If you’re willing to take the Gottshall block and have already taken the bait, you should ask two questions before you begin. What kind of woodworker do you want to be, and how will you know when you get there? There is no right or wrong answer. This is something we do because we have fun doing it. You can be a ten-year old building a tree house, or you can be the guy lying awake at night because the infeed and outfeed tables of the jointer are out of parallel by .003 cm. Are you seeking time well spent in the process, or are you after a finished product?
You can move around the spectrum regardless of where you are located. Knowing where you are will make everything easier. Knowing where the teacher is can make things easier. Kevin Drake once stated to me that the only reason to not use a certain method is because it was taught to you. One of the best things about woodworking is also one of the worst things. There are many ways to complete any task. Here’s how I did it. This is also how I did this yesterday to teach you on my blog. I might use different tools and methods tomorrow, but I think there is some value in what follows.
Gottshall explains in detail how to prepare the block using hand tools and how to inspect it to ensure it is square and straight. Many schools go through the exercise of making a perfect board with hand planes, refining each surface until it is square, straight and flat. If youre into using planes you should try it. There is danger in the path to perfect surfaces. It wont be a perfect board if it is too small. You need true surfaces to work from, but you also need to know when to stop. To get there, I used my jointer, planer and table saw, then I refined the surfaces using my planes. How did I know I was finished?
You need some good tools to let you know. One of my great leaps forward as a woodworker was a commitment to good measuring and layout tools. Some are inexpensive and some seem pricey at first. Lets look at the inexpensive first. It is important to have a good ruler made of steel. You will be able to get close most of the times. Calipers are a great tool if you want to be certain of something. Mine read in fractions because I think better in fractions and I dont like to convert back and forth to decimals. Don’t try to convince my that I should switch to the metric system. Im well prepared with a long argument about how foolish and silly it is, and you wont win.
Starret 15 cm combinationsquare is the tool I depend on most. Yes, it is expensive and its worth every penny. It is essential and you won’t be able to find a cheaper substitute. You can still get the kids through school with their last year’s shoes. The soles aren’t too worn and their toes don’t hurt so much. You need the Starret square. You might be tempted to buy the larger 30 cm model when you shop. However, it is much bigger than what you actually need. The center square and the protractor are not required. You will use those once to see how they work and put them in a drawer.
The adjustable square is useful for checking everything and can also be used to mark and layout things quickly and easily. You can set a distance, then slide the stock along the edge of a board with your pencil on the end of the blade. You will eventually want a 10 cm double-square. Even though I love the Starret combination squares, I prefer this Veritas one for the 10cm double square.
This set-up can be used to mark repeating distances. It is important to maintain consistency rather than being exact. It may be that your 5/20 cm setting is 2 cm rather than 2 cm, but it will still work if the settings are consistent throughout the project. You always hear pithy advice like measure twice and double check your work, and Im not going to argue against that. But I need to warn you that if you use the same instrument and the same method when you measure twice, the chances are good that if youve made a mistake you will repeat it.
Here Im checking the line I made with the square by using the steel rule. I have the 3 cm mark over the edge because that is easier to see than using the end of the rule. In the opening photo, Im using a block of wood against the end of the board to register the end of the rule. My finger was too small to accurately feel the rule’s end.
Chuck Bender commented on an earlier post to point out that woodworking is primarily about solving problems. The curved parts of the block present some problems. Although the drawing provides the information needed to locate the centers of the curves using the compass and the center lines, you will still need to find them. To swing the arc, I needed to locate the point where the centerline crosses the edge of the curve. The arched cutout on the long side was out of space. The radius on the corner is also a bit of a trick, how would you find the center?
Ive done all this in pencil, and before I start cutting, Ill go over most of my marks with a knife or a wheel cutting gauge. That will help locate and guide the cutting tools. You may be asking why I did all this work with a pencil, only to repeat it later on. The answer is in the last photo, the outline of my first attempt at drawing the arched cutout. I let my mind wander, concentrated on getting a good photo instead of getting the work just so. After stepping back for a while, I realized the error and compared my final layout to the drawing. And that is the most important lesson in all of this; take a good long look before you start cutting.
If you have any questions or would like to share your layout methods, please leave a comment. Or you can tell me Im nuts, its only wood, and you dont need to be this picky. You can also tell me Im a complete slob and a hack. I’m somewhere in the middle.
