Hi folks.
I’m starting to wonder if I should get myself some therapy.
I have a lot of tools for checking how square stuff is (the more certificate numbers after the description of the setup tool the better) and I seem to spend a lot of time setting up jointers, table and mitre saws.
I’m at the point where I can lose 4 or 5 hours trying to get a piece of equipment right, dead, spot on and I seem to need to do this after each time I bump into the table saw or move the combination jointer/planer or change the angle of the mitre saw
Is this normal or is it just me?
Glynn
Replies
glynn,
there's being anal and then there's being accurate. i love my own accuracy above being the other thing. when i am being the other thing, it is accompanied by anxiety. accuracy is attended by a kind of happiness. it is important for me to know the difference. also, i notice that the work goes smoother, more relaxed and i have to re-tune things less often if my attitude is calm when setting up, and in, the needed precision.
good topic, thanks for posting.
eef
I suspect that you're not the only person suffering from OCWAS (Obsessive Compulsive Woodworking Accuracy Syndrome), Glynn. Recognizing the symptoms, however, is the first step to recovery.
I'm pleased to say that I've finally joined the PCWAS (Pretty Close Woodworking Accuracy School), and have sworn off measuring my boards with a micrometer. I do, however, still trim corresponding pieces to length with a shooting board. But, I stop at the point that I can't feel any difference with a fingertip. Free at last, free at last. ;-)
Sign in shop: "I am NOT a machinist".
People (and philosophers) Thanks for the replies.
Where do I start?
I suppose this actually boils down to (like most things) money.
When I make some little thing for she who must be obeyed, then line of sight is normally of adequate tolerance.
On the other hand when a customer has handed over £800 for solid Rocking Horse Pooh, I mean Beech. Then I do have a tendency to get a little Anal (I’m not a pro).
I don’t know what it is; it may just be large gaps in boards just don’t do it for me or them.
So this is the dilemma. I’ve bought the best tools I can afford. I’ve spent as much time in the workshop practising with the tools I’ve bought as I can afford.
Now I have £800.00 of timber in front of me.
I go to the first piece of equipment and as a fresh start check the settings. Which invariably are out.
So I reset everything. I do all the cutting needed for the first part then move on to another piece of equipment and carry out the same procedure of setting up then back to the first piece of equipment.
Now when I check it’s not as I left it.
What’s changed?
Well one piece of kit the mitre saw changes angle as you tighten up the fixing handle.
The jointer/planer doesn’t seem to like being rolled out the way or for that matter changed from jointer mode to planer mode.
The table saw carriage sticks out and can get bumped and the fence is a little temperamental.
The boards below where edged with a Tri plane in half the time that I spent trying to get a good edge on the JET (and no that’s not my back side).
Glynn.
glynn,
did you make that piece, from which your backside is not protruding? that's some serious accuracy! i know of what you speak. very often the equipment in my shop is found to be out of tune or in need of some adjustment. there are many "floating variables", as i have come to refer to it, that need to be corrected from time to time. the idiosincratic qualities of my machines and tools is unique to mine. it must be known and dealt with. sometimes it is only one thing that's out of true and often it can be several. the latest project in my shop required that i reset the fence on my miter sled, square up the chopsaw and make a new crosscut sled as well. the plus side to all of this might be that i am now just a bit more familiar with what's what in my shop and have decided to go down the road of more hand work and less machine.
are you moving your jointer (planer, in english) around the shop? i would be nervous about messing up jointer true-ness if i had to do that.
eef
Eef
Thanks yep I did make that piece. It’s a large fitted desk for staff in a care home to use.
While making it there was quite a pucker factor it’s not just the money it costs to replace any matchwood made it’s getting more wood the same or similar colour to match.
Over here that isn’t easy as I found out when I was asked to make a matching cupboard.
The thing is when it came down to getting the edges square and true, I played with the JET for over 4 hours trying to get it right. I won’t bore you with everything tried suffice to say it didn’t work.
I then gave up and moved on to the Stanley No. 7 Jointer Try Plane. To which I have now grown very fond. I never thought for one minute I would be able to take a long board as they are and get the results I did. They were spot on.
I think with the Jet I was over cooking it and sometimes it’s hard to see the wood (Ha, Ha) for the trees and yes due to the size of the shop I do have to roll it around.
Glynn
It’s WOODWORKING, not machining parts for the space station…..
Just remember, the material you are working with will seasonally move FAR more than the level of accuracy you are obsessing about, it’s organic. Also, did the Townsends and Goddards use a micrometer or super straight edge? Hell, did Sam Maloff? No, well I guess that answers the question. I have never understood this obsession with thousands of an inch or degrees of micro bevel; doesn’t it take the fun out of it? If not take up machining as hobby.
