Trees, Wood, Carbon and Bugs

A giant California redwood tree located at the time of this photo near my former home in Forestville California. The gentlemen shown have done a marvelously clean bit of work up to this point using only a two-man saw and their axes. A serious job performed by serious men.

All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Thank you for visiting our humble website, focused primarily on woodworking tools, especially those made by Japanese craftsmen for Japanese professional carpenters and woodworkers.

Consistent with the educational and contemplative nature of this website, in this article we will examine the nature of wood itself including the trees that produce it, two of their controversial by-products, and a couple of techniques for dealing with wood’s inherent weaknesses of which Gentle Reader may not be aware. It will a useful read without being boring, I swear by Grabthar’s Hammer!

The Miracle of Trees

As a matter of common sense, most people assume that trees, such as the California Redwood shown above which once grew very near my old house in Forestville, grow to such height, diameter and mass by extracting minerals from the ground at their roots. That huge mass must come from somewhere, right?

Of course trees do extract some minerals from the ground, along with many tons of water. But if it’s as simple as that, please consider why trees don’t create correspondingly huge depressions in the soil into which they are rooted, depleting minerals and biomass from the soil. Moreover, please consider how trees add biomass to the soil they’re rooted in instead of making a hole. You’ve heard of conservation of energy, no doubt, but is conservation of mass a thing?

Most people think plants and trees are made of minerals robbed from soil, but the fact about trees and plants so heavily hushed-up nowadays is that they are built almost entirely of carbon extracted directly and entirely from the atmosphere. Yes, from thin air.

Clearly, despite what the doom goblins wail on TV in order to shame and coerce actors and politicians for support, to solicit clicks, and to extort donations, carbon dioxide is a useful substance critical to all plant life; it’s not the poison the smelly, screeching environmentalist orcs claim it is. Consider what would happen to this planet and all creatures who live on it if carbon dioxide went away. Or if oxygen went away.

If you aren’t clear on this point, please spend some time and effort to learn, or risk being an environment cuck. Ah! Could it be there’s no money to be made speaking the simple truth rather than inciting panic?

A climate scientist fleecing the ignorant (and gullible) masses. I wonder if he has any of my favorite Idiotbegone pills in his wagon?

Of course, plants do extract a few minerals from the soil along with great amounts of water. Powered only by sunlight, plants and trees remove carbon from the air and use it to create cellulose, a material very similar to sugar, BTW, and which many insects and animals, but not humans, can digest. Think grass and other plant matter.

Show me a single “scientist” that can replicate this miracle in a lab and I will bow down and kiss his bulging bunions. Good luck in your search for that miracle worker, but in the meantime, I won’t be needing any scientific kneepads.

Plants need free carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to grow, and animals, including me and thee, need both plants and oxygen. Indeed the greater the concentration of CO2 available, the more plants grow, the more CO2 they remove from the atmosphere, and the more oxygen they produce. Indeed, every molecule of oxygen surrounding planet earth was produced by a plant. Hmm, sounds almost like an endless, natural cycle, one that animals and humans rely on unconditionally. Imagine that…

Plants are marvelous sunlight-powered miracles. And don’t forget, except for the salt, every crumb of every ingredient in your peanut butter, humus and boiled mutton sandwich on rye originated with plants produced using sunlight, carbon, and water.

The Importance of Wood

Wood is a wonderful material, used by humankind since well before the archaeological record to produce heat, light, shelter, clothing, tools, weapons, food and water. Even today it remains the supreme catalyst.

Although computers, concrete and carbon fiber get all the attention nowadays, and those who evaluate the complicated “environmental” impacts of materials on this world carefully ignore it, there would simply be no human civilization without wood.

There are those who disagree with this statement, mostly highly edumacated individuals affiliated with supposedly serious organizations, many of whom are short-sighted, financially-conflicted souls with short attention spans that never exceed the news cycle, and who, despite clear evidence to the contrary, choose to equate the use of wood with the destruction and/or pollution of the natural environment for fun and profit.

Of course, they believe, or at least profess, that the carbon released by the combustion and decomposition of wood is wholly poisonous. These nitwit geniuses instead promote the supposedly “ecological” use of steel and concrete and petroleum products instead, all materials that require huge amounts of energy to fabricate, transport and recycle, all while releasing millions of tons of truly (versus imagined) poisonous substances into the natural environment annually. Alas, the medicinal cure for idiocy your humble servant strongly advocates is apparently not yet widely available.

Wood contains a tremendous amount of energy, as Gentle Reader has observed in wood-fueled fires. The immutable laws of thermodynamics state, in essence, that all heat comes at a cost. Oil costs money to pump, transport and refine as well as special machinery to use it, but the heat given off by wood is simply the conversion of sunlight gathered by the plant while it was alive back into heat and light. A complete and pure circle.

Sure, the combustion and decomposition of wood releases carbon back into the ground and atmosphere, but every molecule of carbon released by wood was originally extracted directly from the atmosphere by many, many plants over many many cycles. Therefore, plants remove carbon from the atmosphere, and only release that carbon when they return to the big lumberyard in the sky. This is true “net zero,” without the production of an ounce of pollution, unlike steel, concrete, oil, coal and every other fuel and material used by mankind without exception.

I’m not suggesting the use of petroleum and coal and windpower, within limits, is irresponsible, but if the environment is important to you, as it should be, then using organic materials and fuels instead of oil, coal, steel, concrete and wind turbines should be a high priority.

Furniture Pests

Our Beloved Customers use our tools to make elegant, useful stuff out of wood. This wood is formed of cellulose, the most abundant organic compound on Earth, one very similar to but fundamentally different from the sugars we consume for energy. Many animals, including herbivores such as elephants, cows, rabbits and termites have the built-in ability to convert the cellulose in the plant matter they eat into energy by a process we cannot replicate. Humans can’t do this, nor have we figured out a way to accomplish this apparent magic without the intervention of animals, insects or fungus. Once again, puffed-up prideful science can’t do what every carpenter ant and every mushroom obediently does without even be asked to.

A part of the “carbon cycle” relies on such animals, bugs and micro-organisms. If left to their own devices bugs and fungus quickly recycle wooden objects, including houses, furniture and parts of our tools made from wood. You may not have noticed these pesky critters, but you’ve probably seen the holes they chew and the wood dust they excrete. Check an old tool handle, handplane body, or antique table leg for evidence of death watch beetles of powderpost beetles, two common varieties of bugs commonly called “furniture beetles.”

I don’t know about you, but I hate the very idea of icky bugs eating my furniture, tools and handiwork. But what to do?

There are plenty of chemicals manufactured to make wood taste yucky to bugs and fungus, but most of those are toxic and/or carcinogenic so you wouldn’t want to leave them in contact with your skin or lungs for any period of time. But what’s a safe way to keep bugs and fungus from chewing on your workbench, furniture, tool handles or plane bodies? And what can be done once some of them have taken up residence therein?

Termites are are problem bugs, too of course, but most of them prefer a higher moisture content in the wood they dine on than is typically found in houses and tools. That said, I’ve seen subterranean termites and Formosa termites in Guam swarm and eat interior furniture and wooden doors down to hollowed-out toilet paper tubes in front of my eyes. Scary stuff. This is precisely why people don’t build much of anything from wood on that island but spend lots of money on chemicals to prevent termites from turning cellulose into bug crap.

For example, while living on Guam, I had a neighbor in the US Airforce stationed there who’d imported some beautiful Amish furniture made of American Cherry wood from his home in Pennsylvania. Unfortunately, there was a crack in the concrete slab-on-grade floor underneath his beautiful dining table with a corresponding gap in the ceramic tile on top that allowed the local termites to access a single cabriole leg of that table unseen. The table collapsed into a pile of sticks and red termite crap after a year. I kid thee not. Vicious, voracious, vile bugs.

If Gentle Reader has ever frequented flea markets and antique shops, or even perused photos of antiques, you will have seen the many holes left by furniture beetles. I own several old hammers, axes and planes with their wooden components riddled with bugholes. But how can you prevent bugs from infesting your valuable wooden objects in the first place without using highly-toxic, corrosive, and expensive chemicals containing lead, chromium and/or arsenic? Easy peezy. Borax is the answer.

A Non-toxic and Inexpensive Method of Wood Preservation

There are any number of effective chemicals available for wood preservation against insects and fungus. Borax is what I recommend based on direct workplace experience. Its a naturally-occurring white powder sold everywhere as a laundry detergent additive. But it’s not just for washing Gentle Reader’s socks, oh no. It’s essential in many industrial processes, including blacksmithing, where it’s used as a flux when forge-welding iron and steel. Japanese blacksmiths use it too.

The vast majority of borax is mined in California where there are huge deposits in ancient lake beds. You may have heard of the famous “Twenty Mule Team” wagon trains once used to transport borax from Death Valley.

For this application you don’t need wagons or mules, just water and borax powder, but NOT Borax-brand washing detergent. Both are sold as laundry additives in the supermarket and big-box stores, so don’t confuse them.

2 mule team wagon
A borax mine in Boron, California USA

To prepare this wood preservative and insecticide, dissolve borax powder in warm water to make a 7-10% mixture. Then spray it onto wooden objects at-risk, or better yet, soak the wooden objects in this mixture and let dry. Be careful not to spray the cat or the carpet.

Borax messes with the internal functions of bugs and fungus, but it’s harmless to humans and domestic animals to handle, so long as you don’t soak in it and ingest it. Indeed borax and its variants are the only sure way to protect wood against bugs and rot without putting human life and health at risk. No VOC risk. No carcinogens. It won’t pass through skin. No environmental contamination risk (that’s important). It won’t corrode metal fasteners. It has no odor. And it’s cheap. These are all important reasons for woodworkers to use borax.

There are only two downsides to using borax. First, since it’s water soluble, you need to keep wood treated with borax from repeated wetting or the borax will leach out. Second, you need to keep wood treated with borax out of direct contact with soil because moisture in soil will, once again, leach borax out of wood.

I add borax to the water I soak my sharpening stones in to prevent crud from growing. It works for years at a stretch, and doesn’t harm any variety of sharpening stone, synthetic or natural, nor does contact with dissolved borax harm me, or even irritate my skin, so long as I don’t drink it (see the Wood Finisher’s Pledge above). That said, I don’t bathe in it, and I understand that some people have a reaction to it, so don’t go crazy.

Borax also makes the water alkaline preventing rust. I add it to the water I use to clean my blades when sharpening and for cleaning my muzzleloading rifles. Entirely historically correct too.

But before using this mixture for any purpose, please recite the Wood Finisher’s Pledge along with me now: “I will not drink wood preservatives, use CCA impregnated toothpicks, nor wash my face with oven cleaner.”

A Quick, and Cheap But Slightly Toxic Way to Eliminate Bugs from Wood

Borax will kill bugs already in the wood given time, but is there a quicker way to get rid of those voracious beasties?

Here’s a technique to deal with wood-eating bug infestations I learned from woodworkers in Japan. I’m sure its not unique, but I’ve never heard of it being used elsewhere.

Before employ this methodology, please recite the Wood Finisher’s Pledge again, but with more feeling this time.

Simply find the entrance/exit holes bugs chew into and out of an infested wooden object and, using a syringe or pipette, squirt or drip a little gasoline into each of them. You might even soak the wood overall in a bit of gasoline.

But, be warned, because Murphy rules the universe and truly wants to hurt you and yours, so be sure you do this outdoors well away from anything flammable. Also be sure to put out your stogey, give your Puffco Cupsy bong a rest, and dial down your “electrifying personality” because “hair on fire” is not simply a real risk around uncontained gasoline, it’s garan-frikin-teed.

After judiciouly and carefully applying this small amount of gasoline, you can wrap the object in plastic, or place it into some kind of airtight container, to allow the gasoline vapors to permeate the wood. Do this outdoors, once again, and refrain from smoking. The gasoline fumes will promptly send the bugs, their eggs, and all their chilluns to the big lumberyard in the sky. In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti, Amen.

After a few days, unwrap/unseal the wooden object and place it outdoors in the sunlight to remove the smell of gasoline.

This technique works perfectly, every time, and costs almost nothing.

The chemical companies don’t make a penny on either of the highly-effective processes described herein which is why you’ve never heard of them before.

Until we meet again and all your bugs have been purged, I have the singular honor to remain,

YMHOS

I can’t believe those damned bugs ate my favorite bow! If only I’d followed Stan’s advice and treated it with that white powder…

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below. You can also reach us at Covingtonandsons@gmail.com

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Japanese Handplanes Part 9 – Maintenance & Storage

Preventive Maintenance: Don’t start today by doing yesterday’s work.

– Deniece Schofield

High-quality handplanes are not cheap, and when you have a good one in good fettle, the time and effort it takes to maintain it ready to rock and roll immediately is never wasted. Indeed, it’s a solid investment that pays higher dividends than General Electric stock ever will, I promise you, on condition that the maintenance is done right, and your handplanes are stored and transported properly. On this subject as in many others, knowledge is power, so let’s get some.

Maintenance

There are several items to consider when maintaining your handplane. We’ve discussed how to set-up and fettle a Japanese hiraganna handplane in previous articles, all listed at the end of this article. In this article we’ll examine how to maintain it while we’re using it, and how to store it when we aren’t.

Sharpening

A dull plane may make excellent firewood, but it’s as useful as a screen door in a submarine, so the first step in keeping it useful is sharpening it. The true value of the high-quality-forged blade in your plane is that it’s easily and quickly made extremely sharp, and it will retain that sharp edge a long time, reducing the time, trouble and cost of maintaining it. Does your time have value?

For detailed directions about sharpening, please read the series of 30 articles linked at the end of this article. They will explain the what and why of the blade of a high-quality plane. And of course, there are supernatural aspects worthy of review (ツ).

