Handwork vs Powertools

In days of old a fella determined to go into the woodworking arena would first determine what sort of woodworking he wanted to do. Most woodworking was specialized. In a world of wood, from transportation to furniture to tools, one would specialize in a particular area. There were woodworkers making boats and ships and wagons and, well, you get the point. And there were similar, but different skills involved in each, so one would specialize based upon the type of work being done in their locale.

The second thing one would do was find a master under whom to learn. An apprenticeship was little more than slavery. In exchange for learning a woodworking trade, one would subject himself to hours of hard labor with little or no pay other than maybe room and board. The apprentice was the stoop laborer. The fella who swept the floors, carried the rough lumber into the shop and did all of the other sundry unskilled back breaking work while picking up this or that little bit of knowledge and skill from the master. He was the one who first learned to plane rough stock into foursquared thicknessed lumber for the senior apprentices to perform the more advanced cutting to size and joining skills under the direction of the master. Many years would be spent learning and advancing and practicing the skills before the apprentice would go out on his own to make a living.

Apprenticeships are now few and far between and for one to learn woodworking he has fewer choices. In decades and centuries of woodworking past, cutting and shaping of logs into furniture and conveyances was all done under muscle power. But now we have electricity to power rapidly spinning metal blades that chew there way through the wood, making short shrift of ripping and smoothing the material of choice. But what of the pieces of furniture we see at antique stores made even a short century ago with invisible joinery and fine detail. One can't help but to stare at such pieces and imagine the skill and effort put into them by someone using nothing more than hand powered saws and planes and chisels. First we try to imagine how we would set up our electron burners to make this or that fine detail, how to get our tools to make such a smooth clean surface with such sharp looking grain patterns. But if we think a bit longer we begin to wonder how this was done with such archaic tools as were available when the piece was made. I can't help but be amazed.

At this juncture I must confess to having been a devout electron burning junkie for the first many years of my woodworking experience. A basically self taught electron consumer. Books, magazines, and later the internet. Started out with a few handheld electron burners and later graduated to benchtop stuff and finally free standing. I did have a few handtools, of course; those absolutely needed to augment the screamer tools. A few cheap chisels for squaring off stopped dados and such, a couple rasps, but not much else. I didn't have a power jointer, but made do with a router table setup and a jig for the table saw. At some point I thought that maybe a jointer plane might be a better method and so the first plane I got was a big old Stanley #7C. I started doing some research on the internet and found some articles on fettling old planes and went to work on it. Even managed to get it almost sharp but it was still a bit discouraging to use it to get a jointed edge. But I was hooked on old rusty iron stuff.

I searched out e-bay for more and ended up with varying sizes of bench planes and then I discovered block planes and specialty planes and started throwing money into them. Then I stumbled onto a partially complete #45. Figured I could pick it up in pieces for less than a whole one would go for. Wrong! Some of the easily lost parts cost more than the body. But I finally assembled a full set of standard cutters and all of the other little parts from as far away as Australia. Still don't have the rounds, but . . .

As time went on, I still mostly augmented my 'lectron burners with hand tools, mostly planes. I got a power jointer, an old Craftsman that I had to rebuild and then discovered that for a really fine edge joint, the power jointed edges still needed to be cleaned up with a couple swipes of a hand plane. If you can get the grain fairly matched, the joint simply disappears when you do that.

Then one day I stumbled onto an old Disston D-8 thumbhole rip saw at an antique place. Now I already had tried several small razer type joinery saws but was a bit disappointed. I did some research on the internet and found some decent sites on handsaws and the Disston company. Went searching for backsaws as I was still thinking to augment my power tools with these little gems for joinery. Kept stumbling across other full size and panel saws and they were steals. In the interim, I also picked up the tools of the trade for sharpening them and managed to get halfway decent at sharpening handsaws. Sliding bevels and mortice and marking gauges seemed to find their way into my hot little hands as well as many other small things.

Anyway, here is a pic of my sawtill at one particular point in time. Some of those I have since sold and, ofcourse, replaced them with others.

Somewhere in there, I also found out what "sharp' really was and my planes began producing much better results and so I bought some more of those. And scraper planes, too.

