New to Carpentry

[Mark-J]

Thanks for the advice ED65

 

[Jacob]

Just to reinforce something that Sawyer said, sharpening shouldn't be under-emphasised. Most people starting out have some trepidation about it if they don't have prior sharpening experience, and you may well screw up once or twice early on but that's okay. It's a skill you have to acquire to be a woodworker so perseverance is the order of the day. Freehand sharpening is well worth learning to do but can take a while to master so don't be afraid to make or buy a honing guide to help maintain your angles.

To begin with one good oilstone (which you can often find at car boots) and a leather strop (which you can make yourself) will get you going. Waterstones, ceramic stones and diamond plates are also options but generally will cost a lot more. Every system can work well, each has certain upsides and downsides. But oilstones and strops are the traditional European workshop staple and IMO still represent the best bang for the buck.

yep. Everybody should start with oil stone. Best known, tried, tested, cheapest, most popular, easiest. You can always move on to other expensive methods later but many don't feel the need!
But I do think honing guides introduce more problems than they solve - I wouldn't bother until you have a fall back level of skill with freehand basics. All you need really. Honing guides are very much a recent novelty gadget - 50 years ago almost unheard of.

 

[morfa]

Mark - I live just down the road in Bridgend. You're more than welcome to come over to my place one evening/weekend and I'll talk you through my tools.

I can strongly recommend travelling down to Pyle (J37) and going to Nottage Timber for your wood. They're one of the better local yards. But there might be somewhere good in Swansea, I don't know.

Also:

This 'what tools should I buy question' comes up a lot, so I'm just going to copy and paste my list from before:

Second hand tools are the way to go. For hand tools, they're a fraction of the price and equivalent quality to the fancy stuff. You will have to learn to fettle & sharpen your hand tools anyway, so you might as well start with second hand stuff. Doesn't matter if you make mistakes.

As an example a 2nd hand Record or Stanley no4 can be had for £20 off ebay, a Quangsheng (chinese rip-off) will cost you £120 and a Lie Nielsen will cost you £270. You could get most of the planes you need for the cost of one Lie Nielsen plane. So far all the second hand planes I've bought have been working out of the box. Ditto saws. A couple of sensible ebay purchases will net you some decent saws, while new saws will cost you £100s.

Chisels are a bit more hit and miss second hand, there's a lot of heavily abused chisels out there. But modern chisels are generally ok and there's no need to spend a fortune. A decent new oilstone isn't expensive either. Second hand marking tools are all fine as well, you can buy what you need for small amounts of money compared to spending huge amounts for new stuff.

I will second the recommendations to buy:

The Essential Woodworker by Robert Wearing & The Anarchists Toolchest by Chris Schwartz - https://www.classichandtools.com/acatal ... Press.html

I could give you a rough list, but those two books say it all and much better than I will. Buy them, you don't be disappointed.

As you don't say if you have a workbench, I'm going to assume you don't and say that it's a very important tool to have. Here are a couple of guides on building a standard 'British' workbench.

GS Haydon (of this parish) - http://gshaydon.co.uk/blog/the-workbench-build-begins - posts start there but you'll have to hunt the rest of them down...

Paul Sellers video guide - http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD39949332C7FB168

and his blog posts - http://paulsellers.com/2012/06/making-your-workbench/

Here's a list of tools - http://www.renaissancewoodworker.com/ge ... tool-list/

And this post of mine has lots of useful links in it:

post736527.html#p736527

 

[Mark-J]

Thank you very much for this morfa - priceless advice

The advice I've received on this and the other 2 carpentry websites I now frequent, has been massive and it's quite humbling to be honest. Those books sound great and I'm seriously considering buying them.

Thanks also for the invite to call in at your home too, unfortunately, I'm struggling right now with mental health issues so I don't really get out as much as I used to do.

My project/goal/ambition, is to build my own shed/man cave in my back garden, so I can place a nice 8'x5' wargaming table inside. It's a dream right now, but it's a goal and it motivates me. That won't start until next summer at the very earliest, and it will very probably be a few summers too soon depending on the learning curve.

Thank you again, very much, it's appreciated

EDIT: The link to the website that lists carpentry beginners' tool set is broken. Do you know of another by any chance?