Maintaining and Storing a Handplane While In-use

The following is a list of maintenance items you should consider performing and the specific conditions under which I think they’re applicable. These are suggestions not rules, of course, but unlike most of the woodworking gurus on the internet, I didn’t steal them from noobtube, nor suggest them because they’re good clickbait, or fish them out of my fundament because they smell like lilacs, or because I think they’ll sell tools or books to the gullible. They are simple and they work, but it’s important to understand the applicable conditions. Each item assumes that the blade is sharp, but if isn’t, sharpening it should be first priority.

The Essential Oilpot
  1. Condition 1 – Overnight Storage: The plane is working fine, its blade is still sharp, and you intend to use the plane in the same place for the same jobs tomorrow, but just need to set aside on your workbench for a few hours, perhaps overnight. You may want to take the following actions:
    • Don’t remove the blade and chipbreaker, but simply wipe the body with a clean, dry rag and clear dust and shavings out of the blade opening with a clean, dry brush. Purpose: To prevent wood resin from accumulating and gumming things up (depends on the wood), and to prevent corrosion (yes, sawdust can cause rust).
    • Oil the cutting edge at the sole using your trusty, ever-faithful oilpot.
  2. Condition 2 – Short-term Relocation & Storage: The plane is working fine and the blade is sharp, but you need to relocate it to another location for a short time. In this case, you may want to take the following actions.
    • Safe the blade by retracting it into the body using your wood, plastic or leather mallet so it doesn’t become damaged, or damage other tools while lounging in your tool box or tool bag during the relocation.
    • Remove dust and shavings from the plane, especially the mouth opening, because they will make the toolbox or tool bag dirty.
  3. Condition 3 – Short-term Storage: The plane is working fine, the blade is sharp but we need to store it out of the way short-term.
    • Remove blade and chipbreaker entirely (see previous article)
    • Clean the blade and chipbreaker of sawdust and wood resin. Resin may have accumulated on the blade and chipbreaker which, if not removed in a timely manner, can harden over time increasing friction. Use you oilpot and a clean rag and/or a small stick of wood to scrape-off built-up resin resin. If that doesn’t work, use acetone or lacquer thinner.
    • Clean dust and shavings from blade opening and mouth with brush/rag.
    • Wipe down the plane’s body with a clean rag.
    • If the body is dirty with oil, sharpening stone mud or fingerprints, clean it all over with your oilpot and wipe. If that doesn’t make it clean, dampen a clean rag along with drop or two of dishwashing liquid (neutral PH), then wring it out as hard as you can. Scrub the body clean with this nearly-dry rag. Caution: We need the soap and water to remove oil and dirt, but making the body wet may cause it too warp. When you’re done, make absolutely sure the body is perfectly dry.
    • Oil the blade and chipbreaker.
    • Reassemble the plane but leave the blade’s cutting edge retracted up inside the mouth opening. How tight should you fit the blade/chipbreaker? Tight enough to firmly retain blade and chipbreaker so they won’t rattle out, but no more.
  4. Condition 4: Long-term Storage:
    • Remove the blade and its chipbreaker entirely.
    • Clean the blade and chipbreaker removing sawdust and all accumulated wood resin as described above.
    • Apply a protective coating of a paraffin wax-based corrosion prevention product such as CRC 3-36. For longer storage under more difficult conditions, CRC SP-350 or CRC SP-400 are even better.
    • After the carrier has evaporated to some degree, wrap the blade and chipbreaker in aluminum foil and store them together with the wooden body so they won’t become separated. Don’t assemble the parts!
    • Clean the wooden body removing all dust, shavings, dirt and fingerprints.
    • Place a mothball in the body’s mouth and wrap the body, along with the blade and chipbreaker, in newspaper, or place it in a plane bag. This will be good for a number of years in any condition except underwater.

Plane Storage on the Workbench, Atedai or Planing Beam

There is some disagreement about how to set down one’s handplanes when they aren’t being used. I won’t consider all the possible options, but will simply present the one that I was taught and use.

The old boys who trained me insisted that it is improper set down a plane with its sole touching the workbench, atedai, tatami mat, carpet or ground for any length of time, but one must instead rest it on its side. After many years of using handplanes, I feel this is a good habit to develop for both Japanese and Western handplanes.

Since I’m right handed, this results in the plane resting on its right side with the cutting edge oriented towards towards the left side as shown in the photo below. This position takes up less space on the workbench, and protects the cutting edge and sole of my plane from contacting anything but air.

80mm and 60mm hiragann handplanes at rest but just wiggling in anticipation of yummy shavings.
Resting on its side, even a larger plane like this 80mm hiraganna plane can be picked up and put to use quickly and deftly.

This position is also makes it quick and easy to pick the plane up and get it back into battery without fumbling.

Is it rude to rest the plane sole-down, or will it damage it? Probably not, but seeing a handplane with it’s cutting edge oriented up or down instead of to the side bothers me like a bug crawling on my neck. OCD?

I also rest my planes on their sides when placing them in boxes, toolboxes or toolbags even for long-term storage.

A Japanese carpenter back in the day with his hair done up in the traditional”chonmage” haircut, wearing his employer’s “happi” jacket, and carrying his open-topped wooden toolbox on this shoulder

One can place a plane on any stable surface it’s willing to sit on, and where it won’t be kicked or fall from, even a chair, bench, board, carpet, floor tile, or other flooring material, but never directly on gritty surfaces such as bricks, paving, concrete, or heaven forfend, the naked ground. You see, carelessly allowing hard grit to become embedded in the sole of one’s wooden-bodied handplane is an act that will surely invite harsh judgement in the Great Lumberyard in the Sky.

Place the plane resting mouth-down only when the plane is actively being used or it’s wrapped in cloth or newspaper.

Do all Japanese craftsmen follow this rule? Heck no. Why do I recommend these habits? Well, first of all, because this habit shows proper respect to my tools, to the craftsmen that made my tools, and to those who taught me how to use them. Second, because these habits help my tools last longer with less damage. Thirdly, because it helps to keep my workplace better organized. And don’t forget judgement day!

Until we meet again, I have the honor to remain,

YMHOS

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Other Articles in the Japanese Handplane Series:

Links to Articles in the Sharpening Series:

The Japanese Gennou & Handle Part 23 – Finishing the Job

A man in love is incomplete until he has married. Then he’s finished.

– Zsa Zsa Gabor

This is the last article in our series about designing and making a handle for a Japanese gennou hammer.

In previous articles in this series Beloved Customer completed designing, shaping and fitting the handle of your gennou hammer and attached the head. Then you tested it and perhaps made adjustments. Assuming Beloved Customer is satisfied with the results of those adjustments, at least for now, the time has come to sand it and apply a finish.

Finishing Options

There are a couple of approaches your humble servant might propose on the subject of finishing tool handles. The first is perhaps the oldest, and easiest, and that’s to do nothing. After all, tools are made for hands not museums, and flashy finishes too often make otherwise honest, workmanlike tools look silly.

In addition, most woods (except for those that might cause allergic reactions) perform just fine unfinished, thankee kindly. In this “au natural” approach, you may choose to leave tool marks on the surface of the handle without sanding them into oblivion, lending your handle undeniable gravitas and dignity, even character.

If the au-naturel approach appeals to you, I recommend erasing marks left by files and rasps and replacing them with crisp marks and cleanly cut surfaces left by sharp edged tools like knives, carving tools, and spokeshaves.

An unsealed, unfinished handle will, however, unavoidably become stained and discolored, and it’s head may not stay attached as long as a well-sealed, well-finished handle. I say this from experience.

Unless a chemical sealer/finish material is applied afterward, a plain sanded finish is probably the worst surface treatment possible, whereas a surface cleaned with sharp blades will serve you better. I often use this texture for the endgrain butts of my hammers and saws.

A convenient and expensive light-duty finish material for an au-natural handle is a quality non-slip floor paste wax like Johnson’s well-known product in the yellow metal can. Does it seal the wood? No, but it does help keep the handle looking cleaner. Why floor paste wax? Some waxes, for instance those used to polish furniture and automobile paint, are intended to provide a slick surface that encourages water to run off and to which dirt doesn’t adhere well. History has shown that slippery waxes used on floors will result in slips, falls, and a transfer of wealth to the legal profession. Accordingly, carnuba automotive wax is not ideal for tool handles, while non-slip floor wax is, IMHO.

And then there are the chemical finishes such as linseed oil (BLO), milk finish, tung oil, shellac, varnish, lacquer, polyurethane, etc. To one degree or another, these chemicals tend to seal the wood reducing the penetration of dirt and oil, and (sometimes) slowing the movement of moisture into and out of the wood.

But what chemical finish is best suited to a gennou handle? It is far beyond the scope of this humble scribble to properly describe, much less evaluate, the many varieties of finish applied to wood, so I will simply provide a few comments.

Linseed oil and BLO, a by-product of the flax plant, are organic materials used for centuries if not millennia as a traditional finish in Europe. It was once used widely for paint and, until it was replaced by rubber and later petroleum products, flooring and waterproofing materials. Have you heard of “linoleum” floor tiles? They were once extremely popular covering thousands of square miles of floors, including the floors of every school I ever attended, and for a long time most of the offices I worked in as an adult. The death of these floor tiles, however, was the unfortunate practice of mixing in asbestos, a decidedly hazardous material. Of course, this was back in the day when lead was a common ingredient in paint and even makeup.

I had thought linoleum had gone the way of disco, but on a recent project here in Tokyo I learned that not only are floor tiles made from linseed oil still available commercially, but the equivalent of “sheet vinyl” floor covering made of linseed oil is too. It still has that smell of processed linseed oil I remember from my deranged youth, but without the asbestos filler.

Linseed oil no longer has much value as an applied finishing material for wood because it never really dries without adding problematic, even toxic, chemicals called “driers,” it seals poorly, collects dirt, and discolors badly over time. But because it’s constantly mentioned in old writings, which many people trust just because they are old, linseed oil products are still in-use today.

To advocates of liquid linseed oil finishing products I say “make sure you soak your oily rags in water and dry them outside well away from any fuel (like your house).” You’ve been warned.

I am a fan of the modern milk paints, but do not like them for tool handles. Nonetheless, it’s a valid option.

Tung oil is an ancient finish, but the price nowadays far exceeds its value, assuming you can even find an unadulterated source. The immoral and corrosive CCP corrupts so much that was once good.

Shellac creates a beautiful surface coating but it’s far too delicate for tool handles.

Standard synthetic varnish, nitrocellulose lacquer, urethane and polyurethane are readily available, easy to use and can create a beautiful, durable finish, but when used in the traditional manner, the surface film coating they produce eventually chips and cracks with time, exposure to ultraviolet light, and expansion and contraction of the wood to which they have been applied. And every scratch accelerates this degradation.

Why is degradation of film finishes the a problem you say? The obvious downside of a once beautiful finish looking ratty aside, every defect in a surface film finish promotes the movement of moisture into and out of the wood, and of course increases the swelling and shrinkage of the wood it’s intended to protect. What most people don’t realize is that, as time goes by, the solvents and compounds in film finishes intended to provide flexibility in dealing with expansion and contraction of the wood dissipate causing the finish to gradually become more brittle, and break down, crack and peel at a ever-increasing rate, independent of dings and other defects.

In modern times, the use of latex rubber in water-based paints has greatly reduced this problem, but such paints are not especially durable as a tool handle finish.

Sanding

If you prefer a smoother finish, and are prepared to apply a chemical finish, then by all means sand away. But please do not sand the tenon. If you decide to sand the handle before installing the head, please apply masking tape protection to the tenon.

How fine should you sand your handle? I think 600 grit is fine enough, but I’ve gone as high as 1200 grit on fine-grained, hard woods like black persimmon. Did using such fine sandpaper make a difference? Nah.

After you’ve sanded the surface to where you like it, the next job is to eliminate hidden hairs. No, this does not involve applying hot wax to delicate areas of the body and then violently ripping out body hair so that you look delightfully-sleek in your new sequin string bikini, but rather it’s the job of encouraging the naughty ends of wood fibers still connected to the handle, but currently pressed flat onto and into the handle’s surface, to stand up so we can cut them off using sandpaper.

Dealing with these fiber is always important when finishing wood because, with time and moisture, they may pop up over time creating rough patches in the finish encouraging degradation. Once they are standing and no longer hidden, we can cut them off at the base with sandpaper to create a durable, smooth surface long-term even when exposed to moisture and sweat.

Although it’s not used much nowadays, sanding sealer was originally a shellac product developed specifically for this purpose.

To raise hairs, lightly wet the handle’s surface (but never the tenon) with water and allow it to dry completely. Some hasty people like to dry the wood quickly with a forced-air blower or even propane torch at this point to make any loose fibers stand up immediately in preparation for the next sanding pass. But simply allowing the wood to dry naturally is effective too.

This is an ancient, very effective technique. Please do this at least twice, after which you can apply the finish material of your choice.

Kanō Hōgai, Two_Dragons_in_Clouds (1885), ink on paper. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Father and son dragons are depicted playing in the clouds.

The London Finish

There’s a durable wood finishing technique I learned from custom gunstock makers that I wrote about in an earlier article about handplanes called the London Finish. This is the finish I recommend for hammer handles too. It can be as subtle or as flashy as you like.

A pretty handle is nice, but the key objectives for applying a finish to your gennou handle should be (1) to moderate swelling and shrinking of the tenon during seasonal and climactic changes in humidity; and (2) to prevent oil and dirt from penetrating the wood making it look grubby. This matters because such swelling and shrinking can cause the head of your gennou to loosen and do naughty, acrobatic stuff at inconvenient times. And a greasy, dirty handle is no way to treat a friend.

If the head is attached when applying the chemical finish of your choice (I recommend it be so), please tape it well to keep finish off the metal. Apply masking tape to the hammer head on all four sides of the eye, but leave the end of the wooden tenon exposed.

Tape the rest of the head well with masking tape.

Soak the finish material (flat varnish or polyurethane thinned 100% with high-quality thinner) into the eye and the butt as deeply and thoroughly as possible. Plan for three or four applications allowing time for the material to soak in and dry.

