At 6:03 PM -0500 1/31/99, Jim O'Brien wrote:
        [snip]
>My involvement in woodworking and preference for hand tools is not a
>Luddite reaction to machine work.  It is a desire, however misguided,  to
>use tools as extensions of my hands and fingers in the creative process.
>The activity flows outward from my mind and spirit to physically accomplish
>a task or process, not backwards in an attempt to avoid a mechanical moment.

        Yeah, what he said!

        Getting pretty well into my version of Mike Dunbar's 6-board pine
chest (I say *my* version due to various modifications and adaptations from
his FWW cover project), I'm not saying I've been transported back to 1764,
but I'm having fun, learning and relearning, and making something I hadn't
made before.  Not having done any extensive projects with pine recently,
all my user planes had their mouths tightened up to approximately 1.5
gnat's *ss units.  Working up my recycled pine flooring, it was Clog City.
At this stage my #5 1/2C jumbo jack, MF#9 and T11#3 smoothers, T9#8
jointer, and #40 rabbet planes have all have had their frogs backed off to
open the mouths to roughly 3 GAs, and the shavings are clearing nicely,
making a huge pile of pine aroma off the end of the bench, newly released
from lumber harvested maybe 140 years ago. Don't know how I'd get these
18"-wide panels flat and smooth with machines, even if I wanted to.  The
mouth of the #78 just sits there gaping, but it does what it's made to do,
as Bill Fissell said (and this could go for most of our tools), once you
get the hang of it...  That especially goes for the #45 combo, which I've
used for grooving the front and back planks to receive the chest bottom
(one of my monor design modifications).
        My sawing stool and pair of sharp One Son (1865-71) Disston #7s, a
4 1/2 ppi rip and a 10 ppi crosscut, are a joy to use.  The rip has an H.
DISSTON eagle medallion nut, and the cc has an H. DISSTON & SONS medallion
with scales in keystone.  Hmmm, interesting.  The marking gauge I made from
cherry scraps a couple of years ago, using a broken twist drill sharpened
like a crescent blade, continues to function admirably. The tote I made for
the #40, BTW,, feels good to my hand. The bench, the Veritas dogs and pups,
the tool tray, the vises--I try not to take them for granted.
        My little Disston 4" try square comes in handy for checking edges
when jointing, the James Swan drawknife is just right for knocking down
edge cuts that I don't want to have to rip again before final planing.
Mike instructs his readers to work up the dados with knife and chisel,
probably thinking that if he introduced the concept of a non-buzzing router
it would sew confusion in the ranks.  Yes, *this* is what a #71 router
plane is made to do.  And we don't want mention in a magazine article to
cause a run on them, pushing prices up, now do we?
        This little ramble is meant to provide a positive spin on What It's
All About, for me.  Thanks, Ernie, for the tenon report.  Nice to hear from
you.  So what have the rest of you been up to?
                Tom Holloway