The nasty waterfall bubinga in the top photo, above, shows the clean, tearout-free surface produced by the Shelix, while the lower photo shows ugly tearout, visible toward the far edge of the board, from a conventional cutterhead. This is the great advantage of the Shelix for the work I do.

But how does the scalloped surface – see the previous post – left by the Shelix fare in the building process?

First, assessing this surface for flat and square is not a problem. True, if you hold a straightedge across the wood and back light it, you can see tiny gaps created by the valleys of the scallops. However, the straightedge (or square, or winding stick) sits on the peaks of the scallops and permits an adequately accurate evaluation.

For marking out, I wondered if lines would look squiggly. Again, no problem. I marked with a fine pencil point across and along the grain, laid out dovetails, and knifed lines across the grain (and made a “V” shoulder on one of them). See below: the markout looks fine to me and would be easy to follow with a saw or to chop against.

How about glue lines? Just as with a conventional cutterhead, I would not use a Shelix surface for edge gluing. (Anyway, the Shelix is on my planer, not the jointer.) I always hand plane the machined surface to increase accuracy and the quality of the glue surface. No machine can remove a thousandth of an inch in a controlled manner and leave behind a pristine, unbattered surface the way a hand plane can.

However, for bent laminations I want to glue directly from the machined surface and I do not own a thickness sander. I have not tried this yet with the Shelix but I think urea formaldehyde glue such as Unibond 800 or URAC 185, which I use for laminating, would easily fill the tiny voids created by the scallops. These are barely noticeable in the photo directly below which shows the meeting of two crossgrain Shelix surfaces. For comparison, the photo below that shows the meeting of two handplaned surfaces.

Maybe there will be times when I don’t want that scalloped surface but I doubt it will be often, especially as I get more used to the Shelix. I still have my Inca 10″ jointer-planer but will probably use it only as a jointer for the vast majority of work.

Well, when it comes time to clean up the Shelix-machined surface, how goes it? Wonderfully! This is an unexpected advantage of the Shelix. When hand planing, the peaks of the scallops register the sole of the plane and stringy shavings are first created. The shavings widen as the valleys are approached and finally planed away. So, for figured species it is actually easier to avoid tearout when handplaning (or scraping) the Shelix surface compared to a conventionally machined surface. Furthermore, the gradual removal of the peaks makes it easy to evenly plane the width and length of a board because the shavings indicate your incremental progress and tell you when you are done. It is somewhat like cleaning up a toothed plane surface.

The shavings first look like this:

This photo shows, from right to left, the progression of shavings:

With all this in mind, I think for most projects, I will be able to hand plane away the scalloped surface, or partially clean it up, at the same point in building that I would for a conventional machined surface, and when I do clean it up, it will go very well. For example, to dovetail a box, I would clean up the inside surfaces, mark and cut the dovetails, glue up, then plane the outside surfaces.

While it truly takes a long time and varied circumstances to fully assess the value of a tool, I think I’m on board with this thing. I’m especially more confident dealing with figured woods.

[This review is uncompensated and I have no relationship with Byrd Tool.]

The Shelix employs three helical rows of 11 carbide cutters, arranged so that each cutter’s path is partially overlapped by other cutters. The edge of each cutter is slightly cambered (actual width of the cutter pictured above is about 5/8″) and meets the wood at an angle to the axis of the cutterhead (see below) for a shearing cut, much like skewing a handplane. Each cutter can be rotated three times to use a fresh edge when, after a long time, one has dulled. This is very different from 13 inches of blade meeting the wood all at once.

So, how does the Shelix perform? In short, beautifully. However, it produces important differences in the wood surface compared to a standard cutterhead.

The first thing I tested was the consistency of thicknessing across the width of the bed. I passed two 3/4″ wide wood strips simultaneously through the planer at each side of the bed. They came out less than 0.001″ different from each other in thickness. Wow.

The planer seems to vibrate slightly more with the Shelix but this does not seem to get translated to the bed or the wood. Noise is reduced – still loud enough for hearing protection, but not the scream produced with the OEM blades. Planing wide stock demonstrated that the Shelix gives the DW735 significantly more functional power. Dust collection improved from excellent to great, with fewer shavings sticking to the rubber rollers.

I fed this beast some nasty woods, including waterfall bubinga, curly and quilted maple, lacewood, rowed mahogany, and brittle curly pear. I took passes that I expected to be too deep and fed some wood in the wrong grain direction. The results: no tearout! The only exception was very slight on the lacewood (which hates machine blade surfacing) but much less than with the OEM blades. It laughed at the docile, straight-grained cherry in the photo below.

So, where’s the “but . . . ?” Look at the photo below, showing the same cherry board as above, but in a low, raking light. Notice the scalloped rows produced by the cambered cutters. The depth of the scallops is about 0.002″. This is different from what we’re used to with machined surfaces.