Do no use low VOC thinners as they contain politically-correct compounds of water, acetone, emulsifiers and other counterproductive substances the State of California’s poorly-educated but thoroughly-conflicted and richly-corrupt environmental lawyers have determined will save the polar bears while crippling the State’s industry, but that will weaken the finish.

If you faceted the butt and want to keep it that way, you must be careful when sanding it or the facets will disappear. This is a matter of personal preference.

Of course, be sure to apply lots of finish to other surfaces of the handle, and wet sand them well as described in the article linked to above. Don’t allow a surface film to dry except for the first time as described in the webpage linked to above.

Hammers are lifelong tools, but too often handles are not. You can help your gennou’s head stay tight longer, and the handle stay cleaner and look better longer by applying a London Finish instead of a thick surface film finish.

I hope this series of articles has been useful. I’m certain the lifetime friend you will make by following this tutorial will be grateful for your kind diligence.

YMHOS

A fairy princess discussing the best lures for trout fishing with her friendly blue bird. I wonder which brand of outboard motor fairies prefer…

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please use the questions form located immediately below or email us at Covingtonandsons@gmail.com.

Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, incompetent facebook, or gossipy X and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. Promise.

A list of our gennou heads: C&S Tools – Gennou Hammer Head Pricelists & Photos

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The Japanese Gennou Hammer & Handle Part 22 – Tasting the Pudding

True perfection is unattainable, but if you chase perfection you will catch excellence!

Vince Lombardi

In previous articles in this series about a craftsman-made gennou hammer handle, we discussed how to design and make a handle to fit Beloved Customer’s body and way of working. This article assumes you’ve mostly completed your handle, attached the head, and are now ready to test it. So let’s get started.

Why Testing Matters

I don’t know about you, but after all the research, design and fabrication work we’ve invested in your gennou handle, I need to see how it performs and determine if its performance is superior to a Minion impaled on a stick. Being a Beloved Customer and therefore highly intelligent, you’ve asked yourself the following three indubitably perspicacious questions about testing.

  1. What can I learn from testing?
  2. Against what performance standards should I compare my most excellent new hammer handle (besides to a Minion on a stick)?
  3. How should I conduct that evaluation?

To perfect your hammer, you will need the answers to these questions and more. You can get them over years of use, or get many of them now by testing it in a methodical manner and paying attention, but one way or another, you must get answers, bro.

Desired Testing Results

We can learn several things from testing our gennou with its new handle, but I encourage you to do your best to ascertain the following two things at minimum.

The first thing, of course, is whether or not the hammer with its new handle is comfortable and stable to use, and if possible, what needs to be improved to make it more stable and comfortable. This may entail many small details depending on your requirements and powers of perception.

Whether it’s comfortable in-use or not is subjective and entirely up to you, but you can probably identify problems easily through this testing process. Pain, soreness and blisters and the lack thereof are solid indicators (ツ).

Whether or not it’s stable in use is another important thing to determine early. Does it tend to track straight on the downstroke, or does it want to twist off your intended path of travel striking chisel handle or nail head erratically? When it hits the chisel or nail, does it convey its energy into the target smoothly, or does it wiggle like an eel on a hook on impact?

An unstable head and handle combination may perform well for one or two consecutive strikes, but because Murphy’s Law of Buttered Toast irrevocably dictates that small errors accumulate to maximize damage, an unstable head will often wiggle off-line enough for the third swing to hit weakly, even miss entirely, ruining your rhythm, damaging your confidence, and eliciting snide looks from resident bench cats. Oh, the shame…

A second thing you need to learn is whether or not the face of the hammer is striking the chisel/nail squarely and if the center of mass of the head is aligned with the vertical axis of the chisel handle or nail. Please make sure you understand the meaning of the previous sentence.

With this experience and the answers to these questions under your belt, you will be in a position to adjust the handle to perform its best for you and the way you work.

Testing Procedures

Out of an abundance of well-deserved humility combined with a strong desire to avoid looking even more the fool, your humble servant will refrain from suggesting any specific objective tests, or urge you to use quantifiable standards, or seek concrete empirical results because that would be too silly to even contemplate. Unless, of course, Beloved Customer will conduct these tests in your super-secret laboratory, possibly located at the heart of a dormant volcano on an uncharted South Pacific island, maybe covered by coconut palms with cold beer taps, probably surrounded by hundreds of horny bikini babes, likely frolicking in crystal surf. BTW, if you do have such a lab, please text me the address!

In this super-secret lab you will probably have access to equipment and software suited to more scientific, empirical, replicable methods of comparison, such as those developed for analyzing and improving the apparent performance, marketability and profitability of mass-produced sports equipment such as baseball bats, golf clubs, and green dildos (シ). Sadly, while your humble servant does not possess such equipment, most (but not all) humans own and operate one of the world’s most refined super-computers and sensor networks: our bodies and brains. I therefore propose you focus these formidable tools on this analysis. (brains and bodies, that is, not dildos).

Below are four absolutely subjective tests only you can perform, the results of which only you can evaluate.

Incorporating Test Results

To thwart the confusion promulgated by Murphy and his multitudinous malevolent minions, I strongly recommend you use the results of your analysis to guide you in making incremental improvements to your handle over time rather than large changes immediately, so to that end, please plan to remake your handle, once, twice or even thrice, improving it a little each time. Such is the true path of the craftsman.

Please update your handle drawing each time to record the improvements you’ve made and ensure no “increments” are misplaced.

In scobe veritas. (“In sawdust, truth”).

The Grip

As you are aware, for any testing other than drinking beer or women choosing wall paint color to be meaningful, some basic techniques must be established and followed to reduce variables to a manageable degree. How you hold the gennou handle to be tested is just such a basic technique.

The handle design presented in this series of scribbles is intended to work best when gripped in a particular way, so when performing the following tests, it’s important that you grip the hammer correctly thereby removing one huge, often-problematic variable.

Of course, I’m describing a particular grip here as being “correct,” but that’s just my well-informed opinion. In any case, I promise your hammer will work more efficiently if you abandon the so-called “hammer grip” (what I call the “Hobbit-killer” grip with the handle grasped in your fist) right away and switch to this more advanced grip.

I didn’t invent this grip, BTW, but observed and consulted with craftsman I respected in the USA and Japan who used it for many decades, all of whom are now working overtime in the big lumberyard in the sky. I later came to call it the “Sam Snead grip,” after the extremely successful pro-golfer of the same name who made it famous, and him rich, in tournaments and in dozens of books he wrote on the subject of using golf clubs skillfully.

We’ve talked about this grip in some detail in Part 13 of this series, but please review the photos below to confirm your understanding.

The first photo labeled “Bridging the Palm” shows how the hammer’s handle is NOT held in a fist, but is angled diagonally across the palm, supported on the first joint in the index finger, as well as the heel of the palm.

You can see how the index finger wraps around the handle while the thumb is pressed against the side so that the handle is strongly clamped between index finger and thumb, but can still pivot the handle if the operator so desires. This grip affords the joints of the forefinger and thumb, digits accustomed to fine motor control (unlike the fist), absolute control over three critical surfaces of the handle.

This grip also provides better control, more power, and greater reach without forcing the wrist to do the strange, unnatural contortions the Hobbit Killer grip does.

Bridging the palm
Index finger wrapped around the handle with the tip pressing against the rounded front edge of the handle.
Handle pressed between tip of the thumb and first joint of the index finger. The tip of the index finger presses against the rounded front edge of the handle, and applies most of the force required to return the handle to battery.
Notice how the handle is pressed between the pad of the thumb and the side of the index finger in the famous “Sam Snead” grip.

The Three Tests

Following are three tests to help you ascertain how well your new gennou and its handle suits your body and your work style.

Before attempting these tests, however, it is important to use your new handle for a time to establish a connection between it, your hand, and your eye (using the proper grip, of course).

Besides moral virtue and a sense of humor, you will need a few things.

  1. A wood chisel suitable for cutting a mortise hole, around 24mm.
  2. A piece of light-colored scrap wood for cutting a test mortise hole;
  3. A stick of light-colored wood approximately the size and shape of the handle of the chisel you would normally use for cutting mortise holes:
  4. An ink pad, wide-tip marking pen, or Dykem.
  5. A lab assistant. I recommend a buxom, young lass with a cute giggle wearing a sexy lycra lab uniform (Warning: bad stuff may happen if you let She Who Must Be Obeyed meet, or even see, this assistant!)

So, now that we have our supercomputer and its sensor suite warmed up and focused, our tools laid out, and a bubbly lab assistant standing by, sound the trumpets and let the testing begin! We who are about to dye salute you!

Test No. 1: The Blind Retrieval Test

After you have used your gennou with its new handle for a few weeks such that your hand has become accustomed to it, please give your bench dogs a few treats, shoo away any arrogant bench cats, set it on your de-cluttered bench, step back a few steps, close your eyes and turn in-place once or twice like a ballerina with hairy legs. Now, have your lab assistant, perhaps a child, a friend, a neighbor, your girlfriend, or wife, or even a clever bench dog (but never your neighbor’s girlfriend’s wife’s cat!) change the gennou’s orientation on your benchtop by turning it over, switching it end for end a few times, spinning it, or whatever. Random orientation is what’s needed.

Next, with your eyes still closed, grab the gennou with your hammer hand in a correct grip ready to rock-n-roll. Notice how easy or difficult it is to grip the handle correctly, without fumbling and without opening your eyes. If it’s not easy to do, however, you need to know it now. It may be simply that you’re not accustomed to your hammer, or that the geometry or details are out-of-wack.

By “correctly” in the previous paragraph, I mean (1) the flat striking face of the head is facing away from you and toward the chisel or nail; (2) the handle and head are aligned straight in your hand, and not twisted, (3) the heel of your hand is pressing against the flat spot on the back edge of the handle adjacent the butt; (4) the distance from the center point of the face to the heel of your hand is located precisely the distance shown in your design drawing.

BTW, whether you picked up the habit from your daddy or some internet guru, choking-up on the grip is an inefficiency you should discard simply because it’s counterproductive and silly, like a powerful cane corso dog wearing flower brocade.

If the grip area of your handle is shaped as shown in the drawing with a flat back edge and sides perpendicular to it, a radiused front edge, and flared toward the butt, it should be easy to instantly grip the handle in precisely the proper place, with the intended striking face oriented properly, without opening your eyes and without any fumbling whatsoever. 

If, on the other hand (the one with six fingers (ツ)), your hammer doesn’t leap into your hand in perfect alignment without argument or eyeball action, some adjustments to the handle are called for.

For example, a frequent cause of confusion between handle and hand is the leading edge of the grip being square instead of rounded. Or the sides and butt of the handle being angled wrong. These details can all be adjusted once you know they need to be adjusted

A gennou that naturally orients itself in your hand with the striking face in the right direction, the same distance from the striking face first time every time without your having to look at it, will provide you a tremendous advantage in speed, efficiency and confidence. It will become a good friend and companion.

BTW, just for gits and shiggles, try this test with any name-brand one-size-fits nobody nail bender you have laying around. The virtues of your new handle will become immediately apparent.

Test No. 2: The Blind Swing Test

This test will teach you something about handle length and other details.

Once again, perform this test after you have used the gennou with its new handle for some time and have become accustomed to it. A sexy lab assistant (one who doesn’t talk too much) in slinky woodworking togs is optional (ツ).

Grip the gennou properly in one hand and the stick shaped like your chisel handle in the other just as you would an actual chisel. But instead of placing the end of the stick against something as if you might cut it, please keep the stick in the air without butting it against anything. Now, with your eyes still closed, swing the gennou at the end of the stick of wood.

You should be able to strike the stick with the flat end of the gennou solidly and squarely on the first, or perhaps second try. Success in this test is common.

If your hammer misses the stick consistently, it may be because you aren’t yet accustomed to the handle, or it may be that you are choking-up up on the grip, or it may be you need to make it shorter or longer, or the grip shape needs to be adjusted. Or it may be that Murphy keeps distracting you by sending dickpics. It’s absolutely worth figuring out.

Once again, if you consistently miss the target, pay attention to why and where you are missing. Is the handle too long? Is it too short? Are you missing off to the side? Make notes recording the results and your observations on the design drawings to incorporate into your Mark II handle.

If accuracy can be improved by shortening the handle or modifying the grip, go ahead and make the necessary changes a little at a time. It’s easy to shorten the handle, but lengthening one requires an ACME Wood Stretcher Mark 2. I can lend you mine if you don’t have one (ツ)

Test No. 3: The Ink Test

Never fear: this test has nothing to do with gossip screeds or Rorschach drawings. It will help you determine if the handle of your gennou is the right length, if it is cocked at the most effective angle, and whether or not it should be canted to the left or right, and all without pulping an innocent tree.

This test works best if preformed after the Blind Retrieval Test and Blind Swing Test.

Begin by coloring the striking face of your gennou with an ink pad or by applying dark marking pen ink or Dykem to the gennou’s striking face (the flat face). Clean or sand the end of your chisel’s handle to produce a clean, white surface. Then cut a mortise using this gennou in the same posture you assume when cutting most of your mortises.

For instance, if you mostly cut mortises in wood located at a constant height on your workbench, such as drawers and furniture parts, you should employ that position. Or, if you tend to cut mortises in timbers while sitting on or straddling them using the venerable butt-clamp, please assume that position.

The impact with the chisel’s handle will wipe ink off the face of hammer and deposit it on the end of the chisel’s handle at the same time. This ink transfer will print the story you need to read. Check the ink on the gennou’s face and the end of the chisel every two strikes.

This is a time-tested technique professional golfers use to select/design golf clubs, BTW.

If the ink at the center of the striking face is scrubbed clean first, and the center of the chisel handle becomes inked first, then you have made your handle the right length with the head angled correctly. If not, you should make notes describing the results in the handle drawing you made earlier, and adjust the design of your next handle accordingly.

Again, you may find it enlightening to perform this same test with conventional hammer with a standard handle.

When your done testing, be sure to record your conclusions. Either erase and adjust the drawing, or trace over it to make and date a new drawing with your revised details. Tracing paper is our friend.