Then I needed some chisels 'cause some stuff is just better and more easily done with a chisel than with any other sort of tool, hand or 'lectron powered. With all these new old tools flowing in, more practice at sharpening again redefined my definition of "sharp". And some other knowledge and skills were needed. I found that many of the plane irons and chisels had been ruined by being butchered on high speed grinders. But these were good carbon steels and I discoverd that if you get rid of the butchered part, you can fairly simply retemper the metal. So I rescued many of these ruined pieces of metal with my MAPP torch and some oil.

And in order to do hand work properly, one must have a sturdy bench on which to work. My original one made from kitchen cabinet type stuff worked alright, but a proper one had to be added. Here's some pics of mine in its most recent incarnation.

As time went on, less frequent screaming noises emitted from my little garage shop, slowly but surely replaced by the swishing sound of a handplane removing less than paperthin shavings from pieces of hard wood, and the voopaw of a handsaw replaced the battleing of long pieces of stock across the screaming table saw. The louder noise of a mallet striking a chisel is more often the loudest sound heard.

So, while I still use my power planer for removing the bulk of the wood when thicknessing, and the table saw is still used to cut that near perfect miter, one or more of my many handtools are what I reach for more and more often for refining a joint, or cleaning up a surface. My power sanding equipment gets occassional use, mostly in grinding a new bevel on a chisel or such, but even when it is used on wood, handplanes and scrapers make the final surface. And most joinery is cut by hand because it just seems more natural.

So, in this age when apprenticeships in woodworking are mostly gone, and with the expense of good hand woodworking classes outside the budget range of most folks stumbling into this hobby/avocation I think that a more likely evolution is from power woodworking to augmenting power tools with some hand tools, then to more extensive hand tool use, and, just maybe, exclusive or near exclusive use of handtools. The fact is, is that handtools have a bit longer learning curve than do power tools. Without the guidance of someone skilled in their use, learning to use hand tools can be very frustrating. There is a sort of finesse one must discover in the use of many handtools, not the mechanical setup and adjusting of powertools which can be learned by reading. Handplaning an edge square to a face can be assisted with a jig attached to the plane, but planing a ragged edge to a line is a matter of finessing the plane to take a little more off here and a little less off there all in a single stroke, or swoopping the plane down onto a certain place on the edge then swooping it back up at another place. One must learn to read the grain in knarly woods, and feel those changes through the metal and wood between the workpiece and the hands.

But, all of this effort and frustration in learning pays great dividends in the final product. The sharp grain of a planed or scraped surface is much more appealing than is one which has been abraded with sandpaper. A hand tuned dado just seems to fit more nicely than one which has been bulled out on a table saw. And a handcut dovetailed corner with varying sizes of dovetails has more appeal than one with a number of same sized dovetails cut with a router.

So, while some out there will maintain that one should learn to get the feel of the wood and how it interacts with metal by starting out with handtools and working their way up to power tools, I think that method, without the advantage of a master to teach the handskills, would be more likely to turn people away out of frustration at their lack of progress toward work they can be proud of. Taking that to its simplest form, if one has never experienced a truly sharp blade, one can not know easily what a sharp blade is. Sharpening is one of the most basic skills of woodworking and it can only come through practice and the experience of the feel of a truly sharp blade. When my chisels and hand plane blades dull to the sharpness of a brand new power planer or jointer blade, they are well past a useful state.

The mechanics of setting up and using power tools can be learned quickly and one can produce satisfying results early on. A nice bookcase or table that outshines and outlasts anything one can find in a furniture store can be made in short order after minimal time spent learning to use ones machines. Decent, long surviving joints can be made with your machines and a few chisels to clean out the little bit of waste that the machine can quite reach. Consistantly perfect joints that nearly square your projects can be attained with the addition of a shoulder plane and little more learning of hand skills. With continueing effort with hand tools you will find that for many processes it is quicker and easier, to say nothing of quieter, to do it by hand than it is to set up and use a machine.

In final analysis, I have found that handtool use takes my woodworking a step beyond what I could produce with powertools. Cleaner, sharper lines and surfaces produced by hand tools may be something noticed only by those with eyes trained through the use of such tools, but they add a certain something else even to those who are viewing the piece only as an observer. They simply take the piece a bit further beyond the norm. And their use adds to the enjoyment of the hobby, and, after all, that is really what it is all about.