Popular Woodworking 2005-12 № 152, страница 38
Arts & Mysteries ing plane. You can also convert your table saw into a lathe, but is it a good idea? There are very nice, very smart people who do such things, but I wonder how long it takes them to complete their projects. Sawing Faster: Avoiding Arbitrary Requirements The trick to sawing faster is not sawing at all. That's the fastest saw cut! The trick to not sawing is understanding what the real goal is. In an assembly line, quality is measured in thousandths of an inch. Dimensional consistency is important to the machines and workers down the line. Most of us don't have such requirements. The goal is to make quality, good-looking furniture, regardless of the exact measurements. Sometimes you need a dimension, such as table height or chair height. But most times you don't. We don't really care whether the high boy is 78" or 75" tall. For interior guts, there are few requirements governing their exact dimensions. How wide does a drawer runner need to be? Is 2" wide enough? How about 21/2"? If any size will work, can't we just use the scraps from the shop floor as they are ? I know it takes only a few seconds to pass a board over a table saw. And because it's quick and easy, you may never ask yourself if you really need to do it. When all you have is a handsaw, you find yourself asking this question more and more: Do I really need to saw this board? More often than you might think, the answer is "no." The working title for this article was "How to saw faster than a table saw." Because the answer was the mystery of the article, we felt the title was teasing. But now you really do know how to saw faster than a table saw. The Plane My Brother Is: Turn Your Face to London How do you define quality? To the period woodworker, quality furniture was good-looking furniture, furniture that achieved the artistic intentions of the designer, furniture that exhibited a specific style. Joinery was important, like the quality of the stitching in your shirt. But do you really choose your shirts based on their seams? Every craftsman appreciates finely made joints and finely planed surfaces. But this is an aesthetic every bit as arbitrary as any other. Axes can be used to make fine furniture, because not every bit of fine furniture needs to be fine. When you look under, behind or inside the finest furniture of the 18th century, you see joinery and surfaces that don't look exactly "masterful." They look hurried. OK, sloppy. While some have excused such work as that which is necessary to earn a living, I prefer to view it as reflective of the craftsman's definition of quality. He wasn't selling joints anymore than Armani sells stitches. Craftsmen used the phrase "Turn your face to London" to describe how their efforts were focused on making the outside of a piece the best looking it could possibly be. I know many will be unconvinced by this and will continue to plane (and sand) the insides of their cases and undersides of their tabletops. The only thing I can tell you is that while you are concentrating on your surfaces and your joinery, you may be missing the larger picture of proportion, color and composition. Given the choice between a painting that looks good only from far away and a painting that looks good only up close, which one would you choose? There's no right answer. I'd just like to make the point that you often can't have both. Exploring in Your Shop Like the old masters, the real wisdom I offered in my articles lay beneath the techniques I demonstrated. Unlike the old masters, I lack the experience and training to be confident in my conclusions. That's where you come in. For unlike so many other woodworking articles that feature projects you may never build or tools you don't have, you can try these techniques tomorrow and see if they work. Try building something without a ruler or tape measure. The mystery in the striking knife article wasn't about the knife itself. So try using your carpenter's knife to mark a board before you handsaw it and see if it helps. Ask yourself why it's necessary to foursquare absolutely everything. How square does a table edge need to be? How parallel must its sides be? Most important of all, let's recognize that we just don't know it all. Let's give our ancestors the benefit of the doubt and try to understand why they did what they did. Let's go exploring together. We can turn over a few stones and see what we find. PW MORE ARTS & MYSTERIES This article marks the end of my first year writing this magazine's "Arts & Mysteries" column. I hope you enjoyed reading these articles as much as I enjoyed writing them. The topics were very academic, which can offend some woodworkers' pragmatic sensibilities. It's difficult for me to believe the editorial staff thought these articles would receive mass appeal. And yet here they are in print. These were not particularly easy articles to write. From the very first instance, I planned to shroud the intended subject of each article in a seemingly practical technique. As a result, each article was more difficult to grasp. I apologize for that. But it served an important purpose to keep the mysteries ... well, mysterious. I felt that if I wrote the mysteries directly, an important aspect of period woodworking, perhaps the only thing I'm certain of, would be overlooked. There are mysteries in the world of woodworking. There are enough for all of us to discover something new, share our findings and still leave our grandchildren searching. Mysteries lie beneath our tools, like bugs under stones. Many blindly step over them. But the curious are always rewarded. Why is a wooden smoother shaped like a coffin? Why are the sides of some old mortise chisels beveled? How do you sharpen a plane blade without a flat stone? Should a ripsaw have fleam? I don't know the answers. But you don't need me. You can make your own discoveries as I have - by asking questions, examining old tools, old furniture, old books and trying. — AC 36 Popular Woodworking December 2005 |
