Dangerous ground.

It’s not clear if Noah’s wife Naamah, or Emzara (take your pick), gave him and the lads a hand with his big boat build, the Cainites didn’t say, but how many post-diluvial women would have enjoyed that sort of thing?

In a perfect world, half of all woodworkers would be women, for utopianist, anti-Semite and general all round social-schemer Charles Fourier, this would have been more than just conceivable, almost compulsory, but when did socialist utopianism not contain a huge dollop of prescriptive compulsion? A question I ask myself virtually every day. Fourier, as you know, was an enlightened early advocate of feminism (his own word) who had some very particular visions of commune-living. In the Fourierian Phalanx imagined around 1808, any and every woman could expect a freedom of choice and a right to equality that was only beginning to become a reality, and then only patchily, 160 years later. Scattered amongst his more sensible ideas there is a lot of incredible nonsense, but he was a late-night scribbler.

There is a magazine and an internet forum or two and classes all aimed at the female woodworker, which could be thought of as sexist and patronising. I don’t see why there needs to be the gender-specific
differentiation,  woodworking projects very rarely require the use of a penis, and if they do, then just make something else. As to the actual number, it's probably impossible to tell, but at the very least there must surely be more female woodworkers than bearded pole-dancing blokes, and that has to be a positive thing.

To save anyone else the trouble I have been researching this whole subject and I think I have found what may be the earliest reference to a female actively involved in woodworking in England. It comes from the journals of the prolific diarist Sir Thomas Houghton. This, from an entry dated 25 th April 1757.

This afternoon the fair Lady Houghton took to her chamber badly misused by an oaken splinter after she rested momentarily on the hall settle. Being unable to testify to the whereabouts of the splinter through her skirts and petticoats, I declared it suitable work for a physick and took my leave. Was much berated on the state of my furnishings.

I called on the young Mary from within the scullery to plane and smooth the settle which she did gladly showing an undoubted enthusiasm for the task, I concealed myself most well behind the library door so to observe her rising skirts on each and every forward stroke. Such sturdiness of ankle betokens of a mighty Gavotte at some future date.
With the effluvium of the beast rising, I hastened to my bed. Doctor Franklyn was summoned forthwith to bleed me.

The much-criticised Sir Thomas Houghton, man of letters and dance enthusiast.

The turn of the skew

The Stanley 289, is like a 78, above above, that’s been working out but wanted instant results and succumbed to the whining persuasive voice of a dealer and tried some steroids, but something went wrong, very wrong.
“Look at my leg, look at it, you never said that would happen.”
“Yes mate, I must admit, it does look a bit thin.”
“Thin? Thin? Damn right it’s a bit thin, you’re going to pay for this, come here....”

Dealer sprints off, lifting his knees very high as he runs.

The withered leg of the 289 is the single arm fence, the rest of the plane is great, but just because the fence rod is thicker doesn’t negate the fact that it is singular. I have an ominous feeling that my sister-in-law may be singular soon, it’s just something that Mrs Stimp said on the phone to one of her friends about sister-in-law and a trial separation, I’ve probably got it wrong and she was talking about trying out a new bra.

On so many Saturday evenings Mrs Stimp and a group of her friends gather in the kitchen, while the younger Stimp and I cower in his room (the furthest room from the kitchen) playing X-box games and trying to drown out the shrill, wine-fuelled screams of mirth from below with a selection of his favourite music. This is almost as painful. Although there’s usually only about four of them, from a distance it sounds like the complete coven has arrived, desperation for coffee gets me after an hour or so and I have to prepare myself to run the gauntlet of humiliation.

To make a cup of instant coffee takes about three minutes, and virtually every time that’s a quick group-type unenthusiastic greeting from them all, followed by two minutes and fifty seconds of innuendo and what can only be described as women’s personal things, just as if I wasn‘t standing there willing desperately for the kettle to boil. I don’t think that it’s done for my benefit, they just can’t bring themselves for even a few minutes to have a normal conversation, and would do this regardless of whether I was there or not, which leads me to believe that this sort of thing is all they ever talk about.  