Nap,
You misunderstand - it is fun to be obsessive, especially if it causes the purchase of and play with gubbins. Next you will be telling us that time is money so we must not play, seek high standards or otherwise do owt but stack em high!
Also, there is no simple rule about accuracy for woodwork. Some aspects require only a by-eye judgement whilst others do indeed benefit from paying attention to the thous. It depends on the joint, process and even the timber-type. Also on the required look.
There is a school of contemporary furniture making in Blighty, inspired by the work and teaching (at Parham College) of Robert Ingham. He himself acquired his mantra from others of similar outlook. He speaks of "wood engineering" and uses the best tools (particularly machinery) to achieve pieces that do indeed have the perfect look, fit and surface of things made to engineering tolerances.
Now, I personally don't care for the look, which might have been rendered by a very excellent robot. However, that is just personal taste and many admire his work. In fact, he seems to be a major inspiration in that comtemporary school of work I mentioned.
One could not get the look, or the associated perfect functioning of parts, without the sort of engineering accuracy Robert Ingham seeks and achieves.
*****
As for me, I like handtooled surfaces but detest a bad or sloppy joint. I find no benefit in getting a table top flat to 5 microns but a lot of benefit in using vernier, micro-gauge or other tool to make joints that fit like a chicken's top lip. I hates a gappy or raggy one.
And even those not-that-flat surfaces benfit from the smoothness and tear-out free aspect got by use of planes flat to 1 thou in the sole and sporting a microbevel on their ever-so-well-held blade edges. A well-engineered plane - made to tolerances of a thou or two - definitely produces superior results to a tinfoil slop-wagon-mit-bumpy-part.
Say it ain't so.
Lataxe, wary of hard & fast rules, especially the allegedly global ones.
You will be like Sisyphus, doomed to fail for eternity. If that makes you happy, enjoy.
Glynn
As someone once said
Measure it with a micrometer
Mark it out with chalk
Cut it out with an axe
wot
Glynn,
Many of the woodworking machines sold for home shop use aren't well designed when it comes to getting them set up accurately and they won't stay lined up for long after being adjusted. The common contractor's style table saw is a poster child for this sad fact. On top of this, wear and tear and poor maintenance can ruin the accuracy of even a well made tool, this is especially common with chop saws.
The argument that accuracy doesn't count because wood moves seasonally is bogus. When you are actually cutting joints and assembling a piece of furniture the wood shouldn't be moving if it has been properly prepared and poorly fitted joints will look bad immediately and weaken the final product.
John
Thanks you really know how to depress someone.
I have to say though the more I think about this the more I realise I use hand tools to do a lot of the work I have power tools for. The chop saw is a case in point.
I’ve just come up from the workshop for some tea (it’s flipping cold down there and heating and dust extraction don’t mix).
I went to cut a piece of moulding and ended cutting it by hand as I knew the chop saw wasn’t going to give the results needed.
Actually this does beg the question why keep something that doesn’t do what it says on the tin.
I only have a small shop and the bench space taken up by the saw is large and thinking about it I only really use that saw for copping up the old wood to fit in the wood burner I have.
Just a shame it was over £300.
Glynn
Glynn, if adjustments on the chop saw aren't holding, you may need to examine the holding mechanism. Often, this is a set screw that is screwed against a pin of some sort. That may produce a dimple or a depressed ring on the pin, making fine adjustments difficult, since the set screw wants to slide back into the same depression. Rotating the pin will usually give the set screw a fresh surface to hold against.
Also, I don't consider a chop saw to be a precision tool, since there is usually some "play" in the mechanism. It is, however, more predictable than my arm and wrist. For some things that require greater precision, I'll cut a smidgeon proud on the chop saw, and then trim on a shooting board.
Glynn
Couple of years ago I visited my son in Scotland and he conned me into doing some renovations for him. One job consisted of bulk saw work ( spindles in a staircase) He took pity on his poor ole dad and raced out and bought a chop saw. 'Got this for under 100 quid Dad'.
Needless to say I finished the job by hand. Pity he hasn't got a wood fire it might have come in handy sometime.
A lot of the accuracy with a chop saw is with the quality of the blade, sometimes forgotten.
Re the backside that's not yours. Why is he wearing shorts? I didn't think you could purchase shorts in the UK.
wot
Wot
The guy with the shorts is the money man he signs all my cheques.
You certainly shouldn’t be able to buy shorts like that in the U.K but there still not as bad as the bandana head band thing he wears.