In either case, be sure to add a date and/or revision number to the drawing to ensure you don’t confuse it with older, superseded drawings. Don’t put this off but do it right away before you forget. This applies to all the tests described herein.

Adjustments to Your Handle

You should use the results of these tests to make small, incremental adjustments to your handle, as you deem necessary, rather than big, drastic changes.

For instance, you may need to shorten the handle. This is easily done if your handle is a little long and you’ve made the neck as I recommended. Worst case, make notes, adjust the drawing and remake the handle with as few changes as possible to avoid confusing over-complication.

A common correction you may want to try is, after becoming accustomed to using the hammer, to reshape the grip area to distribute pressure more evenly over the hand, and to reduce stresses induced in skin, muscle, tendons and bones by easing edges and corners while maintaining control and indexing. Most importantly, you should shape the handle so it doesn’t twist in your hand stretching your skin in uncomfortable ways, a common cause of blisters, especially in plastic-handled one-size-fits-nobody hardware store hammers.

If I may share an example from my experience, every new hammer handle I make tends to produce a blister on the first joint of my right hand index finger. Obviously a lot of pressure focus on this location on my hand. So I know to smooth the transition from back edge to the side just where this joint bears to avoid blisters.

This modification creates an obvious dent in the smooth lines of my handles, but your humble servant is resigned to sacrificing beauty for performance when necessary. Just look at the sorry state of my career as a fashion supermodel if you doubt my dedication to performance.

Another less-common problem is the hammer’s face striking the chisel handle or nail head at an angle instead of being centered on, and at a 90˚ angle to, the long axis of the chisel handle. The ink test will reveal such impish behavior.

This tendency usually improves with practice, but you can adjust for it by making a new handle with the head skewed to the left or right as necessary.

As a way to determine how much skew is required, you can plane down the sides of your test handle, glue on slips of wood, shape them as you see fit, and test the results. Once you’ve determined how much total correction is necessary, you can remake your final working handle accordingly.

Once again, work patiently to achieve small, incremental improvements, and be sure to record the results on your drawings.

Don’t hesitate to methodically scrape, shave and experiment with this first handle.

The design of this handle, and the process your humble servant has described for making it, is suited not just for Japanese gennou hammers but for all short-handled hammers and axes. Give it a try and you’ll see what I mean.

In the next article of this series we’ll apply a protective, and maybe even tastefully elegant, finish. Please remind me to call Ramon and beg him cater the unveiling party! I simply love his cheesy shrimps on crackers, don’t you?

YMHOS

A list of our gennou heads: C&S Tools – Gennou Hammer Head Pricelists & Photos

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please use the questions form located immediately below. To see a list of our tools and their pricing, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of this page. To contact us please use the Contact form below or email us directly at Covingtonandsons@gmail.com.

Please share your insights and comments with all Gentle Readers in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.”

We see data miners and their bilious bots as dastardly sneak thieves and so promise to never share, sell or profitably “misplace” your information for any reason. If I lie may the heads of all my hammers fly away to Valinor!

Brother Saint Martin and the Three Trolls by John Bauer. Supernatural creatures are everywhere, if you have eyes to see.

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The Japanese Gennou Hammer & Handle Part 21 – Installing the Head

No one should be ashamed to admit he is wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.

Alexander Pope

In the previous article in this series we finished fitting and shaping the handle of our gennou hammer in accordance with our design document. Some refinements may be pending the results of testing, but in any case the time has come to attach the head.

This is an important task, perhaps not as easy as it sounds, because this is a craftsman’s handle, made with love and skill, not a mass-produced cockroach killer ground out by barefoot Bangladeshi farmers and secured with crude wedges. Nor is it typical of the tools sold at Home Despot designed to fail quickly and be tossed into a landfill soonest. And because the head is not secured with barbaric wedges but relies entirely on the extremely tight fit between the eye of the steel head and the tenon Beloved Customer cut on the end of the handle, some careful, but nonetheless violent action is required to successful connect head and handle. The purpose of the article, therefore, is to help you install it carefully with all due violence.

Installing the Head

Beloved Customer can install the head either before or after sanding and finishing the handle, but in this example we’ll attach the head before testing and finishing the handle. This approach will be most efficient if you decide to adjust or rework the handle after performing the tests I recommend in the next article.

In this case, I use the word “finish” to mean to apply a chemical “finish material” to the wood, not to “complete” the work or “conclude” the job. This difference in definition matters to me because confusion regarding the dual, even treble meaning of the word “finish” has caused problems for me in the past. So there you are.

Preparing the Tenon

First, remove any tape remaining on the tenon and, if necessary, use a solvent such as lacquer thinner to remove any adhesive residue. DO NOT USE soap, water, or any water-based chemical as this will make the tenon swell! After cleaning there should be no finish material, wax, oil or unicorn wee wee left on the tenon.

Depending on the relative humidity the handle is acclimated to, it may be advisable to make an effort to shrink the tenon a bit by placing the handle in a low-humidity environment for a time. Please do NOT microwave your handle, cook it in your oven, or heat it in your toaster, not even with cheese and Tabasco Sauce.

There are several ways to remove moisture from the tenon in order to shrink its width and thickness a bit without ruining the handle or burning down your workshop. Perhaps the safest way is to store it for a time in a tightly-sealed plastic container with packages of silica desiccant. Other ways include placing it in a warm spot close to an operating gas furnace, or indirectly exposing it to an electric room heater for a day or so.

If you use any method that involves heat, make sure you are nearby to monitor progress and deal with scorching and fires.

Orienting the Tenon

You’ve already shaped the handle, and shaved and lightly chamfered the tenon so it should partially fit into the head’s eye almost as deep as the chamfer, but should go no further using only hand pressure.

Please keep in mind during this process that it’s extremely important to get the tenon started in the eye straight, and to keep it straight, without allowing it to become cocked.

It’s also important to install the head in the correct orientation. This usually means its flat striking face is oriented towards chisel or nail, and the brand oriented towards the handle’s butt.

Some people like to orient the head’s brand so it faces up (away from the butt) when using the hammer. I can understand this compulsion, and while it makes no difference in performance one way or the other, you should be aware that it’s seen as bass-ackwards among professionals in Japan.

Starting the Tenon

Of course, in accordance with your humble servant’s advice in previous articles, you’ve already created an elegant dome on your hammer’s butt to prevent these taps and strikes from damaging the handle.

I like to place the head on a working surface such as a benchtop or a softwood board like pine or cedar resting on the floor/ground cushioned by a piece of leather or rubber to prevent slipping.

Insert the tenon into the eye, and, after sighting the handle and head from multiple directions to check alignment, when you are absolutely certain the tenon is poised to go into the eye straight, tap the handle’s butt with a flat-faced hammer, genno (not a domed-face hammer) or mallet. After a few taps, stop tapping, check your progress, and make sure the tenon is going in straight and not cocked.

Although the tenon should not have entered the eye more than a millimeter or two, it should be an extremely tight fit, with each tap making barely any progress.

I can’t describe the sensation in writing, but if the fit is too tight at this point in the process, you may need to scrape or sand the tenon a little.

Driving the Tenon Home

This is where the “violent” part of the job begins.

With the tenon properly aligned and started in the eye, stand up, hold the hammer in a fist with the head hanging straight down, and strike the butt of the handle with your hammer or mallet paying attention to its progress into the eye with each strike and the friction created. Gradually adjust the impact force of your strikes accordingly. Don’t be surprised if it takes literally dozens of extremely hard strikes to install the handle completely. If the tenon just slips in, however, we have a problem, Houston.

If you find that the fit is too loose, however, don’t despair, simply shim it with quality paper as described in the last section of the previous article. Remember, most people find it difficult to get the tenon/eye fit right the first time. Such adjustments to a new handle are nothing to brag about, but neither are they something to be ashamed of. It’s more the rule than the exception until experience is gained.

Some people like to make their tenon extra-long so it projects out of the eye 6-12mm or so. Nothing wrong with this approach, but it looks silly to me in the case of a new handle. Once again, beauty is in the eye of the bean holder.

I was taught that the ideal is for the tenon of a new handle to remain recessed inside the eye a few millimeters. The purpose for this goes back to one of the reasons for the gennou handle design described in this series of articles, namely, that the handle does not have a tumorous swelling below the head but the neck is approximately the same dimensions as the eye for a portion of its length to permit the user to tap the handle further into the eye should it loosen. By leaving the end of the tenon short of the end of the eye in the case of a new handle, one provides visual evidence that (1) the handle is tightly fitted and; (2) that plenty of tenon length is available for making such adjustments.

Accordingly, a tenon projecting a long way out of the eye indicates to the knowledgeable observer that either the handle is old and has been adjusted many times, or the tenon fit was sloppy from the beginning. In my humble opinion, a tenon of a new handle projecting from the eye a significant distance looks odd, but in practice, it doesn’t make much difference. The choice is yours.

In the next article in this series of articles about danger and violence, we’ll test you’re new handle. How exciting!

YMHOS

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please use the questions form located immediately below, or email us at Covingtonandsons@gmail.com. To see a list of our tools and their pricing, or to contact us, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of this page.

Please share your insights and comments with all Gentle Readers in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.”

We see data miners and their bilious bots as dastardly sneak thieves and so promise to never share, sell or profitably “misplace” your information for any reason. If I lie may all my hammers swim away from me!

Title: Cormorant. This ink drawing was made by Japan’s most famous swordsman, Miyamoto Musashi (c. 1583 – 13 June 1645). This style of art (suibokuga) is not well-known outside Asian countries, but despite the few materials used (paper, ink stick, inkstone, brush and water), it’s an extremely difficult art to master. Why? There’s no pencil layout to follow, so the artist must have the drawing planned down to the last stroke in his mind’s eye. Each stroke must be made precisely but without hesitation or mulligans. The ink is black, so color gradations can only be achieved by altering the speed of the brush and the ever-changing water/ink balance contained in the brush. High-speed, high-precision, powerful lines, no wasted strokes. Very much the work of a swordsman.

A list of our gennou heads: C&S Tools – Gennou Hammer Head Pricelists & Photos

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please use the questions form located immediately below. To see a list of our tools and their pricing, or to contact us, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of this page, or email us at Covingtonandsons@gmail.com.

Please share your insights and comments with all Gentle Readers in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply”

We see data miners and their bots as dastardly sneak thieves and so promise to never share, sell or profitably “misplace” your information for any reason. If I lie may my eyes go blind!

Previous Posts in The Japanese Gennou Hammer & Handle Series

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The Japanese Gennou Hammer & Handle Part 20 – Making Sawdust

 

Woodworking minus patience equals firewood. 

– Author Unknown

In the previous article in this series, we selected and prepared the wood for our gennou handle and layed-it out in accordance with our design drawings.

The next step in the process is to gather our tools and begin the fun work of making sawdust.  Yeeehaaaa!

Tools

I prefer to use the following tools when making a gennou handle. You will need to have similar tools on hand for layout and fabrication, but the specific choice is entirely yours. 

  1. Divider with sharp points (transferring dimensions and tenon layout); 
  2. Sharp pencil (making pencil marks (ツ); 
  3. Small try square (laying-out and checking tenon); 
  4. Marking gauges (Titemark and kama kebiki. Marking tenon and centerlines) ; 
  5. Marking knife (layout); 
  6. Hozohiki rip saw and/or dozuki crosscut saw for cutting the tenon (in hardwood, a sharp hozohiki rip saw frequently makes both rip cuts and crosscuts cleaner and more precisely than a crosscut dozuki saw);
  7. A fine saw such as a fret saw or coping saw for making curved cuts;
  8. Auriou cabinet rasp (Lie-Nielson) (optional); 
  9. Boggs-pattern flat-sole and curved-sole spokeshaves (Lie-Nielson. Optional but very handy and pleasant to use if you can tolerate A2 steel);
  10. Sandpaper; 
  11. A board to support the handle-in-progess. I suggest dimensions of 300-400mm long x 50-60mm wide x 40-50mm thick, with a “V” groove cut full-length and a cross-stop inlet about 2/3 its length. The handle will rest, more-or-less securely in this groove, and be restrained at one end by the stop when using spokeshaves and rasps. This support board can be clamped in a vise, or clamped to a workbench with a C clamp. I also find it most efficient to place this board on my benchtop with the gennou handle resting in the v-groove with one end touching my chest, perhaps cushioned by a rag, and use rasps and spokeshaves pulled towards me to shape the wood.

Safety

I dislike safety nannies and never want to become one. But Gentle Readers of this humble website include everything from venerable old-timers to fresh newbies, so it would be unkind of me to write for the benefit of only accomplished woodworkers while ignoring the new guys. And since the operations described herein include sharp tools, and potentially harmful substances, please plan to work safely. The following webpages may help.

In addition, before you start making (and sucking into your pretty pink lungs) the millions of the tiny airborne wood particles that comprise sawdust, please check that the species is not dangerous in general, and that you do not have allergies in particular. The website at the link below might be useful.

Wood Allergies and Toxicity

The Tenon and the Unblinking Eye 

Let’s start by cutting the tenon and fitting it to the gennou head’s eye. 

You’ve already layed-out the tenon, so next use a fine precision rip saw like a 210mm hozohiki to cut the four cheeks being extremely careful, like a big-eyed kitten stalking a grasshopper, to stop short of the layout line. Be careful to work very precisely with your saw to not cut too deeply as any excess meat removed from the tenon, or sawcuts left in the tenon, will fatally weaken it. I’m not kidding!

I humbly confess to making this mistake more than once, ruining all my work to that point and wasting some nice wood. Indeed, it may be best to cut the shoulders shallow and trim with a chisel, once again being careful to not cut too deeply. Ruthless, merciless, unrelenting control of your coke-snorting inner-badger is critical!

At this point, the handle is a chunky, graceless block with square edges, flat surfaces and a stubby tenon sticking out at one end. That’s alright. There’s no need to contour the handle yet.