Now and again the forces of female sociability combine to provide a perfect storm where Miss Stimp, fourteen, has some friends to stay for a sleep-over at the same time, then there is very little option but to abandon younger Stimp to his fate and join the villagers at “The Decapitated Stranger” for a drink or two.

There really wasn’t any reason for the 289 to have a withered leg, I know Stanley’s 78 has only one fence arm but plenty of their other planes have two, and not forgetting that WS and Woden followed later by Record all went bi-armal on their versions of the 78. There is just something more reassuring about having two fence arms, especially when you consider the work that a 289 was made for with it’s bulk and a cutter nearly 2” across. It’s not exactly the first thing Elizabeth Siddal would have reached for when putting a rebate on the back of a frame, “Milly babe, this planing has worn me out, I’m going to lie in the bath with me long dress on for a while.“
“Okay darling, I’ll bring my sketch pad”
“Do you have to?”
“Might as well”

Here is the WS, Woden and later Record variations on a theme, note they have a total of six arms between them. Lets not get side-tracked with date issues -like these were all made when the 289 was defunct-the thing is Stanley could have if they’d wanted to.

 

The wooden equivalent to the 289 is possibly called a moving fillester or sometimes a moving filletster or sometimes a moving fillister and sometimes something entirely different, maybe a moving cauliflower, designed to cut a rebate along the edge whether with or across the grain. Note the skewdness of the cutter and the spur, all welcome sights and even some boxing, lovely. One of these has three screws securing the repaired fence; count them ghost of Stanley, not just one arm, but three screws. I’ve never been out with someone with even a broken arm, but if you have and they were quite amorous, feel free to put an anecdote here, in your own mind. Try to crow-bar in the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune if you can.

The can-do Stanley 46.

Previously I mentioned Stanley 39s, the all-metal skewed dado planes that come in various widths, but, and here is the absolute crunch of the matter, are there enough widths? The 39s I have go from ¼” to 1” in seven graduations, which is fine if you’re content to live your life permanently shackled to these restrictions, only daring to dream of a 7/16” dado.

That is, until one night when you‘ve been drinking with a close friend.

“ Steve, if I tell you something you won’t … y’know spread it around will you? It’s just that lately I‘ve been thinking … I’d like to try something a fraction bigger than the 3/8.”

“Yeah, well that’s what your 1/2” is for.”

“No Steve, you don’t understand, just a tiny bit bigger, like, oh I don’t know… say …7/16.”

“But the 39 doesn‘t co.…what are you saying?”

“Think about it Steve, what if we could make any size dado we felt like, when we felt like it... wouldn’t that be really something Steve ….wouldn’t it?”

“Jesus Stimp, I mean…well… look, I‘d better get going, times getting on.”

The next morning you wake and realise what you’ve done, you feel so ashamed you want to call him and say you didn’t mean it and the 1/2” is great, but you can’t find the courage, so you avoid him, the weeks pass and one day you hear that Steve and his wife have moved away. A long way away.

There is a very simple way to avoid the above unpleasantness, either keep your avant-garde ideas about fractions to yourself and live the lie or buy a Stanley 46. It was originally sold with a selection of cutters, when I bought mine, it had just three or four left. I ordered a shiny replacement set from the very pleasant Bob at St James Bay Tool Co in Arizona, they arrived after several long phone calls, a few emails and about six months, none of which really matters unless you’re desperate.
 
Bob is a talkative craftsman living in the desert city of Mesa and the only person in the world to make these cutters. This sounds like the helpful information given by a dying mystic to a goat-herding, sandalled and unlikely hero, who then has to overcome terrible obstacles throughout his tortuous journey to Mesa and persuade Bob to make him a set of cutters so that he can slay the Hydra; and rescue the girl with the piled-up coiffure. It would have been perfect if there were nine cutters in a set, but what were the chances?