I thought at first that the scalloped surface would be a disadvantage. I wondered if referencing off such a surface would be compromised. Obviously, any machined surface is not the final one for furniture, but I wondered how this surface would clean up, and at what point in a project I would start to do so. More intriguing, could the scalloped surface have any advantages? All of these questions must be addressed to be able to integrate this new tool into the process of a woodworking project.

Next: answers to the above.

The Byrd Tool website has outstanding illustrated step-by-step instructions for the DW735. The photo above shows the parts laid out after the OEM cutterhead was removed. It is without its blades just behind the Shelix in the photo above.

Referring to those instructions, here are a few helpful tips:

• Step 4. The cutterhead lock cannot be reinstalled with the Shelix which does not have a flat on its shaft.
• Step 10. Also remove the rocker tensioning arm (it is removed in the second photo in Step 11).
• Step 11. It is difficult to remove and reinstall the nut on the end of the head. It seems to be about 22mm  is a 23 mm hex (per report from a reader, see comments) for which I do not have a socket head. I used a locking pliers on the nut and gripped the pulley with grip gloves.
• Steps 13 and 15. You need a snap ring tool for this installation. The small external snap rings in step 15 are delicate.
• Step 14. There are 3 screws on that cover, not 4.
• Step 22. Removing the helical gear from the OEM cutterhead is very difficult. The ridiculously tiny hexhead is very hard to grip, and it quickly gets rounded. Locking pliers finally worked. The same goes for reinstalling the helical gear on the Shelix. In order to tighten it, I needed a helper with heavy gloves to grasp the cutterhead which I wrapped in layers of cloth. Yes, it is standard right-hand thread, in case, like me, you have doubts when trying to remove it from the DW head.
• Step 24. The supplied plastic cover sheet helps a lot but cut it a few inches narrower.
• Step 25. The bearings fit VERY tightly in their housings. Lots of pounding with a dead blow hammer is necessary to seat them.

Next: the Shelix design and its performance in the shop.

I have had my eye on carbide segmented cutterheads for a while. After studying the options and particularly after reading Glen Huey’s excellent article in the February 2011 Popular Woodworking, I decided to get the Byrd Shelix cutterhead for my DeWalt DW735 planer.

Most of my pieces use highly figured woods. I had been having trouble getting good surfaces from the planer on some of these difficult gems of nature, despite using appropriate technique. I don’t expect a machine planer to yield a finished surface, of course, but tearout surprises can require corrective handwork sufficient to change dimensions and relationships. Parts meant to match and reference surfaces were disturbed; there was too much backtracking and unpredictability. This affected my work flow and was frustrating.

In considering a segmented cutterhead, I first had to decide if the DeWalt DW735 was a good enough machine in which to invest. After years of use, its design, quality, and reliability are proven. So, primarily for the joy of using my beloved figured woods, I took the plunge: $447 for a Byrd Tool Shelix – “she” for shear, and “helix”. (Sounds like a part to soup up a motorcycle or something.)

Below is the Shelix in all its medieval-looking glory. Thankfully, it comes with the bearings attached. 

In future posts, I will discuss the basic design and performance of the Shelix, and how this tool is integrated into the work flow of a project. The latter issue is the most important one and required the most thought to make this a sensible investment.

The post immediately following this one lists tips for installing the cutterhead.

The utility of a tape measure is mostly early in the building process, later steadily diminishing as most parts are cut in relationship to other parts or structures that are already in the project rather than to absolute dimensions. In general, we only measure when we have to. It is usually safer and more accurate to relate one part directly to another. This allows the effect of small absolute inaccuracies to cancel.

Nonetheless, when you are choosing boards at the wood dealer, breaking down stock to approximate sizes, and dimensioning a project’s primary structural parts, such as the length of a table leg, the tape measure is on duty. So let’s take a look at this humble tool.

In choosing a typical cupped-blade tape, I think for most furniture makers, an 8 or 10-foot tape with a ½” wide blade is too short and too floppy. It certainly will not do the job when sorting boards at the wood yard. On the other hand, a 25-foot tape with a 1″ wide blade is fine for that but seems too big in the shop where the deeply cupped blade and heavy case are cumbersome for marking out. A 12-foot tape with a 3/4″ blade is a good compromise. It has enough overall length, adequate stand-out stiffness, and is fairly convenient to mark from – the blade can be rocked so the edge meets the wood to eliminate parallax when marking. Look for a tape with neat, fine increment lines. I’m happy with my Ace Hardware model, pictured above.

Most tapes read left to right – hook it at your left, pull out the tape toward your right and the numbers are facing correctly toward you. Tapes that read right to left are marketed to be more convenient for right-handers, like me. The idea is that you pull the tape toward your left with your left hand, the numbers are facing you correctly, and your right hand makes the mark. I find the standard left-to-right tape is just fine since the tape is used in many different ways and it does not bother me to read it upside down sometimes.

