cellardoor

The lack of a proper bench had been holding me back for some time and frankly a Roubo bench is a very expensive and intimidating project for a beginner - conversely, having one would allow me to advance more rapidly since I wouldn't constantly be solving work-holding dilemmas. I'd looked at the Sjolbergs (sp?) at Woodcraft which they use for their classes and liked them, but something about spending as much as the vises and materials for a roubo didn't sit well with me. Finally I built the knock-down nicholson and it's been a revelation. While not as cheap to build (at least in the suburbs of Boston) as it's made out to be (I think mine was about $250 including all of the hardware from McMaster Carr) it's still VASTLY cheaper than any similarly sized bench. It's also not a challenge at all to build. I did it without any power tools save a bench-top planer and it was one of the easiest things I've built to date.

I'd grab the strop ASAP. That was the final step when my sharpening came together. It produces an edge that's not only sharper, but more durable. The less you're sharpening the more you're working wood!

So glad I'm not the only one who does this!

Here's some very tangential advice, but I think it's getting to the root of TripleH's advice - the less I labored over sharpening, the better my sharpening became. I started off not just with complex jigs and media, but with a general impression that sharpening was time consuming and had to produce a museum quality edge each time. There was so much "thinking" around sharpening that it obscured the very simple task of getting a sharp edge and getting back to work. In fact I took a sharpening class once and was so disappointed that it wasn't absurdly esoteric and exhaustive. Basically a furniture maker in the Boston area reminded us that an edge is where two planes meet (in other words don't forget to flatten the back of your iron) but basically just showed us how to hollow grind on a slow speed grinder, use an oil stone to develop a bevel, and then a strop to hone. The whole thing took less than 10 minutes and the maintenance was maybe 2 minutes. He grudgingly said we could use jigs if we had to! To this day I still probably take more care than he did in that class because I'm a hobbyist and can afford to! But I'm still back to work in minutes and don't much care if I can take hair off the back of my hand or not. I use DMT plates because I hate flattening and I finish with a few swipes on a strop. Haven't had any issues with this method.

I agree - the Anarchist's tool chest is extremely comprehensive and really uses the tool chest as a stand-in for the hand tool shop. Each tool is covered in adequate detail for a beginner to understand its use. Personally I feel that if you think too much about a total inventory of tools your head will explode. Rather you should familiarize yourself with the basics of most tools so that you know what you need them for and acquire them as you need them. It's very hard to make a good purchase decision about a tool you're not using yet. Often when questions are asked on forums you can tell that someone is trying to plan ahead and the answers can be just as vague as the question. When you need a tool it's the perfect time to buy it because you know exactly why you need it and what it will do. This will help tremendously in its selection. So here's the sequence I've been following that I've seen prescribed online by folks a lot further down the path than myself... 1. Start with planes, chisels, saws, marking & measuring, and sharpening media. With these you can build simple furniture at most scales. A great place to start is shop furniture. Work bench, saw bench(es), tool chest, etc. Simple boxes, end tables, etc. are easily achieved with these tools. 2. Add some moulding planes to add some detail. I've found using these doesn't require too much more in the way of motor skills and can be applied to the majority of furniture made with the above. 3. Carving seems to be a good third step and requires, of course, all sorts of fun new tools and some new skills. I've taken a class on this and while it's not my cup of tea in terms of the result, the work is a lot of fun and a real challenge. 4. Next might be curved work with files, rasps, spoke shaves, etc. This really takes furniture outside the limitations of shaker style. Now you have to think dimensionally in a new way. This is the part I'm starting on and some parts seem very easy and some I find to defy intuition - since I'm used to working on one plane at a time. Not just new tools, but - to me - the first time I've really had to adjust how I approached the project in three dimensions. 5. Turning gets thrown in there somewhere, too. I think of it as both a crucial part of nearly every discipline of furniture construction, but also a rabbit hole unto itself. Unless you're Shannon you're likely to introduce some power for this part! Hopefully that's helpful. I'm barely conversant in the boxy world of the beginner, but I've dabbled in most other areas enough to see which ones seem like a natural next step and which seem like a total reworking of my knowledge and skills.