The beauty of the 46 lies in the fact that just like the 39 it has two spurs, skewed cutters and a flat edge to run along a guide, but the width of cut is obviously variable. Therefore, behind closed doors you could carefully grind down a 1/2” cutter to 7/16”, ensuring you retain the side profile, then simply order another 1/2” and wait.

While you wait, why not listen to “Silvan’s Night Train Trip” by Silvan Zingg, and wonder, if like me you occasionally disturb the piano, what if I could do that? I would also wonder why there is a skewed match cutter, is there a cross-grain version of this joint? If, however, it was intended to just do the conventional cut along the grain I feel a bit let down, that’s not the destiny a skewed cutter was born to fulfil. The Stanley 46 is very versatile in it’s way, you can cut all your housings of say ¾”, then just add your floral fence, adjust this and the depth stop to reduce the ends of your chunky shelves to fit. All done with one tool and no need to go searching for a specialised special that only cuts a certain type of cut in a certain way and then only on a Friday….suddenly it loses some of it’s allure.

How are any of these planes better than an electric router that you just plug in? Well, for one thing they are quiet, if you have a workmate-type folding bench you can actually set yourself up and cut dados right beside a sleeping granny, just brush the shavings away from her air ways as you go. Bear in mind, if she does wake up she will think a lot less of you, and you’ll have to live with that until she forgets.

I think that comprehensively covers the whole subject of making a trench across a piece of wood, other than the multitude of multiplanes, which are naturally non-specific so can't be included. The dados that the 46, and the 39s and the woodies make are all through as opposed to stopped. Such is life, and just like them, I’m all through as well.

Pleased to meet you, in a way.

When meeting people I try to avoid the whole hug and kiss pantomime, nine times out of ten it’s not the appropriate greeting (I’m talking about women here - I can’t even contemplate the Euroman-on-man-embrace thing, it fits slap bang in the middle of what my grimacing uncle Norman would call shenanigans). The most recent, and I hope final, act of this depravity happened on a crowded London street when I met up with my sister-in-law this week to visit an elderly relative and then have lunch.

It’s the open arms, upraised chin and puckered lips that tell you there’s no way you’re going to get away with a firm handshake. She had adopted the position and it merely remained for me to get in there and get it over and done with. It was probably nerves, a severe lack of coordination and the sun was in my eyes, but my approach was far too hurried. I firmly grasped her shoulders, lost all sense of distance and found myself too close, simultaneously tilting and turning my head towards her right cheek, lining up for the final thrust, but unfortunately trod really heavily on her left foot. I immediately lowered my head to look at the foot I’d just squashed but momentum carried me forward so I ended up burying my lips against her neck three inches below her right ear and actually inside the collar of her blouse (oh dear).

As in a reflex action, I instantly jumped backwards and stumbled with one foot caught behind the other, to regain balance my knees had to bend and for a split-second I found myself motionless on one knee with my arms out to each side in the middle of the pavement as if I’d just landed after a pretty good ski-jump; before leaping adroitly to the upright human posture and saying: “Hiya, sorry about that.” Tragically, it’s not uncommon for me to lose balance when meeting people; I may have a gene or two from the fainting-goat side of the family.

Considering that she’d been literally violated by someone now crouched before her like Quasimodo‘s less good-looking cousin, other than a barely audible whimper (the toes), she didn’t even let a look of mild surprise show on her face. There may have been just a hint of detached amusement playing briefly across her full and slightly parted lips, but I didn’t really notice; because, as we started to walk beside each other she slipped her arm through mine, now if there’s one thing I try to avoid its walking arm in arm, nine times out of ten it’s not the……

Lunch was very pleasant, over-priced and over cooked but also slightly disconcerting, I’ve known her for years but there was a period when we rarely saw each other as she lived in Australia, she returned with her husband Pete-mate about six months ago. I’ve seen her quite often since then as she is Mrs Stimp’s younger sister, but never alone, and she grabbed the chance to touch on some rather personal issues. By the end of that meal I couldn’t have managed one more intimate revelation, not even a wafer thin one.

