Tools For Working Wood

Last week I wrote about epochs in the history of woodworking and several people suggested that I needed to add a revival category for all those folks making furniture now.

I didn't for two reasons. Even with the growing numbers of people making stuff the actual percentages of people making furniture for fun and friends is tiny compared to the population at large. And on the professional level the numbers are even smaller.

When I was a boy in the 1960's my parents needed some more closet space in their tiny apartment. A carpenter, a Mr. Goldstein came and did a fair amount of work on site. The closets were modern for their time, made of varnished plywood and sliding doors. We took the two cabinets with us when we moved and they live on at my parents house in Queens.

If doing something similar today my parents would have gone to Ikea, or Home Depot, or some other big chain. The idea of getting real custom work on a civil servant's salary would be pretty rare today.

On the other hand the custom cabinetmakers who are my tool customers are making really cool stuff for very rich clients.

You see custom made furniture whether made by you for yourself or made for someone rich is a form of cultural expression that we use to say something.

For the rich person it's a way of conspicuous consumption. A way of showing that they are cultured and refined. For people making stuff for themselves it's a way of showing individualism and personal values.

In my case the furniture I made is a fairly regular conversation point. When I was single it was one way I subtly showed the women who I managed to lure to my abode that I was a stable person, dextrous and rooted in tradition and traditional family values. As a family man, the solid pieces show us as traditional, non-trendy, and with a sense of history and permanence. I'm not going to be tossing the settles I made twenty years ago just because someone on the TV says furniture this year should be all blue.

There are lots of reasons for making stuff yourself and I just touched on a few reasons. All of this comes under the concept of "personal expression"

And that's what makes it art.


As furniture makers we are anomalies in our culture. Our work, even though it is most of the time in traditional forms and in many cases unoriginal forms, in the finished context of being used in a room in our house it is a personal statement just like a work of art is. We didn't have to make that table, we could have bought a table - but we didn't. This is the same idea but a different, just as valid form of expression, as painting a picture.

For a wealthy customer deciding to have someone design and make the perfect vanity for the bedroom is just as much a statement as finding the perfect picture to hang over the mantle.


For those of you who say that it's not art because the design isn't original and it's just a copy I say go to a museum and count the sculptures of "Madonna and Child" or go look at some landmarked building and count the stock details made by anonymous craftsman. Now it's art, then it was just craft. The personal expression of wanting something you made is the message of your art and it's just as valid as someone who paints a picture and has it hanging in a museum (except they have a better agent).

Note: The picture above is of the top half of the cabinets custom made by Mr. Goldstein for my parents' Manhattan apartment c. 1966. It now sits in their basement and is used for storage. The bottom half is in the garage.

There have been 5 major upheavals in the development of woodworking tools. Each upheaval changed the way woodworking was done, changed furniture styles, and changed the skill level needed to produce professional work. The dates are approximate.

1 - Hand tools mature and become standardized c. 1750-1850.

Aside for the water or wind powered sawmills, which were not ubiquitous, all work was done by hand. With the arrival of the Industrial Revolution quality steel became more available and at much lower prices. Greater availability of tools along with a population explosion greatly increased both the demand for wooden buildings and the demand for furniture. Tool manufacture became the province of highly specialized industrial firms, working out of several major cities; Sheffield and Birmingham topping the list. Centralized manufacture took advantage of new national transportation networks of canals and railroads which drastically reduced the cost of transport and by extension, further reduced the cost of the end product. Regional makers could not compete. Tool designs standardized. The lowered costs of tools made it possible for more people to answer the demand for wooden products successfully and the standard of finished work became higher and fancier. However all furniture and house construction involved skilled labor working fast.

