Does anybody ever wonder about what some of the guys out there use to produce furniture if they are not retired with plenty of extra cash to invest in the latest gizmo? Don’t mean to sound like Andy Rooney but… I do. I like seeing woodwork and how it gets done — with a little imagination and parsimonious proceedings.
I have visited many shops over the years and I have come to a couple of observations:
– some of the ugliest and incredibly cluttered shops produce the most amazing pieces. Like the best mechanics I know(not the remove and replace types) they never have a fancy new car. Sorry dealership Mechs, I love the shade tree mechanic and I love to visit and see WORK IN PROGRESS.
– craftsman without the latest jig from Lee Valley are making jigs as they need them and moving on. I think they loose them most of the time.
Whats the point?? Is anybody else out there proud to be cheap and make their own? Do you take more pleasure in making your own file handle or is the catalog the first response?
I don’t mean to offend anybody who loves to go out in their shop and dust off the tool collection and line up the matching set of chisels… really I don’t. I just wonder if some of the readers scratch their heads as much as I do? What is up with a 85 dollar rasp?
Can someone send me a photo of the work they did with that rasp that just couldn’t be matched with a middle of the road tool?
Don’t mean to be rambling but I spent a little time flying in the Phillipine Islands and I saw some woodwork on the floor. Yep. They held the work down with their feet as they carved. No lie. They watered my eyes.
My ugly bench and a chair I built with a bicycle powered lathe. Yep- a 10 speed. It ain’t in FWW but I am sittin’ in it 30 years later rambling on to you.
See ya
Edited 11/21/2007 3:41 pm ET by danmart
Replies
>Don't mean to be rambling but I spent a little time flying in the Phillipine Islands and I saw some woodwork in the floor.<
That caught my eye. I spent some time flying around the Phillipines, too, and visited Subic Bay more times than I can remember. There's some great woodcarving that is done around there. Really great, with a style born of speed, efficiency and a tropical flair. Sounds like FWW needs some new material - they ought to go out there and produce an article with photos.
Ed
Most folks would need to see it being done to believe it. The speed that they get it done. Amazing.
Here is a workbench I just put together, total cost $22.00. The top is a solid core wood door I salvaged from a jobsite. The desk was purchased from the ReStore, which is a used building material store that benefits Habitat for Humanity. I built two plywood boxes to get the height up to about 34". I do need to add a vice or two. Sorry for the poor quality picture.
Rob
Hey that looks like my bench and shop there. My bench is made of a solid core door topped with 3/4 MDF edged with oak trim removed from a finish job. The base is a variation of the one in FWW #181. I do have a $25.00 vise on it though. It works for now.
There should be a book written about the Thrifty Dollar woodworker and the furniture they produce. Rob Millard and his one car garage workshop I saw in Pop Wood comes to mind.
Can someone send me a photo of the work they did with that rasp that just couldn't be matched with a middle of the road tool?
Can someone tell me the difference between a person who drove to the supermarket in a Jaguar and another who did so in a Ford Taurus?
Better quality tools don'e always produce better quality work, though sometimes they do. And other times they can make doing the work easier or more pleasant.
It's fun to play with nice toys, be it a Jaguar or an Auriou rasp.
dan,
In 1975, a buddy came to the house and excitedly said, "They're tearing an old warehouse down, behind the hardware store. If we get there tonite, we can salvage any of the timbers we want. They're covering everything up with the dozer tomorrow." So away we went, and I came home with the makings of my bench. Two 6x10 x 8' s for the top, and 4 pcs 6x6 for the legs, plus an assortment of 2x's for battens etc. All red oak. I had to adze a half inch or so off the top, because that warehouse was used to store fertilizer, and the timbers were impregnated with the stuff. I kept having to scrub the rust off the plane I was using to flatten the top, every day a new layer of rust! The chips off the benchtop went in a flowerbed. Waste not, want not.
Takes 4 men and a small boy to think of moving it, and as a friend used to say, "It ain't much for pretty, but it's he11 for stout!"
Ray
And it works. I've seen some of the stuff.
Forget the bench, I want to see pictures and plans for a bicycle powered lathe!!!!
Tarsalas
I'm sorry I don't have a picture of my old rig(pre-digital). That was 28 years ago. I was building windsor chairs outside behind the house and I didn't have a shop or a place to put a lathe so I made a wooden lath with a treadle arrangement. It was OK.. but not good enough.
