Gotta Start at the Beginning

There seems to have always been a woodshop in my parents garage, so I grew up around it. I've tried to make things in the past, and even kept some of the projects that turned out ok, but I would never delude myself into saying that I'm a woodworker, well at least not a master. It always seemed like the joints didn't quite line up, or something wasn't exactly right.

Over the years I've come to the conclusion that a master woodworker isn't one who doesn't make mistakes, but is a person who is very skilled at hiding them.

Enough of my philosophical musings.

I've grown a bit weary of wrenching on my motorcycle and decided to build a work bench. The first one I built didn't turn out quite how I'd hoped, but I learned from my mistakes, and even more importantly I discovered something. I actually enjoyed using a hand plane!

Amongst the tools I inherited from my father was a small wooden hand plane. I have always enjoyed sharpening stuff, so I sharpened the blade until it would shave the hairs off my arm ( I looked like I had Mange for a few weeks :D ) and proceeded to learn how to use it.

Fast forward a bit and I'm in the process of building a real woodworking bench. After reading a few books on woodworking benches I've come up with a design that I think will work well for my needs.

We had some white oak that I had chopped up years ago and never figured out what I wanted to do with it. I guess it was just waiting around until now.

So here's the boards after I'd removed them from the ceiling mounted rack they were in. They are stacked up so it's a bit hard to see how many there are, but there's about a dozen or so boards.




I decided to start by squaring what will be a stretcher between the legs. The edges were pretty jagged (if you know what it looks like when you have a table saw blade wobble while sawing, you'll get the idea of what it looked like.)

I've never actually tried doing anything like this using hand planes, and these planes are new to me. I bought both of them on eBay, one came in great useable condition, the other I had to flatten the sole and sharpen the blade. I've played around with them and made shavings, but never anything that I cared about. It probably would have been smarter to have tried squaring up a board I didn't need.. but I really didn't feel like it so into the fire I jumped.

Here's a view on the edge. It's a little difficult to tell, but the edge is anything but square.



Here's one of the edges after I had made some passes over it with the hand plane.



I don't have a fence or fancy jig for my hand plane, I'm doing this all by feel and the use of machinist squares for reference. As crazy as it sounds, I'm finding it all very Zen. Another major advantage of using a hand plane is noise. Aside from the slight rasping sound of the plane moving over the wood, there isn't any noise. My sister came over and we talked while I worked, and we could hear eachother, it's a pleasant way to spend a few minutes.

After a few hours worth of work I had both edges pretty square, although not perfectly parallel. I started working on the faces of the board. Unfortunately this board is twisted a bit, so squaring the faces to the edges is gonna take a bit of work. A few more hours and my arms were beginning to get a touch sore. I had one face about half done, and decided to call it a night.