OldTools Archive

Recent Bios FAQ

13384 Gregg Schwabauer <Griggy_S@m...> 1997‑02‑10 Newbie Bio
After a few weeks of lurking it's time to enter a bio so I can come out onto 
the porch.

My name is Gregg Schwabauer and I just moved from Santa Cruz, California to 
Collierville (Memphis), Tennessee. Kind of a culture shock, but not as big as 
when I moved to Santa Cruz from Portland, Oregon three years ago!

My woodworking experience is limited to say the least. I do not come from a 
woodworking family and I never took any kind of wood shop in school. Roy 
Underhill got me started thinking about learning and keeping a skill that is 
as independent of technology as possible. So I started buying books and 
reading them. After stumbling accrossed some articles on Japanese Planes in 
Fine Woodworking, I went up to The Japan Woodworker in Alameda, California and 
got half a days worth of instruction on Japanese saws, chisels and planes, 
(amazing what a salesman will do for you on a slow Tuesday morning). I walked 
away with 2 Japanese saws and a list of chisels to add to my Christmas list. 
Santa was good this year! .25", .5", .75" and 1" blue steel chisels, a 
combination 400/1000 grit waterstone and a 6000 grit polishing stone. I bought 
two more saws with some Christmas money and 2 bow saws for scroll and re-saw 
work. $50 at some antique stores yielded two braces, various bits both auger 
and expansion types, a breast drill and a wooden jointer plane with a pretty 
good bottom and blade but needing tuning and a new sole to close the mouth 
back up.

I recently inherited 2 Stanley smoothers and found a good deal on a #45 user. 
The #45 is more of an experiment to see if the idea is usable or if I need to 
build a whole set of specialty planes. I suspect that the #45 will work OK and 
that I will probably build certain specialty planes to I use more often and 
keep the #45 for the less common operations.

So I've started learning to saw, chop and pare out some basic joints and test 
my sharpening abilities, (or lack thereof). I'm almost confident enough to 
start repairing the old jointer plane and build some other planes, Krenov 
style as they are less finicky than the Japanese blades. (Does anyone have a 
different opinion?)

I just started fleshing out plans for a Japanese style work bench. If this 
works out well I will build a European style bench with tail and end vises in 
order to hold smaller pieces of wood in vertical or awkward positions. The 
Japanese technique of sitting on the work to chop, kneeling on the floor to 
saw and leaning over the work to pare seems to work well for M&T joints, but I 
find that doing DT joints a pain because you don't saw either vertically or 
straight down when cutting pins or tails. A European bench with a dog-leg vise 
ala Frid and Klausz looks more convenient.

Well, enough yacking. If anyone has any comment regarding Japanese or Krenov 
style planes I would love to here from you!

I'll post some separate questions about techniques and other things when (and 
if) I get invited onto the porch.

GAS

p.s. Do I need to hold my want list until FMM or can I post it anytime?



Recent Bios FAQ