Wood comes from trees, simple enough, but sometimes the trees or logs have a surprising history or the wood has been processed to dramatically alter its properties. Surfing the internet for wood sources is much more fun than cruising the TV menu, so here’s a resource list that I hope you’ll find interesting and perhaps will inspire a new project. Following the list are several resources for general information about wood. Enjoy!

Ancientwood, Ltd unearths 50,000 year old, enormous kauri logs in New Zealand, then processes them into workable honey-colored lumber with an exotic, opalescent appearance. Greener Logs retrieves sunken exotic tropical timber from waters in Central America and sells this old-growth lumber, including big-leaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) via Greener Lumber, located in Missouri.

Blue Moon Exotic Wood in Ithaca, New York operates an exotic woods plantation in Palau in the South Pacific where they sustainably harvest Cuban mahogany (Swietenia mahogani). I once got my hands on a small chunk of this species and still recall its remarkable working properties, sometimes described as like slicing cold butter. It is, of course, expensive, but I don’t think I can much longer resist giving this stuff a try when the right project comes around. Another source for Cuban mahogany, among other species, is Urban Forest Recycling who salvages removed trees in the Florida Keys.

Northwest Timber in Oregon buys and mills salvaged logs, notably my favorites Claro walnut and Western big-leaf maple. I really think Lewis gets his wood from heaven and you might agree after perusing his online store!

You can buy directly online from the above dealers and from Pure Timber (below).

Normal wood is subjected to special processing by the following companies to produce amazing new possibilities for the woodworker. Pure Timber in Washington puts solid wood of many species through an amazing proprietary process that yields wood so flexible it can be tied into a knot. The shape stabilizes after it dries. You can buy lumber ready to bend to your imagination. Seasonwood in Canada offers a special heat treatment which produces a controlled darkening of any species of wood. The process also makes the wood much more stable. WoodSure in Oregon infuses wood with acrylic resin to produce dimensionally stable, super-durable wood. With the addition of dyes, they can also produce dramatic figure effects.

To explore innovative materials that you might want to incorporate into your projects, take a look at the Inventables website, especially the “wood” section. You can order samples of the materials from them.

For general information about wood and specific species:

• Forest Products Laboratory’s Wood Handbook, a pdf download of the whole 508 page book.
• FPL’s Tech Sheets give extensive information on many species. Look on the right side of the page under “Tech Sheets.”
• The Wood Database has lots of information on many species of wood. 
• Same for the Purdue Cooperative Extension – go to “Hardwood Lumber and Veneer Species” on the drop-down list.
• Hobbit House has a zillion pictures of lots of species.
• Woodfinder is a search engine for where to buy specific woods and wood products.
• An article by John English in Woodshop News: “Is it an endangered species and who’s making the call?”

Myth: Woodworking is easy. If you simply follow [whatever clever procedure], you can do it quickly and it will come out perfect every time.

Reality: As with doing anything well, woodworking takes a lot of skill, few procedures go lickety-split, and there is a degree of uncertainty in making any piece.

Where is this myth promulgated? Look at several issues of most woodworking magazines: “made easy,” “perfect every time,” “quick, fast,” and similar catch lines are rampant. TV and, of course, ads also seem to thrive on this approach. Perhaps this sells but it must discourage many woodworkers who find a different reality when they get into the shop.

Also, I wonder why, in conversation with fellow woodworkers, I more often hear how a particular technique is so easy and “no problem,” than about the likely reality of uncertainty, trials, and mistakes that preceded such ease. I guess this is understandable since most people like to talk about their successes more than their failures. I’m sure I’m guilty of this here in the blog.

High quality woodworking requires artistry, imagination, engineering, knowledge, physical coordination, and patience. Building a piece involves many subtractive processes and without constant awareness, errors are prone to accumulate. Different woods require alterations in technique and often hold surprises. So, maybe it’s just me, but I think woodworking is not easy.

As for “quick,” sure, to get things done and to make money, work in any field has to move along efficiently. However, speed comes only after study and experience; without those, quick usually means poor results.

