Fine woodworking

What is decent fine woodworking?

welcome i'm going to make this intro short and sweet just want to let everyone know that we will be taking the next episode off for the holiday break but we'll be back in 2021 with renewed vigor and gusto and whatever you call it so this episode is just mike and i trying to soldier through as many questions as we can quick note apologies for some leaf blower noise nothing i can do about it all right on with the episode all right mike so uh it's you and me yeah good way to finish out the year try and get a good number of questions answered all right so this is it for the year for you.

we've got one more episode and then like the next one lands on the holiday breakish area so i figure i'm taking a holiday break sounds good let's do that so um i thought it would be really cool to just go through and try and catch up a little bit yeah we've gotten really bad about answering more than three questions at a time and it's probably for the best but let's try and catch up and quickly answer some questions but first i had a huge realization this weekend that i almost want to do a public service announcement about this okay.

So my brother has been finishing off his kitchen and he had to build three drawers right yep and his friend told him if you don't dovetail him everyone's gonna think you're a hack and it was for a kitchen drawer it was like dude don't don't worry about it come on just just just get this done you can work on your kitchen too long just get it done you know you could you could always change the drawer later you know 10 years down the road if you can't live with yourself then you dovetail drawer right so this weekend my son and his daughter were on the phone playing video games very very loudly with speakerphone and i hear my brother go lorelai i'm trying to learn something over here and i was like i know what's going on so i said jay you need a hand he goes which box joint jig do i build i was like oh no okay all right box joints we're down to a reasonable level for kitchen drawers okay.

I was proud of that he goes i'm on i'm on youtube and this one guy i'm not gonna name but this one guy has like this huge thing with gears and this other guy has this huge box with like bubba and like which one do i build and i had this distinct realization that there are with with jigs right any type of jig picture frame jigs box joint jigs dovetail jigs whatever there are jigs you build when your goal is to build the jig yes when all of a sudden you say i want to build my end-all be-all box joint jig and i'm going to use this thing i'm going to spend a month building this jig and i'm going to use it into my golden years and i will be buried with this jig yes there are those jigs and then there are jigs that you build when you need to build a thing right when you need to build a drawer okay i need to make box joints okay .

How about we just take our miter gauge and put a fence on it and offset that you know like put the you know do the little zippy do put the half inch keyway in there you know offset it and get to building your drawers yeah right there are jigs that i need to make a picture frame quick boom just tilt your blade whatever use this make up some stop block system get the job done right and then there are like what's the word like you know like heritage jigs or something where like your goal that week is to that is the project that is the end goal and like using what little uh audience reach or whatever i have this is what i want to announce to the world learn to identify the difference between those things there is a time when your end goal is making the jig and there's a time when you have to get to the next step of the project and youtube algorithm loves making jigs maybe that complicated jig is complicated for video view purposes not because it's the best tool for the job yeah so yeah and don't listen to people who say that you have to dovetail kitchen drawers are your kitchen drawers dovetailed um anything with a drawer slide um no it's just i mean it's birch ply but it's sort of got like a little tongue rabbit joint which is glued and literally nailed with a nice uh false front on it it's appropriate for kitchens it's a really nice kitchen drawer and i can do it on my table saw and that you know once you're set up you can bang out as many drawers as you want in an afternoon so you're is it the lock rabbit thing i guess.

So it's a little um yeah i think you just use the same setup you're just like running the stock one stock piece of stock across flat and the other one vertical and somehow it just matches and it's done one of those things i have to like refigure out every time i make those because it's like once every five years but i agree i mean for me in the past i would say that the perfect jig is something that takes five minutes to make so it wants to throw it away yeah and then i started teaching and it's just like you actually had an opportunity to remake jigs and make them better and then also make them in a way which is easier and more intuitive for other people to use as well and that just led to your point.

So i have a range of jigs some of them are still super stupid and super quick do a good job when they're done and other ones like a box mitering jig spline jig things that i will use in multiple classes and have gone through three or four iterations to the point where i'm kind of happy with them yeah those you know if you want to get into miter boxes and you think you want to make 100 of them yeah take an afternoon and make a really nice jig but well bob teaches that class that's you know five table salt jigs or whatever yeah you go in there and you build it and those are those are tools those are all things you'll have forever yeah they're important for the functionality of the table saw 100 yeah and and like i totally get that and i i'm not anti making a nice box joint jig i'm not anti making anything honestly it's like if you love making your shop function you know to a thousandth of an inch fine however you enjoy .

your shop time that's fine i am against not being able to get the job done because you think you need to go through all of these hoops right um but like i have i didn't tell my brother this but one time i did sit down and i made a box joint jig that i thought was going to hold me over for the rest of my life but then i upgraded table saws you know and it didn't line up anymore and then so then i changed it and then by the time that i got to the next set of box joints the mdf had swelled just enough so that nothing lined up like i pulled it out and i think i even like ran a mess of parts thinking this is dialed in it was dialed in perfectly a year ago it's still dialed in and it wasn't you know so like it just didn't for me if i'm going to do box joints i'm just going to use a miter gauge and a couple and a couple of auxiliary fences and move on right but um i totally get the desire to make awesome awesome awesome jigs i just think you shouldn't get in the way of making the thing that you need to make right yeah you mentioned your picture frame that actually i came across that notion .

