H a nd To o l s/ Pow e r To o l s
When my son was in Cub Scouts, we went on fi eld trips on
Saturday mornings. One week we went to the woodshop of
one of the kid’s grandfathers. It was a nice two-car-garage-sized
building behind his real garage; in other words, a dedicated
well-equipped shop. The boys went to work on a simple shelf,
and after herding the group from the band saw to the oscillat-
ing spindle sander, Grandpa decided it was time to impart some
wisdom. "If you want to get anything done, use power tools.
There isn’t any reason to use hand tools any more. It will take
you longer, and won’t turn out as good." I didn’t say anything
at the time, but on the way home I said to my son "you realize
that man is a fool don’t you?" Hunter replied, "I was wonder-
ing when you were going to say something."
When he was four or fi ve we started making stuff together:
toy guns and rubber-band powered boats for the bathtub. Our
main tools were a coping saw and a spokeshave , tools he could
handle safely without scaring his mother half to death. One
of my proudest moments as a father came when we were at a
festival watching a guy build a canoe. When the demonstrator
held up a spokeshave and asked if anyone knew what it was
called, Hunter shouted out the name and asked the guy if he
wanted him to show him how to use it. He stepped up to the
bench and, reaching up almost over his head, thrilled the crowd
by quickly producing a pile of shavings and a fair curve.
I’ve never been able to understand why people try to divide
woodworkers into two opposing camps, Normites versus
Neanderthals. And I can’t understand why anyone would buy
into that and only work with one method to the exclusion of
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the other , power-tool users who will spend hours building jigs
and setting up machines to avoid making one simple cut with
a backsaw, or hand-tools users who claim some sort of moral
superiority by chopping the waste from a dozen mortises by
hand. I work with wood because I enjoy making things as well
as I can. I don’t have as much time in the shop available as I
would like so I want to work effi ciently, but I don’t want to
compromise the fi nished product. I consider myself fortunate
that the men who taught me how to work with wood had a
well-developed sense of when to pick up a router and when to
pick up a plane.
The "Poppy" table project is an excellent example of what our
publisher, Steve Shanesy, calls "blended woodworking", using
power tools and hand tools together. This is a curious little
table. It has fi ve legs, which makes it an interesting engineer-
ing problem as legs and stretchers, a shelf and a top all need
to solidly connect. At the same time it’s an artistic expression.
Every edge of the fi nished piece is curved, and the fl at surfaces
of the top and shelf are interrupted by sweeping carved curves.
One of the parts, a pentagon-shaped hub that connects the
legs and supports the top, is very small, but getting it the exact
size and shape and fi tting the joints is the keystone that holds
the whole table together. This little block of wood will make the
table straight and solid if it is right , or wobbly and twisted if it
is less than perfect.
Because of its small size, I chose to cut the shape on the band-
saw, shoot the edges with a plane, and cut the dovetail sockets
by hand. It is just too small to safely cut on the table saw and
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