Wood-working for Beginners: A Manual for Amateurs

by Charles G. Wheeler

Care of Tools.—Keep your tools in good order. You cannot do nice, fine, clean work with a dull tool. A sharp tool will make a clean cut, but a dull edge will tear or crush the fibres and not leave a clean-cut surface. You can work so much more easily and quickly as well as satisfactorily with sharp tools that the time it takes to keep them in order is much less than you lose in working with dull ones, not to speak of the waste of strength and temper.

I assume that you will not attempt to sharpen your tools yourselves until you have had considerable experience in using them; for sharpening tools (particularly saws and planes) is very hard for boys and amateurs, and not easy to learn from a book. So, until then, be sure to have them sharpened whenever they become dull. The expense is but slight, and it is much better to have fewer tools kept sharp than to spend the money for more tools and have them dull. When you get to the point of sharpening your tools, one lesson from a practical workman or even a little time spent in watching the operations (which you can do easily) will help you more than reading many pages from any book. So I advise you to get instruction in sharpening from some practical workman,—not at first, but after you have got quite handy with the tools. You can easily do this at little or no expense. For further points, see Sharpening, in [Part V].

It is a good plan to soak tool handles, mallets, and wooden planes, when new, for a week or so in raw linseed oil and then rub them with a soft rag every day or two for a while. If you use wooden planes give them a good soaking. They will absorb much oil and work more freely and smoothly. You can save tool handles from being split by pounding, by sawing the ends off square and fastening on two round disks of sole-leather in the way adopted by shoe-makers. If there is any tendency to dampness in your shop the steel and iron parts of the tools should be greased with a little fat,—tallow, lard, wax, vaseline,—or some anti-rust preparation.

Use of Tools.—It is very important to get started right in using tools. If your first idea of what the tool is for and how it should be used is correct you will get along nicely afterwards, but if you start with a wrong impression you will have to unlearn, which is always hard, and start afresh.

If you can go to a good wood-working school you will of course learn much, and if you know a good-natured carpenter or cabinet-maker or any wood-worker of the old-fashioned kind, cultivate his acquaintance. If he is willing to let you watch his work and to answer your questions you can add much to your knowledge of the uses of the different tools. In fact, so far as instruction goes that is about all the teaching the average apprentice gets. He learns by observing and by practice. Do not be afraid or ashamed to ask questions. Very few men will refuse to answer an amateur's questions unless they are unreasonably frequent. There will be problems enough to exercise all the ingenuity you have after you have learned what you can from others.

But the day for the all-round workman seems to be rapidly passing away and the tendency nowadays is for each workman, instead of spending years in learning the various branches and details of his trade, to be expert in only one very limited branch—or, as sometimes happens, a general botch in all the branches; so unless you find a real mechanic for a friend (such as an old or middle-aged village carpenter, or cabinet-maker, or wheelwright, or boat-builder, or carver), be a little guarded about believing all he tells or shows you; and beware of relying implicitly on the teachings of the man who "knows it all" and whom a season's work at nailing up studding and boarding has turned into a full-fledged "carpenter."

If you can learn to use your tools with either hand you will often find it a decided advantage, as in getting out crooked work, or particularly in carving, where you have such an endless variety of cuts to be made in almost every possible direction, but "that is another story." A bad habit and one to guard against is that of carrying with you the tool you may be using whenever you leave your work temporarily, instead of laying it down where you are working. Edge-tools are dangerous things to carry around in the hand and there is also much chance of their being mislaid.

For directions for using the different tools see [Part V].

Edge-Tools.—Bear in mind that all cutting tools work more or less on the principle of the wedge. So far as the mere cutting is concerned a keen edge is all that is required and your knife or other cutting tool might be as thin as a sheet of paper. But of course such a tool would break, so it must be made thicker for strength and wedge-shaped so that it may be pushed through the wood as easily as possible.

You know that you can safely use a very thin knife to cut butter because the butter yields so easily that there is not much strain on the blade, but that when you cut wood the blade must be thicker to stand the strain of being pushed through. Soft wood cuts more easily than hard, because it is more easily pushed aside or compressed by the wedge-shaped tool, and it does not matter how keen the edge may be if the resistance of the wood is so great that you cannot force the thicker part of the tool through it.