Dr Al's Woodworking Pages
Introduction
I wanted to get into woodwork for many years but simply hadn't had the space. In early 2020, we made the decision to sell one of the two motorbikes that occupied half of my single garage. That gave me a very small amount of space (and some money) to think about woodworking. It still isn't really enough for a lot of woodworking projects, but it's better than nothing and it allows me to scratch that particular itch! I was fortunate enough to inherit a number of old tools (including quite a few planes) from my grandfather and have bought some others to give me what I need to get going. I also have some tools that were bought for DIY jobs that can be used for woodworking. You can read a bit about the woodworking area of my workshop here.
For the first couple of years of my woodworking "education", I embraced the idea of using power tools whenever there was a benefit (and I had space). I fairly quickly acquired a table saw, a couple of power routers (1/2" and 1/4") and a thicknesser. After a couple of years I realised that, while the table saw was very effective for doing woodwork quickly, it made the process noisy & dusty. More significantly, the combination of the table saw and electric router acted as a bit of a crutch: the use of jigs (like my cross-cut sled) made precise cuts very straightforward but took away any need for me to learn more challenging woodworking skills.
In August 2022, I made the decision to sell the table saw. I have never regretted that decision, even for a moment. Getting rid of the table saw gave me two big benefits. The first of these was that I had space (just about!) to buy a bandsaw. The bandsaw is still a power tool, obviously, but it's nowhere near as noisy, dusty or dangerous as the table saw. It is also vastly superior to the table saw when it comes to resawing, which is a really tedious job to do with hand tools. The second benefit of not having the table saw is that it meant that, for all the jobs that I previously would have used the table saw, I had to learn how to do them by hand. In some cases I could have used the bandsaw, but I've tried to keep that mostly for resawing and do everything else using hand tools. Projects take longer, but I learn more and they feel more like my achievement rather than the achievement of a machine that did the work for me.
I've still got the thicknesser and it gets used occasionally. When space allows I'd like to get a surface planer (called a "jointer" in the US I believe). While the surface planer suffers from a lot of the same issues I have with table saws, for large projects it would be nice to be able to have a session on surface planer & thicknesser to produce a batch of "raw" stock and then get on with the rest of the work by hand. For smaller projects I'm sure I'll keep doing the initial stock preparation by hand as I do enjoy it and it's satisfying to be able to do it myself rather than relying on machinery.
Like metalworking, everything I've done in the way of woodwork has been self-taught, albeit with the help of a lot of books, forums and some excellent videos from (in particular) Matt Estlea and David Charlesworth, although I've also watched quite a few from Paul Sellers, Neil Paskin and others.
As with the metalworking projects described on this website, I've really enjoyed making my own woodworking tools and fixtures (as opposed to finished articles). You can read about the hand-tool related ones of these here and the power tool related ones here. There are also details of some benches, some completed furniture projects, some boxes and some projects for outdoors. Anything that doesn't fit into those categories is included on this page.
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