I guess as you delve into the art or wood creativity, it’s easy to start making friends through blogs, woodworking classes, or conventions that share the same interests.  It’s even cooler when, by off chance, you happen to make that friendship and it crosses paths throughout your woodworking saga.

I was looking up hand-built wooden handplanes one day, and came across a blog called “Toolerable” where he made his own Jointer Plane (of the Krenovian style out of Maple).  I was intrigued and began following his blog.  Brian: thanks for meeting me out in Tegernsee!

I also received a consolation prize, hand-built by Brian himself (in his series to encourage beginners to hand-tools with only the most fundamental of tools): a half-lapped Square (in my hand above and shown, in its full glory, below).

I haven’t gotten around to building one of these yet (nor do I have a square that’s over 4 inches), so this is the perfect addition that I needed.  I only wish I would’ve had the same forethought to build something in return.  Brian: it will get continual use in my shop… just wait!

Of course, Brian wrote up a better post than I, which includes his finish that I was grilling him about… finishing is something that I’m still trying to find my way.  I’ve been wanting to do an almost purely wax finish, and that’s exactly what Brian did with this; his instructions provided here.

Rather than woodwork the last two weekends, I had to prep the shop to be shipped off to Britain. I took apart and cleaned each tool and put a coat of Jojoba oil on prior to them all being packed up. Because I didn’t feel like breaking down the workbench, I told them that it needed to be shipped as-is. They had to build a special wooden crate just to hold it – have fun moving that beast! As with all my valuables, I took a photo (for insurance purposes) that catalogues what I own in case of damage or loss. So here’s Snakeye Woodworks in a nutshell:

Bummer, I never did finish the table I was working on. Hopefully what I’ve done so far makes it to England ok and I can pick up work where I left off. But I’ve learned one thing from delving into the realm of hand tools in the past 3 years:

Enjoyable woodworking, like a fulfilled life, is not about the reaching the destination… it’s truly about the journey that takes you there. Sure, I love seeing the end product when I’ve finished, but I enjoy the therapy involved in creating with wood so much more. And hand tools (for me) has made it more enjoyable because I can listen to music or enjoy relative quietness while I work.

Even though I started building things from wood back in 2003, I’ve learned almost everything I now employ during the past 3 years.  Granted, I do owe a lot of gratitude to my Dad; he was always building things with his Shopsmith when I was a boy, and planted the “woodworking seed” in my head.  Unfortunately when I was a boy, I didn’t have much of an interest in it… I thought electronics were the bee’s knees back then.  Granted I still like my fair share of electronics, but I’ve come to realize that good electronics last only 10 years at best… good woodworking lasts centuries.  I’ll take the latter!

So my learning curve started accelerating when, on a whim, I went to the military base wood shop to build a birthday present for my son.  A local Italian guy, Stefano, ran the wood shop and helped me out (perhaps initially more to keep me safe than to ensure it turned out exactly as I’d wanted it!).  It was then that I realized that I didn’t know much of the craft: the expanding and contracting of wood during the seasons, the joinery, and how to use the machines without killing yourself (you ever try to run end-grain through a jointer machine?).

I took a 7-month vacation to Afghanistan after that and, while there, had the revelation of switching to hand tools.  My wife was a little reluctant to let me spend every Saturday at the base wood shop while I was building my son’s toy table.  Hand tools were my solution to wood working at home (besides, power tools would’ve instantly blew the fuse to my house).  That quest detailed here.  After a lot of research, I came home on a mission… and I quickly enlisted the expertise of Stefano in order to stand up a home woodshop.  The first tool to obtain?  A personally-built workbench.  I executed my plan while Stefano checked everything I did.  And when Stefano was out for quite some time from back surgery, two other regulars stepped in and imparted their knowledge to help me: Mark and Mike.