 

[ED65]

But I do think honing guides introduce more problems than they solve - I wouldn't bother until you have a fall back level of skill with freehand basics. All you need really. Honing guides are very much a recent novelty gadget - 50 years ago almost unheard of.

I agree that freehand sharpening is the ideal for most of us, but I don't see that guides introduce more problems than they solve though.

One obvious downside is that they hamper the development of freehand sharpening skills, but if someone starting out is having trouble getting good edges at the outset then using a jig makes a lot of sense: they need good edges now or they'll run into immediate problems which could stall them or put them off.

Even if the goal is to become proficient at freehanding I think using a guide can be a definite plus for the average beginner who is new to proper sharp edges, giving them something concrete to aim for, a standard to match or exceed with their freehand sharpening endeavours.

 

[morfa]

Thanks also for the invite to call in at your home too, unfortunately, I'm struggling right now with mental health issues so I don't really get out as much as I used to do.

Well the offer is there. I only live 5 minutes from Bridgend train station and I'll pick you up from there if you want. Just let me know.

EDIT: The link to the website that lists carpentry beginners' tool set is broken. Do you know of another by any chance?

Is that the German one? This was what I think I linked to, it's not cheap:

https://www.dictum.com/en/tools/woodwor ... ageSize=12

 

[Mark-J]

The other day I was watching Paul Sellers sharpening chisels. It looks quite involved. It wasn't so much that he had 6 rectangles of sand (?) paper, it was more a case of having to file them in a certain way as to remove a burr.

It looks like you're just basically sharpening a chisel, but it's obviously more than that.

 

[Mark-J]

Thanks also for the invite to call in at your home too, unfortunately, I'm struggling right now with mental health issues so I don't really get out as much as I used to do.

Well the offer is there. I only live 5 minutes from Bridgend train station and I'll pick you up from there if you want. Just let me know.

EDIT: The link to the website that lists carpentry beginners' tool set is broken. Do you know of another by any chance?

Is that the German one? This was what I think I linked to, it's not cheap:

https://www.dictum.com/en/tools/woodwor ... ageSize=12

Yes it was the German one

That is a bit pricey, but the tools look really nice. What else would I need to get: forge head and cross pein hammer, a plane or two, various saws?

 

[Jacob]

.....I agree that freehand sharpening is the ideal for most of us, but I don't see that guides introduce more problems than they solve though. ...

1 They don't work well unless you have dead flat stones - hence the big new fashion for flattening stones - or using sandpaper on glass, stone, solid gold, optically polished flat, etc. People even buy expensive diamond plates to flatten their stones! A bit of lateral thinking and they could use the plates and just throw away the stones :lol: .
2 They don't work well unless they are set up exactly - or you have to re-form the bevel until it meets the stone.
3. They don't work at all with cambered blades - but cambered blades are essential/useful for most purposes (but not all).
4 They constrain the bevel angle not to a maximum, but to a minimum value - exactly the opposite of what you want. You can easily increase the bevel angle but can't easily reduce it (without adjusting it). This is because they all have the same design fault - the wheel is behind the edge instead of in front.
5 Er - could go on; they keep working on MkII, Mk III versions and each one worse than the one before. The absolute pits was the Kell Mk something which is just about impossible to use - unless you just like fiddling about all day, which some people do!
6 You have to BUY them BUT they slow down the job!
7 Sharpening is much easier without them - which is why hardly anybody in the whole of woodworking history has ever bothered to use them.

So why do they exist at all? I bought a couple many years ago - they do look such a good idea, and if done carefully the edge does look lovely and surgical. It took me some years to realise that the simple method I'd learned at school was less tidy, but totally superior in practical terms.

The problem is that info on freehand sharpening is a bit scarce - it's something that people would pick up on very early (like blowing your nose) and detailed instructions were never deemed necessary. Which means there's no money to be made out of it.
Loadsamoney to be made from the new crazy sharpening - people spend a effin fortune!

 

[ED65]

The other day I was watching Paul Sellers sharpening chisels. It looks quite involved.

The basic process is actually very simple and can be broken down into just a few simple steps.