when i was in writing my latest book cause i did a chapter in miters and i wanted to talk about cutting picture frames and i use a really simple down and dirty method because i don't do that many picture frames but because it's a book i thought that i know that there are some really really awesome picture frame jigs out there where if you're setting up to make picture frames these are super smart and for about five minutes i was like mike you need to go and research and you need to show people like a really good picture framing jig so after like you said after looking at youtube and getting completely overwhelmed and feeling completely inadequate about writing a woodworking book because this is so over my head i backtracked and i showed folks a super down and dirty method.

That gives you really accurate miters because hey if you want to cut a picture frame once in a while this is perfect and if you want to cut a whole lot there are a lot of other super cool out there you might want to look into i remember the mark scofield picture frame yeah that one's great yeah and it's it's fantastic and i've seen a million variations out there in the world and none of them credit mark um but uh i remember in the back room of the old shop like that back copy room area remember where rodney had like his own little personal woodworking area secret woodworking stash that jig was back there and i remember like wandering around the office one day i saw i was like it was like i met a celebrity or something.

But all right let's answer some questions i've i've taken this off the rails think we have time for about three questions yeah this is why we don't get anything done uh okay. let's um you well actually both of us replied to this person already but uh from adam um i have a quick question about a visible glue line on a small project i'm working on an urn for a friend made of black walnut and english walnut i made a mistake and i used type on 2 on this project do you have any tips for fixing or covering this up thanks for any help you might have and so i don't like it would it be a mistake to use type on two on walnut for you well not a few joints super tight you know i think it's a combination of factors it wasn't an open miter joint but it was open enough to show that lighter glue line we both had similar answers but your answer was better than mine so why don't you go ahead and answer that one well no i just i i amped yours up you had said find a stain marker right yeah so they make stain markers like i think uh minwax sells a variety of it just looks like a a marker but it's stain and you can get in you know multiple colors i believe mohawk sells like a million colors but they're a little bit more difficult to access i think.

They're very yeah mohawk um mike michelle turned me onto mohawk stuff and i wish he didn't because a i can't afford everything i'm buying right and b it's like an act of congress getting it um but they make it's so mohawk makes super high-end finishing projects or not projects uh products and um there are people out there who their whole job is furniture repair for the hotel industry sure that's a big business yeah you know and when you do that and for shipping companies too i know people who that's all they do yeah yep um when when you do that that's that's you know that's your livelihood you need to have a bag full of 50 different color stain pens right yeah um so mohawk can get very overwhelming with that and um you can actually buy like you know their kits of like the most sold colors or or whatever so if if you want to dive into that realm that's a great place to be um i have like the kit of so i've i've started doing some some furniture repair and and light touch-ups for people in in my town and um i have the mohawk uh wax kit like the the wood color you know kit of it's crayons basically like crayons yeah brown crayons yeah just various browns um but that was like i think 50 bucks for 10 of them or something you know it was it's not like i screwed up a project i want to fix this um so i think i've mentioned on the podcast before but what i told.

What i told uh adam was that uh you might want to take a piece of scrap or whatever into an art supply store uh dick blick or jerry's autorama are the two that we have around here um there's others independent ones uh new haven my favorite craftsman art supply but um prismacolor markers are alcohol-based or probably any alcohol-based marker but prismacolor generally they have a rack and you can test them out so i've brought in a piece of scrap wood and instead of testing them out on the pad i've tested them out on a piece of scrap wood and match the color that way they have tons and tons of different colors i like the brush tip prismacolor alcohol pens oh and i should give credit where credit's due i learned this from ted woodford on uh he's a luthier on youtube and they have to do this a lot more than any woodworker probably any furniture repair person they have to constantly match colors and they have a very persnickety audience so um you can generally get i have like a tin full of markers and i can match just about anything going through different colors and layering them if you want but one thing to note is that it when you go to put a finish on it if you go to wipe on shellac you will wipe off the alcohol-based marker right so i do i keep a little spray can of shellac for that purpose and just spray it on that first layer yeah and the the thing is that if you're applying this over a sealed surface you can reverse it and keep prying so yes that's cool and also.

You know the the point isn't to make it look completely invisible it's really just to minimize the contrast and get it close enough to where it's not drawing your eye to it in a way that you don't want it to and looking at the the photos that i'm sorry his name is his last name is adam his first name is michael um looking at the photos he sent in don't point it out and no one's gonna ask right i mean i know if it's an earn for most earn sake i i know that this is a very very special project 100 yep and um you want to do your dangest to um to make a perfect project of course uh this is a beautiful piece that you should be very very proud of and um i don't think that this little glue line should detract from the work that you've done michael yeah so have you ever had to make an urn mike uh yeah i did it's a super special thing yeah you know and in normal times i would say that i lost my shirt on it bass because i charged like almost nothing and i didn't care yeah that's that's not the point i had to make three matching urns for a friend and they were going to three different climates and it was a whole different bag because i was like i didn't you know i wanted to make him so wood movement was not going to be a problem.

