I say all this, not because I want you to start doubting the validity of everything that you do, this might result in a visit from the men in white coats, but I do encourage you to have an open mind and the confidence to try new ideas and new methods of working.

Which leads me to the, ‘Jack of all Trades?’ question. The plane that I have always reached for first, my main weapon whenever indulging in the gentle art of making components for all things woody, has always been my trusty 5 ½ “Jack Plane”. Why? Well it’s what I’ve always done! It’s what I was told to use when I was training, I didn’t ever question it. It’s a ‘Jack’ plane after all, the ‘Jack of all Trades’ of the bench plane world, which makes it the obvious choice for doing just about everything, doesn’t it? At which point I sense the unmistakable tones of Mr Gibbs saying ‘Whyyyyyy?’ in my ear, and I feel I have to try to justify this behaviour, bearing in mind that the ‘it’s what I’ve always done’ answer, very definitely isn’t going to hold much water. Being a ‘Jack (of all trades) Plane’ definitely seems to infer that it’s going to be able to do many things, but is it actually just a one trick pony that is of a manageable size and weight, making it the plane that is (was) habitually used for most general planing duties but is actually ‘master of none’, or precious few, of them? And if it’s not much good at doing many different things, is there a plane available that is?

OK – so what are the strengths of a No. 5 ½ (or a No. 5) bench plane? If we’re considering a Stanley or a Record ‘Bailey’ pattern plane, apart from the fact that it ‘looks the part’ and the ‘bevel-down’ orientation means that the blade, perched on the rather oddly named ‘frog’, sticking up at a jaunty 45 degrees, gives a convenient place to nestle your fore-finger, whilst the rest of your fingers wrap themselves around the rear handle, strengths seem to be rather thin on the ground.

·         Adjusting the mouth opening is a right old palaver, although rather better on a ‘Bedrock’ bench plane.

·         Generally you’re stuck with a cutting angle of 45 degrees, (Common Pitch), unless, for instance, you have a Lie-Nielsen with an optional high-angle frog.

·         Common Pitch is not great for dealing with end-grain.

·         Common Pitch is not great for dealing with difficult timber that’s tearing out.

·         Every time you sharpen you have to remove and then re-adjust the chip-breaker.

·          The Stanleys and Records have frogs that are rather precariously perched on the main casting with 4 small areas of (potential) contact, not a particularly solid platform for the blade to sit on (although much better on a ‘Bedrock’ plane)

So their main strengths seem to be that they look like a proper plane and if they’re tuned up, with a decent, sharp blade fitted, they’re pretty efficient at planing wood that’s not too challenging.

Any good at dealing with end grain? No!

Any good at dealing with difficult, highly figured, timber that has a tendency to tear when a plane gets anywhere near it? No!

Easy to set up? No, not really!

So not a very versatile plane at all really!

Is there a plane that is? How about a Low Angle Jack? A plane that’s really just a Low Angle Block Plane on steroids, the sort of thing that Lie-Nielsen and Veritas produce.

Now, with a ‘Bevel Up’ blade configuration the cutting angle or ‘angle of attack’ can be changed simply by changing the bevel angle of the blade – or, a more practical solution – have several blades with different bevel angles.

Assuming a 12 degree bed angle:

·         25 degree blade gives a cutting angle of 37 degrees – great for end grain

·         33 degree blade gives a cutting angle of 45 degrees – ‘Common Pitch’ great for general planing duties

·         38 degree blade gives a cutting angle of 50 degrees – ‘York Pitch’ reduces tear-out on more difficult timber

·         43 degree blade gives a cutting angle of 55 degrees – for controlling tear-out on really wild grained timber

It’s easy to set up, the mouth can be adjusted in seconds, the hugely thick blades are well supported and it works really well on a shooting board, especially if fitted with a ‘hot-dog’ handle.

Sadly there’s nowhere to put your fore-finger though, no frog! So you have to do something with this stray finger, in time, maybe you could learn to wrap it around the handle – hopefully not too challenging with a bit of practice.

So, the Low Angle Jack might actually be the ‘Jack of All Trades’ and might even be the master of more than one of them!

And while we’re on the subject of planes, is a No.4 ‘Smoothing Plane’ actually any good at ‘Smoothing’…………………………..?