The zero point accuracy of the hook varies from tape to tape so check it against a quality steel rule. Assuming the incrementation is accurate (a dubious proposition), if the tape is reading short, the hook can be shimmed with a bit of tape on its inside face. If it is reading long, you can try to file the inside face but that’s difficult. The more practical way to manage layout is to simply use one tape for all the related parts of a project. The tiny absolute errors almost never matter and the consistency will make all be fine.

When the marking reference is on a surface, meaning that the tape is not hooked over the end of a board nor is the end butted against something, you’ve got to start the measurement somewhere on the tape and the using the end is awkward at best. Let’s say you want to measure and mark 32 ½” starting from a line on the wood. Do NOT place the 1″ mark at the reference line thinking that, sure, you’ll remember to mark at 33 ½”, because you will NOT. Well, at least I will not. Instead, I use the 10″ mark on the tape for zero and mark at 42 ½”. True, I could make a mistake and be 10″ off, but that really does not happen because that error would be visually obvious. Give it a try; it works reliably for me.

Also consider the flat tapes from Fast Cap. While this is not a tape for the wood yard because it has no stand out stiffness at all, it has advantages in the shop because it lays flat on the work and effortlessly eliminates parallax. I have the 16-foot “Standard Story Pole Flatback” model, pictured above, which has a clear zone on the bottom of the tape which is easy to mark with a pencil and is erasable. In addition, this is an overall well-made tool with other convenient features. Again, though, don’t mix tapes for related parts of a project; choose one and stay with it.

This is really a matter of opinion and personal work habits, but I would like to make a case for the humble workbench tool well. The bench that I have used for more than 25 years has one and I would feel awkward working without it. Here’s why.

The tool well is a place for tools, small parts, and other sundry items not in immediate use while working at the bench. When placed there, the items are protected from bumps and dings because they lie below the level of the work surface. Think about vigorously jack planing a board, pushing the plane in various directions, and the possibility of the toe of the plane crashing a square, gauge, or straightedge. Ouch. Working a curve with a rasp, sawing joints, and paring with a chisel are other examples.

Of course, the tool in hand may also be damaged from such collisions.

Without a tool well, it will actually take up more space to place the unused tools on the work surface at a safe distance to create sufficient clearance from the work at hand to avoid feeling inhibited. Thus, the tool well saves, not wastes, space.

The work on the bench surface is likewise protected from the items in the well, such as chisels. Wood parts are rotated, pushed, and otherwise manipulated on the work surface and you want to avoid unintended meetings with tools.

The outer edge of a tool well at the end of the width of a bench should be flush with the work surface. Thus, for most purposes, the bench width effectively includes the width of the tool well. The same is true of a well in the middle of the bench width. The inside of the well on my bench is 5 1/4″ wide and 2 3/8″ deep.

Of course there are some disadvantages to the tool well. Tool wells at the end of the bench width prevent most clamping in that area. Also, there is less continuous flat area on the bench. (Though Bob Lang has a clever solution to this in a bench he designed and is detailed in Popular Woodworking.)

The disadvantage that seems to be stated most often, that the tool well collects dust and debris, is not a disadvantage at all. Yes this does happen, but I would rather the debris, such as chips from chopping joints that didn’t get swept to the floor, be out of the way in the well than sit on the work surface. Anyway, it’s no big deal to sweep out the well since there is a handy ramp at one or both ends.

So, for woodworkers who are buying, building, or upgrading their workbench, these are some considerations to keep in mind and which I hope will be helpful. There are many bench designs and many excellent sources to study. Decisions are ultimately personal, so go with what seems right for you and enjoy every minute at the bench.

Here are more second thoughts regarding previous posts. The updates are based on additional experience, news, modifications, and ideas relating to these tools.

The Domino Effect, June 12, 2009. It takes time for woodworkers to develop faith in new forms of joinery, as in new glues and finishes. We would like to have a crystal ball to see how they perform a few generations into the life of a piece. To ease my lingering doubts, I assembled a few test joints with the Domino and annihilated them with a 3-pound drill hammer. The wood failed before the joints. A very light sanding of the surface of the domino tenons to improve wetting seems like good insurance.

I’ve used Domino joints in high-end pieces but still don’t think they will ever replace traditional mortise and tenon joinery. It would be helpful if the system could make the mortises at least 1/4 inch deeper than the current maximum of 28 mm (nominal; actual is 29 mm) and use accordingly longer tenons. The machine can also be used as a handy small mortiser even without using dominos.

It would be interesting to hear of readers’ experiences with Domino joints.

Lie-Nielsen Convex Sole Plane, September 11, 2010. Finger grips filed into the sides of the plane have proven helpful. In general, I almost feel that a tool isn’t really part of my repertoire until I’ve done something to personalize it.