Most early woodworking guides will give the simplest and most direct guidance on what you need to do (usually using just one oilstone and perhaps a strop, sometimes just the stone). Modern instructions can be a lot more involved or seem a lot more involved but in short here's what you do:

• flatten and smooth a portion of the back (up to a fine polish if you want and/or your materials allow) but only near the edge, not a huge swatch of the flat area or worse still, the entire thing
• hone the bevel, or a small portion of the bevel – there's a long tradition in English woodworking of just honing the tip of the bevel to make honing faster and easier, making a secondary bevel or as it's sometimes called the honing bevel (modern guides often refer to a microbevel which is a very narrow version of the same thing)
• work the back again to rub off the wire edge/burr (you can sometimes just wipe this off by running the chisel's edge sideways through the end grain of a scrap of wood, it's often advised not to hold the scrap in your opposite hand if you do this as the potential to cut yourself accidentally is high)

With practice and experience, and a bit of luck, you can do the above on a new chisel to get it up and running in five minutes or less. Expect it to take longer when you've never done it before

6 rectangles of sand (?) paper

He has demonstrated sharpening on wet 'n' dry paper but he mainly sharpens on diamond plates of three degrees of fineness, then completes the job on a strop charged with that green waxy compound most people use.

 

[ED65]

Jacob:

1. True enough.
2. That's easily done with a simple jig made from a couple of scraps of wood.
3. Depends on the guide. One simple mod to the simplest homemade type makes it a beauty for doing cambers.
4. I don't see why constraining to minimum is a problem, much less the opposite of what you want. Just holding steady is the idea here isn't it, not going up or down?
5. The best types of jigs are made from wood and cost at most a few coppers in materials, no need for a Mk II, III or whatever, they just work :mrgreen:
7. Agreed. Usually lots faster too as you mention.

 

[Mark-J]

Thanks for the information

 

[morfa]

Thanks also for the invite to call in at your home too, unfortunately, I'm struggling right now with mental health issues so I don't really get out as much as I used to do.

Well the offer is there. I only live 5 minutes from Bridgend train station and I'll pick you up from there if you want. Just let me know.

EDIT: The link to the website that lists carpentry beginners' tool set is broken. Do you know of another by any chance?

Is that the German one? This was what I think I linked to, it's not cheap:

https://www.dictum.com/en/tools/woodwor ... ageSize=12

Yes it was the German one

That is a bit pricey, but the tools look really nice. What else would I need to get: forge head and cross pein hammer, a plane or two, various saws?

You can do an awful lot of work with the following:

Cheapo hardpoint tenon and panel saw (if you're feeling flush the japanese saws are great for a beginner)
no 4 plane
no 5 plane (or just a 4 really)
block plane
square
1/4, 1/2, 3/4 and 1 inch chisels
marking gauge
some kind of drill
oil stone (buy the decent norton stones)
strop
mallet
as many clamps as you can afford!

A good work bench is essential. Then the extras like bench hook and shooting board you build yourself. I happen to have a spare vice in the shed that I need to get rid of. You're more than welcome to it. Do you have the space for a work bench? I have a Paul Sellers style bench. If you can afford it, the courses here also look good:- http://www.theenglishwoodworker.com/pre ... eo-series/

But the Paul Sellers stuff is free and just as good.

Building a shed is fairly straight forward. It's hard to really cock it up. I have to say (I used to wargame myself) I'm not sure I'd want to leave my minatures in a shed. It's hard and relatively expensive to get them warm and dry. But I guess if you've got a box for the minis, then it'd be fine.

Also you might find that Mens Sheds are worth looking up - http://menssheds.org.uk/find-a-shed/

 

[Mark-J]

Thanks for the tool list - very useful

I'm on video number 5 of the Paul Sellers video. I find it amazing how he can just 'eyeball' the surface and then (a) know where he needs to plane and (b) know exactly how much to plane. I guess that's what working with wood for 40 odd years does for you.

Very interesting to hear that sheds aren't all that hard to make. Really starting to think even I could do it

When you say drill, what kind of drill?

 

[morfa]

Drill, a hand brace will do plenty. But if you do DIY then a standard cordless 18V drill (with a hammer function) is incredibly useful. I also have a 10.8V drill which is lighter and smaller, so better for jobs where I do a lot of screwing/drilling.

If it's just a basic shed, then yeah, it's just a frame made out of 2x4 clad with something. So really not that hard. Especially if you don't mind a bit of wonkyness.

 

[Mark-J]

The shed is going to be 15' wide by 20' long and it'll house a wargaming room/man pit. Hopefully no wonkiness as I want this to be a solid structure. Something that will last a log time.