I was slightly apprehensive about the closing ceremony, as the time approached I was preparing for the cheek-kissing and was determined to not only get it right but also add a long “mmmmwuaaah” at the same time as a sort of social flourish. Which has to be better than falling over. I thought later I could have cried ‘dedaaaaaah’ triumphantly while I was kneeling with out-stretched arms and told her I was trying out an archaic greeting that is now only used by the few remaining herdsmen living in the foothills of Mount Basildon. Just another lost opportunity to look a bit Essex-centric I suppose.

As we said goodbye she didn’t risk another go at the kissing and just gently squeezed my hand instead; which somehow, for all the wrong reasons, seemed the right thing to do.

The Stanley 39 and a skewed sense of priorities.

Considering dadoism, as a reaction to the failure of religion, science and bourgeois society generally to avoid the Great War it pretty much proposed nothing in their place. When everything has gone with no viable replacement, it’s Somalia. I doubt they desired any real acceptance, they would have felt obliged to start another movement reacting against it, but they were polemic and that’s good even if you are proselytising anarchists living a comfortable café-life in neutral Zurich during a European war.

It started naively as nihilistic and anti-art as art, but became more positive with some dilution and the occasional urinal, it also paved the way for much greater things. Just mentioned this in case you’re here because you mistyped and thought, that’s it I give up, I’m going post-minimalism from now on, I wouldn‘t, you won‘t like it, just change the o for an a.

Back to dadoism, when Stanley introduced the 39 the second Anglo-Boer war had just ended which was a great relief, and around the time Stanley ceased production Britain tested its first Nuclear Bomb, there isn’t a direct connection, it’s a time-scale thing.

The Stanley 39 is an all metal plane with a skewed blade, two spurs, an excellent depth-stop adjustment,  and are used in exactly the same way as the wooden dado plane. They actually work very well, and unlike their wooden forebears they don’t warp, they don’t take up much room, they don’t look too bad and they don’t even make much noise. In fact, all the merits of a long-term partner. The above qualities were all there in Sarah in abundance (that’s not where she lived it’s just she had so many good points). I knew she was great right from day one, we had been seeing each other for a few months when we went to Rome to celebrate her birthday. It would be the first time we had spent any length of time on our own together. Days were filled with laughter, fountains and Baroque iconography, and the evenings were all candlelit endearments.

It was when she fell asleep that all the evil that everyone has in them, that never showed when she was awake, emerged spectacularly. She started making a high-pitched squeaking sound like a guinea pig, followed by kicking, possibly some flatulence and snoring then more squeaking, some shouting, waving her arms around and more squeaking. All night, a frightening cacophony and the gratuitous violence. Think of the surprise I had when Audrey Hepburn turned into Linda Blair and no Father Merrin available at such short notice.

After the initial shock, that is by the third night, I’d become accustomed to the nightly metamorphosis and even began to find it appealing in a way. An unintentional tiny flaw in someone who is otherwise perfect merely, I think, reinforces that perfection. I’d managed to push her right back on her pedestal. She stayed there for a few more months until she was promoted at the bank where she worked and made the choice to transfer to Brussels, yes Belgium. I took the rejection stoically of course, but Belgium?

It seems delusional and a big mistake to idolise someone you know intimately, but when millions of people worship someone they don‘t know at all, it can go beyond all rational explanation. There is the Michael Jackson issue with the 39; some men have taken to wearing one glove to alleviate the pain of pressing on all the protruding pieces of metal at the front end. My own epic single effort was about twenty feet of oak in twelve-inch runs on a pair of bookcases, the cutter was very sharp and I was using the 5/8”. I didn’t have any problems other than the usual tirade of abusive advice, “what a waste of time, I know you’re into all this retarded stuff mate, but you wanna use a router on that, no seriously, it‘s a lot quicker mate, really.”