But it was also using wood from a tree from the person's house you know and it was it was one of those projects that the deeper i got the deeper it got and um i would try not to make another urn it was it was it was a very very stressful thing but uh it's a good service to offers as a woodworker it's a great thing to be able to offer this is neither here nor there i didn't know the people personally so i didn't know the person personally the urn was for um but they had brought over it's basically sort of like a paint can with no label which was you know held the and it was like to take measurements and so i took measurements and they said you want to just leave this here.

I said no go ahead and take it it's like i just yeah that's just me but it's like no hang on to it i don't want that in my shop but i'll make sure it fits so so i was given specific measurements and i was told that the funeral home would handle the actual transfer oh okay but i didn't know what kind of like does it need to be airtight does it need to be but i actually think matt kenny told me don't worry about making an airtight i think he's done him before too don't worry about making it airtight because they put it in an airtight container right that this time yes okay it wasn't like you know the thing where you sneeze and you blow ashes everywhere i think that's more of a movie thing than a yeah i imagine i don't know yeah all the scenarios um yeah all right let's see but good job michael .

Really nice piece really cool thing to do yeah um all right this next one is from thomas and i apologize i i am just reading the emails i normally try and whittle them down a little bit um okay i recently had a harrowing near-miss involving one of my tools i was complaining to someone i was working with about the challenge of planing quarter-sawn cherry we were away from my shop and he at or we were away from my shop and he asked if i could if i had brought a card scraper with him which i hadn't in slow motion prepare yourself people in slow motion i saw this person pick up my bad axe sasha sas oh wow sass you know what i'm saying people with the tote sticking straight up in the air he was about to use the front edge of the plate like a card scraper i voiced my disproval in the form of no no no no don't stop bad bad bad bad and rescued my poor saul have you ever seen or heard of this cutting up an old saw to make scrapers is one thing but this got me thinking about tool hacks for lack of a better term in other words using tools or parts of tools in ways they are intended such as the classic ones of using a lever cap from a plane as a as a screwdriver for your chip breakers or using your chisels as scrapers or can openers aka how to ruin your edge in one easy step what are some tool hacks that you like and or loathe another topic to discuss do you loan tools out how do you address taking care of them i don't learn tools lab do you um like tools out of my shop to like people in general i i loaned tools out to my brother or barry or you know or you yeah barry doesn't i just said you so that you have to loan it out to me so you have to reciprocate um i would loan a tool out to barry and i think no one else sorry man [Laughter] however when i teach um it's something that i i think is a really important component of learning is trying out a tool that is in good condition not trying out like a super expensive tool that has nothing to do with it but a chisel that sharpened well the plane that's set up to get nice shaving and sometimes if i'm working with a student who's struggling whose tools aren't really set up there yet um i will i'm really happy to let people use my tools you know obviously it's like i'd like them to ask and i'd like to know where the tool is in the classroom but uh yeah i think that's a really important thing and for the most part um i've had you know chisel get dropped and you know was missing a little corner i think that's probably about the worst thing that's ever happened none of my tools have ever walked away during a class and that is like the one scenario where i you know super i really encourage people to try a tool if they're having problems if you want to borrow one of my tools the only way you can do it is class [Laughter] um all right so tool hacks how do you feel about the using the uh cap iron as a screwdriver do it i cringe you do it well i've done it and then i um then i finally bought the lee nielsen you know it's really reasonably impressive i almost said lots but it's a really reasonable price it's short it's wide it fits perfectly the other screwdriver.

I have with the blade large enough is like one and a half feet long and i know so that's like a super cool thing however older um a screws like old stanley's it it's too narrow to fit and then i still pull out the lever cap and loosen the screw there so i don't like doing it i do do that so a more common hack would be um taking the blade out of a block plane and using it to maybe get glue out of corners i have used a super sharp chisel as a scraper of sorts to get into really tight areas i don't think that's a misuse of the tool necessarily so like i forget who i'm gonna you know we've already name-dropped him so i'm gonna say bob i'm gonna say it was bob who said like you can sharpen a tool like that's why you have the sharpening kit over there you know so like if you do something that's not abusive to a chisel but is gonna dull the chisel quickly or whatever that's why you have sharpening.