2 - Water and steam powered machinery - the Age of Belt Transmission c. 1840-1920
As the Industrial revolution matured precision machines allowed for the construction of the first woodworking machinery. The machines were large, belt driven, and required a lot of capital to obtain, and specialists to maintain. The latter limitations made machinery impractical for smaller shops but in the United States, especially for furniture making, the factory system became the norm and furniture became a factory made item that the middle class could afford instead of purely a bespoke industry for the rich. As the nineteenth century wore on the middle class no longer bought simple joiner's furniture. Instead they bought fancy factory made versions of the latest styles made for the rich.
In house construction the biggest change comes in the 1840's with the introduction of inexpensive, pre-sawn lumber in standard sizes, which completely changes American architecture away from traditional timber framing. While previously standard sized timbers were used for most construction the introduction of framing with 2" x 4" standards greatly lowered the skill level needed for house construction. Fairly early on moldings and other worked details are made by machine. Later in this period pre-made door and windows further standardize construction and lower the needed skill to build a house. The United States was a leader in developing highly specialized machinery for production work in the furniture industry. In England some industrialization took place but there was far more reluctance to industrialize as the piecework system made it impractical for investors. Capital was also much harder to get. Even as late at the 1930's mid-price furniture in London was made by small workshops working with hand tools only. However these shops would take their wood to the local lumberyard for planing.
The picture at the start of this blog entry is of a early planing machine from the early 1850's. While I don't know if this machine was ever built, at this time machinery like this would be found only in saw mills, very large lumberyards, and in the US, large factories.

3 - Stationary electric motors c. 1920-1960
With stationary electric motors it became possible for small shops to have "machine rooms" and compete with the giant factories. No longer did you need an expert to run a system of pulleys from a central location. Each machine needed could be installed independently, anywhere there was electric power.

4 - Portable Power Tools - c. 1940-1990
The boom in housing after WW2 put a huge strain on the national capacity for building housing. Motors became small enough to make hand held tools and for the first time a portable circular saw, drill, and jig saw could replace hand tools on a job site. Most important of course was that far less skill was needed to use power tools than maintain hand tools in productive condition, so lesser skilled craftsman could be employed. In addition, plywood and other materials that would easily dull hand tools could now be readily used on their own and plywood and other sheet goods replace solid timber wherever possible. Cordless tools, popular since the 1980's have increased the versatility and productivity of on-site building equipment.

5 - Prefabrication and outsourcing. 1980 - The real change in production since the 1980s has been increased use of prefabricated parts. Even framing elements are routinely assembled in a factory and trucked in. That idea, but overseas outsourcing has moved a lot of the core furniture making and building elements overseas. Architectural woodworking for most Americans is no longer the work of a skilled cabinetmaker making a kitchen or library. The actual woodworking is now done at a factory and except on the high end, prefabricated, machine made parts are just assembled at the job site. Furniture is less and less a work of a cabinetmaker or a woodworking factory and more an advanced, automatic production of composite materials and high tech. Furniture, which used to be an expensive capital investment for any family is increasingly a commodity item that you buy, use, and discard like an item of clothing. Most Americans have very little connection to new furniture built in a traditional manner.

A few weeks back I did a talk at the monthly meeting of the NYC Woodworkers which was held at Makeville Studio. I'm in sales and I spend far too much time talking about features of tools. Far too many furniture designs are linear and for this talk I wanted to show people the potential of what you can do with rasps to introduce curved and sculpted elements into your work.
I spent a little bit of time on technique. In three sentences or less. Hold the rasp by the handle and the tip - you want to use the entire rasp so you get the fastest, most controlled stroke, and so you wear out the teeth evenly and the rasp will last longer. You also want to cut uphill with the grain. It's like using a saw in that sense (see here for the uphill saw explanation).

Auriou makes left and right handed rasps for maximum efficiency in cutting. I'm no longer sure how important that is. Gramercy Tools rasps are unhanded. We stock both Auriou and Gramercy Tools and both are hand cut. The slight random spacing of the teeth caused by a human cutting the teeth means for far smoother, faster cutting action because the rasp teeth don't run lock step into the proceeding tooth's cut as they would with a machine cut rasp.

Then I took a piece of wood and cut a simple chamfer on it in 30 seconds. About the same time it would take to look for a router wrench. Then 30 more seconds and I had a scalloped chamfer which I don't know how to cut with a router. Then a stopped chamfer which would add a lot of interest on a normally square pit of wood. I wrote about stopped chamfers a long time ago. Than a scalloped edge. This would look really cool on the underside of a table. And finally a scallop with a "V" between the scallops. The "V" was done with the edge of a rasp.
As I told everyone, I wasn't trying to do the perfect design, and even with the very smooth finish left by the rasps, a follow-up with a scraper would be needed to really get a final finish surface. But what I wanted to show is how fast one hand tool could take a rectilinear design and turn it into something special. And something special is what makes custom furniture worthwhile. It's like a restaurant. Serve a plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce it's $9.95. Add two anchovies and a sprig of basil, you can charge $14.95. I'm just an iron monger and this demo just showed the basics. It's your job as craftspeople to make beautiful interesting stuff. Go for it!