The post The Importance of “n+1” and why you need a Stealth Router first appeared on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

The post The Importance of “n+1” and why you need a Stealth Router appeared first on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

I say all this, not because I want you to start doubting the validity of everything that you do, this might result in a visit from the men in white coats, but I do encourage you to have an open mind and the confidence to try new ideas and new methods of working.

Which leads me to the, ‘Jack of all Trades?’ question. The plane that I have always reached for first, my main weapon whenever indulging in the gentle art of making components for all things woody, has always been my trusty 5 ½ “Jack Plane”. Why? Well it’s what I’ve always done! It’s what I was told to use when I was training, I didn’t ever question it. It’s a ‘Jack’ plane after all, the ‘Jack of all Trades’ of the bench plane world, which makes it the obvious choice for doing just about everything, doesn’t it? At which point I sense the unmistakable tones of Mr Gibbs saying ‘Whyyyyyy?’ in my ear, and I feel I have to try to justify this behaviour, bearing in mind that the ‘it’s what I’ve always done’ answer, very definitely isn’t going to hold much water. Being a ‘Jack (of all trades) Plane’ definitely seems to infer that it’s going to be able to do many things, but is it actually just a one trick pony that is of a manageable size and weight, making it the plane that is (was) habitually used for most general planing duties but is actually ‘master of none’, or precious few, of them? And if it’s not much good at doing many different things, is there a plane available that is?

OK – so what are the strengths of a No. 5 ½ (or a No. 5) bench plane? If we’re considering a Stanley or a Record ‘Bailey’ pattern plane, apart from the fact that it ‘looks the part’ and the ‘bevel-down’ orientation means that the blade, perched on the rather oddly named ‘frog’, sticking up at a jaunty 45 degrees, gives a convenient place to nestle your fore-finger, whilst the rest of your fingers wrap themselves around the rear handle, strengths seem to be rather thin on the ground.

·         Adjusting the mouth opening is a right old palaver, although rather better on a ‘Bedrock’ bench plane.

·         Generally you’re stuck with a cutting angle of 45 degrees, (Common Pitch), unless, for instance, you have a Lie-Nielsen with an optional high-angle frog.

·         Common Pitch is not great for dealing with end-grain.

·         Common Pitch is not great for dealing with difficult timber that’s tearing out.

·         Every time you sharpen you have to remove and then re-adjust the chip-breaker.

·          The Stanleys and Records have frogs that are rather precariously perched on the main casting with 4 small areas of (potential) contact, not a particularly solid platform for the blade to sit on (although much better on a ‘Bedrock’ plane)

So their main strengths seem to be that they look like a proper plane and if they’re tuned up, with a decent, sharp blade fitted, they’re pretty efficient at planing wood that’s not too challenging.

Any good at dealing with end grain? No!

Any good at dealing with difficult, highly figured, timber that has a tendency to tear when a plane gets anywhere near it? No!

Easy to set up? No, not really!

So not a very versatile plane at all really!

Is there a plane that is? How about a Low Angle Jack? A plane that’s really just a Low Angle Block Plane on steroids, the sort of thing that Lie-Nielsen and Veritas produce.

Now, with a ‘Bevel Up’ blade configuration the cutting angle or ‘angle of attack’ can be changed simply by changing the bevel angle of the blade – or, a more practical solution – have several blades with different bevel angles.

Assuming a 12 degree bed angle:

·         25 degree blade gives a cutting angle of 37 degrees – great for end grain

·         33 degree blade gives a cutting angle of 45 degrees – ‘Common Pitch’ great for general planing duties

·         38 degree blade gives a cutting angle of 50 degrees – ‘York Pitch’ reduces tear-out on more difficult timber

·         43 degree blade gives a cutting angle of 55 degrees – for controlling tear-out on really wild grained timber

It’s easy to set up, the mouth can be adjusted in seconds, the hugely thick blades are well supported and it works really well on a shooting board, especially if fitted with a ‘hot-dog’ handle.

Sadly there’s nowhere to put your fore-finger though, no frog! So you have to do something with this stray finger, in time, maybe you could learn to wrap it around the handle – hopefully not too challenging with a bit of practice.

So, the Low Angle Jack might actually be the ‘Jack of All Trades’ and might even be the master of more than one of them!

And while we’re on the subject of planes, is a No.4 ‘Smoothing Plane’ actually any good at ‘Smoothing’…………………………..?