Nowadays, I think the three of them look at me like I’m crazy because I’m a fervent hand-tool believer, but they still continue to mentor me and help me out… and I can actually now counter with ideas of my own to help them out.  Like in medieval times, I owe these guys a lot for taking me into apprenticeship.  They may have the last laugh here soon though… when I move to England, I will be no where near a US military base (that typically has a woodshop for use)… and British bases aren’t armed with the same morale luxuries.  I may very well have to put my money where my hand-tool-toting mouth is.

You see, I’ve been kinda cheating: I buy the wood from Stefano and use his shop’s power tools to clean, square and dimension the wood; then I take it home for the joinery and finishing with my hand tools.  I think wood purchasing will be easy enough (after all, I’m in England), but with no power tool shop available, it looks like I’ll be even cleaning and dimensioning wood by hand.  So the journey continues…

But in reflection: thanks boys, for arming me with the know-how that I use today… and giving me a memorable 3 year journey.

from left to right: Mike, Mark, me and Stefano

I’m left-handed… in fact, I’m so left-handed that I’d probably be burned at the stake not 4-500 years ago.  A quick side-fact: “Left” in Italian is “sinistra” – sounds a lot like sinister.  Don’t believe my left-handedness?  I (obviously) write with my left hand.  In my house, the computer mouse is always on the left side of the keyboard.  My wife got sick of moving it back all the time, so she puts up with it.  I throw balls with my left hand.  I open cans and use scissors with my left hand.  Up until I started flying jets, I even flew predominantly with my left hand.  Then I started flying a jet where the controls were against the right side of the cockpit – so the force adjustment was automatic.  Believe it or not though, it was easy to pick up because I could fly it no other way.

Like that same ground-up training that I experienced in a “right-handed” jet, I find that it’s easy to switch between hands in my infancy of hand-tool work because I haven’t built any habits yet.  Though I feel more comfortable using my left hand over my right hand in woodworking, I haven’t noticed too much degradation in switching from left to right.  It’s not like trying to write with my right hand (in which case my 4-year-old would be more legible), or eat with my right hand (in which case I’d starve, but my pants and the floor certainly wouldn’t go hungry).

I built my workbench off of Bob Lang’s 21st Century Workbench design with the intent of making it a “left hand” bench.  After reading Chris Schwarz’s book on workbenches, it took me a little bit to figure out and understand what the difference was between a “left hand” bench and a “right hand” one.  All I knew is that, since I’m a die-hard south paw, I wanted a “left handed” bench!  I started building my bench.  Prior to mounting the top onto the base, I drilled 2 holes to mount the tail vice… and then when I test mounted the top, I realized I drilled the holes on the wrong side making it what Chris described as a “right hand” bench in his book.  I was horrified and faced with 3 courses of action: 1) I could attempt to cut out really thick dowel blanks to plug the holes and redrill on the other side, 2) I could just chop where I drilled, sacrificing maybe 6″ in table length, and drill on the other side, or 3) I could just press and have a right-hand configured bench.  I didn’t want to shorten it nor mar the bench top this early with plugs; I went with COA 3.

So what’s the difference between a right-handed and left-handed bench?  It’s only where you put the vices. Ultimately, you want to be pushing into the vice holding your piece (like the image on the right).  In this, you are pushing into the friction rather than trying to pull the piece from the friction. If I plane left-handed from my twin-screw vice, I’m essentially pulling the board (via friction) from the vice (like the image on the left).

I’ve now been using my “right-handed” bench for over a year.  My horrified vice misplacement was a farce; to this day I have absolutely zero regrets in choosing COA 3, rather than reconfiguring it to be left-handed.  First, I’ve not found that planing opposite the vice (as in the left picture) pulls the piece from the vice – the twin screw vice actually holds the pieces pretty well, especially if you use the entire length of the vice to grip the piece.  Second, I’ve found that it’s quite natural to swap from planing left-handed to planing right-handed when I do face problems.  In fact, my sawing is more true with my off-hand (right, in my case) than it is with my accustomed hand because my off hand allows the saw to do more work with less interference (whereas my dominant hand, I think, subconsciously tries to over-guide the saw).

