francovendee wrote:From time to time I watch youtube videos of people making wooden items, sometimes furniture. These videos are interesting in a way but so much machinery gets used it takes the hand skills away. I recognise skills are needed but of a different kind.
I'm assuming 'green woodworking' entails the use of very few power tools?
Ha - you have touched upon a subject that gets many a woodworker's collar hot. The great debate between the machinists and the hand toolers.
Perhaps it won't surprise you to hear that the no-machines woodworkers can be not just a bit purist but the full zealot! They fulminate agin' all and any machine. Some don't even like the more complex handtools, which they dismiss as "over-jigged". (The jig is the topological arrangement of tool gubbins that guides the user in it's use, such a fence on a handplane; or the frog holding the blade of the handplane at the right angle).
The machinists tend to be more pragmatic types, for whom a machine is a useful way to reduce otherwise tedious hours of work. They will use a planer-thicknesser of some 3-6 horsepower to flatten a plank, to square it's edges and to make it evenly thick. The same can be done with a plane or an adz. It will take approximately 50X as long - and that's not counting the 300 days to learn how to adz properly before you start on a valuable plank.
Some machinists are a bit zealous in their own way. They dismiss the "hand of the maker" evidence of handtool use in the wood surfaces in favour of a factory-made look, as "this is what people want and expect now - perfect surfaces, joints and corners". It is the case (sadly) that many get their aesthetic judgements about what furniture should look like from IKEA.
Personally I like to do the grunt work with machines but all the final shaping and construction with hand tools. I like the piece to be well-made - to look as though it was made by someone competent at the required skills to make it. But I have no desire to spend a week trying to adz a plank. And then another ten of them.
One advantage of using handtools is that it teaches you a lot more about the nature of wood. A machine doesn't feel the various resistances to it's edge (although it does give clues via changes in the motor noise and feedrate). When using a handtool, the make-up and behaviours of the grain tell you a lot about the timber via the feel of the tool in the wood transmitted to your hands. This is experience well worth having when considering which bits of timber to use for what.
Cugel
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