PS. Please pardon any inconsistencies in the sample photographs. All the samples were made live in front of the club while I was talking and in thirty seconds or less. At the very least layout lines would make everything more regular if I was working on real stuff.

Or is the old adage "a poor workman finds fault with his tools" true. Having a just turned seven year old son I am spending more and more time watching the trials of Wile E. Coyote (Super Genius) on YouTube. The basic mantra that my son and I repeat all the time is "never order anything from Acme" because Mr. Coyote constantly is let down by the products he orders.

Mr. Coyote is a good craftsman, not for fine work, but he's fast and resourceful. He can build a wooden track for a rolling bomb in no time at all, and all the many launch pads and extra equipment he needs for his hunting get assembled quickly as if by magic. I wish I could work so fast. He also comes prepared. If he needs a stick of dynamite at the last minute, he has it with him. Same with rubber bands, rope, and the occasional white flag. The folding door he uses for introducing himself to his victims is lightweight, portable, and ingeniously made.

So what's the problem? Why does his Acme flying Batman outfit suddenly fail? Is it Acme's fault that Mr. Coyote isn't a great pilot? Is Acme to blame if their anvil falls at the wrong time?

I'm thinking that the real problem is not the quality of the Acme tools, but that they are meant for consumer use, not for a professional coyote hunting of roadrunners and rabbits.

We get customers like this in the store all the time. Your average consumer might be perfectly happy with a regular Home Depot cordless drill for the five times a year they use a drill, but the serious amateur or professional quickly finds out that that inexpensive drill doesn't last very long with constant use. Then they find with top of the line professional tools like Festool that the same quality that allows a tool to last long (three year warranty) also allows for better smoother bearings, less vibration, less noise, more accuracy and overall faster performance. Just what you need to catch a road runner.

Maybe Mr. Coyote keeps buying Acme products because when he was a kid they were better made and he is just used to them. Maybe as he grew up, and started hunting harder quarry he just outgrew the capabilities of Acme products and didn't realize it. Maybe Acme doesn't make them like they used to. In any event I don't blame the Acme Mfg. Co. or Mr. Coyote. I blame a lack of education and information. I would like to mention that as of this writing Festool USA does not import any of their anvils, cannons, rubber bands, grenades, bat-suits, or other hunting paraphernalia into the US. Why? I don't know, but I assume there are good reasons for it. Until that changes maybe the real reason Mr. Coyote keeps buying Acme is that he doesn't have a good alternative. On the other hand if Mr. Coyote needs any quality power tools I hope he considers Festool and considers Us, a full line stocking dealer, as a good source for tools.

Note: Above is a link to one of many videos about Mr. Coyote. All of them are fun. This is a later video that features some of the ACME equipment.

On another note, I got an email from Kevin Lippert of the Princeton Architectural Press who thought, correctly, I might be interested in great show of a British artist's recreations of benches from American utopian communities. You can read about the various utopian communities listed in the exhibit in the show catalog here. and towards the end of the catalog there are pictures and descriptions about the benches that were used in the various communities. This is a great, very interesting round-up of different takes on the design of a very useful, very simple household item.

In the last lesson I finished the basic exercises of a flower, reported to Chris Pye and started the next project which was a bull from the Woodcarving Course book. because I didn't have a good way of enlarging the plan in the book I did it about 3/4 size. It came out okay (see picture) but I did have issues around tight curves and around the eye. According to the lesson I was supposed to use a stabbing cut when the arc of the curve got tight but I didn't. In practice I could not make the stabbing cut work so I used a low angle cut. After finishing the bull I knew I had screwed it up. The tight curves are muddy and uneven, and the eye is a disaster area. Otherwise, the low angle cuts which I had practiced extensively were fine.

