It has been a while since I expanded this wish list, so here goes.

1. Is it too much to ask for Lee, Lie, or some other great maker to come up with a modern compass plane? To use this tool effectively, think of the compass plane as a light jack plane, not a smoother, for curves. As with other hand planes, I have little doubt that modern manufacturing, informed by history, will outdo vintage models.

2. Speaking of tools for curves, a curved rasp, flat across its width, would be nice. Start with the idea of the “curved ironing rasps” made by Auriou (pictured above) and Liogier but make one about 6-7″ long, 1 1/2″ wide, with a knob on the leading end and a near-vertical handle at the rear. And Santa, if you’re listening, I want the radius of the curve to be smaller toward the rear and larger toward the front. Medium and fine grain, thanks.

None of the following currently available tools quite fits the bill: flexible floats, the very coarse Liogier Beast, and the Surform shaver. The latter is decent when modified, but it’s rather short.

3. The Pony brand 22″ hard-tooth saw with three-bevel, Japanese-like teeth is a wonderfully useful stock breakdown tool and a great value at about $16. It crosscuts like a demon but does not rip very well. A 26″ rip tooth version would be a very useful bargain.

4. I still haven’t given up on advocating a higher bed angle for bevel-up bench planes. About 22.5° would be good. This is a large topic that has been addressed earlier on this site but here are some highlights. [I should add here that this is mostly applicable to bevel-up smoothing planes.]

Compared to a 22.5° bed, the 12° bed angle in Lee and Lie bevel-up models may have a slight advantage in reducing the downward deflection of the blade edge but I think this is made largely moot by the excellent support of the blade close to its edge that is provided by the bevel-up design.

The 12° bed creates problems with sharpening. For example, to get a 55° attack angle, the blade must be sharpened to a 42.5° secondary bevel. That makes it significantly more difficult to produce and retain a good edge.

Even if you don’t agree with my contention that such a blade creates a fatter wedge that is more difficult to drive through the wood, and that the only thing the woods “sees” is the attack angle, then why not use a 22.5° bed and make edge creation and retention easier?

5. To mark pins from tails, in some situations, I prefer to use a chip carving knife like this, modified to eliminate the secondary bevel. I learned this idea from Chris Becksvoort.

However, it is not easy to flatten both sides of the blade to meet at the edge in a single bevel because the angle gets quite small, making the edge fragile. It would be nice to have a manufactured version. The sides of a blade 5/16″ wide and 1/8″ thick at the back would meet in a single bevel at 25°.

6. I wish the pads on my earmuffs did not squeeze the temples of my glasses against my skull. It’s uncomfortable. And I hate earplugs.

7. When jointing and planing to get flat stock, the thickness of some boards seems to disappear faster than cash in my wallet. I don’t need a board stretcher, I need a board inflator.

Hope is a good thing.

One of the best ways to develop your design skills is to look thoughtfully at lots of furniture, including unfamiliar work. Books and collections that organize work in historical and stylistic context are especially helpful learning tools. Here are two books that are both worthwhile but differ greatly in approach.

Furniture by Judith Miller (Dorling Kindersley Publishing) covers furniture design from ancient Egypt to contemporary. [Note: At Amazon, the larger format 2005 American edition is now much more expensive than the slightly smaller format 2010 UK edition.]

Done in the beautiful and orderly style typical of DK Publishing, the more than 500 pages will supply you with plenty of browsing hours. It is organized primarily by time period, for example 1760-1800, then by country and style, for example late 18th century Scandinavian. I like best the several sections within each time period that are devoted to specific furniture types, which allow you to study, for example, tables in the Art Deco period of 1919-1940.

Even though anything I design and make is unlikely to directly emulate more than a few, if any, of the pieces in this book, there are lots of stimulating ideas, motifs to borrow, and much to learn just from studying a wide variety of good design.

That’s the good part of the book. Now for the bad and the ugly. It is painful enough just to look at much of the furniture in the “Postmodern and Contemporary – 1970 Onward” chapter, but it is exacerbated by reading the highbrow credibility given by the author to some of this crap.

There is no Maloof rocker or Krenov cabinet to found here, though we are informed that Castle, Maloof, and Frid “worked in a highly contrived Postmodern style.” Further, the author states, “Using a laborious, painstaking method to produce off-hand, jokey objects was self-consciously ironic.”

Administer relief to yourself from such nonsense by picking up Craft Furniture by Dennis Blankemeyer (Schiffer Publishing, 2003). The author does an outstanding job of placing this work in the context of our daily lives and, more broadly, in our spiritual lives. He also gives fitting tribute to craftsmanship.

After sections on Esherick, Krenov, Maloof, and Nakashima, he presents the work and background of 25 contemporary craftspeople. There is so much beautiful, honest woodwork here; I think readers are sure to find it inspirational.

I suspect this book has not gotten the attention that it deserves. It is available in only hardcover from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Resolving the different vantage points of these two authors is a matter for another day. I’d rather get back to the shop.

A good woodworker must know a lot about wood. Unlike glass, clay, and metal, wood is a product of biology and so, wonderfully, comes to us in incredible variety. No project is likely to be successful unless the properties of the species and even the particular boards at hand are taken into account.