Right tools you know but um so i've used chisel as a scraper uh i've actually done and next time we have andrew hunter on i need to find out more about this because i know that he actually uses a chisel sharpened without taking the burr off as a more aggressive scraper okay and i did that one time on uh on a ukulele that i was building um and it's nice because you can really get into teeny tiny places with it nice i don't consider that abusive no i don't i mean i playing um mdf profiles with the hand plane or block plane and things like i said it's it's a perfect tool for the job you are going to need to sharpen it afterwards but i think that's i did i was digging uh post holes and there's these big massive roots that i i couldn't quite chop with my shovel so i got my two inch erwin chisel from the shop and my mallet and i was like down in the bottom of post hole.

chopping roots with a chisel so oh my god it's i think i mean i wouldn't do that with just any chisel so you know [Laughter] wow wow um i've never done the cap iron thing i'm trying to think of other like tool misuses and i've i've been coming up blank can you think of anything that that's common no it just seems like whenever i use my tools out of context like in the bottom of a post hole but you know if i'm doing like carpentry tasks in the house like a tool which is like perfectly suited for tasks within furniture making in the shop and you bring them out of context all of a sudden they're too small or what you're doing is like planing the side of a door that still has paint on it you know i think it's more stretching the use of that tool beyond what it's tuned up for and set up to do yeah that's yeah what about something like nibbling away laterally a piece on the i swear to they have not done the leaves here in two years and i swear the one time i'm in a conference room at the office they're doing the leaves um what what about uh like laterally nibbling away up to the line at the bandsaw where you're kind of pushing the teeth the the saw blade sideways i think that would be considered a misuse right and i do that all the time [Laughter] or what about the speed tenon moving moving the piece laterally that's works great too yeah okay yeah i don't have any problem with those either yeah i don't know if it doesn't ruin a tool it's good nah cause i was talking to bob van dyke the other day he was saying yeah you know what a speed tendon is essentially i said what he goes it's like the same as cutting a cove on the table saw you're just running a work piece across the blade at an angle other than parallel to the line yeah so as long as you do it safely then whatever yeah and i i don't know as has anyone ever said oh i ruined that unison during speed tenants no no so all right um sorry we couldn't come up with anything any juicy bits for you thomas uh all right next question is from ken uh i am a believer.

In the micro bevel 25 degree primary and 30 degree micro question should i put a micro bevel on my smaller chisels quarter inch eighth inch 16th inch and mortising chisel in my case only a 3 8 inch if important all but the shop made 16 inch chisels are robert sorby if this topic has been covered before apology they've all been covered before ken um if if we only covered sharpening things one time we would never talk about sharpening again so micro bevels on small chisels yeah i mean what that alludes to is that you're supporting the the chisel at an angle other than the angle in which the blade was originally ground which means you're using a honing guide which i would recommend and then the question is some chisels are super hard to clamp in a honing guide in which case i wouldn't recommend a micro bevel in that case i would just grind the bevel on however you do that at the angle that i want to cut at and then i sharpen by hand by referencing especially if it's a hollow grind the leading edge in the trailing edge of that hollow on the stone to maintain that angle which is a traditional way that i can sharpen anyway so um short answer is when i was using honing guides that fit my plane irons well but didn't handle chisels well i would put that secondary bevel on all my plane irons and when i couldn't use a honing guide i just sharpened all my regular chisels by hand in which case it meant that i didn't have that secondary bevel but now that i'm using the side clamping attachment to the veritas mark ii for chisels i find that holds like everything even really weird short thick japanese chisels that don't fit in any other honing guide.

I was even able to sharpen my eighth inch wide japanese chisel with a really strange side profile really and it's just like put it perfect because even by hand you're trying to sharpen it yeah so you look at the bevel it's like and then you start again and it's off the other way super hard to sharpen um so i guess my answer is if i can get it into a honing guide comfortably and reliably i'll go ahead and stick a secondary bevel on there and when i can't it's good to know how to sharpen things by hand because sometimes that's the only way to go about doing it um okay so question you.

Were once quoted i think i made it i think it was the title of the show but you know if i look in if i look at your half inch chisel i look into your soul or whatever basically the idea was you can tell what what is important to a woodworker based on the shape the fit of their half inch chisel so let's say that your half inch chisel is a hundred yeah where does your eighth inch chisel land on the [Music] niceness or the sharpness scale um i think every chisel there's you know level of sharpness like if you know like let's say like a a ideally sharp say half inch chisel if that's say that's a hundred i would expect all of my chisels to be there except for my chisel that i dedicate to kumiko because that's like pairing in grain pine which is the toughest test for sharpness of a chisel so i dedicate that just because i keep it sharp and i don't want to dull it by using it for other tasks but so in that case i would say that's 120 or you know.

That looks like even even more and then plane irons really sharpness in edge tools it's a function of the sharper the tool is the thinner the shaving you can and that manifests itself in a couple different ways for chisels um where you are let's say fitting joinery um you know chiseling the side walls of a dovetail or something like that the thinness of cut you can take with the chisel equals um the level of accuracy you can do with that tool like if your your chisel is so dull that you can only take 16th inch shavings then you're going to go from two loose super quick so for a chisel the sharper it is the more precise it is the more accurate work you can do and for plane irons it boils down to you get the best surface by taking the thinnest shavings you eliminate or reduce tear out by going really thin the only way you get really thin is to be really sharp so sharpness is a direct correlation between the the thinness of the shaving you can take so in and because it's a plain iron um i depend on that to take super thin shavings between the thousands and thousands of an inch that is far.

