I've got some questions and answers again and James is asking how do I develop the skill of fitting a joint, and I know this frustrates a lot of people. How do I drive my own learning in this I'm having trouble improving my joint fitting, you say in the videos look for the bruising, how can I develop this skill what am I looking for, how do I tell where to remove material, thanks. Ok, let's take a look at a joint I did this last weekend when I was demonstrating in Oxford, I made a joint here, I think I might be able to show you what I was looking for.
So this is my mortise and tenon joint, actually it's actually slides together quite nicely but once all the hairs inside the friction start to grab it can be quite difficult to take the part let's have a look on the surface here and if I rotate this little bit here I can see shine here and I can see shine along this bottom edge and that's what I'm looking for when I'm working with the wood I'm looking for shine on the surface, when I'm putting it together if I was putting this joint as I was when I made it this weekend, the shine might stop here because that might be the distance that I end to the wood to and and I can see here already if I push this it's got an anchor point somewhere right here which means that is a little bit fatter than this side is as I push it into the wood and try to rotate it he's still anchored down there so that means that this bottom edge that bottom surface is one thousandth of an inch thicker than this top surface so I might take a shaving off that high spot because it's registering against the face of the inside of the mortise and when I pull this out I can see that this has a shiny spot I can see I'm not sure how well this will show up for you but I can see a shiny spot here and look on the reverse look here this is all shiny all the way around here and those are guidelines, here is not shiny at all, it's very dull and so that's where I aim for I aim to take a shaving off here maybe a shaving here wherever the high spots are, is a question of practice the more you do it the more you'll observe and then you'll start seeing those high spots you'll see the piece of wood pivoting inside the joint and that's your guideline up that you sense these things you start looking for them and that's how you get it just keep practicing keep trying and you'll get it you'll have beautiful Joints in no time at all.
What are the benefits of hollow ground chisels and knives well this is a practice, let me get my whiteboard here this is a practice that has been done for a long time it comes from the grinding wheel so if you try to imagine the grinding wheel like this and you put a knife blade on here like this and you've got another one on this side like this exaggerated of course, can you see how this if I strip this wheel away the grinding wheel away and this is a common way for grinding knife edges and actually for grinding chisels what you really end up with is the same size of the diameter on the edge of this knife or if it was a plane iron it would look like this well this goes to infinity is not a viable edge so you have to thicken that edge up so the question is do you need a hollow grind, is just a fast way of removing stock and getting the heel of the bevel either on a knife or chisel out of the way and that's why people prefer hollow grind because you can do it on a mechanical grinder it removes the stock very quickly there is no advantage over a hollow grind over over a flat grind as long as the two angles are exactly this angle is exactly the same as this angle because this non-viable edge here like this, you have to create a viable edge by coming in here with a second bevel so exaggerating this it will be like this and like this and on a knife it will be like this ,of course, I'm exaggerating this and like this so that's how you develop this viable edge so you have to have a second bevel whereas with a single bevel you can go straight to 30 degrees and it will give you the same cutting strategy it will still work just as well.
Is there an easy way to cut a closed, closed end rebate I'm looking to make a rebate bottom of a box with dovetail corners and don't want the rebate visible on the edge of the box, thanks for great material. Usually you can do this either on the box when it's completed all you can do it independently of the box so here is my opinion my way of working this let's say I want to make a rebate on here and I want to stop that distance from the end Put a line in here for you there and I'm going to go a little bit shallower in depth because I don't want this to take forever for you so there is my depth here so I'm going to go here and down here and remove this section here so i'm going to use a bullnose plane you can use whichever plane you want what we do you can add a little piece of wood here you can clamp this on either end as long as the clamps don't get in your way like this and that will give you a guide to run your plane your chisel or whatever against and you can actually chisel the whole of the rebate if it's just a short rebate you can just chisel it if the if it if it's a long one then just run a plane see how well I do here I'm not exactly setting this up scientifically but I think it will give you an idea of where we're going instead of going right to the line here's my distance line here and my distance line is here start about half or maybe three-eighths of an inch away 10 mm here chop chop and chop remove this way this is creating this step down to stay away from the end because we're using that as a bumper and we're going to run so we can go all the way along here this way you want to then this works fine and you can get it surprisingly accurate like this and then take a bullnose plane like I have here and you just run this in into the bump bump it into that end like this and start dropping your hand so now we've got a sloped cut going down from here and now we just rely on this straightedge here keep going down you can work all the way up to this end here this way you're taking down that mid-section as well then this end we drop the chisel in exactly the same way so remove some waste like this, I'm being a little bit crude here but if you'd be taking your time with this if you want with it and then bring the plane the other way then work the same way, pop the nose into the four-part like this time lifting the heel up with and as I said you can use a chisel to do the whole of this I'll take the most of it and then go down with these and that's how I would do it if I wanted to stop the rebate and then on the very last bit we just after we've got it down to depth we just come in here chisel out that last bit of waste here from both faces here like this and this and it works fine this works fine of course you can use a router, power router you know if you want to seems a bit defeatist to me but there you go clean up so that's your stop rebate in any piece of wood you care to want it in and you could be going directly to your lines and you'll have a perfect rebate alright great question thank you.That does come up fairly frequently and I think you need to be aware of that my question is all the hype about de-waxed shellac flakes versus waxed shellac flakes I can buy off the shelf, is there any real difference.
