How do you become good at something? Practice, practice, practice. This holds true for woodworking, as it does for: sports, games, cooking (Bar-B-Q!), etc. I don’t do my own Bar-B-Q, and I don’t mean grilling in the backyard. There are some things I just leave to the professionals.
This last Saturday I had a fun day at our local Woodcraft store. Rob Cosman was there teaching a hands-on class. The course outline was: Sharpening, Hand planing, Dovetails, and Mortise and Tenon. Rob said this would generally be a 3 day class. We had to cut something, so we voted. It came out to something like this. Dovetails and Hand planing I think were tide for 1. Then Mortis and Tenon, then Sharpening.
Rob paused for a minute. He then said, one the most fundamental skills needed for hand tool work is sharpening. Without a solid understanding and the skill of sharpening, your work will suffer. Who could argue with that? He then took a brand new plane blade from a Lie-Nielsen plane, and had it perfectly sharp in about 3 minutes. Rob does all his sharpening freehand, no jigs. After seeing how quickly he was able to sharpen that blade, it was a skill I wanted to have.
The next day I played around with Rob’s approach to sharpening. I still have some practicing to do, but I was getting some good results. Not perfect yet, but enough to encourage me to me continue. In that vain, I have taken all my sharpen jigs and boxed them. Not that any of them really worked that well anyway. Having the jigs gone, I will force myself to learn to sharpen freehand. Practice, practice, practice.
In the class, Dovetails took up most of the time that was left. My sample corner came out about the same as some of my recent attempts. The nice thing about a class like this, you get firsthand help. The tips and critiques Rob gave, were amazing helpful. With more practice, I can see that my skill level should rise quickly.
Today, I had some time after work and shop wasn’t too cold, so I practice some sawing. One of the exercises Rob had us do, were a lot of vertical cuts. You are practicing the perpendicular cut across the grain, which is so important on the tails. You are also practicing a vertical cut, which is very important on the pins. I thought I would take this exercise, and cut a few rows each night when I get home from work.
Here are 3 rows I did tonight. The order I cut them is from top to bottom. You can see I was very ambitious on the first row. My lines were pretty close together. I spread the lines out on the others, so the lines would be easier to see.
The first row, I cut from right to left, on the left side of the line. The second row was cut left to right, on the right side of the line. The last row was another right to left.
If you can make the lines out, I’m a little better when I cut on the left side of the line. I still have some work to do, on getting the cut perfectly perpendicular but I’m getting there. One of the tips Rob gave, was to establish a shallow kerf across the end-grain then stop. Pausing after you make this kerf, allows you prepare for the vertical cut. I found this technique very helpful.
Most of my vertical cuts came out pretty well. Although, part of the vertical cut is cutting to the baseline and not going past. Here I still need a little practice.
My goal it cut a lot of these rows, over the next couple of weeks. If you add up just what I cut in these 3 rows, how many full dovetails would I have had to cut? Quite a few. The other skill needed for dovetails, is chopping to the baseline. I also plan to do some similar exercises for my chisel work. Practice, practice, practice.