To that end, here is a compendium of the best resources, in this writer’s view, for woodworkers to increase their practical knowledge of wood.

Top two books

An easy choice for the premier book is the venerable Understanding Wood by R. Bruce Hoadley. First published in 1980 and revised in 2000, this is the book every woodworker needs to understand wood anatomy, strength, dimensional changes related to moisture content, drying wood, and much more.

For information on specific species along with color photographs, plus a concise exposition of basic wood concepts, the newly published Wood! by Eric Meier is the best choice available. It has major entries for about 250 species plus about 100 more covered in tables and lists. This book rises above several other similar attempts in that it is truly directed at the hands-on woodworker.

Not to be forgotten

In the same vein but with greater depth are 22 incomparable articles written by the late Jon Arno for Fine Woodworking magazine. Covered are: ashes, basswood, beech, birches, catalpa, cherry (two articles), chestnut, hickory and pecan, ipe, mahogany, maples, oaks, orchard woods, pine, poplars, sassafras, sweetgum, sycamore, and walnut, plus articles on health risks associated with wood and wood identification. Go to the Fine Woodworking website and search Jon Arno. You can get full access to everything in the site (and download PDFs of articles) for reasonable fees.

Four more books

The Wood Handbook (sometimes titled in print as the Encyclopedia of Wood), published by the US Forest Products Laboratory, has a wealth of technical information on all wood matters. Best used as a reference, there is no reason not to have this book: it is available as a free download from the FPL site. It is also available in print.

With the Grain: A Craftsman’s Guide to Understanding Wood, by Christian Becksvoort, published in a low-key but appealing style by the Lost Art Press, is a very good, very readable option to get just about all the basic information in concise form from a great woodworker who really knows wood. Highly recommended.

Wood: Identification & Use, by Terry Porter, is a beautiful, very worthwhile collection of photos and information on more than 200 species with an additional 200 briefly listed. Though I find it more attractively produced than Wood!, it lacks the latter’s outstanding practical utility.

Getting the Most From Your Wood Buying Bucks, from American Woodworker, is less broad in scope but is included here for its excellent practical articles.

Online

Forest Products Laboratory’s Tech Sheets (see lower right of linked page) give detailed information on many domestic and exotic species.

The Wood Database, by the author of Wood!, should be bookmarked by all woodworkers. Go there and you’ll see what I mean; it’s invaluable.

For true-to-life photos of wood, numbering approximately one zillion, Hobbit House has no equal. This is a great reference to see the different looks within a single species of wood.

A series of monographs on domestic species by Purdue University professor Daniel L. Cassens is available as free downloads (page down the linked page to the species list). These articles also have the flavor of being written by a guy with sawdust in his pockets.

Two more things

With all this knowledge of wood, one of the most useful ways to put it to use in the shop is with Lee Valley’s Wood Movement Reference Guide. This handy wheel chart allows you to easily compute wood movement for different species through a specified range of humidity. Well worth the $9.95, I use it all the time.

When you’re looking for wood (and when are you not, if you love the stuff like I do), the Wood Finder site can widen your world of sources.

Some much wood, so little time . . .

Here is a palpable way to look at power tool safety.

This occurred to me as I was holding in my hand the DeWalt DWP611 compact router. It is so easy to wield this little machine with one hand – it’s easier to grip than a youth-size football – that I sensed a bit of over-confidence sneaking in as I was preparing to put it to the wood.

This little beast, however, has a tail that plugs into an electrical outlet, so it can generate 1.25 HP. Question: are you more powerful than a horse?

Moving over to the table saw, here’s another question. The tip speed of a 10″ blade at 3450 RPM is 103 MPH. Think about kickback. Are you faster than that?

There is no way the woodworker is strong or fast enough to beat an out-of-control power tool. Therefore, the operation to be performed must be fully controlled and fully predictable. There is no room for doubt or hoping. You must know what is going to happen before it happens.

It is difficult to over-emphasize: we ultimately must control our power tools with our brains. Knowledge, proper setup, patience, and alertness are absolute requirements.

Without them, we’re just not good enough.

Eric Meier, the creator of the superb online resource, The Wood Database, has a produced a new, wonderfully useful book for woodworkers: Wood!, subtitled “identifying and using hundreds of woods worldwide.”

If you are not already familiar with the Wood Database, I urge you to visit the site and bookmark it because you will return often, as I do. In fact, you may find it hard to leave this magnificent collection of practical information and data on hundreds of species of wood accompanied by high quality images of each.

It is not an armchair xylophile’s catalog but rather a go-to resource for people who not only love wood but also love cutting it into pieces and making stuff from it. In addition to the species information, there are many insightful articles that reflect Eric’s deep, hands-on understanding of wood.

Now to the book. Eric’s goal was to make a book that would serve the real needs of woodworkers. He has succeeded impressively. In its highly accessible combination of wood science with practical, reliable information and images for hundreds of wood species that is directly usable by woodworkers, I believe this book is unique.