Not the elderly Jesuits that live next door who are very quick to criticise, but my sister-in-law‘s husband, which makes him what exactly? It makes him Peter or just Pete when we‘re being casual. He has spent a few years in Australia which entitles him under Commonwealth law to call everyone mate, which causes my Pavlovian response of Pete-mate. I used to see him fairly infrequently but now they’re back permanently in England and living quite close.

I bought most of my 39s in America, but if that‘s not possible, I expect you could find them here, or have them sent over and it would be worth the effort. They are naturally imperial widths, not French widths so that could be looked on as either a problem when using glass or modern boards or a tremendous advantage because you will need to buy a side rebate or two to widen the dado a fraction, more skewed blades but for a different reason.

You may be wondering if they are better than their wooden equivalent. In some ways, they are, but in other ways not, so to be on safe side I would get as many as you can of each.

A+B=C or possibly K

How did I get to be right here right now? Partly through choices obviously, but what influenced those choices, what wet hands of fate and coincidence shaped me as I was turning on their wheel, and why is this of any importance?

On most days, luckily, there is no time, need or inclination to consider these fundamental questions, but I have, because our whole system here has decided to have a well earned rest and there’s not much I can do other than stare at my reflection in a blank screen or whip out my dongle and do this. We may all like to think that we’ve become who we are by our own volition, and that’s great, or not, if you have, but I can’t so arbitrarily ignore the mass of influences we‘re subjected to every day.

Perhaps I’m overcomplicating what should be as straightforward as A+B=C, but what made B become B? And then, when interacting with A, how much did this impact on A and did it result in C being skewed, possibly due to D influencing B. But C, the outcome, must of itself always be C whatever, it’s only that it could have deviated had B not been influenced by D. It takes at least two to cause an effect of any interest, but behind each of those people there must be hundreds more that have mildly, or dramatically touched them in some way to make them partly who they are, and it must be who B is, that made them react with A in the manner that caused C to be the result. I have stupidly overlooked the fact that B may also only react to A in a way that B may not react to K, because A is undoubtedly swayed in some way, greatly or not, by their own D, which may only be of any importance to B. Whereas the L that K is biased towards may hold no such importance or relevance to B.

In real life, as opposed to here, I suppose there is a set of parameters that are partly self-set and partly imposed by convention that tuck us up snugly and kiss us on the forehead. If you or I, stretch, break or simply ignore our limits tomorrow and say to, or do something with B, then this could, I suppose, change how, in years from now, Z deals with Y, and that, if the resulting C was unfavourable, it would be partly my, or your fault. Just as I would like to lay the blame for some of my unforced errors on something M said or did to P in the distant past.

This is a bigger question than I thought it was, it’s huge. There may not even be enough letters to do it justice.

If there is one person who stumbles blindly around and finds themselves accidentally here, they may just be asking themselves, as I do when the retrospective need arises , "why did I do that?" If they do, this won’t help at all but at least they might feel it wasn‘t entirely their fault, because they can now blame D, as it was D all along.

Across the grain, across the years.

I’m quite enjoying woodwork at the moment so I’ll start with something about the essential tools.

At the dawn of time, when man first picked up a piece of wood and thought what can I make with this? His answer almost certainly was, not much, because I’m never going to produce a decent cross-grain housing or dado with these bits of flint and threw the wood on the fire in disgust. This sad situation continued until the introduction of the skewed dado plane which may well have been in the mid eighteenth century, quite a wait and a quite a lot of fires.

With more a slightly self-conscious look-at-us-we’re-spoilt-for-choice-now glance towards our ancestors than to actually make something, I dug out some wooden dado planes from the tool cupboard. One criticism levelled at them concerns their natural desire to warp, back in the days of wooden tennis bats we used to use a kind of spring loaded clamp to stop their own twisted tendencies, maybe something similar could be used or even those old Rickets splints if you haven‘t thrown them out.



