Woodworking as a hobby

For the first time in literally months, I got down into the basement today to do a bit of woodworking. I'd like to say that woodworking is one of my hobbies, but that's being a bit more pretentious than I can justify. Let's say that I aspire to being a competent woodworker (several of my ancestors were cabinetmakers and carpenters), but for now I'm an apprentice abuser of wood.

I got a few woodworking accessories over the holidays, plus a number of hints that it'd be nice if I got busy and built some furniture soon. Today was my first opportunity to do something about it. One of the gifts was a Lee Valley roller stand, which looks a bit over-engineered in the photo, but works very well indeed. So far I've used it as outfeed support on both the tablesaw and the planer, with excellent results. I also received a pair of monster clamps by Jorgensen. These are big enough to be quite useful as weapons, should the need arise.

This is one of my first forays into using what I call "real wood". Most of my previous projects have been plywood and pine, with only two projects in oak (a bookcase and an entertainment unit) — and for those two, I had lots of help. I'm using Cherry for this new project.

One of the advantages of working with plywood and pine is that they're generally available in known dimensions (although the relationship between the "formal" size and the actual size seems to be drifting further apart). Hardwoods, like Oak, Cherry, and Maple, are generally not available in standard sizes. This means that for a project involving "real wood", a good portion of the initial time investment is devoted to creating the proper sized pieces of wood with which to start building the project.

This means, for example, starting with a "rough cut" board, which means that it's somewhere in the 1-2" thick range, anywhere from 3-8" wide, and up to 8-10' long. And the "rough" is literally that: the saw marks from the mill are often still clear — and jagged. To turn this into something useful, you need to perform a few arcane tasks: face jointing and edge jointing. You have to establish a flat face on the board from which all the other dimensions will be taken. The power tool to do this is called a Jointer (or, in some areas, a Joiner). I don't own one of these yet, so I have to fake it.

I select, as carefully as I can, rough boards that don't exhibit cupping, warping, or twisting (which thins the ranks of usable boards pretty effectively, I must admit), then run them through the planer to get the two faces of the board flat and parallel to one another. That done, I use a hand plane with a jointing fence attached to square off one of the long edges of the board, then rip the other edge on the tablesaw (you need a square edge on one side to safely use the tablesaw . . . you're asking for problems to do it any other way).

When I first bought my tablesaw, my much-more-experienced-in-woodworking friend Clive also had me buy some accessories (stabilizer disks, link-belt, push-sticks & paddles, and a featherboard). Until today, I'd never been able to find a use for the featherboard: it just seemed like it did nothing but get in the way of making cuts on the saw. Today, I finally found out what a featherboard is so useful for: it saves you driving splinters into your hand as you press the good-on-three-sides boards against the tablesaw rip fence, and also discourages you from doing some stupid take-your-hand-too-close-to-the-blade trick that you might otherwise be inclined to do.

I'm a slow worker, when it comes to woodworking, so it took me most of the day to get to the point of having enough wood planed and jointed to actually get started on the project itself. Tomorrow should be the start of a glue-up for a pair of side-table tabletops, and I'll have to go to a lumber store to find some stock that'll be thick enough to use for the legs of the tables, but at least I've finally started doing something with the basement full of tools and rough wood, so I should be hearing fewer complaints from SWMBO (She Who Must Be Obeyed).