8 Simple Shop Tips and Conveniences, February 15, 2010. The Ni-MH batteries in the Panasonic drill-light set have finally died after a long, productive life. I replaced the set with the Makita LCT 300W 18-volt drill-impact driver-light set which uses Li-ion batteries. Wow – lots lighter, faster and longer-lasting charge, and what a buy. The impact driver is more for DIY than furniture making but it’s a serious bad boy with 1280 inch-pounds of torque.

Minimax E-16 Bandsaw, May 18, 2009. It appears from the Minimax website that this model is no longer available from them. The E-16 remains a good fit for my shop because it covers just about all my needs while being lighter and more maneuverable than the more popular MM-16. Nevertheless, I feel as strongly as ever that a quality bandsaw will expand most woodworkers’ range of work as few other tools can and more than any other machine. Bandsaws do not take up much space and can be made mobile. I suggest a steel frame saw with at least 12 inches of resaw height.

How Much Camber Should Be in Plane Irons?, May 21, 2009. Having received a few questions on this, nope, I still won’t say how much. IT DEPENDS. And don’t bother measuring it. In addition to the plane’s function (smoothing, jack, etc.) and the bevel up or down factors, other issues include: is the plane skewed in use (which makes the camber’s “sag” have a shorter span), how sharp is the blade, how hard is the wood, and how is the cap iron adjusted? Also, the amount of downward deflection of the blade’s edge will be altered by most of these factors which will, in turn, affect the functional effect of the camber.

The key is to monitor the feedback from the blade’s performance and make adjustments at the next sharpening session. Usually, camber is overdone. Fortunately, this is easy to correct, since most of the dullness is at the crown of the camber where it is readily honed away.

An Inexpensive Saw that Does Its Job Well, May 30, 2010. This has been a great workhorse in the shop. I wonder if it could be manufactured with a taper-ground plate for a little higher price. That, and a little better handle geometry would make it even better.

There’s always more to learn!

Here are some updates to previous posts, mostly regarding tools.

Since the original posts appeared, I’ve had the time to accumulate experience with additional tools, incorporate modifications to tools, or have additional ideas about their function.

Rust Busters, January 15, 2009, discussed helpful rust prevention products. Shortly thereafter, I installed Zerust drawer liners in my tool cabinet drawers. These look and feel like non-slip router mats but contain corrosion inhibitors which work invisibly and odorlessly. The gripping effect of the mat prevents tools from sliding, bumping, and rattling when the drawer is opened and closed. A 1 x 6-foot sheet costs $8.95 and protects up to 5 years according to the package label, 2 years according to the website. A definite winner.

Dovetail Chisels, September 28, 2008. Opinions vary because there is more than one good way to do almost everything in woodworking, but I still find it helpful to have a set of narrow chisels with side relief to clear the waste between tails. My Japanese chisels for this purpose are more than 20 years old. Bob Zajicek of Czeck Edge Tools has addressed this issue by producing a chisel design with side bevels that directly meet the back at a 70̊ angle, and have a one degree taper along the length to further reduce binding. I have not tried these but it looks like an excellent design and they are doubtless as meticulously crafted as the other products by Bob that I have tried.

Other options to consider are the Ashley Isles round back dovetail chisels sold by Tools for Working Wood.

More Workbench Upgrades – Pups, Anchors, and Stops, December 2 and 6, 2009. The longer I used these helpful additions to my workbench, the more it became apparent that the Veritas Wonder Pups would provide even greater versatility to the wood-holding repertoire. I put thin PSA cork on the clamping faces. They are now part of the team and are clear winners. 

Ditto for the Gramercy holdfast, and the bench already has several of the required 3/4″ holes. This tool is as good as it gets in combining simplicity and effectiveness. I think a piece of modern abstract sculpture can now be held securely on my workbench.

Bandsaw, Hand Tool With a Motor, June 15, 2010. In response to a reader’s question, I noted that I do my bandsaw work with just two blades by Suffolk Machinery, a 3/4″ wide, 2/3 tpi variable pitch blade for resawing and other straight cuts, and a 3/8″ wide, 6 tpi blade (see the Comments section of the post for more details.) I still think they are superb blades. Lately, I have been using the SuperCut’s Premium Gold ½” wide, 3 tpi blade which has bone-chillingly sharp carbide-impregnated teeth. I was skeptical that the ½” width would be sufficiently stiff for resawing. I still need more experience with the blade, but so far, so good.

The handy benefit is that I can also cut my usual shallow, sweeping curves with this ½” blade which comes with the back smoothly rounded. This usually saves me from one of the most unpleasant jobs in the shop: changing bandsaw blades.

More “second thoughts” to come in a future post. I’m always learning more about this craft and enjoy doing so. I hope this information is helpful to you for your woodworking.