According to the instruction I need to carve another bull and do some different effects. I didn't want to repeat the same errors but I could not make the stabbing cuts with any confidence and I did not understand how you keep the line quality of a small 1/16" x 11 gouge which was used to carve the rest of the body, consistent when you change to a stabbing cut.
I thought about photographing the bull, sending it to Chris, and letting him tell me what was wrong but being in the Xmas rush I procrastinated on that. And then it hit me that what was wrong is that I could not do a stabbing cut properly and consistently. Actually when I thought about it the practice piece I had done to show grips really only had a few stabbing cuts in it and I was so thrilled about getting the low angle grip down pat I never really studied the right way to do a stabbing cut.
So before I call Chris I figured I should reread and watch him do the stabbing cut demo.
I did and I am doing it all wrong. Somewhere between my initial lesson and practice I lost the proper grip, I wasn't holding the tool correctly, I wasn't following the cut correctly, and needless to say I have to go back and start learning the stabbing cut correctly once and for all. As I have mentioned before I mostly learn from books, but the videos on Chris's carving TV were perfect in this case. my next step in learning to carve is watching the stabbing videos again, with my workbench right there, and practicing the cuts properly. If need be I will talk to Chris about matching the character of the different cuts in the bull, but first I need to see what happens when you do it correctly.

So I will be carving the bull again soon, but not before more reading and video lessons.

Note: In case you are curious, I know I mention many times the many books we sell by Chris, and his woodcarving TV website. While we do make revenue when we sell a book, we do not get any sort of commission on his website. The main reasons I am writing this series of blogs on carving are: Between work and parenthood my time and commitment to any hobby activity is tough and by blogging about my carving lessons I can justify more time at work spent in what is basically a hobby activity for me.

The process of how people learn is interesting to me. Most of what I write about is trying to teach or at least inform people. Most blogs are like that too. I thought writing about the learning process an interesting subject. Most students writing about their classes write about their progress, what it's like working and studying with others. I'm trying to write about the thought process and experiments and learning epiphanies needed to make my carving progress. I can't draw or sculpt so if at the end of this I can make a nice natural carving of something I will be extremely proud of myself. My wife says I need a hobby and furniture making is no longer a hobby for me. Carving on the other hand is totally out of the left field of my experience and I would guess that how I am learning and how I am acquiring tools and equipment is pretty typical of a lot of people who have learned to carve and can be a typical path of those who want to learn. Carving, for those living in an apartment, does not take up much space, so I hope I can get good enough so what excites me is the project I am working on, not my learning process.
Finally we stock and sell lots of carving tools and accessories. My blog is mostly on the history of woodworking and furniture-making. Adding in this storyline of learning to carve gives me a wider range of things to write on and I am hopeful that maybe a few carvers, beginners and more advanced, will find the inclusion of carving topics in my blog a reason to read it.

While there are a lot of smaller tool collecting society's in the USA, all of which have something to offer along with a gas of a time, The Mid-West Tool Collector's Association is the largest national group devoted to old tools. There are a lot of reasons to join: access to old tools at swap meets, the Gristmill - a fine magazine devoted to tool collecting, the annual convention, the social aspects of collecting, and the reason why I am posting this blog today.

Every year the Mid-West, which BTW has chapters located all over the country, not just in the mid-west, and is also known as M-WTCA, sends out a reprinted publication to all it's members. It varies from year to year but it's also something interesting.

This year it's "The Cabinet Maker's Guide" (fifth edition 1837) which I mentioned in a blog entry here. We were planning to reprint the book, but we were just too busy.

The best for me of course is that now I have a reprint take on the subway with me to read. Also out of the blue, looking at it, I finally realized why in a book called "The Cabinet Maker's Guide" there is nothing on woodworking. Because (duh) the actual building of the carcase of a bit of furniture was basic joinery, it's the fancy stuff that differentiates cabinetmaking. In the Joiner and Cabinet Maker (1839) after Thomas builds his dresser the author goes on to explain that the difference between Thomas's dresser and the work of a cabinetmaker was the addition of veneer, and fancy finishing. So in this guide all they talk about is finishing, gilding, fancy stuff, and basic marquetry, the latter of which would be done by specialists in a big city but a cabinetmaker everywhere else.

If you are already a member of the M-WTCA you should have gotten your copy in the mail. If you aren't I have no idea how you get get a copy but the first step might be joining. So click here and tell them Joel sent you.