Perhaps, for the first time in my life, I’m giving up championing my left hand and advocating for an ambidextrous stance.  I’ve only been hand-tooling-it-up for about a year now, so part of it is because I haven’t had time to form strong muscle-memory in woodworking.  But I’m hoping I can keep up the ambidextrousity.

And now for the bottom line: Don’t be set or intimidated on left or right hand tools or styles.  Your body will learn to use what you present it with (especially if you are early in the hobby).

It’s funny – projects for me are typically easy to start: I buy some rough-cut boards, start planing them down and squaring them up, and rip or re-saw them into rough dimensions.  It’s about that time that I see the real beauty and potential of the boards I’ve bought.  I start to make plans for my project: I want this knot to show on this part and this figure to be divided up amongst these parts… and then everything comes to a screeching halt.  I’ve arrived at my main hurdle.

This hurdle was very prevalent with power tools and machine woodworking: cutting just a little too much off as it shot through the table saw or a router bit biting a little outside the line or creating a ton of irrepairable tear-out.

The hurdle is the fear of failing.  It’s the fear of ruining a board with awesome figure that I’ll never get back.  This fear in woodworking is not something I can just push past without thought.  I have to conscientiously trudge forward in order to conquer and surpass it.  But usually not without a day’s pause and a lot of daydreaming about the finished product.

Here’s what multiplies this hurdle: I’m lazy…  Or you could call it that I like to be efficient.  The way to build that perfect project with power tools is to spend half a day doing test cuts on scrap pieces of the same dimensions as your final piece (like dovetailing with a router and jig, for example).  I hate this.  I always feel that my time is wasted whenever I’m not working directly on the project – and cutting into scrap pieces or spending a ton of time building jigs, to me, is not working directly on the project.  So, as you can probably predict, there’s a lot of room for improvement for my dovetails and mortise/tenons using power tools.  Truthfully, if the figure of the wood is too beautiful to chance a “first-time run” then I will take test cuts to ensure a better product… but I still hate doing it because I feel like I’m treading water rather than swimming forward.

In using hand tools, I arrive at the same hurdle but without that multiplier.  Why?  Because with hand tools, there is no need for test cuts to ensure the jig or spacing is perfect.  You just mark where the cut needs to be (without using numbers to measure), and cut.  I like that.  I feel like I’m making progress on my project.  Sure, in the end, it may take longer than with power tools, but consider this: total up the time you spend setting up a dovetail jig, making test cuts, adjusting, making more test cuts, then cutting your piece… Unless you are mass producing dovetails (say more than 20 total), I’d be willing to bet I’d finish hand-dovetailing around the same.  I guess it’s like the Tortoise and the Hare race (power tools being the Hare and hand tools being the Tortoise).  Regardless – because I’m constantly inching forward on the actual piece of my project, I feel that my time is validated.

Even better, I find that as I continue to do more and more projects purely by hand, this fear of failure is almost eliminated altogether:

1. First off, because hand tools don’t zip through the wood (like a table saw or router), there’s time to tell that your cut is starting to deviate from where you want it.  In my experience with power tools, I usually find that the realization comes after you’re well past the point of correction.
2. Even if the cuts deviate slightly, it’s way easier to salvage the situation.  All you need to do is adjust fire on the mating piece (the piece that you’re joining to the salvaging piece) and the problem is usually solved.  In power tools, you would spend another half a day readjusting your jig to compensate and then starting over with another piece of wood.  I’ve not once had to scrap a piece of wood with great figure because of some sloppy handwork.  In fact, I’m almost finding that handwork can be more accurate than machines in some cases.

All in all, I still take a pause of paralysis when I get to the point of joining and shaping, but then I am comforted by the hand-tool mitigation and can put one foot in front of the other and continue to trudge on.