Cut itsy-bitsy teeny-weeny chamfers on the end of the tenon to help guide it into the eye without cocking and binding. A big chamfer will benefit nothing and look ghastly.

Mark the reference face annotation on the corresponding tenon cheek because you don’t want to mistakenly force the tenon in bassackwards.

Test fit the tenon into the eye a few millimeters but without driving it all the way on. It should not start by hand pressure. 

Although you shouldn’t have yet tried a full-length, full-power test fit, when you are satisfied that the tenon will fit into the eye of your gennou head without the tight fit shaving off much wood, and marked the reference faces, then tape the tenon with masking tape so you don’t accidentally knick or shave it. Don’t ask me why I know this risk exists.

With the tenon close to completion, let’s next shape the curved front, back and side surfaces to fit.

The Back and Front Edges 

The tools you use don’t matter so long as when this step is complete the back edge is perpendicular to the reference face, the opposing side face, and is consistent with the layout lines. 

Cut the back and front edges (surfaces parallel with the long axis of your gennou head) to your design profile using saws, rasps, knives and/or spokeshaves. The two guiding details in this process are the butt and the tenon, with the tenon being most important. These two surfaces should be shaped to smoothly connect the butt with the tenon, not the other way around.

However, leave the corners of the neck and handle area square for now to help guide you in shaping the critical back and side surfaces because, if you start rounding and smoothing edges and corners now, it often happens that the geometry which aligns the hammer’s face with chisel and nail will be compromised.

I recommend you cut outside the layout lines plus a millimeter or two because accidentally cutting deeper than your layout lines will not only disrupt the even flow of the design but may damage the structural integrity of this elegant, minimalist tool. 

Do not shave the handle’s sides flush with the tenon yet, but leave them just a hair proud. 

When done with the this, lightly remark the centerline and extended the eye’s lines. 

The Sides 

At this point in the process the right and left sides should still be flat and parallel, perpendicular at any point with the back surface, and have neat, square corners.

Use the paper/cardboard profile pattern from your design drawing to mark the handle’s layout on the back and front edges. 

Just as with the back and front edges, cut the side surfaces using saws, rasps, knives and/or spokeshaves.

Although some prefer handles with a broken dogleg shape, I recommend you make the transition from tenon to butt gradual and smooth.

As you approach the final dimensions, be careful to avoid tearout or gouging in the neck area since removing these irregularities may require you to reduce thickness too much. 

Do not cut or shave the sides flush with the tenon’s cheeks yet, but leave them just a hair proud. 

Smoothing and Rounding 

I find it most effective at this point to shape the back edge (opposite the flat striking surface of the head) flat with slighty relieved corners, not rounded-over corners. You can always change it later.

Some people like to make the back edge of the handle oval or egg-shaped, but I recommend you leave it flat at first and then adjust it to fit your hand as you use the gennou. 

At this point your industrial-designer sensibilities will scream at you in a voice like a nazgul commanding you to round the the back surface entirely or to make it oval or egg-shaped, but while such surfaces might look better hanging on a peg in a hardware store, or in pictures in a magazine, or as an image on you facebook or Instagram page, and may even feel better when used to kill cockroaches, I promise you it is counterproductive when doing serious work.

Why? Because, despite what you may think, a flatter back surface does not bite into the hand in-use, but because of the greater surface area in contact with the hand it provides, it actually reduces the pressure of impact reaction forces on the hand reducing fatigue and bruising. More importantly, it helps with quickly and unconsciously indexing the striking face of the head correctly.

With the back edge where it needs to be, next round the front edge into the design profile. I prefer this surface to be more-or-less a perfect radius at any point in the handle area, but some guys feel an egg-shaped cross-section fits their fingers better. Six of one half-dozen of the other.

In any case, this surface must smoothly morph into a flat surface with slightly radiused corners in the neck area, and finally with no radius as it approaches the tenon. Yes, you read correctly: no radius.

I usually round-over the flat on the back edge right where my index finger wraps around to the side just a little to avoid developing a blister. But keep in mind that the only way to tell what small details works best for you is trial and error. 

Doming the Butt 

A Hiroki head (bright finish) with a handle of ushikoroshi wood. Notice the domed butt.

The butt should be flat with sharp edges at this point in the process. 

You may find a domed butt strange, but it has both practical and aesthetic purposes.

Let’s consider the structural, practical purpose first. If the wood is adequately hard, and the tenon is not too skinny, you will need to pound on the butt like a son-of-a-gun dozens of times to get the tenon into the eye. That’s as it should be. Don’t start yet, but when the time comes you must be careful with the accuracy of your hammer strikes to avoid damaging the butt or breaking the tenon.

If the butt is flat with crisp edges, unless you have perfect aim with every swing, your hammer might chip or even split it. A domed butt, by comparison, directs impact forces of your hammer away from the edges of the butt and into the neck to help to prevent chipping. Likewise, a domed butt will also reduce damage to the handle over many years of hard service.

Moving on to aesthetics, a domed surface is more organic and, to my beauty-deprived sensibilities, more elegant than a flat one because straight lines seldom exist in nature, are boring to the eye, and are seldom aesthetically pleasing

A warning. Everyone has different opinions about what pleases the eye, as you know. Beauty is in the eye of the bean holder, or something like that, so I entirely understand if you dismiss the aesthetic reasons I’ve suggested. But please don’t ignore the practical, structural reasons if you want to avoid wasting your time and wood.

Assuming the butt is flat and its surface is more or less perpendicular to handle’s centerline, use a marking gauge set at ¼” to scribe a shallow line on the butt’s face (the part the will be domed), and around the butt’s sides (the handle’s sides and front and back edges). These lines will be the limit of the chamfer between the grip and the butt. 

Next, mark a cross on the butt using the front and back edge’s centerline, and a perpendicular line parallel to the back edge. This cross will be useful in maintaining the centerline while profiling the butt. 

Use a knife, chamfer plane, block plane, files or other tools to make a 45˚ chamfer up to the lines just scratched.

Next facet the butt using planes or a sharp kiridashi kogatana knife and remove all tearout and filemarks Try to keep it symmetrical if you can.

The butt can be left faceted (my preference) or smoothed using sandpaper later. That decision must be made before finishing the handles, but need not be made now.

Why might one elect to leave the butt faceted instead of smoothing and polishing it? I’ve done it both ways, and if I’m in a hurry, I sand it smooth and get it over. All commercial products nowadays are machine made and so smooth and symmetrical. And of course, a factory cannot facet a curved surface easily. A faceted butt sets my hammers apart from all commercial products while giving them the craftsman’s signature.

Fixing a Loose Head

So here’s the “I toljaso” in advance.

If you were not as careful and clever as big-eyed kitten stalking a grasshopper when fitting the tenon, you may find it becomes loose and the head begins to wiggle with the passing of a few seasons. A Sergent Elias moment!

I won’t say it out loud, but just between you, me and CCP, you can remedy a loose head by removing it and shimming the eye with quality high-rag-content typing paper. Don’t have any typewriter paper left in your bat cave? It may be your not using your IBM Selectric much nowadays. Are there alternatives?

Don’t tell the Secret Service I said so, but nothing works better for shimming a tenon than a strip cut from a dollar bill. Crane Stationary makes the best paper in the world, and by no coincidence, also makes the paper used in US currency.

In the next few articles in this series we will attach the gennou head to the handle, apply a London Finish, and sample its performance. Yummy!

Until then, I have the honor to remain,

YMHOS

Lena Dances With the Knight by John Bauer 1915

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please use the questions form located immediately below. To see a list of our tools and their pricing, or to contact us, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of this page, or email us at Covingtonandsons@gmail.com.

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The Japanese Gennou & Handle Part 19 – Laying-out the Handle

Not all those who wander are lost.” 

J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

 

Introduction 

In previous articles in this frightfully sexually-charged series, Beloved Customer produced a design drawing for your gennou handle based on the parameters of your actual gennou head and your body. You should have also selected, or at least rolled out of bed onto the floor, bumped your head, partially opened one sticky eye, and seriously considered selecting, an appropriate stick of wood. Assuming you’ve procured said stick, let’s get to the layout. 

Tools 

There are as many ways to layout a hammer handle as Carter has pills, so I won’t insist you do it my way, nor will I dictate what tools you use, but after making dozens of gennou, hammer, axe and adze handles for myself and customers, I’m confident in recommending the following minimum set of tools:

  1. Divider with sharp points (for finding centers and transferring dimensions and lines from drawing to stick; 
  2. Sharp pencil; 
  3. Small try square; 
  4. Marking gauges (Titemark and kama kebiki for quickly laying out centerlines and other details); 
  5. Marking knife; 
  6. Calipers (vernier, dial, or digital. For measuring internal dimensions of the eye, and precisely laying out the tenon)
  7. Handplanes (for dimensioning purposes).
Dominic Campbell’s atedai workbench (in-progress) and his tools, including his gennou with classical-style Kosaburo head and beechwood handle

Preparing the Stick

You need to prepare the stick or board you selected after bumping your head to have 6 flat, parallel, square sides. As far as dimensions go, we need it to be a little oversized, e.g. longer, wider and thicker than the maximum final dimensions shown in the drawing.

You can prep this board or stick using electrical tools, but if you can’t do it with handtools alone, I strongly encourage you to work on your basic skills. Not as flashy as a halfgainer with a twist of lemon while falling from the bed, but surprisingly few have these skills nowadays.

Looking back on the old texts, one of the first tasks assigned trainees in cabinetmaking technical schools and apprenticeships was making a number of sticks or boards with six precisely dimensioned, flat, wind-free, parallel, 90˚ sides just like this because this simple job combines many of the essential woodworking skills, readily makes mistakes apparent to encourage improvement of basic skills, and helps one’s develop an understanding of the material.

Your humble, bumbling servant too was once required to make several boards and sticks just like this using handsaws, handplanes, a trysquare and marking gauge in front of others before I was permitted to be taught more advanced skills. Powertools are fine, but if you haven’t done this before, now is the time to perfect your technique.

Layout 

The following layout steps assume the stick has already been dimensioned as described above.

  1. Begin your layout by selecting and marking a flat and wind-free side of the selected board corresponding to a profile view on the drawing to be the “reference face.” You can write “RF” on it to avoid confusion. I just draw two quick lines in pencil at an angle across the board’s surface at both ends. Don’t forget to label this critical surface somehow so there will be no confusion moving forward.
  2. Plane the surface of the board that will form the handle’s back edge (seen from above in plan view) flat and perpendicular to this reference face. All further layout will be indexed from these two faces. 
  3. Mark the maximum thickness of the handle on the surface opposite the reference face, as determined by the widest dimension of the butt, using a marking gauge against the reference face.
  4. Plane all the surfaces flat, free of wind, and where appropriate, planar. This needs to be done pretty precisely.
  5. Use a marking gauge to draw the appropriate centerlines on both sides, edges, ends of the board/stick.
  6. Use dividers to measure and layout the width of the eye, plus a little extra, centered on the centerline you just marked, and spin this around the eye, butt, back edge and front edge. 
  7. Make paper, cardboard, or wood patterns based on your design drawing of the handle’s elevation and profile views. Paying close attention to minimize grain runout, especially in the tenon and neck area, position the patterns and mark the board accordingly. 
  8. Using these cardboard patterns, carefully layout all the tenon’s dimensions on the board, measured from the reference face and back edge. Be sure to make the tenon a half-sheet of copy paper too large in width and thickness. This can be trimmed down later if the fit is too tight. Layout of the tenon is critical so don’t f* it up.
  9. Adjust the lines of the handle design to meet your requirements for beauty.

In the next post in this series we will begin making sawdust. Oh joy!

GennouHandleDwg85Kosaburo20160415Download

YMHOS

Two Trolls by John Bauer, 1909. Not wanting to pay the construction costs of the bread oven with its gracefully artistic hinges your humble servant has just installed, exceedingly parsimonious Granny Troll is trying to convince me to climb inside the hot oven and do a closeup inspection. Will I fit? More importantly, do you like my fetching new safety shoes?

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please use the questions form located immediately below. To see a list of our tools and their pricing, or to contact us, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of this page, or email us at Covingtonandsons@gmail.com.

Please share your insights and comments with all Gentle Readers in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.”

We see data miners and their bots as dastardly sneak thieves and so promise to never share, sell or profitably “misplace” your information for any reason. If I lie may the heads of all my hammers fly away to Valinor!

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Ancient Tools: The String Line & Straightedge

Torre Civica in Assisi, Italy

I’m not only a philosopher, sir, I’m a fatalist. Somewhere, sometime, there may be the right bullet or the wrong bottle waiting for Josiah Boone. Why worry about when or where?

Doctor Josiah Boone, Stagecoach, 1939

This series of articles is about tools that have been around a long time, used by nearly every craftsman and builder throughout the span of human existence. Tools without batteries, with no plastic parts, with no need to update or replace glitchy decepticon software that intentionally breaks or evaporates after a few months. These are tools that don’t lend themselves to mass-production and corporate profits. You could even make them yourself with little effort.

I call them “Ancient Tools” because their origins are older than writing.

In this post, your humble servant would like to consider two of the most ancient such tools: the noble stringline and its stiffer brother: the straight edge. We will also touch on the divider.

But before we go into details, let’s consider some background about these tools and why they are so important.

Some History

It’s not even a featherweight of exaggeration to say that each of these tools was essential to the design, fabrication and installation of the wood, brick, stone and steel that make up the foundation of both ancient and modern human civilization.

Indeed, beyond simply making stuff, these small tools were critical to the elevation of human civilization above subsistence hunting, gathering, and the herding of goats. How did these simple tools build civilization, Gentle Reader may ask?

Well the reasons are simply that the stringline and straightedge were essential to the development of mathematics, geometry, trigonometry, navigation, astronomy, architecture, engineering, external ballistics, and many other practical sciences, all of which are essential to not only craftsmen, but modern civilization in total. An exaggeration? Not in the least degree.

Does Gentle Reader use round objects? Do you know how the number Pi was first approximated? 

