We were lucky enough to convince Christopher Schwarz, editor of Popular Woodworking and Woodworking Magazine, to come out and give a talk that he called “Hand Tool Boot Camp”. His talk was designed to show how hand tools can make your life easier, even if you live and die by your router and tablesaw.
Chris was able to cover a wide range of material in one day, including sharpening, planes, chisels, and saws. Most of what he spoke about is going to be familiar to avid hand tool users, but there were definitely some things that I learned, so I thought I’d pass them along.
1. Eclipse sharpening jig copies. If you have one of the $10 Eclipse style jigs that are made in Taiwan, the one thing that makes them work less well is that the paint on them is too thick. The original Eclipse jigs had very thin paint. Chris suggested to take a file and flatten out the flat part where the plane blade sits, and to take a triangular file and get rid of the paint that is in the little dovetailed recesses that hold the blade. Or go to eBay and find a real one.
2. Block planes. He like to put a little camber on a block plane blade.
3. Sawing. Using a chisel to get your saw cut started really works well, much better than I thought it would. I’ve read about the three classes of saw cuts, but I always thought that taking the time to chisel a notch to get the cut started would be an interruption in my workflow, and, to be honest, less “manly” than just cutting to the line. Boy, was I wrong.
4. Sawing, part 2: His two starter saws would be (1) some kind of dovetail saw, and his cheapest recommendation would be a dozuki, and the rip vs. crosscut dozuki issue doesn’t matter, and (2) a big rip joinery saw of some sort. He had the 16” Lie-Nielsen tenon saw, filed rip. Since you can use a chisel to start a shoulder cut, you can get away without a crosscut saw.
Anyway, it was a lot of fun.