The first five chapters concisely cover wood basics, wood and moisture, identifying wood, and softwood and hardwood anatomy. Whether as new material or for review and reference, this is core information that will make you a better woodworker. It is presented clearly and intelligently.

The heart of the book is information, data, and images of about 250 wood species, designed to help woodworkers knowledgeably work wood. Among the data included are hardness, strength, and shrinkage properties. The consistently derived density values are the most useful I have seen. Having worked more than 50 of the species listed, I can attest to the remarkable veracity of the author’s comments on the workability of these species.

There are also helpful tables on groups of similar woods, such the oaks, maples, and ashes. The species are wisely listed alphabetically by genus but the index effectively cross-references common names. As minor criticisms, many of the photos are a bit dark to my eye though they still give a good sense of the real appearance of the woods. The book is attractive and very easy to navigate but I would differ on some of the layout aesthetics.

Wood!, the book, is very similar to the Wood Database website, so you might wonder if it’s worth buying. Yes! It is very much worth it, in my opinion. You can joyfully browse the book as you conjure your next project in a way that roaming a website cannot match. Moreover, the book is just an outright joy that you’ll have trouble putting down. And I really like the dedication page.

[Disclaimer: This review is unsolicited and uncompensated, nor have I played any role in the production of the book or website.]

In building furniture, woodworkers wonder if the joints will be strong enough to withstand the many years of rigors to which they will be subjected.

As we parse the elements of joint design, figuring if a tenon is long enough, dovetails deep enough, and so forth, we rely upon hundreds of years of cumulative experience in furniture design and observation of how pieces have fared over the years. We also can benefit from some of the joint testing done by the magazines, data from the Forest Products Laboratory, and of course, a healthy dose of intuition.

However, there is a shortcoming in viewing joint design too narrowly.

Assuming competent joinery skills, answers to structural strength questions are more likely to come from broadening one’s view beyond the joint under consideration and looking at the whole structure of the piece. This will make the requirements for a particular joint more evident.

Here we must ask:

• What is going on in the overall design of the piece that will transfer stress to that joint, and on the other hand, help it to resist stress?
• How will normal use, and perhaps abuse, stress the joint?

For example, this table has fairly narrow legs that allow only shallow mortise and tenon joints. Force applied to the lower part of a leg produces considerable moment at the joints. Racking in the horizontal plane could also be a problem.

However, looking beyond the leg joints shows they have plenty of help. The two cross stretchers are joined to the aprons with sliding dovetails, and there is a corner block behind each pair of leg joints.

As another example, in a bookcase, the joints attaching the horizontal to the vertical members are subject to huge racking forces. Yet, a thin plywood back fastened to the back changes everything.

The point is that when designing furniture and wondering if a particular joint will be strong enough, let the big picture inform your engineering decisions.

Woodworking is such a small matter.
We take little pieces
Of what robes mountains and valleys
Then reconnect them in ways so naive.

Yet in making things
The joy of choosing is large.
Maple or cherry?
More or less curved?

Not only the trees
And us
But also from God,
Is this gift of freedom.

My new, new (ugh) favorite fine finishing stone, the Suehiro Gokumyo, is a real thoroughbred. Nominally 20,000 grit/0.5 µ with a tight distribution of particle size, it can produce magnificently sharp, clean edges.

This is a very hard stone in all respects. A hard, tough binder makes it extremely wear resistant, so it retains a flat surface very well and requires little maintenance. It is virtually non-porous, so no soaking is required – just splash and go.

When first using the Gokumyo, do not expect the genial feel of a Chosera 10K or a soft waterstone. The hard feel of this stone under the steel is initially formidable. However, once you tune in to just how awesomely fast and smooth it is removing steel and adjust your sense of feedback, it becomes an efficient joy to use. Nonetheless, to get the most out of it, you do need good sharpening skills.

The Gukomyo comes with a 1K/3K nagura but I prefer my shop-made 1200-grit diamond nagura to quickly enhance feel and performance. I have not encountered the grabbing or stiction that many of the Shapton stones tend to produce, and one does not need to baby this stone like the Chosera 10K.

Having worked with this stone for several months now, it produces great edges in all the main steels in my shop – ­A-2, O-1, and Japanese blue and white. I transition from the 8000/3µ DMT Dia-Sharp diamond stone, used with a light touch, to the 20K Gokumyo. True, that is a sizable leap but it works, and it minimizes the number of stones and speeds the process.

The Gukomyo 20K is discussed fairly widely on the internet among straight razor aficionados but has not received much attention from woodworkers. The best and least expensive source for Suehiro Gukomyo finishing stones is Tools From Japan, which is actually based in Japan. Proprietor Stu Tierney is tremendously knowledgeable and generously helpful. [This review is unsolicited and uncompensated.] Yes, this is an expensive connoisseur’s stone but at 20mm thick and so wear resistant, it should last an extremely long time.

With this and the transition to diamond stones, the revolving door of sharpening stones in my shop seems to have thankfully reached an end.

By the way, anyone want to buy some used Shapton glass stones or other sharpening gear at a nice price? (Please send me an mail.)