It's Always Sunny in Brooklyn. (Part 1)

So I have fallen in love with saws.

My induction into handsaw-dust began with set of joinery backsaws that I purchased last winter. They been largely unused until the past fall when I began making it a point to do regular sawing exercises for joinery. This consisted of milling up a stack of short little poplar boards and cutting hundreds of angled dovetail cuts. At first I didn’t assemble any joints, I just laid out 20-30 cuts and after they were sawn then tried to divide the material left in between by eye (a Klausz exersiz). Then I got to actually making little dovetail cases, chopping out the waste and pairing the joints. Then it was on to practicing cutting tenons, etc, etc. Anyway, I have a gained little skill, and I am hooked. I am also convinced with continued practice and deliberate use my sawing is only going to keep getting better and better and allow me to cut complex joints that would be a nightmare with my machines. But what about larger cuts?
I think we're going to need some larger saws.

Enter my burgeoning handsaw obsession.

The Straight and Narrow

But, if truth is the correspondence between appearance and reality, then there are some glaring inconsistencies in this system. Straight lines are strikingly absent from nature. If you take a walk in the woods, it is apparent that there is virtually nothing that is ruler straight. Instead, all naturally occurring forms are curved and arabesque. Rocks, bushes, mountains, rivers, gullies, branches, and leavers all follow an organic outline that does not contain a single perfect straight line. Only tree trunks and the perpendicular alignment of he human form standing upright upon the earth offer a commonly seen vertical that approximates a plumb line. Despite this direct evidence of our senses, we continue to connect everything with straight lines. The nineteenth-century Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix once speculated, "It would be worthy to investigate whether straight lines exist only in our brains"

-Leonard Shlain, Art and Physics 

Haptic Memory

 

Last summer, I was in between projects and having a sort of “A-ha” moment connecting between my early experience making things and the path that lead me back to making things. I starting thinking about all the things that I made as child and the contrast of being a kid making things with a very limited set of tools, experience, and knowledge as opposed the challenge of making things now having perhaps too much of one or another. It was at this point that decided to start a little side project. A project that may or not be anything except perhaps an exercise in mining the memory. 

Aus krummem Holze...

"Aus krummem Holze als woraus der Mensch gemacht ist, kann nichts ganz Gerades gezimmert werden."

-Immanuel Kant 

Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, 1784

 

Breaking Boards

First it was a tree, then it was a log, then it was a board, then it was bunch of parts, and then it was a thing.

Resurrection

When I decided to start using handplanes, I was somewhat at a loss as where to start. I had very little experience using planes and,in hindsight, the experience I had was probably more of an obstacle. As I planned my first purchase, I had to decide whether to buy a new plane or fix up on old plane. I ended up buying an old plane: an old Stanley Bedrock Style 605 from the 1920’s off of E-bay for about 90 dollars. The plane was in rough shape, but all the parts were there and nothing was damaged. Using Garrett Hack’s Handplane Book and some tutorials from online, I set about restoring the plane. The first step was to take the plane apart and figure out try to figure out how it did it- I would later have to figure out how well each part was doing what it was doing.

The Invisible Hand

This week I cut a set of mortise and tenon joints for the base of a display case. I decided that I would try out the new mortising chisels I got last month and some sweet new sawing skills that I have been working on. After carefully cutting and fitting the parts, I started thinking about how all of the time and effort put into these joints would be hidden from view the moment that I placed glue into the joint and clamped up all of the parts. I also considered about the myriad other ways in which this joint could be constructed(i.e. dowels, dominos, screws, biscuits, etc.) or handful of less manual techniques that could be employed to the form the parts (i.e. mortising machine, a router jig, table saw, drill press and on and on and on…)

The question is why bother this sort of thing by hand?