Well, thanks for this, Lance in Pacific Northwest. You want a wood finish generally you can use a waxed shellac, it's going to be waxed anyway naturally comes with the wax in it what we do generally is removed and the reason we remove it is because very often shellac is used as a base coat of sealer coat after which we apply other finishes it could be polyurethane it could be any of the film finishes that go on that surface afterward and that wax coat will form a barrier between the top coat so if you are painting this for instance milk paint all or whatever it wouldn't really adhere to the wax surface as well as it does the de-waxed finish so you better using the de-waxed shellac for anything you're going to top coat with other finishes that's why we do that's why we use it this is from Misha – after planing cypress the surface gets a mirror-like finish it but I can break the joint on the glue line and this often happens with certain types of wood and some of the oily woods with cypresses and cypress has what we call cypressene in the material itself it's growing in the wood the older the growth the longer the growth the more cypressene is in the wood and that's what they used to use for making buckets in making water containers things like that because of the cypressene it doesn't rot and so but then you have to take off the surface of cypressene if you wanted to glue the surfaces usually will use some kind of solvent it could be like a lacquer thinner it could be some other agents that you can solve it you can remove the surface cypressene from and then glue them together and you are asking if you should roughen the surface it's not to do with the roughness of the surface although you can still do that without rounding the corners but ideally just use a solvent to remove the surface, glue it together and it will be fine and then you might consider other glue types so you could you say an epoxy but often will be compatible with some of the cypressene or some of the oils in say cedar or something like that that would work fine this one's from Stuart it seems most of your planing is done with a number 4 plane can you explain your thought on the larger planes are six seven and eight how do you use these in your workflow thank you for all the knowledge you share and then another one from Dragomir do i need a number 7 joint of our number-5 jack plane to square stock 60 centimeters long not very long 60 centimeters, in inches for my friends in America is two feet so it's not very long but it's not really to do with the length of the stock either I can get any length of material fairly straight with just a number five possibly a number six but very rarely would I reach for that length of a plane he's talking about it being 30 centimeters wide it's quite wide i want to buy a number seven join to halve this may be the underlying things he may really want to buy a number 7 and if that's what you want to do this go ahead and buy it and enjoy it you know but he said I'm thinking because I have never seen you use 12 by a number five yet get the number 5 / number 7 anyday number five will always be workable for you use it maybe every day your woodworking you use it several times throughout the day they're great plane and they will get everything you want straight and certainly on that length of material for sure you might consider number five and a half to it's a little bit wider and it does give you the extra within the width of the blade which I like so what is going to be your preference after number for four-and-a-half smoothing plane but I just think the jack planes always going to work for you and I don't know whether I ever reach for a six seven or eight really anymore because they don't stay flat very rarely are they flat so off straight so I just I just don't use them ok hope that answers your question Richard says do you ever use breadboard end for tables etc I've seen them in various woodworking videos and was wondering if you have used them and if so have you got any tips well I have and I do and I would I like using breadboard and I like the way they look the only issue is when you get to wider tabletops that maybe three feet wide 40 inches wide that's when you get the problem because I'm something 14 inches wide in high humidity the table can actually expand maybe quarter of an inch so when do you determine the length of the breadboard end so what we usually do is make a feature of the breadboard end and stop it before it goes all the way through and that way we can round the end we can create a feature at the end that will help disguise the expansion and contraction of the table also what you have to do is you have to have expansion points inside because the only way you can't glue a breadboard and I'm not with the table because something's got to give and it will not hold long-term so you have to put a longer stop tenon on to create the joint between the breadboard and then you have to put a dowel through of some kind and you have to elongate holes that will allow for expansion and contraction of the joint very clever I like the way they look I like that the way to keep the table flat there's all kinds of good reasons for having them so I wouldn't not use them I think they're a great way to constrain a table and I think they're great feature to look at too.
Hi, this is from Andy, I have recently made some raised panel doors by hand I was wondering how do you develop techniques to include a molding on the rails and stiles, my answer is that using molding planes has worked for about three centuries it goes back a long way to the early seventeen hundreds probably before that because that's where the planes date back to the recorded history of the plane goes back from the 1700 so we can track it down in Britain we can track it right down to the maker, the house they lived in the, street they lived in, the city they lived in, it's great if you ever get Bill Goodman's book on that that will help you to understand molding planes the rail to stile section can be done in a couple of ways so if you run your mold whether you do use a router power router or whether you use a molding plane what typically, there were two ways one you coped one over the other which meant that you created a reverse of the mold where the joint passed over the top of the other that's quite tricky because especially if you've got 4 or 5 inch wide rail you can't easily do that without a mother plane to create that so what generally they did was was make a mitre at the end where the intersection comes and mitre the two jointed components coming in together and you reduce the molded stuck on the stile so that the rail butted up against it just like a regular two-sided shouldered tenon where it butts up into.
This is he from Lonny, I recently enjoyed the finishing with shellac video showing how to apply shellac and wax finish for this certain applications I'd also like a similar finish with flat sheen what do you suggest for a flat sheen I would suggest either a water-based polyurethane you can get them with the sheen you can get them in between or you can get them high gloss and then follow that with some steel wool and then go over the top of that with beeswax, turpentine mix would be fine you can buy those very readily some Danish oil will work well too depends on which side of the continent you live in but you can get up a high polyurethane base one that can still be a non-glossy not shine one so you have to experiment with finishes to find the one you want because not all manufacturers manufacture to the same consistency or to, the even using the same indeed ingredients so Danish Oil has a life of its own when it comes to finding the ingredients to them, so that concludes this section of questions and answers I hope you go to our other Q & A that we've done over the months and years even where you can find answers to your questions youtube is a great place to find them we've done hundreds of videos now and I think that will really help you progress you working