Does Gentle Reader ever ride ships on oceans, or airplanes in the sky? Or use objects transported by trains, cars or trucks over long railways and highways? Have you given thought to how ancient builders were able to plan and layout those railways, roads, highways and bridges? Or layout and cut the earth, stones and wood to make them? Have you considered how the Parthenon in Rome, the world’s oldest, and until recently, largest domes was designed and laid-out?

Have you considered how ancient sailing vessels were able to navigate oceans and chart constantly changing courses?

You may think that these tasks are all handled by theodolites, lasers, computers and GPS widgets nowadays, and that may be so, but it was the string line and straightedge that started it all.

It’s my humble contention that these simple tools remain of significant utility even to modern woodworkers.

Relevant History

Pardon me while I momentarily wax academic.

Did you know that the oldest and most respected treatise on geometry was a 13 book collection titled Elements of Geometry, written around 300 BC by the Greek mathematician, Euclid? That was along time ago.

A fragment of Euclid’s Elements on part of the Oxyrhynchus papyri.

The fact is that Elements is the world’s oldest, extant, large-scale deductive treatment of mathematics, and for nearly two thousand years was the definitive document studied in the West and Middle East by those seeking an education about the physical world. This includes, of course, Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) (c. 1170–1250 CE), René Descartes (1596–1650), Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), and every other mathematical giant. It’s an impressive set of books by any standard.

Of course, Maestro Euclid did not invent all the principles presented in his books but summarized the works of Eudoxus of Cnidus, Hippocrates of Chios, Thales and Theaetetus.

The exact same principles of mathematics and geometry written about in the Elements are taught in schools and universities nowadays, although the textbooks employed are abbreviated, fancier, plagiarized versions of the Elements shamefully giving no credit to Maestro Euclid or his teachers. Interestingly, the word plagiarize comes from the Latin word plagium, meaning to kidnap.

And here’s why The Elements is relevant to this humble scribble, because, you see, Euclid limited the constructions he presented in his books to those that could be produced using just a simple straight edge (not a ruler) and a basic divider, the two most important tools to civilization, and worthy of mastery.

Let’s first examine the father of both the straightedge, ruler and divider: the string line.

The Stringline

Before the straightedge there was the string line, a simple tool older than the straightedge, the ruler and the divider. Anyone can make one.

Think about it. If you must draw a straight line, or check that something is straight, and you lack a precision straightedge or carpenter’s square, or the tools you have are too short, how would you do it? The quickest, cheapest, most reliable tool for the job is the simple string line, be it made from palm fiber, camel hair, hemp, nettles or dried fish guts. Anyone can make it, and anyone can use it. They sell it at Home Despot, but batteries are not required!

The same string line can also be used as a divider or compass.

For example, if you need to divide a distance into 4 segments, simply stretch the line over the total distance and fold it back on itself 3 times. Each fold is a perfect 1/4 division of the total distance. This may be the origin of the 1/2″, 1/4″, 1/8″, 1/16″ progressions of divisions used in imperial measurements.

If we tie a knot, or make an ink mark at each of these divisions, we’ve now made a very accurate, graduated string line which can be used like a tape measure. And all it took was just some cordage made from a nettle plant or horse tail. Batteries not included.

A commercially-available string line I recently purchased for quality control of a robotic customer fulfillment center construction project in Chiba, Japan. In Japan this tool is called a “mizuito” (水糸), which translates to “water string.” In Japan the “water line” has nothing to do with boats but is a datum line critical to layout in construction, BTW. Made by Takumi in 4 colors, this string line is made of 0.8mm x 120m low-stretch nylon. Stretchy nylon would be a big failure. The black plastic reel that came with it measures 80×52×31mm and comes in both 120m and 240m sizes and is designed to fit into a breast pocket. To use this reel, one places one’s thumb and forefinger on the opposing free-wheeling red circular centers on each edge of the reel. This allows one to completely control the reel with just two fingers while spooling line in or out and all without striking the web of the hand. A very handy tool indeed and one I use all the time.

The Straightedge

The straightedge is a stiffer, shorter, handier version of the string line. It takes some skill to make.

The ruler is a straightedge with marks (graduations) instead of knots. This takes more skill to make.

The folding rule and metal ruler are more durable, convenient versions of the wooden ruler, but take a lot of skill and expensive materials to make. They were too costly for ordinary craftsman to own until recent times.

Civilization & Public Standards of Measurement

In ancient times, each upstanding, well-organized community, be it town, city, abbey, temple, or castle, had a person responsible for establishing local legal standards of weights and distances, for maintaining official references materials (e.g. actual weights, graduated rulers or containers), and for checking on behalf of the local authorities, such as the Pharaoh, king, baron, castle owner, abbot or mayor, that the subordinate members of the community were in compliance with those standards.

In past millennia this system of public standards was considered proof of civilization, one of the primary justifications for government and taxes, while the lack thereof was considered a sure sign of barbarism and crooked government.

Indeed, failure to establish, maintain and enforce these standards frequently resulted in bitter disputes and even bloody wars even in the recent past.

With every Tom, Dick and Pharaoh striving madly to become emperor of the world and establish themself in history forever as the person who governs “standards” (aka the “ruler”), until relatively recently, these weights and measures varied from kingdom to kingdom, castle to castle, and town to town. What a confusing mess!

Matters of health, welfare and uniform commerce aside, from the days of Melchizedek, standards were, and still remain, absolutely essential to taxation, of course.

To ensure that buyers and vendors were familiar with the standard measures current in a certain place, in ancient times these standards were carved onto or embedded into the walls of public buildings and church facades in such a way that all could see and copy them, and so they could not be removed or defaced.

Defacing/modifying standards, sometimes by the taxed and often by those imposing taxes, has always been a convenient but ruinous way to make money. The recent bout of intentional high inflation and currency devaluation the world is experiencing is a symptom of currency adulteration, another ancient criminal activity related to defacement of standards.

Indeed failure to comply with officially-established standards was deemed a serious offense in many communities punishable by fines, imprisonment, dunking, public exposure, dismemberment, hanging and even crucifixion. Worldwide more than a few shopkeepers, bakers, brewers, weavers and even tile makers were maimed or executed for “shorting” their customers.

Historically, master builders and tool makers were often required to provide a letter from the local standards officer attesting that their scales and measuring tools were in full accord with the latest standards.

While we no longer embed standards of measure made of iron or stone in the walls of churches and city halls, in one form or another, this practice continues even today.

Standard measures on the façade of the Torre Civica in Assisi (photograph Elizabeth den Hartog). Shown are public standards for various units of length at the time (yard, foot and palm), as well as the respective official standards for the thickness and size of roof tiles, bricks and floor tiles. These standards often included the minimum size of a loaf of bread and size of a tankard of ale.

How To Use a Straightedge

I learned how to use straightedges, scales, dividers and compasses for carpentry and woodworking as a boy from my father, and from carpenters and other craftsman on jobsites over the years. But I learned the most from drafting classes in college. This was before drafting heads, digital protractors, dot-matrix printers, and CAD. Back then even lettering was done by hand or using plastic/metal templates. The professors back then were justifiably proud of their hard-earned skills and the beautiful and precise documents they could deftly produce entirely by hand.

The first lesson the Masters taught was this: Never lay one’s tape measure, rule or scale on the drawing/workpiece and mark from it directly using pencil, pen, scribe or marking knife, but instead use dividers to first measure the required distance on the scale/ruler, indexing the divider’s points in the engraved lines, and then use those same dividers to transfer and mark the distance onto the workpiece or paper. High precision indeed.

The intuitive, but inefficient way most careful people do the job is lay the ruler, yardstick or tape measure on the workpiece, index one end (a careful man will always “burn” 1″ or 12″ or 10mm and not index directly on the tool’s end), locate the target distance on the measuring tool, and make a mark. But if he is trying to layout an irregular distance like 2-3/64″ (= 52 (51.99) mm), for instance, a pencil’s lead or pen’s tip is too wide for precision, so he will use a scribe or marking knife instead. But in many cases, this requires extremely good eyesight, and sometimes even a magnifying glass. When I as a young man, many senior carpenters kept a magnifying glass in their toolbox. It works.

The wiser craftsman will tip the scale or ruler on its edge, kneel or bend down so he can see the scale’s/ruler’s marks clearly, fit the point of his marking knife or scribe into the engraved line on scale/ruler, and then transfer that to the workpiece, paper, or story stick with a quick “tick.”

There is a risk that the far end of the ruler/scale at the point he is measuring from may wiggle out of alignment messing up his precision. Or that the scribe/knife point may shift while making the “tick.” With practice, these tendencies can be overcome, but clearly this method is time consuming and the results may be questionable.

The improvements I recommend to make one’s marking knife more effective at this task can be seen here.

But using dividers, the wise craftsman can fit/index their points quickly and precisely into the engraved lines in scale/ruler at each end of the measurement, first time everytime, and without kneeling, squinting, pressing down, or worrying about wiggling and shifting mark the desired distance on the workpiece. Once he has set the dividers to the required distance, he can fit one of the sharp points precisely into the index hole, or onto the line he is measuring from, and then use the other point to make a precise scratch or hole in the workpiece, which can be used again for future layout reference. This technique greatly improves precision without using a magnifying glass.

This technique works with both dividers and trammel heads.

Standard dividers are quickest, but a locking divider with screw adjustment is easier to adjust precisely and is more likely to retain the measured distance with repeated usage.

You will find when drafting or doing layout that you repeat some distances frequently. Having 2 or 3 locking dividers set to these distances close at hand will allow you to layout those distances quickly and accurately without the need to refer to scale/ruler. Your humble servant keeps three in my toolchest.

The quality of your scale/ruler becomes important when attempting precision layout. A high-quality, professional-grade scale or ruler must of course be of proper length and uniform width and thickness, be free of twist, and have accurate lines. But to qualify as a high-quality scale/ruler, it must pass 2 simple quality tests, not an easy task nowadays. 

  1. Accurately spaced graduations. Performing this quality check requires the skillful use of precision tools and time, so it is seldom economical to purchase discount scales/rulers.
  2. Consistently engraved graduations. Besides being spaced at the right distances, the graduations engraved into the metal must be the right length, width, depth and have smooth, straight walls. This too is also uncommon. Don’t settle for cheapo tools with shallow, uneven laser-etched or acid etched graduations. Photo-engraved graduations are best. Seldom found in Chinese or Indian tools.

We’ll consider more uses for these tools in the next installment of this crazy adventure.

YMHOS

A fusuma screen by Kano Nagatoku, a designated National Treasure of Japan, commissioned by the Tokugawa clan, Japan’s last and most famous shogunate. Imagine presiding over a meeting with this as your background!

If you have questions or would like to learn more about our tools, please click the “Pricelist” link here or at the top of the page and use the “Contact Us” form located immediately below.

Please share your insights and comments with everyone in the form located further below labeled “Leave a Reply.” We aren’t evil Google, fascist facebook, or raunchy Reddit and so won’t sell, share, or profitably “misplace” your information. If I lie may my straightedge warp and my string lines all break!

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Procuring Wood

We are men of action. Lies do not become us.

― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

No doubt Gentle Reader will agree that the sights, smells and other sensations of working wood are wonderful. And of course we all appreciate owning beautiful, enduring, useful objects made from wood with our own hands and tools, but how best to obtain this supremely sustainable environmentally-friendly material for our projects?

For purposes of this article I am assuming Gentle Reader does not use fully-milled S4S (surfaced four sides) boards exclusively, nor that you start each project from standing trees or even logs, but rather begins your projects with rough-sawn lumber of the sort pictured above and sold not at home centers but at lumber yards.

If this assumption is correct I encourage you to build a relationship with small sawmills, often located far from the beaten track, who are willing to sell directly to craftsmen at their yard. This may take some hunting and travel. And you will need to build mutually-beneficial, respectful relationships with the owners of these small businesses. To that end, I encourage keeping a few things in mind and acting accordingly. 

Remember that, while sawmills are small businesses, Sawyers aren’t shop keepers, waiting by a register at Home Despot with nothing to do but play Candy Crush Saga on their iPhone until you arrive. They are always busy, their profit margins are thin, and their time is money, so if you want to do business with them, you would be wise to not waste their time. This requires forethought, planning, preparation and action as outlined below.

Planning

Your humble servant is fond of making a good plan, and then working that plan, while remaining flexible and responsive to reality. In commercial situations, a good plan for woodworking must include complete drawings with dimensions and clear details, materials specifications, a cost estimate, a time schedule and a reasonable contract to be reviewed and approved by all parties involved before work begins. And shop drawings too must be produced and approved, of course.

But in the case of personal woodworking for pleasure, I like to leave the details of the plan a little looser, a little more flexible to allow me to better adapt to time, cost and material constraints and to permit interesting improvisation. My tools love improvisation. What about yours?

When it comes time to procure wood, we need at least an initial plan that lists approximately how much wood we need, its species, length, width and thickness. This plan must take into consideration the limitations of the tools (e.g. jointer, planer, bandsaw etc.) we have at our disposal to mill the wood after we purchase it. With this in hand, and assuming a realistic fudge factor of 13~20%, we’re ready to go hunting for wood.

Seeking a Source of Wood

Home centers and lumber yards are convenient to purchase wood from, but the cost may be relatively high and selection may be poor and/or boring. Given the option, and the ability to transport the wood (or to have it delivered), I prefer to purchase directly from small sawmills instead.

When I was residing in the USA, locating sawmills was not easy. I ended up purchasing hardwood mostly from Amish sawmills in Central and Eastern Ohio, and both hardwoods and softwoods from mills in the mountains of Northern California and Southern Oregon. But nowadays the internet appears to make sourcing much easier. 

Father and son surfacing boards in an Amish sawmill

I enjoyed purchasing wood from Amish mills. No frills, no BS, just honest wood sold by honest men. They’re not as convenient as Home Despot. They don’t advertise, don’t have websites, may not have telephones, won’t do email, and they’re always closed on Sunday, but if you drive into Amish country and ask around at local stores and gas stations you can usually find them. They are deeply religious and absolutely family-oriented folk, so watch your language, be polite and respectful, and be sure any women accompanying you dress modestly.

