Talked to a guy who retired from cabinetmaking at 55, made me rethink my whole shop setup

I was at a lumber yard in Manchester last Tuesday picking up some cherry and this older guy started chatting me up while we were both waiting for our orders. He told me he cut his fingers off on a shaper back in '98 and had to re-learn everything with one hand, so he switched to using nothing but track saws and hand planes for all his joinery. Never touched a table saw or router again after that, and he claimed his quality went way up because he had to slow down and think through each cut. Has anyone else ever totally changed how they work after hearing somebody else's horror story, or am I just easily influenced by random old timers?

3 comments

3 Comments

noah_chen1725d ago

Had to slow down and think through each cut" - that hit me hard. I went through something similar after a close call with a jointer last year. Swapped to a Lie-Nielsen low angle jack plane for most edge work and it forced me to read the grain way better. Still use my bandsaw and drill press for rough stuff but the hand tool approach cleaned up more joints than any fence upgrade ever did. Took forever to get my sharpening routine dialed in though.

veramiller25d ago

Honestly, "read the grain way better" is exactly right, but I gotta gently push back on one thing. That Lie-Nielsen low angle jack is a great plane, but it's not really the best for reading grain on edge work. The low angle is better for end grain and shooting boards. For jointing edges where you're trying to follow the grain, a standard bevel-down smoother with a cambered iron is way more forgiving. I tried the low angle for a year on edges and kept getting chatter until a old timer told me to switch to a standard No. 5 with a slightly curved blade. Night and day difference for me, especially on figured maple. But yeah, sharpening is the real killer - I still mess up my secondary bevel sometimes.

kevin_martin25d ago

Totally agree on the bevel down part. Once I switched to a standard No. 5 with a slight camber on figured cherry, I stopped fighting the plane and started actually enjoying edge work. That little bit of curve lets the blade bite where it needs to and release where it doesn't.

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