Baby Steps

For a first project I thought I’d start with the essentials: a shooting board, a useful appliance for planing the edges of lengths of wood square. I’m hoping this will also prove a good way of practicing some basic woodworking skills making accurate and true pieces of wood. I'd be working from plans taken from Carpentry for Beginners by Charles H. Hayward.

To start of with, and apologies if these seems dull, I'll be making one bit of wood, the base piece of the shooting board, and doing my best to make sure it was accurate on all sides. 

After a bit of a root around last time I was at the timber yard I managed to pick up some quarter-sawn Chestnut roughly 5’ long, 7” wide and 1 ¼” thick. The quarter-sawn grain should prevent any cupping off the wood throwing the shooting-board out of square (I’ll admit this will be my second shooting board – the previous one was made out of some scraps of Oak and Pine with little understanding of wood movement and following no tried and tested plans, it was near useless after a while).

The Raw Material

A poor picture in which you can just make out the quarter-sawn grain

To start off I cut the board into two pieces just to make it more manageable. You can see that the surface of the wood is fairly rough, so my first challenge was to clean up and true one side which would become the face side.

To do this I started traversing the wood at an angle (planing against a small batten nailed to my workbench top) until I was getting consistent shaving across the wood, which should be a sign that any belly or cupping was removed. I decided to use my fore plane for this as the sole is nice and flat for accurate work while the iron has a bit of a camber for hogging of material. I probably could have got away with using my wooden jack plane, or my jack and trying plane but using the fore plane saved me switching tools continuously (and I think the sole of my wooden trying plane has a slight belly which I've not had the confidence to tackle yet!)

Traversing at and angle

Having trued the board up across the grain I then changed and planed along the grain to ensure the board had no bow lengthwise.

Planing along the grain

Having planed the surface down I checked for any twist in the board using pair of winding strips, then having confirmed it was true I planed down one edge of the board to make sure it was square to the face – giving me a trued face and edge to make all my later marking from.  These were marked with the traditional ‘face mark’ of a loop connected to the ‘face edge mark’ of a V, pointing towards the trued face.

With a true face I then marked round the 4 edges with a marking gauge to mark the desired thickness and then, in a similar process to before, planed the other side down to these marks so the board was of a constant thickness.

Trued up

Having trued both faces I just had the 2 end edges and one side that still required attention. The sides were already parallel. The face edge was already squared up, so it was the work of an instant to square up the other side and one end (which I had taken pains to cross cut square when dividing the starting board) – testing repeatedly with a try square. During this however I noticed some cracks in the wood, what I believe is called 'heart shake', I'm not sure if it's best to try and plane these cracks off (leaving me with a narrower shooting board), or if I can just fill them with epoxy or similar. 

Heart shake?

The other end however had a knot in it and was far from being square. I'd left a bit of surplus length to allow this to be re-sawn. Because I was making a shooting board I couldn’t rely on being able to plane the end square if my sawing was off so I had to get this as close as possible straight from the saw.

To do this I cut a channel square across all four sides of the board for my saw to track in. This was done with a square and a marking knife. First I squared across the board as usual, and went back across the markings to deepen them with my knife, I then came back along the lines with my marking knife at an angle to dig out a V shaped trench. The V should lean into the waste side of the cut with its back, so that you don’t leave a beveled edge on the keeper.

This is a trick I’ve  seen Roy Underhill use on The Woodwright’s Shop and I was amazed at the results. I know my sawing needs more work as I often drift off the line, but following this groove the results were pretty good – a quick clean up with a block plane and I was happy.

All in all, after a couple of hours work I had turned a bit of wood into a square and true bit of wood. It doesn’t look like much but I feel taking the time to do this properly will teach me valuable lessons in accuracy. The shooting board needs two more bits which will hopefully come from the other half of this board of Chestnut. With varying thicknesses I'll be needing to try my hand at re-sawing a thick board down to two thinner ones next - another opportunity to learn something I think!

The Tool Kit

Having opened this blog with an introduction to the tool kit, I thought it would make sense to follow up with a list of its contents. The kit was chosen mostly under the guidance of various Charles H. Hayward books, who edited The Woodworker magazine from 1935-68 and wrote a number of useful books on furniture and woodworking. The two I’ve relied on most are Tools for Woodwork and Cabinet Making for Beginners. The Joiner and Cabinet Maker (of which a tool list is available here) and Chris Schwarz’s The Anarchists Tool Chest also deserve a mention when on the topic of choosing tools.

Most of the tools were given to me by relatives or picked up on Ebay or various antiques markets, though a couple were bought new. There are a few oddities that were picked up cheaply more for nostalgic reasons that for regular use – though I did find a use for the badger plane making the wide tenons for the clamped ends on the tool chest’s lid. I’ve a soft spot for old wooden tools, especially if they are interesting or unusual for any reason (such as the badger plane, which I expect was made by a carpenter for personal use as it’s made out of mahogany, when as far as I’ve seen all tool makers were using beech except for infill planes).

I also went a bit overboard with the brace bits. I’ve a table in one of my books that lists the various sizes of clearance holes and pilot holes for hardwood or softwood for all screw sizes from No.2 – 14. So I’ve more than the average number of shell and half-twist bits in my bit role to try and cover all those ‘required’ sizes. And, once I’d finished the bit roll, I saw the wooden tube of drill bits and in a moment of weakness bought that too (because I didn’t have that 1/16 in. bit I needed!). We will see, but I rather think I will only need a few of those bits for the more common screw sizes.