The post Jack of All Trades first appeared on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

The post Jack of All Trades appeared first on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

 
It took me a number of years, a large amount of diesel and an occasional heated exchange amongst towering stacks of timber, but I count myself very fortunate that about sixteen years ago I chanced upon a timber yard that ticked pretty much all of the boxes – good selection of native timbers, some slightly more exotic timbers from around the world, a good level of tolerance of picky furniture makers, a nutty marketing department, very pleasant staff, a supply of coffee and “Cake Fridays”……….Finding such a yard inevitably involves a certain amount of trial and error although this can possibly be short-circuited by eliciting a bit of personal recommendation from a fellow woodworker – perhaps Social Media is a positive thing after all.

 
Having found a likely candidate for your business, you should at least do your homework and be properly prepared for the buying process when you turn up at the yard. In my book it’s not imperative that you have made a final decision on the type of timber you want for a particular project, after all, one of the huge benefits of finding a good timber yard and developing a good relationship with them, is that you can discuss, or even be informed of a particularly lovely consignment of Brown Oak or stunning Ripple Ash. But you should have a pretty good handle on how much you need and in what thicknesses; in fact you should really arrive with something that looks at least vaguely like a “Cutting List” secreted about your person, that and a tape measure hooked on your pocket and you might just look like you mean business and not have that ‘rabbit caught in the headlights’ look in your eyes.

 
You can take the ‘knowing how much you need/cutting list’ a step too far though. I am aware of someone who once visited a certain timber yard with a full collection of paper ‘patterns’, much like the dressmaking patterns that I used to see my mother wrestling with when I was growing up, representing all the components on his cutting list and the paper patterns were duly laid out on likely pieces of timber to see what would fit where. I am told that this was tolerated by the yard but that this sort of behaviour is actively discouraged, especially if the yard manager is expected to chase around the yard collecting oddly shaped pieces of paper that are fluttering around the yard in a confetti-like Brownian motion, having been made airborne by a gust of wind.

 
Other useful strategies for making the visit to a timber yard less terrifying? Using your cutting list, work out a rough cubic measurement for each thickness of timber, remember to add some ‘Waste’ to this measurement – your rule of thumb might be to add 50% waste for square-edged material and 100% for waney-edged, although this can of course be adjusted depending on how clean, straight and square the boards are – you might be beginning to understand that this is not the most precise of processes! I find it useful to work in cubic feet, not because I’m a dinosaur, just because I find it a much more helpful unit of measurement – for me, the cubic meter is just a bit too big and unwieldy. This is true for both comparing prices and working out quantities, I find that the bigger number for quantity and the smaller number for price is just so much more manageable e.g. 2.5 cubic feet at £35 per cu ft, compared with the metric equivalent of 0.070792 m³ at £1235.50 per cu m. Perhaps with guidance from the yard, choose the species of timber, you might start this process with an ‘Anything particularly lovely in at the moment?’ although be wary in an unknown yard, if you catch a look of triumph in their eyes at this point, they might be sensing an opportunity to get rid of some stock that’s been gathering dust for a while. At this point a fork-lift might be brought into play and some timber selected for you to inspect, with the assistance of a yardhand, or your own glamorous assistant if you’ve taken one with you, you might have a sort through this likely looking stack of timber. Don’t just march into the yard and start clambering over piles of timber or generally rearranging their stock though, this definitely won’t go down well, not to mention that stacks of timber are potentially very dangerous things. You’ll find that a visit to the timber yard selecting timber for your latest project has a secondary benefit of being a great opportunity for a good upper-body workout, so make sure your glamorous assistant has a good set of biceps. When inspecting timber remember to look at both sides of the boards, an unwelcome ‘feature’ might only be visible on one side! If you find yourself selecting timber in a dark, dingy timber store, take likely candidates outside to have a proper look at them, possibly ask if you can take a shaving or two from the surface of a dirty board to get a proper look at the colour/figure (something else to pop in your pocket before you leave your workshop- a small block plane), apart from general shape – (wind, cupping, bowing) and large knots, watch out for extensive splitting or ‘shakes’, keep an eye out for rot around where the sticks, or spacers, were positioned during drying, white splodges around the stick marks could denote areas of rot, which can be quite deep – this seems to particularly affect Ash, and look out for general surface discolouration, although this is often very difficult to identify before a board has been through the planer, especially in lighter woods like Sycamore.

