Starting over with walnut
· 2 min read
Most of what I know about hand planes came from getting it wrong first. The solid part is seldom the hard part; consistency is.
Odds and ends
None of this is new, and that is partly why it works. For a long time I treated drawers as an afterthought. The joint fit on the third attempt, which is about average.
- Start with walnut and nothing else
- Ask someone at the timber yard
- Start with workbenches and nothing else
- Revisit drawers after a week
- Ask someone at the sawmill
What I kept
The result is not perfect, but it is truthful. Below are a few jottings, roughly in the order I worked out them. What surprised me most was how little equipment it needed. I keep coming back to hand planes, chiefly because it rewards patience.
Good furniture should last longer than the person who made it.
In practice
Half of the work is deciding what to leave out. I wrote most of this on a quiet Sunday morning. The best advice I got was simply to slow down. A friend once described dovetails as quiet work, and the phrase stuck. Somewhere between the woodland and home, the notion finally made sense.
I would rather do one thing carefully than five things quickly.
The process
Oil finishes are forgiving, easy to repair and age beautifully. A sharp chisel is safer than a dull one, and much more pleasant. Most of the work happens before any cutting starts. Good chairs is chiefly a series of little, unglamorous decisions.
If something here is unclear, that is on me, not you.
I like dovetails that shows the marks of how it was made. The workbench is the first project and never the last. The trick, if there is one, is to leave enough room for mistakes.
dovetails