Jigs for sharpening, jigs for slicing off thin bits of wood. .

Bosh !

This isn't how the West was won or Louis XV got his furniture made.

be a man - learn to do without the props.

Axe and adze made the wooden walls of England and discovered America. 
Slicks removed the splinters from the floors and jointed the beams of the 
Great Halls and Barns. 

Aye!  Axe, adze, slick, saw,  drawknife  and auger.   All else is wussy 
city dweller stuff. 

Richard 
Going to extremes of long ago.

But when you think about it, all manner of ideas stem from the notion of 
'jigs' - they allow less skilled men to carry out work to a standard, but 
you need enough capital to have some of it lying around tied up in jigs. 
Capital meaning not only cash outlay but the opportunity cost of making 
jigs when you could be doing paying work.  There's no rosy view about the 
skilled men who used 'sharp on a stick' and nothing else - they were 
equally tied to production, and their 'capital investment' was the huge 
amount of time it took to become proficient enough to produce, say, the 
likes of a Robert Thomson table top from nought but an adze.   I've seen 
and used a Thomson table, and could sit there and *look* at it and marvel 
at the skill that produced it - but at what cost in time.  Time is 
nowadays money, instead of being something that goes by as you produce a 
piece of highest quality.   Consider that a widespread adoption of the 
'planing jig'  would have led to flat surfaces, where before all surfaces 
rippled, and caught the light, and reflected it back now in one place, now 
in another.   Doubtless many thought the dead flat surface was so boring 
and machine made.  "These new fangled planing jigs have taken the life out 
of our furniture" they would say - "It's not near as good as it were in mi 
Dads day - no character" 

and so on down the ages until now we invest huge amounts of effort in a 
factory full of jigs that produce flat pack furniture direct from ground 
up reconstituted tree with barely a human hand in site. 

Methinks it behoves us of the Galoot turn of mind to choose carefully when 
we select tools and consider jigs - not turning away from the means of 
simplfying or speeding up our work, but ever conscious of the need to 
acquire the skills to differentiate our work from the output of the flat 
pack farm. 

A galoot Yorkshireman having a bit of a rant. 

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