It's been a busy year at TFWW and we are very grateful to all of you for making it so busy.
Hammer production is in full swing and we have started shipping. Like just about any new product, production has turned out far more tricky than we expected. We are getting better and faster at the hand filing but handles turned out to need far more handwork than we anticipated.



Because of a lot more demand than we predicted, and general slow production we are way behind in fulfilling orders. Of course, all orders will be filled as soon as we can at the ordered price. We are very sorry for the delay.

Happy Holidays from everyone at Tools for Working Wood!

In the summer of 2010 I wrote about taking a short vacation and seeing the absolutely gorgeous 1869 Franz Wertheim tool catalog that had been acquired by Princeton University. You can read about that trip and the catalog here.

The real exciting news is that I just got an email from the library saying the catalog has been digitized and is now available for all to see here.

This Wertheim catalog is probably the nicest, most complete 19th century tool catalog available on-line. The source material is in great shape, scans are great and the software allows you to zoom in to see details.

In the catalog you will find lots of tools that aren't well know in the US or UK, partially because tool usage has changed and partially because European tools are different in some areas than English tools.

Thanks to emails from Wolfgang Jordan I found out that this wasn't the only version of this catalog to survive, German editions are known in several private collections. Wolfgang also mentioned to me that the actual exhibition with the tools, which was considered fabulous at the time, ended up in the South Kensington Science Museum. I made some inquiries and found that the display was split up and most of the parts deaccessioned and sold of in the 20th century. The museum still has some section of a few remaining panels which occasionally are on display.

The catalog is also one of the very few from the time with color plates and seeing it on line like this is a boon for tool collectors, historians, and users everywhere.

Here is the link again. There are two volumes. Volume 1 is the text in French, Volume 2 are the illustrations.
Thank you and a job Very Well Done Princeton University!!!!

Last August, after having an early lunch of some most excellent chicken curry at the India Day Festival in Madison Square Garden I began to wonder what tools were used for woodworking in India before the British arrived. I have no idea.

Continental Europeans use slightly different tools than the English but the difference is subtle. Tons of highly specialized tools were used for professional work in all the pre-industrial trades all over Europe, but the tools have died out. Documentation however exists. Very little documentation in English about tools other than English tools exists.

Both Japanese and Vietnamese tools started out in China, although the Japanese took the tools to new designs. Japanese tools of course are very popular in the US but I don't know any book in English on the history of Japanese tools, although Toshio Odate's "Japanese Woodworking Tools" (currently out of print) is the seminal book in English on current Japanese tools.
The only important book in English on indigenous crafts of China is "China at Work", first published in 1937 by Rudolf Hommel it covers dozens of crafts and has never been equaled. I am reliably informed that there are several major historic Chinese works on the subject of woodworking that have never been translated.

Jennie Alexander told me about "Woodworking in Estonia" with the hope I could figure out how to get it reprinted. I failed, the institute in Estonia that originally published the work is still around but they did not reply to my query. The current English edition was translated by the CIA in the early 1960's but the third generation pictures are terrible.

Finally, "The Traditional Crafts of Persia" by Hans E. Wulff was begun before WW2 but only published in 1967. It only peripherally has any information on woodworking. Certainly there should be something somewhere on woodworking in the Persian and Arabian kingdoms but I don't know where to look.


Back to India.

I can pretty much guess that with the British colonization and importation of British goods the native tool makers would have had a greatly reduced market. By the same token there are tons of really fabulous distinctive Indian woodcarving and cabinetry from the all periods. My question is how do you go about making this stuff? And were there special tools used? Are there any books on traditional crafts that I just don't know about - Stuff that hasn't been published in the US. I know on YouTube there are tons of videos made all over the world showing techniques that are unfamiliar in the west.

This is important for several reasons: Globalization has meant that traditional crafts are dying all over the world and knowledge is being lost. In the US with our more and more eclectic tastes, exposure to more design and craft traditions means more options for making interesting stuff.

I leave you with a request. If you know of any books or other material or media, about traditional woodworking crafts, especially tools, from other parts of the world drop me a line. The English Industrial revolution produced great tools, (and in many cases drove other distinctive tools to extinction) but other cultures also did great woodworking and without their specialized tools the work will be lost.