Thinner than even like the thinnest pairing i can take with the chisel yeah it's still going to be relatively thicker which means that plane irons have to be sharper than the chisel because they need thinner cuts and then john reed fox spoke about um a notion of working sharpness and that that the chisels he likes because any chisel is going to get for the most part super sharp i mean once you get into different steels and grain structures yeah you can argue that say a certain type of steel you can hone higher but but the real difference is as you're working it go from that ideally sharp to a sharp that is sort of going to be that way until you sharpen it again so that sharp sharp is is sort of temporary and unless you sharpen every five minutes um uh so john talked about chisels he liked his favorite chisels had a really good working sharpness where even when they weren't sharp sharp they were super effective about what they were supposed to be doing so you know so while all my chisels aren't new sharp i think they're all within that range of working sharp.

Depending what that is and because um for kumiko working sharp means it has to be super super sharp in order to do its job it just is that much sharper so and about the half inch chisel you know that notion is if i look at your chisel i know the results you're getting i know how much fun you're having i know how much you like your tools so yeah you know if i walk around a shop and i pick up you know someone's chisel and it's like super sharp not coincidentally they're doing really good work as well yeah and so i have a question about john reed fox's working sharpness so in a two two-sentence summary of that the abstract would be good chisels get sharp like off the stone sharp and then settle down to a nice workable sharpness right.

I think that's true bad chisels i've which i've had bad chisels off the stone sharp to unusable like there's no intermediate right and then the other aspect of that is how you're using the chisel has a huge impact on its ability to stay sharp over time yes so and that goes back to if you're always taking really thin pairing cuts whether pairing by hand or chopping the chisel is going to stay sharp if you're like banging a board in the middle of the stock and you're rolling over that steel right away then your working sharpness immediately goes down and stays there yeah and you know so if you're if super sharp is a 10 if you're pairing you know super thin cuts you'll stay about an eight for a really long time but i think if you're working smartly yeah yeah but i think if you're really taking heavy chops and rolling over the edge i think you go from a 10 to a four and then it just stays a four forever and you don't want to re-sharpen because there's no point because it's going to go right back to a four anyway and that's where i think you start to build in poor not poor work habits.

But work habits and expectations based on the sharpness of that tool okay so would you rather oh let's see this isn't you can't this is unanswerable would you rather or i know exactly what you're gonna say but would you rather someone not you someone that's how i'm gonna get this answer out of you would you rather someone work aggressively with good chisels or very very smartly with cheap chisels smartly with any chisel because if you work aggressively the more money you pay for the chisel the less happy you're going to be with it because you think if i get a better chisel it's going to stay sharp longer but if you're working in a way where you take it out of sharp super quickly you're just going to hate that tool and grudge the money that you spent for it so learn how to work smart with any chisel and that's just gonna if there's gonna be a benefit when you get to a chisel with better steel that's gonna be even nicer gotcha um and how sharp is your eighth inch chisel that's the question that you dodged.

It's pretty sharp okay mine so i never use it i sharpen it and i never use it mine's not mine's like all over to one side like you said because i sharpen it by hand and and it's yeah it's but when i need it it's it's there yeah and it's sharp enough what angle is it at no idea what it like like i have no idea anything about it i pick it up once a year and i get the little nibble it out of something and that's it so yeah it's exactly it's that weird dovetail spacing which is for some reason super skinny so you pull it out for that or most of my notching for kumiko strips for grid work is done at the table saw every now and then if i'm doing a custom grade by hand you make a little saw cut make a little saw cut take out your eighth inch chisel and you pop out the waste in between the saw cuts and that's really fun it's just like popcorn popping all over the place which is not going to you know which is going to keep the tool really sharp as well yeah um all right so mike let's just take a minute and talk about .

What's when we started making your foundations of woodworking online class we thought we knew what it was going to be but let's talk about what it's turned into as we've been making i don't think it's migrated too far off of you know its intent i think it's its core mission is the same okay um in that um basically you know every article every video workshop where you're trying to build a piece of furniture in 10 or 12 episodes you know any article you're trying to do in two or four or six or eight or 10 pages you're just leaving out all the ton of basic information like in an article it'd be like um start by cutting the mortises and then the tenons and then once those are done move on to yeah but there's a whole lot said to you know the mortise and tenons even doing something as simple as drilling and chopping a mortise.

which we wouldn't have time to cover anywhere um we were just talking that i think we just took 27 minutes to explain how to lay out drill and chop a mortise which um maybe that's that's something that might be a little too much but in terms of what i really wanted to say about it uh i think it's all super necessary that if you're going to go out in your shop and attempt something i want to give you the information to do and that's really the thing is i wanted this to be you're inspired to woodwork you got your shop set up or you're setting things up um there's you know step one is really really basic skill set in relation to cutting very basic joinery you know dados rabbits and grooves it's like okay well that's good um but there's that is just you know not to use overuse the word but that's sort of the foundation of everything i mean those basic skills um when you're first starting out your your bandwidth is focused on just cutting a joint cleanly and then from there once you have a sort of a kit of joints to put use that the next idea is to have an understanding of how you're combining those joints in order to make what you want to make and from there once you start building there's going to be unique situations where a basic way to execute a joint isn't going to work this time you know and that's going to dictate.