I don’t trust evil Google anymore, but a quick search on DuckDuckGo just now listed dozens of sawmills selling lumber to end-users around the US. A local Chamber of Commerce might be able to direct you too.

Other sources of information about sawmills I’ve had good luck with are cabinet shops, stair shops, custom door shops, millwork contractors, and interior contractors, all businesses that buy a lot of roughsawn wood. Better to drop by and ask in person than to just telephone or email.

A diesel-powered Amish bandsaw mill

If there’s a woodworking club or guild in your area they’ll know the local suppliers for sure and for certain.

Storage

Before you select and purchase your wood you should make sure you have space to store it unless, that is, you plan to cut it all up in a day or two after purchase. Be sure you don’t buy more than you can conveniently and safely store.

Improperly storing lumber so it’s not supported correctly will cause it to warp. If it’s exposed to rain and snow the resulting differential moisture content will always cause warpage. And of course, your boards may become dirty, or bugs may infest it. I hate wasting good wood.

If your ceilings are high enough, you can stack boards vertically, leaning against the wall in a corner of your apartment, house or garage. Be sure to stack it carefully so it won’t warp. Most importantly, tie it off securely so it can’t fall over and crush your kiddies. Notice I wrote “can’t” not just “won’t.” This deliberate choice of language is evidence of my deep confidence in Murphy’s active inclination for malicious harm. Indeed, here in Japan, most lumber is stored vertically, and many injuries and even deaths have resulted from toppling lumber.

A Gentle Reader pointed out that storing lumber this way with the board’s end resting directly on soil may invite termite infestation. Of course this is absolutely true, assuming the ground touching the board is infested with termites and the moisture content of the soil and wood are inviting to such insects, conditions that are often easily met. Best to elevate the boards above the soil by resting on concrete, bricks or cinder blocks, or on the floor of your apartment, house or garage, as noted above.

A Japanese lumber warehouse with vertically-stored product.

The best and safest way to store lumber, IMHO, is to place some stickers (three minimum) on a level floor, in a place protected from the weather, and to neatly stack your lumber on them. 2×4’s placed on edge are usually good, but you may want to skew them a bit for improved stability in the long direction of the lumber they will support. Be sure these stickers are all the same width and that once placed the top edges of all your stickers are situated level and planar (in the same plane). Don’t assume for a second that the floor or ground are level. If your check confirms it isn’t, shim the stickers so they are level and planar. 

Use a spirit level to confirm the top edges of your stickers are level, and a stringline (aka “dryline”) to confirm the top edges are all planar.

Place thin stickers of uniform thickness between each layer of your lumber, so it will continue to dry without warping.

It’s easy to store lumber outside under the eaves of a building, but since it will be more exposed to rain, snow, weather, dust and critters, a few extra precautions may be called for. Once again, place your stickers properly and lay plastic sheeting on top of them. Then stack your lumber on top of the plastic, and wrap the plastic over the top of the stack so rain and snow can’t wet the wood, but leave the ends loose and tented so air can circulate. It may be best to place a few sheets of plywood or roofing material over the stack, well-weighted down so it won’t blow away during a storm.

Once your lumber is stacked, place newspaper or other paper on top to protect your beautiful wood from airborne dust and grit. Plastic is OK if the stack might be exposed to rain, but be aware it may slow the wood’s drying and/or cause the growth of discoloring mildew, so you may want to plan for some air circulation.

Another storage option is to attach steel or wooden brackets high on the wall of a garage, barn or outbuilding that can safely bear the weight. The top edge of these brackets needs to be level and planar to prevent the wood from warping. Don’t place your lumber directly touching these steel brackets, however, but lay down plastic or wood under your lumber to prevent dark lines of iron corrosion from developing in the wood. 

Again, place newspaper on top of the stack to protect it from dust accumulation. Getting wood safely onto and down from these high brackets may be challenging, so be careful.

Preparation & Action

Once you’ve formulated a plan, located some potential sawmills or sources, and arranged safe storage, it’s time to take action. I recommend the following preparations and actions.

  1. Call ahead or visit and make introductions, describe your needs in some detail, and arrange a time to select wood. Make sure the proprietor understands that, after an initial perusal, and on condition he has the wood you need, you will conclude your purchase immediately with hard cashy money and without any tedious paperwork. The Amish, for instance, accept only cash.
  2. Know what variety, and approximately how much wood you need before calling the sawmill. For instance, you need to be ready to say something like “I need 200 board ft of 8-quarter (2” thick) maple, 10’ long 10” wide. ” He may not have that species wood, with that figure, in that size, in that quantity in-stock. Even if he doesn’t have exactly what you need, he may be able to suggest alternatives, or point you to other suppliers.
  3. Be sure to ask if the wood he can supply has been kiln-dried or air-dried and how close he thinks it might be to equilibrium moisture content. He may not know, and that’s alright too. On the other hand, if he says everything he has in-stock is freshly milled and sopping wet, you may want to look elsewhere unless you’re prepared to wait for a couple of years for the wood to dry in storage.
  4. Learn how to evaluate lumber grades and how to calculate board-feet. 
  5. Ask the following questions:
    1. “Do you have a minimum sales volume or dollar amount?” He’s not a Home Despot focused entirely on high-volume retail sales in small quantities, after all.
    2. “How late are you open?” Sawyers tend to start work early, so you need to be done with your selection and complete payment well before he locks the gate at the end of his workday.
    3. “Can I bring my truck into the yard to load, or must I park out front?” and “Where should I park my truck so it’s out of the way?” Customers parking willy-nilly and blocking traffic are a frequent problem for most lumberyards. If he won’t let you bring your truck into the yard, you’ll need to bring/borrow a cart or be willing to hand-carry your boards to your truck.
    4. “Are there any varieties of wood or stacks not for sale?” Sawyers often receive orders from regular commercial customers months in advance and keep partially-filled orders set off to the side, so while it may appear he has plenty of the wood you want, it may not be for sale, or he may be unwilling to break down a stack for the few pieces you intend to purchase. If he does have such reserved stacks, find out which ones they are, don’t touch them, and don’t pester him about them.
    5. “What are your safety rules in your yard?” As mentioned above, the Sawyer may require you to use full PPE (personal protection equipment) including safety shoes, hardhat, safety vest, safety glasses, ear protection, and cut-resistant gloves, or he may be OK with your usual business-casual attire of frayed jeans shorts and flip-flops. Fashion statements aside, it’s just professional to be prepared and learn the rules beforehand.
  6. When you visit the mill, bring all the safety equipment the yard rules require. Even if they are not required, please have the sense to wear certified safety shoes, an orange or yellow reflective safety vest (very important in a lumberyard where vehicle and foot traffic meet in tight quarters), and to have cut-resistant safety gloves tucked into your belt. It is also wise to bring safety glasses, ear protection, and a certified hardhat just in case. You may think you don’t need this PPE, and perhaps you won’t, but the Sawyer’s yard safety policy and/or insurance may require it. Best to be the prepared professional.
  7. Bring a tape measure and moisture meter with you to check the actual moisture content of the actual wood yourself before you purchase it because, if it’s too wet, you will need to sticker/store it while it dries. Be sure you understand the acceptable range of moisture content you buy. 12% is pretty good for lumber stored outside, and 18% may be just fine, but 30% MC will be too high. High moisture content may not be a problem if you know how, and are prepared, to deal with it, but even then please don’t pay full-price for lumber you’ll need to dry for a year or so before it’s useful.
  8. Be prepared to attach at least one red or orange safety flag to any lumber you purchase if it projects out past the end of your truck’s bed much (6′).
  9. Bring enough rope and/or ratcheting safety tie-downs to keep the lumber you purchase from shifting in the bed of your truck while underway. Watching your newly-purchased pretty boards spread artistically all over the freeway in your rear-view mirror may be exciting for you, but I guarantee you folks in the vehicles following will not thank you.
  10. Be prepared to do all your own grunt work, including sorting, lifting, carrying and loading. Don’t expect the sawyer to do more than use his forklift to move stacks around for you, even if you’re accustomed to other retailers accommodating your bad back. Bring a helper if necessary. Bored sons and young boys are useful for this and can benefit from the experience, at least that was my father’s viewpoint, and in retrospect, I heartily agree. Be sure any young folk that accompany you are cautious, respectful and follow the sawmill’s rules, as will you. Provide cut-resistant gloves so their mothers won’t berate you for any cuts or slivers they manage to collect. Modern mothers are irrational about that sort of thing. And hi-viz safety vests can prevent crushed kiddies.
The Dude Abides

In the Lumberyard

Dealing with retail customers that purchase in small quantities is a pain for all businesses, so if you want to develop a reliable source for good wood without buying by the trailerload, make of yourself a mellow, good customer. The following tips will help.

Jimmy Choo’s Safety Shoes from his new “Prostate Exam” Collection
  1. Leave Fido, your pet goat, your mother-in-law, and all small children at home where they’ll be safely out of the way. I grew up in lumberyards, so I know how dangerous they can be with trucks and forklifts operated by tweaker teenagers zooming around, teetering stacks of wood aching for a chance to topple, and sharp slivers, nails and bloodthirsty staples sticking out everywhere. If you bring a teenager to help, be sure he too wears the required PPE.
  2. Most Sawyers are not setup for efficient retail sales, and few can process credit cards or online payments. Of course, checks from people they don’t know well are never welcome. In fact, he may not agree over the phone or by email to sell to you directly at all, but once you are face to face, cash in hand, and you flash your best Brad Pitt smile, everything should be fine. In any case, it’s important you help make the selection and payment processes go as quickly and smoothly as possible, so unless you have an account with the Sawyer, be prepared to pay the exact amount in cash, without requiring change for big bills. 
  3. If you need to park your truck in spaces between stacks, leave your keys in  the ignition when you step away for a bit so the Sawyer can move it to allow large trucks or loads of wood to pass. 
  4. When sorting through lumber stacks, set some stickers (at least three 2×4’s on-edge) on the ground nearby (out of the way of passing trucks and forklifts) to temporarily place the lumber you’ve removed from the stack and to keep it off the ground and clean.
  5. Never place a board directly on the ground or pavement until you’ve paid for it. And don’t ever be so rude as to toss boards you haven’t paid for.
  6. Never step on wood until you’ve actually paid for it. It isn’t yet yours to mark with your pretty pink boots from Manolo Blahnik’s Ironworker Collection.
  7. Never place the end of a board into dirt or gravel until you’ve paid for it.
  8. Keep a running count of the board feet and approximate grade of the boards you have selected to purchase. Tell the Sawyer your final count, and show him your calculations, but be prepared to defer to his count if it differs, at least until you become a large-volume customer.
  9. Lumber dealers, and especially those who are accustomed to selling in volume to commercial accounts, dislike customers who “cherry-pick” their stacks taking only the best boards and leaving mediocre boards behind. More despised are those rude, lazy souls destined to roast for eternity spitted and rotating over Satan’s tar-fired barbecue pit who leave stacks a disorganized jumble inducing the remaining lumber to warp. Please firmly control your inner penny-pinching Scrooge (excruciatingly difficult for many) and select a mix of boards, not just the best ones. They’ll all come in useful. If the only boards you can find are hopelessly useless, discuss the problem with the Sawyer using a non-belligerent, even apologetic, tone of voice. If it’s your first time visiting this sawmill, consider buying some sub-standard lumber just to get off on the right foot. Hopefully he’ll make it up to you next time.
  10. After sorting through a stack of lumber, if reasonably possible, be sure to expend the time and effort to fix or realign the stickers so their top edges are level and parallel (a spirit level and a stringline are handy for this task) and always neatly restack the boards you’ve moved but won’t be purchasing so the stack looks better, is more orderly, and more stable when you leave than before you touched it. This is supremely important. Besides looking tidy and saving the Sawyer work, this minimum human courtesy (vs. arrogant, pigish rudeness) will help preserve the value of the lumber you leave behind, it will show respect to the Sawyer, and will earn you respect in turn so you’ll be welcomed back again. Sawmills often give slightly better rates to return customers with such professional manners who make less work for them. The inverse is also true.
  11. Bring something to share with the guys at the lumberyard and office they can enjoy and that will cement your cherubic face in their memories. For example, personally hand each one a cold beverage, or a couple of your wife’s award-winning double-death-by-chocolate chip cookies. It helps to make friends.

I hope this little article has been a little useful.

YMHOS

Just where the heck is that stack of 8/4 zelkova wood he mentioned?

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Beginning Tools – Part 1 Measuring, Marking and Layout

An antique craftsman-made sumitsubo with shishi lion and peony perched on the lip of the “pond.”

A good tool improves the way you work. A great tool improves the way you think.

– Jeff Duntemann

Over the years your most humble and obedient servant has received many inquiries from Gentle Readers new to woodworking about what tools they should procure at the very beginning of their adventure. The internet is chock-a-block with both confounding confusion and beaucoup BS on this subject, some dribbling from amateurs and even more sprayed by marketing pukes and clickbait sages. Heretofore I haven’t really scribbled anything on the subject in this blog.

But now, at this fork in the crossroads, beginning with this article your penitent servant will share some thoughts about what tools a beginner needs to perform a lifetime of excellent woodworking, with minimum wasted time and funds, and the recommended priority for obtaining them.

Reluctant Advice

From this point forward I will be so bold as to make some suggestions about the the tools I recommend.

But first allow me to explain my viewpoint on the subject to help you gauge how much saltpeter and sulfur to mix with your charcoal, if you follow the allusion. You see, I enjoy giving Beloved Customers excellent choices in tools, but I’m allergic to giving casual advice. Why? Because even advice given honestly, with the best of intentions, and without profit motive often yields bad consequences. And sneezing.

In Proverbs 12:15 it’s recorded that Solomon the Wise (and disobedient) taught the following: “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes; But he who heeds counsel is wise.” Sounds good, I suppose, but does this mean that the man who’s convinced his honest decisions are correct, even after much study and experience, must still be a fool? Are only those who rely on counsel wise? What if the counselor he relies on is a blasted fool or a greedy, lazy influencer? Is all counsel equal in value?