I pooh you not he goes over to the care home wearing this band just in case there’s a remote chance of him working up a sweat (which hasn’t happened in 7 years).
It’s the funniest thing you’ll ever see.
He’s a right Tonka sometimes.
Glynn.
Is this normal or is it just me?
I would say, if you have sort of good tools, a quick check with a GOOD 45 angle would do! Get some scrap sticks and make a cut BEFORE your job! Test, then get onto your work if seems OK!
"...You can get so exact that
"...You can get so exact that you immobilize yourself with accuracy...You buy this square, and you pay $400 for it, and it's accurate to a 10,000th of an inch. Then all you've got to do is get a job with Boeing building 747s and it's great. It's what you want, but it's not a woodworker's measurement, and it never will be..."
James Krenov, FWW, 1997. Page 2 of the archives section. I have to agree with the previous posts, as close as humanly possible, and see how it lines up before final assembly. garyowen
Although "good enough"
Although "good enough" usually isn't it is the results that count.
If the bits of wood fit together without visible gaps isn't that good enough?
Garyowen
I have to say I own about 3 of those squares.
Cheers
Glynn
I recommend the "ready, fire,
I recommend the "ready, fire, aim" approach to woodworking and check everything for square after it's cut, that's if I can find my square.
I just checked my table saw for square about 30 years ago, should be fine.
Bret
The saw will tell you when it needs tuning. The cut is the tell so I simply make a rip and cross cut with a piece of scrap every time I start a new project which is around two months on average. It the saw were to mis-align between those points.. the cut will throw up a red flag to pull out the squares. Once I tuned my current 5 HP two years ago... I have not had to make an adjustment on the saw yet. But.. I do check briefly with a sample cut every two months even though I know it is probably not necessary.
I'm with John White on the need for accuracy of power tool setups. In metrology, there's an axiom that the tools you use to measure something need to have an inherent accuracy of one order of magnitude greater than the accuracy you're shooting for on your part. I find that this holds true for the tools used to make the part, as well.
A lot of people seem to be thrown by the idea of working to thousandths of an inch. "THOUSANDTHS?! Why would anything made of wood need to be that accurate?" Well, 1/64", which is a visible gap on a fine joint, is only about sixteen of 'em. So lets say you're cutting dovetails, which ideally have what in machining terms is referred to as a light interference fit. Now, if it actually were machining you were doing, your butt would be tightly puckered as you made your part, because the difference between a light interference fit and a sliding (loose) fit is very, very small. But since it's woodworking we're talking about, let's be generous and give ourselves a tolerance of half the amount of a visible gap. So now we're working to a tolerance of -.008". We can maybe give ourselves a little more on the plus side, since wood fibers have more "crush" to them than metal does and can be force fit easier. So maybe +.01 - .012", unless you're cutting small ones with itty bitty pins that might be prone to breaking. Either way, you're working pretty doggone tight.
That's maybe not the best example, since a lot of woodworkers don't actually use power tools to cut dovetails to finish dimensions; I'm just using that as an example to illustrate that whether folks realize it or not, thous do come into play in woodworking. But let's consider a power tool setup where that kind of accuracy might be required. Your jointer, for example. The application: jointing 4/4 S2S boards for edge glue-up. Again, we want to hold squareness of about half of 1/64" over 3/4", so we get good edge contact for joint strength. .008" over three quarters of an inch... On a six inch jointer, that means the fence can be out of square with the table by .064", a little over a sixteenth. Right? Wrong. Recall the order-of-magnitude rule. In order to reliably and repeatably hold the tolerance you want on your part, the machine needs to be set up to an accuracy level ten times as tight, which in this application would ba a little over .006" over the full six inches. I submit that this could not be achieved with your average framing square, ajustable square, try square, whatever. I also submit that if your machine lacks the rigidity to maintain that sort of accuracy after being rolled around or what have you, then it lacks the quality to perform its intended function, and you should probably start looking for a replacement.
The table saw and chop saw, I wouldn't worry so much about. At least in my workshop, those are roughing tools only, and not to be depended on for any great accuracy anyway. Although I have read articles and heard talk on here about using them to make cuts to net dimensions, and in those cases similar care should apply in their setup.
Stationary power tools ARE machine tools. When you use them, you ARE machining. In practice, good woodworkers are acuteley aware of the accuracy requirements of their parts, know what their machines are capable of and are equipped with techniques, usually hand work methods, to compensate for what their machines just won't do. Hmmm... sounds remarkably similar to the traits of a good machinist.
Thanks
Thank you for your comments supporting my view.
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