I’d also note that I am already overflowing the tool chest (I was before it was finished in truth), so there are a couple of tools kept separately which are marked with an asterisk (*). This was partly planned, I never expected to fit the larger hand saws in the chest, and partly due to a mild tool addiction. Ideally I’d like to have a truly traditional tool kit (circa 1850) with all the old style wooden tools but in some cases the modern metal tools are nice to have to hand when required. I find they do make some jobs easier, especially whilst I’m still developing my skills. The wooden router plane in particular always causes me distress, and I struggle to get the fine shaving I can get with a metal smoothing plane from a wooden one.

Saws

• *Rip Saw
• *Cross-cut saw
• Panel saw
• Tenon saw
• Dovetail saw
• Keyhole saw
• *Bow saw

 

Planes

• Jack plane
• Smoothing plane, wood
• Record No. 04, metal smoothing plane
• Trying plane
• *Record No. 06, metal fore plane
• Record No. 09 ½ block plane
• Skewed rebate plane
• Fillister plane
• Plough plane
• *Stanley No. 50 combination plane
• *Moudling Planes, ¼ in. beading plane, 1 ogee, 2 rounds.
• *Badger plane
• Router plane, wood,
• *Stanley No. 71 router plane

Chisels

• Firmer chisels, 1/16 in., 1/8 in. – 1 in. in 1/8 in. intervals, 1 ¼ in.
• Bevelled-edge chisel, 1 in.
• Mortise chisels, ¼ in., 3/8 in.

Marking out and Testing

• Try Squares, 12 in., 6 in. and 3 in.
• Mitre square
• Sliding bevel
• *12 in. Combination square set with protractor and centre square.
• Marking knife, striking knife, pencils etc.
• Marking gauge.
• Cutting gauge.
• Mortise gauge.
• Panel gauge.
• Dovetail template
• Dividers
• *Wooden straight edge
• 2 ft. three fold rule.
• 2 ft. folding slide rule.
• 1 ft. steel rule.

Boring Tools

• Ratchet brace, 10 in. sweep.
• Brace, 5 in sweep.
• Assorted brace bits
• Brad and Birdcage awls
• *Hand drill

Other Tools

• Wood spokeshave
• Half-round file
• Rat tail file
• Cabinet-makers rasp
• Scraper
• Pincers
• Pliers
• Punches
• Oilstone
• Slip stones
• Oil can and rag
• Leather strop
• *Framing square (which should have been in the marking and measuring photo)
• Hammers
• Assorted cabinet makers screwdrivers
• *4 ‘Perfect handle’ screwdrivers, parallel tips sized for No. 4, 6, 8 and 10 screws
• Burnisher
• File card
• *Various files, handles and saw-sets for saw sharpening.
• Cork rubber
• Needle files
• *Hatchet
• *Metal plate
• Inches/Millimetres equivalent chart.
• Old candle for greasing plane soles, screws etc. and general lubrication. 
• Mallet

 

So there's the kit, which is rather more extensive than I realised. Next up I really ought to start building things...

The Tool Chest

The Tool Chest

The New Tool Chest

Freshly armed with a hand-made chest of hand-tools, the idea struck me that it would be interesting (for me at least) to chart the progress of the various items which I build from said tool chest. Keeping a record of what I made, how I made it and the various troubles and triumphs of learning how to work wood.

The chest building began several months ago when, with a lot of inherited tools and very little knowledge, I decided to build them a home.

My preferred choice would have been a traditional English chest, such as the tool chest of Benjamin Seaton. However, I lacked both time and the skill to do such a chest justice. I still hope one day to build and English style chest, but I need to get some practice on veneering, inlay etc. before I take on the challenge.

Instead I opted for a Dutch style tool chest, popularised by Chris Scwarz and featured in the October 2013 issue of Popular Woodworking magazine. (Schwarz also builds a version with Woodwright Roy Underhill here).

I’ve also come across a couple more examples at the Frisian Maritime Museum in the Netherlands. This one, dated 1850, is the most similar to the Schwarz (et al) style, but the museum collection also features two other chests with sloping tops, here, dated 1696 and here, dated 1850 (but I expect probably older).

This type of tool chest is much quicker to build compared to the English style, or at least it’s supposed to be. I’ve managed to draw my build out much longer that the two days Chris Schwarz says he can knock them out in. The bottom corners are dovetailed, the shelf is held by a dado and the ends of the lid feature clamped ends using several mortise and tenon joints but the rest is simply glued and/or screwed together. I also had to tongue and groove most of the boards to get the width – the largest boards of pine I can pick up locally are about 5 ¼”.

As far as the history of these chests is concerned they are, as the name implies, mostly of Dutch origin. One features in Jim Tolpin’s, TheToolbox Book (‘look inside’ on Amazon and you can see it on p.8) which was ‘brought to America in the late 1800’s but thought to have been built several generations earlier.’ Chris Schwarz has also blogged about another old example here (also featuring one pictured in Grandpa’s Workshop) and has shown another in a blog post here.

With chest and tool kit complete (ok, the tool kit probably isn’t, there are already one or two thing’s I’d like to add, not to mention several things that don’t fit in it – a full inventory may be another blog entry) I thought I’d take the opportunity to record all the projects which emerge from the tool chest. My woodworking experience is limited – I’ve only really made a tray and a box before this chest – and this is my first attempt at blogging so the journey will be very much an adventure in amateurism but I hope the information may interest or entertain.