

When The Chronicle shows up in my mailbox, I know that my evening is shot. I take the magazine to our sunroom after dinner, settle down in my Morris chair and pretty much read the whole thing.

The Chronicle is the quarterly magazine of the Early American Industries Assc., a non-profit organization founded 72 years ago to understand early technology in the home, farm and workshop. Each issue explores the physical world of handcraft, though it is by no means a hand-tool-only publication. Machinery looms large in the history of early American industry.

What you get in each issue is a heavy dose of hard-to-find information on tools and processes that are in danger of vanishing, like quarrying granite or harvesting ice. And because our country was built mostly from wood with woodworking tools, there is always a strong woodworking undercurrent that runs through the publication.

In the new issue, which I just received last week, there are fantastic articles exploring the crooked knife (essentially a beautiful Native American drawknife), how to read tool marks on old furniture (axes vs. adzes vs. froes and so on), and a detailed exploration of the Stanley 620 hand drill.

How do you get The Chronicle? By joining the Early American Industries Assc. It's just $35 a year and opens up a world of tool information for you. In addition to The Chronicle magazine, you also get the organization's newsletter, the opportunity to attend their annual meetings (always in a cool place), the Eastfield Summer Workshop (usually on traditional skills) or take a European tool tour.

If you pick up your tools (hand or power) and understand that they are a connection to our past, I know you'll enjoy reading The Chronicle. You can join today by visiting their web site at eaiainfo.org.

— Christopher Schwarz

Several years back I was fitting some 1/4"-thick mullions and muntins into a door and needed to plane the little suckers to remove their sawmarks.

Planing thin stock can be a real pain. I've seen how other craftsmen do it. Lonnie Bird drives escutcheon pins into his benchtop (or a planing board) and works against those. It's a neat trick. David Charlesworth attaches the stock to a planing board temporarily with cyanoacrylate. This is fantastic for long stock especially.

Here's how I came up with my method. I like to use planing stops because they are fast. And as I was considering how to plane these little nubbins of wood I was staring off into space outside my shop window and the tool rack hanging before it.

I remember thinking to myself: "For this planing stop, I need a really thin and rigid piece of material. Something with really square edges so they'll grab the work. I need something like a steel ruler."

So I searched over the junk pile in the window well behind my bench. (Note: This is my secret shame area. Though I don't have a tool well in my bench I have a junky window well instead.)

None of the little bits of wood in the window well fit the bill. They were too thick or their edges weren't crisp. Then it occurred to me: Hey moron, why not use a steel ruler?

And so I did, and I continue to use my slender 12" Shinwa to this day. It works great. I clamp it to the bench and go to town. And now to go get some ginseng.

— Christopher Schwarz

The back page of the upcoming issue of Woodworking Magazine (which mails to subscribers at the end of November) focuses on wood structure. What’s the difference among ring-porous woods, non-porous woods and diffuse-porous woods (not to mention semi-diffuse/semi-ring porous)? What’s a tracheid? A vessel? What’s meant by earlywood and latewood? And most important, what’s it all mean to a woodworker?

While researching the topic (I know far more about parenchyma cells and fusiform rays than my high-school biology teacher would ever credit), I discovered that cherry and maple are diffuse-porous woods, and therefore ought to take up stain fairly evenly according to the basic structural properties they share with all diffuse-porous species. But if you’ve ever worked with cherry and maple, you know that’s not the case. They can get blotchier than Chris in his Clearasil days.

So what’s the explanation? Our money is on elves. R. Bruce Hoadley doesn’t provide an answer in “Understanding Wood” (our wood technology bible). The Forest Products Laboratory doesn’t have an answer. Our finishing expert Bob Flexner doesn’t have an answer…and neither do any of the several world-renowned wood technologists he’s asked (though apparently, Bob has a scientist in Switzerland looking into it).

Anecdotal evidence points to stress. The explanation goes like this: In the winter, when snow is piled up on tree limbs, they’re bent down under heavy pressure. Or in windy forests, gusts stress limbs in a constant direction. These areas of stress change the grain pattern, and the irregular grain pattern is where the blotching occurs. Uh huh. This apparently has yet to be scientifically proven. Black walnut (another diffuse-porous wood) doesn’t blotch…or when it does, it’s good-looking blotch. Black walnut’s natural range includes western Vermont. I’m pretty sure it snows there.

I still think it’s elves (the fellow pictured above is named Eugene)…but I’m willing to entertain other explanations, should you care to comment below.  

— Megan Fitzpatrick

One of the most powerful things about hand tools is that they allow you to work on small areas of a board with ease. Instead of running the whole board through an electric planer to remove a small area of ugliness, you can usually remove it with a couple well-placed swipes of a handplane.

But exactly where you put those swipes is the topic of this blog entry.

This week I'm building a contemporary Arts & Crafts cabinet in maple for the master bath (OK, you caught me, it's a flipping potty cabinet). One of the structural details of the cabinet is that it has a thick base piece and top cap that are attached to the carcase.

The top cap and base are face-glued to the carcase. Getting the pieces to mate can be tricky. There are a lot of surfaces to get flat, and the fit between the carcase and the top cap and base will be highly visible (to me and my spouse, at least).

To encourage mating, I recommend friction (I think the human resources department is going to come down on me for this post).

First secure the carcase against your bench. Then take the mating piece and rub it vigorously against the carcase. About 10 swipes will be enough. Remove the mating piece and then get yourself down low so you can see light reflecting off the carcase. The high spots on the carcase and its mating piece will be burnished and will be shinier than the low spots.

Mark the high spots with a pencil. Then remove the shiny spots using a plane with a short sole, such as a low-angle block plane. Remove the high spots from both the carcase and the mate. Then repeat the process until you get the fit you want.

— Christopher Schwarz

Mark the shiny high spots with a pencil.

Then remove the high spots using a plane that has a short sole.