Some of my collection. Sold most of my power tools to buy these.

Weirdo!

Mix n' Match. They play to different strengths, too. Lie-Nielsen bench planes for me. They're tough but elegant and feel very un-fussy. Veritas is more gadgety and has interchangeable doodads and stuff. They seem to lend themselves to joinery planes. Just like in Portlandia when they say "put a bird on it!" Veritas says "put a fence on it!"

If you're just looking at a general list without a project in mind, I think that the marking gauge stands out. I have two now and will likely get the one you mentioned as well this year. They're so handy to have set up for different operations. Many of the other items are cool - and possibly useful - but seem to demand an immediate task. For example I may go the rest of my life without owning a chisel over 1" and the small router plane has never entered my mind as a consideration. So something that I could see using on every project seems very enticing.

I've followed similar advice to Shannon's and it was definately body mechanics for me. I could tell that no matter how much I wanted to trust the saw to track that I was shying away from my line and drifting further away as I got down. After identifying it I still have to take some warm-up cuts before taking on a tenon.

As TripleH mentions, the design was prone to cracking and many of the originals didn't survive into antique-hood. Where the sides dip down in the middle it turned out to be just too weak for the metallurgy of the time. I bought into the hype about this being the first plane because it was a good multi-tasked and that argument just CANNOT be understated to someone at the very beginning of the craft. To a seasoned woodworker 15 years of accumulated tools and widgets and doodads are easily taken for granted. For a newbie each little tidbit has a cost and a burden of mastery associated with it. When I got mine at a LN handtool event I went from messing with grandpa's neglected planes to hogging & smoothing like a champ. Had I not made that purchase - and probably that specific plane - I can't say I'd still be woodworking. You can only fail at a hobby so many times before you move on! Fast forward to today and I still find it versatile enough that I don't see the need to add a bevel down jack. In fact, when you think about the "jack of all trades" nature of the jack plane it's almost better suited to that role than the standard #5. With the adjustable mouth and easily swappable irons I'd much rather do some on-the-fly scrub work, extemporaneous smoothing, and fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants jointing with this than something with a moveable frog and a cap iron.

https://www.lie-nielsen.com/product/DVDs/building-furniture-with-hand-planes?node=4071 My girlfriend bought me this DVD early on and it was really helpful. It's very direct and comprehensive. No tips and tricks so much as the basic fundamentals of setting up and using the tools for their intended purpose.

Yum. Tool porn.

Having agonized over this very decision myself this past summer, I'll tell you where I landed: Bronze No.4 from Lie Nielsen. Here's how I got there... At some point I got in my head the wild idea of a modular system of interchangeable frogs. Maybe a holdover from my Festool addiction. Fortunately I thought better of it. Swapping frogs as part of a workflow is bonkers. Then I thought about going with the 4.5 and the 8 (I was buying a smoother and a jointer at the time) so I'd have the heaviest dutiest of all the planes! (again - a holdover from the power tool world). So I drove up to Warren and started making shavings in the showroom. I wound up with the No.4 and the No.7 because both represented the lightest weight version of their ilk and that allowed me greater control and longer planing time. I can't imagine the No.4.5 being of any real advantage in terms of producing a wider shaving. Smoothing a board with a nice sharp well-tuned plane is such a pleasure it's one of the few stages I don't feel like rushing! Hope that helps.

There's something magic about using tools that have been in the family. I still have a few of my grandpa's planes and saws in rotation. Several I also rehabbed and donated to an aspiring woodworker. Grandpa's hopefully helping him now as much as me. (I assume he's haunting the tools) One day someone will dust off my 3D printer in an old barn somewhere and take it, in their flying car, back to their own house to restore and use. There will be a wistful look in their eye as it spits out a lime green eiffel tower.