Popular Woodworking 2006-02 № 153, страница 12
Out on a Limb There is No Shame In Using Sandpaper Among many of my hand-tool friends, there's a notion that real woodworkers don't use sandpaper. Instead they use cutting tools only - hand planes and spokeshaves - to prepare a surface for finishing. A dirty cheater will use a card scraper to clean up a bit of tear-out. But woodworkers who pick up pieces of sandpaper, well, there are even worse names for those people. In some ways this intolerance is understandable, if not forgivable. Many hand-tool woodworkers began the craft as power-tool woodworkers with a full array of random-orbit sanders, drum sanders, detail sanders, pad sanders and - most important - air scrubbers. Then they had something that's akin to a religious conversion. Either someone put a well-tuned hand plane in their mitts or they got sick and tired of coughing up the fine sanding dust that clogs many nasal passages. They threw out their sandpaper and decided that if the woodworkers of yore could build nice furniture with hand planes alone, then they could, too. But there are some problems with this approach. First, the woodworkers of yore actually did use sandpaper. Early inventories of woodworking shops and tool dealers show sandpaper in significant quantities in the early 1800s. Some high-style furniture demanded it - especially with the advent of French polishing, which requires a flat surface. The second problem is that finishing straight from the tools can be as inefficient as power sanding. Your smoothing plane (the last tool to touch the wood) has to be tweaked out to an extraordinary degree to finish straight from the tool. That means an iron that is wicked sharp and set perfectly in the mouth. And it assumes your wood is fairly mild and easy to plane. I don't know about you, but every project I work on involves wood that has reversing grain, a few knots, some curly figure and boards that are simply ill-mannered. Getting all of these to behave under a smoothing plane involves superhuman effort. Sure, some woodworkers can do it, but most of us will struggle and wonder what we are doing wrong - or why this all takes so dang long. You see, sandpaper is a logical and smart part of the wood-preparation process. It's all about removing material in an efficient way. Jointers, planers, hand planes and scrapers all remove wood pretty quickly and leave a decent surface. But when it comes to taking your surfaces to the very last, a few swipes with #220-grit sandpaper is remarkably more efficient than endless experimentation with a plane. And if you need guidance from the woodworkers of yore for this, look to the Egyptians. They invented saws, cutting tools, plywood, dovetails and mortise-and-tenon joinery thousands of years ago. They often finished their furniture straight from the tools, too, according to Geoffrey Killen in his book "Egyptian Woodworking and Furniture" (Shire). But when they needed a project to be nice, they turned to sandstone and rubbed it with the grain, according to a wall relief in Ti's Fifth-Dynasty tomb. And if it was good enough for them, it's good enough for me, too. PW Christopher Schwarz Editor CONTRIBUTORS GLEN HUEY Glen Huey started his media career on the pages of Popular Woodworking eight years ago with a Shaker hanging cabinet. Today, he is also the author of three books as well as host of a series of project-specific DVDs (available at woodworkersedge. com). He also finds time to teach weekend classes at Woodcraft stores around the region and is teaching weekend and week-long classes at American Sycamore Retreat in Cloverdale, Ind. But Glen still builds custom furniture for clients (hueyfurniture.com) and also finds time to offer clever furniture projects on our pages. On page 64 Glen takes a kitchen storage concept and turns it into a multi-media storage cabinet that's perfect for his DVDs. DAVID THIEL Long-time subscibers to this magazine know that David Thiel is a power-tool maven, and that his mind is an encyclopedia of model numbers, motor statistics and quotes from Monty Python movies. But he's also a professionally trained cabinetmaker who came up in his father's shop, building everything from custom furniture to chili parlors in the Cincinnati area. So when it came time for us to publish our seven-part series on building casework, David was the name at the top of our list. He knows how to do it quickly and efficiently. To read part four of our series, which covers smart carcase assembly, simply turn to the section in the center of this magazine. Our Privacy Promise to You We make portions of our customer list available to carefully screened companies that offer products and services we believe you may enjoy. If you do not want to receive offers and/or information, please let us know by contacting us at: List Manager, F+W Publications 4700 E. Galbraith Road, Cinncinnati, OH 45236 10 Popular Woodworking February 2006 |