Perfect every time? Even if one employs highly systematic procedures, even with machinery, there is a host of gremlins poised to thwart perfection in woodworking. Among these is variability in the wood itself, tool sharpness, and tool calibration. Excellence certainly is an achievable goal, but perfection is not a realistic expectation to hold out to students of woodworking – and we’re all students.

I learn more from the hype-free literature and discussions that are out there, where I can appreciate the difficulties as well as the successes of woodworking. That’s the real stuff that makes for happy woodworking.

Myth: a well-tuned handplane is the best choice for final wood surfacing prior to applying the finish

Reality: Sometimes yes, but it depends.

Disclaimer: Because I am the writer, “reality” is through my eyes. Yours may differ. I recognize an element of subjectivity in issues such as this. Nonetheless, the “myth – reality” approach has a nice jolt to it, and this blog is about woodworking, not metaphysics. (I work wood. Therefore, I am?)

The method to produce the most desirable surface on the wood prior to finishing depends on the wood, the finish that will be applied, and the physical circumstances of the piece.

This is best demonstrated by a set of examples.

A dense, hard, small-pore wood such as bubinga, with either an oil or a film finish such as varnish, will look every bit as good with fine hand sanding as with the most careful planing. A flat surface could be completed with planing or finished off with sanding, while rasps, scrapers and sandpaper could be used for a curvy leg. All will look equally good when finished.

On the other hand, Port Orford cedar looks resplendent directly from a sharp smoothing plane, with a clarity that sanding cannot match. I like this beautifully fragrant wood without any finish.

What about curly big-leaf maple, one of my favorites? A well-tuned smoothing plane with a high cutting angle can handle it but I feel that sanding, finishing by hand with 320 or 400 grit, produces an equally beautiful appearance when the piece is finished with gel varnish, my preference for big-leaf. I use whichever method is easier for the circumstances.

Curly cherry is a difficult one. After experimenting with various samples, I am convinced that sanding muddies the figure, which looks inferior to the clarity produced by planing, and this effect persists even with a thin film finish such as padded shellac or wipe-on varnish. The same is generally true, though less so, for curly pearwood with a thin water-base acrylic finish.

Mahogany? I find that hand sanding and planing yield surfaces that look the same under shellac or varnish. This wood is so often rowey that I usually find it easier to complete the surface preparation with sandpaper. Oaks? Both methods seem to work equally well in most cases. Claro walnut? It depends on the figure and the choice of finish but I plane when I can since it does seem to preserve clarity when an oil finish is used.

There are other considerations, such as the peaceful, dust-free experience of planing. Planing is usually faster than sanding, maintains the trueness of a surface more reliably, and usually produces crisper edges. On the other hand, edge tools are often impractical for contoured work, yet we can use rasps, scrapers, and sandpaper to sensitively produce the desired shapes.

The point is that it depends! In making choices for surfacing, the woodworker has to consider the wood, the intended finish, and the circumstances of the piece, and may need to do some experimenting. You must be observant and make choices based on your concept of the piece, not on purist generalizations. Trust your perceptiveness and judgement, more than what anyone, including me, tells you.

Veritas Tools, the manufacturing arm of Lee Valley, makes excellent tools, delivers outstanding customer service, and has added numerous innovative products to the woodworking world. However, the totes (rear handles) on their planes are another matter. Maybe some woodworkers like them, but I, like many others, can only wonder, “What were they thinking?” I feel that the Veritas tote is graceless and unfriendly to the hand, especially for a long session of planing.

After experimenting with options to accommodate Veritas’ two-bolt mounting system, which I wrote about here, I decided it was better to stick to furniture and leave this job to an expert, especially after getting in touch with Bill Rittner, who already was producing handles for vintage Stanley planes. I came to realize that making excellent plane handles is harder than it first seems.

Bill and I corresponded for months as I tested his prototypes and gave feedback while Bill sweated every nuance of a comfortable and functional tote and knob for these planes. His handles have subtle shaping that really matters to a craftsman. Furthermore, he came up with a simple, effective solution for the Veritas mounting system that permits a more curvy, friendly handle than the OEM.