I know what it wants to be i can't do it the way i normally want to do it now what do i do yeah and you're not up against a wall yeah so i think we're we're addressing all of those things so it isn't just is this just for beginners um i i think it's a really good place to start but at the same time we pick up speed really quick we go from no but see you can't answer this as well because sorry is it just for beginners no not at all because i think in the last uh episode i talked about it in the intro where um i am picking up things like i've i have made many videos with you and i have made many videos with other pretty good woodworkers right but we're going into a level of detail that i am saying in even the most simple joints or processes i'm saying oh that was worth it you know where like there's always in each lesson or whatever we're calling them there is a thing that i am surprised by um and it would be a great place for a beginner or an intermediate to start but i do think that even advanced woodworkers are going to pick up a lot of things that will make your woodworking better and the other thing that i have been wanting to talk about i guess is that it is it's like an encyclopedia the rest of your woodworking where it's like okay i need to make a mortise and tenon you're covering what 15 different ways in the end yeah that will you know it isn't it isn't this is the way i make a mortise and tenon this is this is the way i make a morris attendant in this situation this is the way i make a mortise intent in this situation if i need to do this here's this option this option it isn't it isn't just a single um set of lessons like we normally have where it's like i'm making this thing this is how i do it it's kind of how to figure out any way of doing it and it can apply to any type of woodworker based no matter what i guess i guess even if you have a router table or even if you have a mortiser if you just have this or you just have that there are lessons in there for anything right definitely yeah and so you know the book.

The foundations of woodworking that came out that is in essence the textbook for this online course so i would say that online course is the equivalent of a semester-long woodworking course if not longer yeah and the book acts as sort of a textbook to that but in addition even if you don't have the book um the course is also broken down into lessons and each lesson is going to have that video component it's also going to have a number most likely of different pdf handouts which cover the information as well if we're building a piece there's going to be plans to download as well so you may um be able to binge watch a a video workshop building a piece of furniture you cannot binge watch this yes there's there's there's a lot there but i hope it's really helpful the main thing is there's a lot of techniques and um to address a lot of different situations but there's a lot of information everywhere online things have been written videos that have been made it's all there i think a lot of times what it lacks is a context of i can google 25 ways to cut a dovetail still doesn't get me where i'm going so um so what i'm sort of offering here what i'm attempting to offer is sort of a holistic approach where every single technique i'm i'm offering it it all contributes to an overall system of woodworking so not like the only way to go but these are like all of these different techniques are aware of what the other techniques are and are and often are informed by and will inform other techniques that i offer as well so it isn't like how to do this how to do this how to do this but this is how you can work create an overall framework for your woodworking that makes sense well and so like one of our most popular videos is michael fortune's uh how to get rid of drift or whatever on your bandsaw right and it just goes through how he sets up his bandsaw where to set the the gullet of the blade in relation to the blah blah blah blah blah and goes through.

This whole system right and i swear forty percent of the commenters get to where he puts his the gullet of his teeth on the upper blade and say well that's not the way alex snodgrass does it you're wrong yeah and it's like well no you didn't take in the whole thing and a alex snodgrass isn't right and michael fortune isn't right there's not like this one correct answer to how to do this sure but the way michael fortune sets up his bandsaw i assure you is spot on so his entire system works but a lot of people sit there and say that one element is something i don't agree with wrong so with this course you even say sometimes it's like you know other people do it this other way and they're not there and i i believe you you even said like master woodworkers better than i do it this way but i do it this way because it informs and it all falls into place um it is not just one quick thing like do this and your woodworking problems are solved you know you're kind of going over your entire approach to woodworking from layout to execution of joinery and um that holistic approach like you said is the main difference i think between anything that we've made before so yeah i hope it'll be helpful i think it's akin to like if you take a two-year program at north bennett you know everything they tell you to do may not be the same way someone else may do it but it all fits within their program.

You know if you're going to college in the redwoods i think you know you're going to learn an entire system yeah and i think that's the benefit of going to a year two year four-year program is you're learning of a system and that's one thing with as much information as available out there it's really difficult to do that um in in the absence of that so that that's definitely something that i i wanted to present is a holistic system um which hopefully will get you doing the work you that you want to be doing that's that's the main thing yep all right let's uh we answered three questions.

Let's try and get two more in all right uh from bob uh i have another sharpening question i bought ellen nielsen number five and a block plane i have 600 grit 1200 grit and 800 stone for sharpening and a diamond flattening plate to keep the stones flat two questions how long should it take to flatten the back of a lee nielsen plane blade uh the two that i have seem to be taking hours to get an even scratch pattern i flatten the stones by putting a curly pencil mark on them and rubbing on the plate until the mark is gone i'd also like to know how long a diamond flattening plate should last mine is not nearly as coarse as it was new although it seems to be flattening stones quickly so normally i don't name names like lee nielsen or whatever but flattening the back of a of a high-end plane blade yeah that's a trick question because it's already flat so i mean let's let's um let's note the difference between a flat surface and a scratch-free surface those are completely different things uh and there's the big picture so there's a flatten and a polish.