King Solomon’s most famous descendant once said “Ye shall know them by their fruits.” Sounds like reasonable evidence-based judgment to me. So what were the fruits of Solomon’s advice? The record tells us that he thought his judgement so wise that he frequently ignored it on an epically immoral scale and with tragic, destructive results.

While less decisive than Proverbs but equally concise, I think Professor Tolkien’s insight on the subject may be even wiser, and so I have taken it to heart. In the Lord of the Rings he wrote “Advice is a dangerous gift, even from the wise to the wise, and all courses may run ill.”

Solomon’s fabulous famous folly aside, your humble servant has seen first-hand ostensibly wise advice purchased from reputedly wise “experts” at unjustifiably high cost run horribly ill too many times, so I dislike giving advice. And there’s the sneezing thing too, of course.

But since advice is what’s required, in this series of articles I will climb far out on a skinny tree limb to offer the following advice on two conditions. First, I insist Gentle Reader accept the value of this advice as worth no more than what you pay for it (nothing), and second, that any consequences that spring from your acting on this advice are entirely yours. Accordingly, I won’t be offended if, like Solomon the Wise, you decide to ignore it entirely and get yourself another hundred foreign girlfriends instead.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand.

Tool Categories

The following are the four basic categories, by function, of the tools I believe a beginner needs to possess to get started in a lifetime of woodworking, whether as a career or hobby. You’ll most likely need all the tools listed here eventually, but you won’t need them all at once to make excellent things from wood. The categories are as follows:

  1. Measuring, Marking and Layout Tools: 
  2. Sawing Tools
  3. Chiseling Tools
  4. Planing Tools

Of course, depending on your projects, you’ll need tools that don’t fit neatly into these four categories, such as those used for processing trees and making lumber, nailing, boring/drilling, screwing, gluing, clamping, laminating, sanding, edge treatment, assembly, and finishing. When it comes to these other categories of tools, I can only encourage Gentle Reader to rely on your prodigious innate common sense.

Each list is divided into two tiers. The first tier includes absolutely necessary tools. The second tier lists essential tools you will eventually need, but can get by without until later.

So let’s begin by examining the minimum measuring, marking and layout tools every beginner needs. I will deal with the other categories in future posts. If I’ve forgotten anything critical, please let me know in the comments form below.

Essential Measuring Tools (Tier 1)

While chopping, sawing, carving, joining and planing get all the attention, final results in woodworking (and all physical trades for that matter) can never be better than one’s skills at measuring, marking and layout, so woodworkers and builders need to own the related tools and master them.

By no means sexy jobs, both ancient and modern history provides endless examples of poorly performed measuring, marking and layout work buggering cost, schedule and quality goals with a barge pole wrapped in barbed wire. No wonder these jobs have historically been assigned to the most experienced and intelligent craftsmen. The simple tools included in this category will serve you well in any handwork activity, not just woodworking.

One caveat. I have listed a few tools below that are modern precision tools beginners should own and learn to use skillfully, but I know a few purists who find such tools violently repulsive. The truth is that the more experience one obtains, the less one tends to rely on absolute measurements in millimeters, inches, or cubits, and more on relative precision. But possessing the tools to perform precise measurement is nonetheless necessary if you plan to do quality work.

Necessary Measuring Tools (Tier 1)

You’ll need the following essential measuring tools from day one.

1. Quality Tape Measure with an accurate sliding hook (check to make sure it’s not sloppy). Size will depend on the projects you plan to undertake, but 2-4 meters is a minimum useful length for cabinetry, furniture making and joinery. Get a reputable name brand, with a warranty. Avoid like an Asian giant hornet with flaming hemorrhoids any cheapo crap made in China, India or Vietnam. Tape measures are a bit delicate and don’t last forever, so treat yours gently and check it frequently against your precision straightedge for accuracy and damage. Do not rely on it for great precision. Since ancient times the folding scale has been thought superior, a sentiment with which I agree in the case of some jobs. But in general nothing beats a quality steel tape measure for most quick and dirty measuring tasks.

2. Precision Straightedge (12”/300mm long) with accurately, deeply etched graduations. This is a precision measuring and layout tool. Good quality graduations are useful for precisely indexing and guiding layout tools such as pencils, pens, divider points, and a marking knife. Hardened stainless steel is ideal for durability. Best if it’s made to high quality standards (JIS, etc.). You’ll use it not only for measuring and checking the accuracy of your other tools, but more frequently for checking that surfaces are flat and free of wind (twist). If treated with respect, it will serve you well for a lifetime. 

3. Try-square (see item 2 below). The handy dandy try square has many uses as a measuring tool, but rather than making numerical measurements, its most important job is checking that right angles of components, tools and assemblies are indeed 90˚ , a check one must make constantly and quickly when planing/machining the components of furniture, joinery and cabinetry and casework not to mention setting up portable and stationary power tools. Most try-squares sold nowadays are poor quality Chinese or Indian junk that are out-of-tolerance when new. I too like pretty tools and realize that a plain stainless steel square doesn’t look as cool as more traditional squares with rosewood stocks and brass fittings, but the blade and the stock should both be made of stainless steel and should be solidly welded to each other, not glued or pinned. Best if the blade is hardened. Graduations are not necessary. Get this essential tool wrong and all is lost.

Necessary Measuring Tools (Tier 2)

4. 1-meter stainless steel precision straightedge. This tool needs to be certified by a reputable standards organization, such as Japan Industrial Standards Committee (JIS), NIST: National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA); UKAS United Kingdom Accreditation Service (UK); DIN (Deutsches Institut für Normung), etc.. Why does certification matter, and why is it worth the extra cost? Fraud and deceptive marketing are more common now than ever, with many well-known manufacturers taking a page from Chinese Best Industrial Practices of bait, lie, mislable & switch. In the case of a tool certified by an organization such as NIST, JIS, DIN etc. with a valuable reputation to lose, you are much less likely to be fleeced by quality crooks. Indeed, this tool, along with the 12″/300mm straightedge and try square listed above must be accurate enough to serve as one of your own in-house “standards.” It must not only be extremely straight when new and stress-relieved, to avoid future warping, but it must have deeply, uniformly, precisely-etched graduations. It’s OK if it spends most of its life hanging from a nail on the workshop wall, because there will be times when it will be critical for quickly for checking surfaces for flatness and wind, layout, assembly, dimensioning boards and fettling handplanes.

5. Caliper Gauge: This gauge can be of the vernier, dial or digital variety, whichever type you like and can afford. Once again, buy a certified product. This tool is useful for precisely and quickly measuring, comparing and laying out distances and dimensions. Some are sold with carbide tips convenient for directly scratching layout arcs/lines/points in harder materials such as metal or stone. Will you use it constantly? No, but for those tasks where it’s needed, nothing works as well or as quickly. Quality vernier calipers cost much less than the dial or digital variants, and are not as delicate, but take more time and concentration to use well. Once again, nothing made in China, India, Vietnam, Cambodia, etc. When in doubt, I buy Mitsutoyo.

Necessary Layout & Marking Tools

Try Square (same as see item 3 above). This tool is absolutely indispensable for layout and marking of joinery, cabinetry, and furniture work. 100-150mm is a handy size for furniture work. Even if your workshop has been thoroughly purged of pernicious pixies this tool will be dropped, and will wear out in-use, so a useful one will have a welded (not just pinned) connection between the thinner blade (aka beam or tongue) and the stock. And, this is important, the blade will be made of hardened stainless steel. Graduations are totally unnecessary. Used for marking 90˚ lines and checking for squareness. Matsui Precision makes the best one I am aware of after much searching and hands-on experience in the field.

7. Framing/Carpenter’s/Builder’s Square.

Essential for checking lumber, laying-out and marking of larger joints, casework, checking square of larger joints and assemblies, working with doors, panels, and plywood, and many other tasks. Regarding materials, carbon steel squares are heavy and always turn red and go away, so I don’t recommend them if you have a choice. Stainless steel is more durable, but still heavy and costlier. Aluminum will suffice. You may need to true it, but this is easily done with a hammer, punch and file. Just ask me how when you think it’s necessary. This is a tool with a long history you should be proud to own. In all nations more than a few centuries old, the carpenter’s square has been associated with stability, honesty, righteousness and order, all traits a craftsman should seek to foster in himself, his family and his crew. In Japan, this tool was traditionally extremely expensive and was considered the craftsman’s “spirit” in the same way the sword was revered as the warrior’s spirit by the warrior caste. Indeed, in past centuries, stepping over a carpenter’s square resting on the floor or even ground was seen as a mortal offense resulting in bloodshed at times. Such emotional sentiments did not extend to other carpentry tools. The Japanese version of this tool goes by several names written several ways including “kanejaku,” “magarijaku”（written 曲尺or 矩尺), “sashigane”指矩, and several other names. Don’t ask me why. Unlike the Western square of uniform thickness, the better Japanese kanejaku have a variable cross section for less weight/greater rigidity. Being thinner, smaller, more flexible, and much lighter in weight, the Japanese square is handier to transport and use in the field. Of course, it has a couple of disadvantages such as not handling longer/wider boards as well, and being more difficult to control because it’s more flexible. Horses for courses, of course, so I own and use both types.

8. 45˚ Stainless Steel Layout Tool or quality speed square for laying-out miters. An accurate combination square will work too, but such tools are relatively expensive and quite fragile. The Shinwa tool shown below is cheaper, much tougher and absolutely reliable.

9. Marking Gauge: There are many types of marking gauges, most of which the craftsman can make himself without special tools or machinery. Perhaps this will be the subject of future articles. In any case, you will need at least 2 types of gauges.

The venerable old Stanley No.65 marking gauge.

The classic type has a single pin or blade to cut/scratch a single line with each stroke and has been around since Moses wore gator skin loafers. You can make versions from scrap wood, nails, or scrap steel easily yourself.

An excellent kamakebiki mortise gauge by Kinshiro

The second marking gauge you should have is called a “mortise gauge.” This tool has two pins or blades to make 2 parallel lines, at a set distance from each other, with a single stroke. It’s especially suited for quickly and precisely marking mortises and tenons and installing hardware. I prefer the Japanese version of the mortise gauge called the “kamakebiki” (sickle mortise gauge shown above) which has two L-shaped steel blades, easily adjusted and easily resharpened. A handy tool indeed.

Having multiple marking gauges on-hand will help to minimize the time you must spend resetting/adjusting the pins/cutters, a principle key to performing precise work consistently because every time a gauge is reset, error creeps in, sure as pigs are made from bacon. Marking gauges are simple tools easily mastered, but don’t underestimate the importance of owning a few and mastering them completely.

TheTite-Mark marking gauge

The Titemark gauge is an excellent tool, not only because it cuts consistent lines, but because it can be quickly and precisely set using a single hand and no tools. The only downside is the depth of cut is shallow and the cutter is easily damaged.

10. Carpenter’s Pencil. Useful for the same marking jobs as a plain pencil, but if one sharpens its wider lead to a chisel edge, it will be more durable (won’t break as easily) and last much longer than a standard pencil.

11. Divider/Compass. An essential tool for layout used to quickly and accurately transfer distances from straightedge or layout stick etc. to a workpiece. Of course, it can perform all the classical geometrical tasks that have made this tool essential to skilled craftsmen, architects and engineers worldwide for millennia. A spring divider is adequate, but finances permitting, Starrett 92-6 or 92-9 dividers shown below are worth every penny. I always have at least two on-hand to minimize the lost time and inaccuracy frequent resetting entails.

12. Ballpoint Pens: Not often thought of as a precision layout tool, inexpensive ballpoint pens are more durable than pencils and can make a permanent mark or line of consistent width without needing to be resharpened. Too wide for accurate layout, you say? Practice perfectly sawing in half the centerline of a line drawn with a pen and you’ll change your tune.

13. Marking Knife and/or Scriber. Instead of leaving a line of ink, chalk or graphite on the surface of a board, these tools cut or scratch a permanent line into the surface of material being worked into which divider points and the blades of cutting tools such as chisels, saws and even planes can be indexed quickly, reliably and without the need for expending much attention, greatly increasing speed and confidence in one’s layout. Essential tools. Here’s a Link to an article on the subject.

A Japanese-style marking knife, a simple but surprisingly sophisticated tool.

14. Inkpot and/or Chalkline: For making long straight lines on wood, concrete, steel, gypsum board, etc. The article at this LINK contains more details

15. Colored Marking Pens or Lumber Crayons: Marks made with colored marking pens or lumber crayons, while not precise, are helpful for speedily marking/identifying the orientation and/or relative position of parts, pieces and components in an assembly. For instance, a blue stripe, or two parallel black lines on the end of a part or tenon, might be drawn to indicate right-hand, or North, or front direction in an assembly. I sometimes draw an arrow to orient the front of the assembly or to indicated the direction/location of a reference surface or part, etc. Of course, drawing the cabinetmaker’s pyramid is essential for joinery and casework. The marking convention you choose is, of course, up to Gentle Reader, but having one and using it will help your work go faster and with less confusion, especially if you must set the part aside for a few days or even months. Lumber crayons are especially useful for marking lumber for dimensioning and planing.

Storage, Transportation & Protection

With the exception of the 1-meter long straightedge, and that only because it’s inconveniently long and I want to protect it from dents and dings, I always keep these measuring, layout and marking tools located in the handiest place in my toolchest when I’m in my workshop, or in my portable toolbox and/or toolbag when I’m working in the field.

If you carry these tools outside the workshop, and intend them to be lifetime tools, I recommend you make a simple case for each tool, of cardboard perhaps, to cushion them in your toolbox to help retain precision, to keep them from dinging each other, and help to them last longer. Only then can you reasonably expect a long, mutually profitable relationship with these good friends.

In the next installment in this swashbuckling adventure we will consider the next category of tools the beginner needs: Saws.

YMHOS

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