In short: I found an old 10 speed Schwin and welded the axle to the gears so it would spin with the wheel and the axle. I rigged up a holder to keep the frame in-place. From the spinning axle with a pulley, I connected a belt to the lathe pulley and around the spindle went. My friends would come over and pedal the bike for beer and I turned out green maple legs. No one got thirsty, we got some aerobics, and some of the legs are in the kitchen holding somebody up now.
After a while, and being a hard head I build another one that I could pedal and turn. Yep. the thing I found on the 1st edition was adding weight to the rim of the turning well to give it lots of power once you got the centrifagal force going.
Its not hard if you can weld. Hech these days I can have my mother welding beads with the new wire/gas mig set ups at HD. Give it some thought if you're in the Roy Underhill mode.
dan
I just went to Home Depot this afternoon and picked up a small rolling toolbox. Why? I need something to store rough carpentry tools. I have plans for a really nice one that I would like to build, and could do so in a weekend. But I never have a weekend anymore, so I need to allocate my time accordingly. So I bought this box to solve a need that I would rather have solved myself.
Bottom line is that sometimes we're not buying things because we're not clever or ingenious (and I know that was not the point of your post). We do it because sometimes it's just more efficient.
Now, an $86 rasp...well, can't really say. I have a Nicholson #49 and I thought that was expensive.
Most nights are crystal clear, but tonight it's like he's stuck between stations.
JJV
You are not the only one. I hear you loud and clear. Glad you said that about the Nich. I used to get frustrated paying out the bucks for lots of bastard mill files. I go thru them pretty fast filing rifle barrels and other parts. Being cheap, I saved all of them in a bucket.
Took a forge welding course and Pendleton School in NC. Now I only have a couple slick ones in the bucket. I made knives with pretty antler handles for the guys in my muzzleloading club and I'm experimenting with some other uses. Cheap fun.
Is this some sort of attempt at making yourself feel better about being cheap and messy? (Ha Ha)
On a serious note:
As much as we'd like to associate quality of work with the 'quality' of tools we can't. Everybody with expensive tools will say it improved the quality of their work, and everybody without will say it can be done with a cheap tool. In the end their are just as many people with cheap tools producing crappy work as there are people with expensive tools producing crappy work.
The rasp is a good example, I've got an $85 rasp. I received it as a gift. The cut it produces in much smoother, and it removes as much material than the cheaper Nicholson rasps I had before. I don't think it necessarily improves the quality of the end product, but I enjoy using it. As a hobbyist that's as important as anything else. The same goes with planes, I have a few old ones... But I hate cleaning them up, and all of them need some work. I'd rather just pay the money and get to work. It may cost me more money, but then again I don't have to spend any time doing things I don't enjoy.
Is this some sort of attempt at making yourself feel better about being cheap and messy? (Ha Ha)
Yea I suppose. My wife yells at me for being a pig and I'm cursed with being rather parsimonious. A couple of the other guys got some funny digs in and they are correct to a point. However,...it seems like every person who has driven past my place comes by at some point to find that part to fix their whatever on a Sunday night "cause they just knew a guy like me would have it" somewhere in there.
Being cheap has also lead to learning a bunch of additional skills along the way that others might pay for and never learn some good insights. I'm not on any kind of campaign, I just thought it would be funny to stir up a couple responses from the guys on the other side of the coin.
After reading about that guy who wanted to give away his futton after he broke it "having sex" with his partner, I knew I couldn't generate the zings with an ugly bench pun. Keep workin' on the skills and have fun with the nice planes.
dan
Dan,
Pay no attention to those neat nicks. That's a right proud bench ya got there. It shows that it gets used, ALOT! I see you spiffed up the shop a bit for the photo though. :-)
By the way, is that an Austin-Healy in the background?
Regards,
P.S. Got another logger looking for some wood.
Bob @ Kidderville Acres
A Woodworkers mind should be the sharpest tool in the shop!
Oh thank heavens Bob to the rescue. I was waiting by the phone hoping someone would call and ask me if that was the bench behind the junk? Most of my friends have only seen parts of it.
I did clean it up for the picture and I tried to put all my miss matched chisels and junk in some order so it wouldn't be a total disaster. Ha.
I guess you are referring to the red car behind a piece of wood photo??
That's my 1950 MGTD I have owned for 39 years. Finishing up the interior this winter. I used to get my parts over in Walpole. There's a place called Abingdon Spares right across from Bellows Falls.
Have a nice TG
dan
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