These planes come in various widths and really do work quite well once they’re adjusted correctly and sharp and straight, you’ll notice the metal spurs sometimes called slitters or snickers or even nickers.

Which conveniently reminds me of a tall, sylphish goddess named Sonja, could have been Sonya but not Sandra. I suppose the elastic gave way and they just slid to her ankles, we were walking along a long corridor at work. In one fluid movement, she stooped, removed them and tucked them in her pocket, hardly breaking stride, smiled and continued walking. She was so cool and as graceful as a ballerina, a wonderful person who I admired big time, obviously not just for her ability to disrobe on the move.

If it had been me and I don’t know how it could have been, but if it had been I would have spent five minutes wriggling around on my back like an upturned tortoise pulling helplessly at my underwear firmly knotted round my shoes as my pants gradually stretched like chewing gum to the length of my leg. Probably muttering “sod it” over and over again, as a circle of colleagues formed around me offering advice and encouragement, “no, no, no look they’re still caught on your heel, pull upwards then to the left, no, no, your left.”

The spurs don’t need to gouge to any great depth, more just scratch the surface as I‘m doing here. I’m not an authority on any of this so if you want to set them to cut deeply that’s absolutely okay, but they really just need to slice the wood fibres a fraction deeper than the depth of cut of the blade, cutter or iron. From here on in, I’m going to call it a blade. So adjusting the cutter, usual procedure, step 1- remove cutter and wedge, step 2- replace cutter just less than desired depth, replace wedge and tap gently, step 4-try to plane some wood, step5, repeat steps 1 to 5. Until you are satisfied or have grown too old to remember or even care what you are doing holding this plane in one hand and a small hammer in the other and you keep looking from one to other whilst slowly shaking your head. The shed door opens throwing a shaft of sunlight on your bemused, tear stained and wrinkled face, you look up squinting against the glare to make out an elderly woman you vaguely recognise from years ago holding a cup of tea and with a faltering, barely audible voice you ask, “is it all over? Can I use it now…can I? “ It’s actually not too bad after a bit of practise.

Just how important is it to be skewed? Well, that’s a big question, but in the present context for all sorts of technical reasons it really is helpful for cutting trans-grain. The somewhat esoteric technicalities mean in effect the pitch of the blade is lowered without changing the actual pitch. Picture yourself walking carefree and laughing up a hill in a zig-zag or series of inclined planes as opposed to struggling wretchedly in a straight line. The thing you should constantly bear in mind is the sine of the physical pitch and the cosine of the skew angle will give you the sine of the effective pitch.




I suppose the ancient plane makers arrived at the perfect angle of skew empirically, you may ask do they vary between makers? I don’t believe they do, perhaps it was the blade makers who dictated the angle and the plane-maker had to conform or be derided and ostracised when they all met down the pie shop at lunchtime. “How’s that thirty-seven degree skew Isaac hahaha?”
“Yeah, yeah, very funny, careful you don’t split your cod-piece Moseley, you git.”

We will need a straight edge to guide us, no need to kneel in the desert looking upwards, as any firmly clamped small piece of scrap wood will do, set the depth stop, draw the plane towards you a couple of times so the spurs start to do their thing and that’s it, plane away until your depth stop stops you.

If you are by nature a person who eschews safety and is prepared to live on the edge no matter what the consequences, and says things such as, “I’m like Hemmingway man, watch me”, you can remove the guide after a few passes and the cut is started. Are you are overly fond of porridge and cold weather? If yes, then none of this will make any sense until you substitute the word raglet for every time you see dado, some viewers may trenchantly disagree with the word dado and raglet. I have also always refused point blank the optional e in ‘dados‘. If offered, just say no.

Welcome, I am Nactus Stimp.