 
When working out quantities, in a timber yard you need to remember that you are buying by volume, the standard measurement is cubic meters, but as mentioned earlier, I find a cubic meter to be rather unwieldy, so I work in cubic feet and convert to meters if I need to (1 cubic meter is 35.3 cubic feet if you’re interested!) You might find it helpful, when trying to get a rough idea of the cubic quantity of some likely looking lumps of tree, to remember that a 12 foot long board that’s 1 foot wide and 1 inch thick has a volume of 1 cubic foot!
Of course you could avoid the traumas associated with visiting a timber yard and just send them your cutting list and let them do all of the selecting for you, in fact this would be much less trouble, and much quicker for them than having you involved in the process, but are they going to have quite the same vested interest in picking something lovely for a table top? Is your interpretation of a beautiful pattern of medullary rays the same as theirs? Will they pick boards of a consistent colour………………………?

 
Do your homework, select a likely timber yard and be brave. Remember, you can always walk away if you feel you’re being bamboozled. Above all – enjoy yourself!!

The post The Terrors of the Timber Yard!! – Part 2 first appeared on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

The post The Terrors of the Timber Yard!! – Part 2 appeared first on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

The post The Terrors of the Timber Yard!! first appeared on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

The post The Terrors of the Timber Yard!! appeared first on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machinery is hardly a new thing – I can remember taking over a joinery workshop in Battersea about 25 years ago, which had become vacant because the previous tenants had invested their life savings into CNC technology. Unfortunately for them, they had been unable to make their new, highly complex, super-efficient machine productive enough to pay its way and sadly they ended up having to hand back the keys to their hungry, automated beast, and ultimately, also to their workshop.

Woodworking machinery showrooms have always been pretty predictable places, band-saws, table saws, planer/thicknessers, morticers, and, for the more adventurous, spindle moulders and perhaps even a planer or moulder with multiple cutter heads. The main decision that had to be made was generally ‘how much money do I have to spend?’ which generally had a direct correlation to how big a machine you could buy and how many bells and whistles it would be fitted with, in short, it was all very familiar and predictable.

So what makes me think that things are changing? About 10 years ago I paid my first visit, up the M1, to the Felder showrooms, no cause for alarm, just the usual suspects spread across the expansive, airy, showroom, ranging from the affordable to the aspirational, but generally just the usual suspects and no great surprises. Some years later I paid another visit to these same showrooms to demonstrate a planer fitted with a ‘Silent Power’ cutter block, a new innovation for a standard machine, so no cause for concern. But I did notice a large box-like imposter had muscled its way in and was nestling quietly against one of the showroom walls, this was not something I immediately recognised – a CNC machining centre! My most recent visit, just a few weeks ago, revealed something of a transformation, the floor of the showroom was now awash with wall to wall, state of the art, CNC machinery, all complete with impressive looking control panels, flickering VDU’s and very cool-looking blue downlighters. Where were the planer thicknessers and table saws that I had come to look at? Upstairs on the new mezzanine! It’s not that the standard kit had been side-lined but it’s seemed that Felder’s focus had shifted over the last few years to include many more of these, rather imposing, bits of kit.

But there’s no need for the smaller furniture maker to panic, as the joiners in Battersea discovered to their cost, CNC machines are at their best when used for higher volume repeat work, they have to be kept busy so that their not inconsiderable capital cost can be used effectively to increase productivity and profit margins, not cause bankruptcy. This doesn’t mean that CNC technology can’t be utilised to some degree by the modern, small furniture maker, but a pre requisite of taking full advantage of CNC is that you have a good understanding of CAD (Computer Aided Design) or at least have access to someone who has mastered what is surely a dark art.

CNC is not really designed for making one-offs but it is very good at making extremely accurate formers and Templates, and curved components that incorporate compound angles and tricky joints are a breeze. Set-up time for these modern machines for each job is not quite the time consuming process that it used to be and you might find a local company with CNC kit that’s happy to produce odd pieces for you which you might find will open up all sorts of new design opportunities.

So, ‘Don’t Panic!’, modern CNC technology is a positive development, it doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing thing and as a small furniture maker you’ll still be able to show off all those hard-won hand skills.

The post DON’T PANIC!! first appeared on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

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The post DOVETAILS………still relevant after all these years? first appeared on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.

The post DOVETAILS………still relevant after all these years? appeared first on John Lloyd Fine Furniture.