So really what you're trying to do is polish the back of that iron and you're using but by the grits you mentioned the fact that you've got a diamond plate to flatten your stones you're using water stones and especially if you're using a coarse water stone which is very friable means it goes out of flat very quickly there's a really good chance if you're spending any time at all with the back of a plane iron or chisel on a coarse grit water stone you're doing a really good job of taking it out of flat and one really good indicator of that is that say you're on a core stone and you work on the back and you have an even scratch pattern all the way across the blade great and then you move up to your next grit and maybe the corners stay a little bit frosty but it's like okay this is you know i'm about 80 there i'm just going to move up to my fine stone then you go to a fine stone which is much harder and stays much flatter and you end up with an arch of polish in the center of of the blade with the corners being frosty that's a really good indicator that you took it out of flat with your core stones that were softer and the the harder stones couldn't flatten that entire surface to give you an even polish so mean traditionally say i don't know 15 20 years ago even elie nielsen iron i wouldn't necessarily consider that flattened in in terms of able to polish it which is why i started to utilize the day of the david charlesworth.

Ruler trick where you place a thin ruler on the edge of the stone so all you're doing is you're just polishing that front you know 30 second of an inch get a nice polish um and evenly nielsen uh recommended that as well because they really want you to get sharp yeah in order to use their blades um but now that newly nielsen tools are newly uh veritas tools the backs will look a little bit frosty but they're dead flat and i just treat them as flat and the last thing i want to do is just sit and really start to try to polish the entire back because i'm just going to take it out of flat there are some techniques for flattening tools on water stones and literally what you do is you flatten the stone you work your way up one edge so the blade is only hitting a fresh stone surface you flip it around you work up the other edge and then you flatten the stone again and then you do that so it's it's a really long and tedious process but it's really about the only way you can stay keep your surfaces flat as you're trying to polish them on water stones shaft and stones are more of a ceramic stone they're harder and they do a better job of keeping your back flat but even then you want to be really really considerate about how you're working over the stone as if you're having to work on the back of a tool so um yeah yeah so the the bottom line now is if you've if you've taken a wide number five plane iron out of flat you know the ruler trick is a good way to at least get you up to a polished edge because you have to be able to reach all the way to the edge with your fine stone in order to remove the burr that you create by hanging the front because if you can't do that and you can't remove the burr you're just not going to get sharp.

which is why i'm not a huge fan of um stropping plane irons and chisels carving tool is a completely different situation but the minute you strap a tool you are getting sharp but you're doing that by slightly rounding over the edge in order to get that and the minute you slightly round that over it's really hard to go back to a flat stone and get remove steel all the way up to that edge without reestablishing that flat so um yeah you know so how long does it take if you're working against yourself on water stones the answer is you're probably getting further away from your goal the more you're working on it unfortunately that's really interesting how the lower grits are more friable break down faster yeah come out a flat faster the longer you spend on them the worse you're making it probably learn something new every day there you go that's what's the second question um second question was oh this is a quick one uh i'd like to know how long a diamond flattening plate should last mine is not nearly as course as it was when you i've i've experienced this as well i mean diamond plates are notorious for being super aggressive.

When they're brand new uh what has to do with is there there's a plate um or you know a backing of some sort of steel with the nickel plating which is adhering the diamond grit to the plate so what happens is even though all the grits are all the same size because of the way it's plated often you'll have individual grits that are sticking up higher than the other grits and that's where you get a sense of it cutting more aggressively but once you wear off those the little particles that are sort of sticking up above the others it's going to feel like it's cutting more slowly but it's still super workable and you know you can really wear out a diamond plate after a really long time but for the most part it's going to cut super aggressively for a short time and then it's going to sort of find its place and it'll be good forever so even though it's not cutting as aggressively as it was when you got it most likely it's still serving you well the diamond plate i use on my stones i've had for 10 years yeah i i remember that initial aggressive yeah and and it was like oh wow and then a week later i was like what did i ruin it yeah you know it just it it never comes back to that and that's you just have to accept that that's what it is yeah um right all right let's let's try and get one more question oh good one .

From jake another question for you i've attached a photo of my hand after card scraping a large table uh sorry it's a little graphic we've got a blister on his hand yeah um every time i use the card scraper for more than five minutes i end up with blisters in the same pattern on my index finger and thumb am i doing something wrong or is this par for the course uh yes and no but you know you scrape a scraper a sharp scraper you got four sharp edges so you scrape until it gets warm and you flip it and you scrape until it gets warm and you flip it and or rotate it scrape until it gets warm you just keep flipping um if you do an entire tabletop sure you know my thumbs will get a little bit hot by the time i'm done with it but um the other thing i do is i've got a little wooden block with saw kerfs in it and i've got four scrapers yeah what that means is at the beginning of a really big job i will take the time to file down and polish and hone every edge of every scraper so i've got 16 cutting surfaces and when a scraper is cutting really well you're taking shavings i don't know if i would say it stays cooler that way but isn't there something to staying cooler based on the angle you're holding the scraper i don't know i don't know that's a good question i mean i tend to scrape as vertically as i can because okay your scraper is going to work more efficiently you're gonna remove more material and if i'm scraping a large surface i'm really wanting to get through mill marks machine marks tear out like i'm really wanting to remove material i'm not sitting there really just trying to dress that surface in a really fine way so i want my scrapers to be super aggressive so it's just scrape and you just keep flipping before it gets too hot yeah and you'll solve the the blister problem uh ninety percent of it will go away not a hundred percent yeah and they sell little like scraper holders.

