friends insisting I start using power tools

[Dusty]

I have to be honest and say that I will use machinery etc when ever possible , I left school and came into the building trade and did things as was told , After I went self employed ,I took more of an interest as a hobby in the joinery side . Time was precious so utilized what machines I had . As I grew my business I needed more machines and have heavily relied on them , that being said , if a door was plimming , I will always grab and hand plane before running out a lead .

Now as I get older-ish , both my shoulders are trashed and have regular cortasones to minimise my pain etc , so the though of shooting boards fills me with dread , so it is less choice , and more of a case of I need to get to retirement before being invalided off . I enjoy jumoing to a hand tool , wether it be a chisel , handplane or a sanding mouse , but 10 to 15 minutes is enough for a day .

As a hobby it must be great to dedicate the hours to working solely with hand tools and the pleasure and self reward of accurately cutting a perfect joint or shooting a panel square and perfectly flat . And from the angle of a commercial effort , there isnt many customers who pay for traditional hand made efforts . That being said we did have a job some years ago to finish many large 12" x 15" oak beams by hand , many hours planing with a no7 and scrapers . If I could , I would but for financial and health reasons , for me , it just isnt a possibility anymore

Cheers Sam

 

[MarkDennehy]

I'm sure there's another sex and woodwork line in there somewhere...
But I won't go there

I will

It might be helpful to think of amateur woodworking like sex with your spouse Jacob.

No, bear with me a minute.

It's messy, it doesn't look pretty to outsiders, there's often a lot of strong language and sweating, some folks do it all by hand and some use power tools, it's usually done at home, it's definitely not done the way the pros do it, most people don't do an apprenticeship with a master craftsman to learn how to do it, it doesn't pay the mortgage and yet despite all that it's a ton of fun so you keep on doing it anyway and enjoy it immensely even when you make a total pig's ear of it.

Oh, and you don't really don't care if it's done efficiently or not, you just like doing it well while you're doing it. Even if it doesn't actually produce anything at the end that you can show off to your parents or neighbours. And if it takes all day, that's not a bad thing...



I was going to make a joke here about bench dog holes, but... it seemed too vulgar for Radio 4.