Bill’s toolmaking skill and insight was evident throughout the development process, just as it is in the final product. Wow! The handles feel great right away and just as superb after a long session of planing. They install with zero fuss and lock down as snug and solid as you could want. And don’t they look great?! I’ve got them on my Veritas bevel-up smoother, low-angle jack, and large scraping plane. Even the finish is just right – silky smooth but not slippery or glossy.

Ahh, relief at last. Now I enjoy my Veritas planes without misgivings. What else can I say? Dump those OEM clunkers but don’t go it alone. Contact Bill at rbent.ct@gmail.com and have him make a set for you. I think you will be very pleased.

[As usual, this review is unsolicited and unpaid.]

Addendum 2/3/2012: Bill’s great plane handles are available from his Hardware City Tools website

For sawing dovetails, as well as various other tasks, this vise raises the work piece to a more comfortable height than does the typical bench front vise. It was first described by Joseph Moxon, the seventeenth century author of The Art of Joinery. Credit for its revival and refinement goes to Chris Schwarz, editor of Popular Woodworking, who published a modern adaptation of Moxon’s text along with extensive new analysis. Chris published plans for a vise in the December 2010 PW. Stephen Shepherd’s insights and the variations produced by web authors such as Derek Cohen have added to our shared knowledge. What a wonderful example of the vibrancy of current woodworking!

That said, I’ll toss in my two cents: I built my version of the vise and would like to share it with readers.

I used an 8/4 cherry board that had been hanging around the shop far too long and $22 of hardware available locally. The vise jaws are 1 3/4″ thick, 6″ high, and 19 1/4″ wide, with a clamping capacity of 14 1/8″ between the bolts. The ½” diameter 8″ carriage bolts are set in functionally shaped handles. Each is secured with a cross pin (finishing nail) passing through a hole drilled in the shaft of the bolt. The handle shape facilitates a one finger spin of the lightly waxed bolt as well as a solid grip to sock the jaws tight. Clamping thickness capacity is at least 2 ½”.

In the front jaw, for smooth operation and to protect the wood, each bolt is supported in a ½” ID, 3/4″ OD, 1 1/8″ long oiled bronze bushing which sits in a stepped hole. To prevent erosion of the bushing, the first 1 1/2″ of the bolt threads is filled with epoxy and the sharp edges of the threads were eased with a file. A 1/4″ thick, ½” ID, 1 5/8″ OD nylon washer, sanded flat, placed between the handle and the front jaw, protects the wood.

To receive the bolt in the rear jaw, a 2″ long coupling nut was hacksawed to about 1 3/16″ and set from the back side into a stepped hole chiseled to a matching hexagon. This gives more support than a regular hex nut. A wood screw that meets it from the side prevents any chance of the nut twisting in its housing.

The rear cleat, about 1 3/4″ square in section, extends to each side 2 1/4″ beyond the jaws and allows for convenient clamping to the bench. Thanks to Derek Cohen for this idea. I chamfered the edges and finished the wood with one coat of oil-varnish.

One more detail. Quartersawn wood would have been ideal but I used flatsawn wood because that is all I had available in this thickness. It will inevitably cup and reverse through the seasons. I wanted to avoid a vise that in some seasons would grip the wood only at the central part of the jaw faces and thus make the work piece prone to slipping. I arranged the growth rings as shown in the first photo below and not like the photo beneath it.

Here’s why. I built the vise during the approximate midrange of the yearly humidity cycle in my shop. I left the inner surface of each jaw very slightly concave across its width. As the driest months come along, the inner surface of the front jaw will become more concave while the mating surface of the rear jaw will become flat, then slightly convex. Thus, the grip will be maintained at the limits of the width of the jaws. As the humid months come along, the rear jaw’s inner surface will become more concave (than now) while that of the front jaw will become flat, then slightly convex, again maintaining a good grip of the work piece. Too punctilious you say? Well, the pieces were going to be given some arrangement and I preferred giving it some thought rather than just guessing, and this is one simple solution.

The vise now has had test runs in the shop and I like it a lot. It feels more ergonomic for use with a Western dovetail saw than with a Japanese saw due to differences in the handle angles, but it is good for both.

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.