1) For mortises, avoid the
drill-out-most-of-it method. Chiseling out the rest tends to leave a
tapered mortise wall – at least that’s how it worked for me. Using a
square block of wood to guide the chisel introduces just enough fiddling
and clamping that it become quicker and easier to just bash them out
with a chisel – that works better than you think it will. Or buy a
hollow chisel mortiser. Or buy a Festool domino. But if you’ve got the
money and/or space for that, you probably never even went through any
of this hand-tool business anyway.
2) A router plane and a
shoulder plane turn the process of making tenons from near-impossible to
near perfect. Again, this is true if you’re using hand tools. But I’m
gonna claim that even if you get rid of most of the waste with a power
tool, these two hand tools will complete the tenon with perfection and
avoid your having to spend a lot of time fiddling with a jig. But hey,
we all make choices…
3) Laying out things works
so much better with a divider than with even the most accurate tape
measure. And the more mortises you have, the more the layout will get
out of whack with even the tiniest error creeping in at each
measurement.
4) Waxing the sole of a hand plane makes a huge difference in how much energy it takes to push the plane.
5) Sharpening a saw makes a
huge difference in how fast it cuts. This seems obvious but it is
still striking when you first experience it. Perhaps because dullness
sets in very slowly and you aren’t aware of how gradually things are
getting worse.
6) The humble holdfast is more valuable than any F-clamp. And faster.
7) The chamfer is an
attractive accent and extremely easy to do with a handplane or
spokeshave. For me, it went faster than a router when I factored in the
time it took to find the chamfering bit and get it installed into the
router table and hook up the dust collection. The crossover seemed to
have been about twelve linear feet of chamfering – more than that and it
became feasible to do all the router set-up. But the routerless method
was more pleasant due to the lack of noise. If noise doesn’t bother
you, then route on!
8) You have got to learn to
cut as close to your line as possible – whether with a hand saw of
powered one. Splitting the line is not some high-minded goal – you’ve
really got to do that or risk making a lot of work for yourself later
on.
9) If you use hand tools at
all, your bench becomes all-important; it is as much a tool as anything
else. If you are an all-power-tool person, then all you need is a
table to assemble parts on.
10) Everything is great until
you have to work on an especially large or long part. Then your tried
and true methods of work have to be altered. A long bed rail may force
you to abandon your precious band saw (or, hypothetically, your table
saw with a tenoning jig that holds the work vertically) and grab a hand
saw anyway because that’s really the only way to attend to that tenon on
the end of it.
11) A surface planer truly is a luxury that almost anyone can justify. Life would be extremely difficult without it.
12) A project becomes almost
chess-like when you try to look ahead several moves in order to match
the pieces of wood you have with the project you’re building but to do
so successfully will make the project end up looking noticeably better.
13) Sharpness is important but
it seems that only the smoothing plane and a block plane intended for
doing end-grain need to be as sharp as a razor. But because chisels are the easiest thing to sharpen, there's no reason they shouldn't be razor sharp.