That you put the scraper in and it saves your thumbs the problem with that is that i'm flipping a scraper over ever after every three or four cuts maybe like i'm constantly flipping flipping flipping and there's no way in the world i would ever take a scraper out of a holder as often so i think it just leads to a bad practice some people put the refrigerator magnets on the back to me that that's less cumbersome but you're still hesitant flip i mean if i have to move a magnet every time i flip the scraper over again i think it leads to a bad practice you're going to end up scraping beyond the sharpness of the tool you're probably going to leave the tool there and you know heating up to i don't know possibly uh undermine the edge as well i mean you're not blowing the steel but you're certainly heating up things quite a bit um yeah just flip flip flip sharpen them up flip flip flip if you're taking dust instead of shavings re-hone that and then you can or re-burnish it you can burnish an edge three or four times um before you actually have to file it back and polish and burnish it again um but that gives you say four edges four sharpenings burnishings for four edges that's 16 edges times four scrapers that's a whole lot of scraping going on before you have to go back and get your you know get the file out and get your fingers black from the steel and all that kind of stuff so i mean scrapers are cheap just buy more yeah definitely definitely the best investment

you can make yeah have have you ever tried uh christian baker uses that finger tape or whatever it's it's um he gave me a roll of it i don't know where he gets it off the look um but it is it's almost like it only sticks to itself you wrap your fingers around it and it's like a friction tape or something oh and he uses it for long sanding sessions okay i have a finger of him or i have a picture of him giving me the finger showing off the tape that's the only reason why i haven't used it on fine woodworking's feed um because that was only way i got the photo but um it's it's pretty cool i leave it lying around i will wrap my fingers in it for long sanding sessions because sanding can like hand sanding that builds up a lot of heat as well any time you are taking material off there is um heat being made um i don't i think i have two two go-to scrapers .

I need to get more though get a couple yeah yeah all right well i think that does it for this episode uh do you have anything else you want to bring up mike uh i didn't do a favorite technique of all time okay you wanna do a shrink uh stretch wrap okay yeah so that's that's it um we were making uh a project in the class this last week and making a bunch of little tiny drawers and instead of dovetails they were pinned rabbits and because you're gluing together door that a drawer that is only rabbeted and all the parts can kind of move around but they're tiny normally on bigger things you get like six clamps on there and there's no room for clamps so the stretch wrap man you just go in every axis and keep going and it worked out really really well i could see that especially at bob's yeah he's always got that stretch wrap around yeah and then at some point in class i saw someone actually striking a chisel with a roll of stretch wrap there you go i think that goes back to our uh misusing tools oh that's perfect.

Perfect way to bring it back around i have i have a small uh smooth move when building a shipping container crate or whatever for a piece keep in mind someone has to take it apart i oh no the other smooth move i uh built the container or i started to build a container and the piece that i was shipping was covered in a packing blanket because i was planning on shipping it with a packing blanket but i didn't realize that the piece was oriented in the wrong fashion or multiple pieces so the measurements i were taking of the were wrong basically so i i had it was covered by the packing blanket and i thought i was measuring something i wasn't built a whole shipping container in not hole but most cut out all of the parts of a shipping crate and they were the wrong size eventually bought more mdf or osb i built another shipping container as i'm building it all of a sudden realized oh no somebody needs to take this apart at the end of the day i'm only used to making things that won't come apart yes right and caught myself just in time to make sure that somebody would be able to unscrew two sides and get the thing out furniture makers keep that in mind somebody has to take something apart sometimes don't uh screw your packing crate together with square drive screws that will drive someone crazy i just have their phillips screwdriver i am using torx but i have t i am going to tape the torx bit to the top of the shipping crate and write in sharpie here's your bet awesome i uh i bought a a pack of drywall screws that are the worst drywall screws in the history of the world and i just keep snapping them as i'm putting things together and patrick mccomb from find home building was down at the shop and i expressed my concern over these drywall screws and he was like oh well yeah somebody put something on top of this crate the whole thing's going to come apart then and i was like oh no i have to re-reply now i have to replace every screw in the in the crate but yeah that does it for this.

Live i hope everyone has a good safe happy holiday season and i hope that everyone gets out into the shop and i really want to thank all of you for taking us out into the shop with you it's quite honestly an honor to have so many people listen to this podcast and surf the website and read the magazine and we're very very lucky to be able to do it and it's only because of you so thank you thank you thank you if you want more information on mike's online class head on over to Foundations of Woodworking if you have any questions for the podcast send them into shoptalk The Taunton Press - The Taunton Press and we'll see you next year thanks .