Hand Tools For Beginners Woodworking - What you NEED

hi i'm rob cos and welcome to my shop today hand tools for beginners woodworking i get asked the question a lot what do i need if i'm going to build furniture entirely with hand tools so what i'm going to do is i'm going to walk you through a piece of furniture i actually built with hand tools only and that'll tell you all the tools that you're going to need stay with us i'm rob cosman and welcome to my shop we make it our job to help take your woodworking to the next level if you're new and you haven't subscribed please do so hit the notification bell so you'll receive alerts when we release a new video and anytime we use a special tool we'll always leave a description down below alright let's get to work i think the best way to broach this subject is to actually use an example and it just so happens that i have the very first piece of furniture that i ever built entirely with hand tools as part of a class did this way back in 2003 taught the class in calgary now the significance of that is it's several thousand miles from where i live so i only took the tools that were going to be needed and in mentioning that since we were starting with rough lumber we had to have all of our dimensioning tools we had a drawer on either side so all of our dovetailing tools we're using tapered legs so there's mortise and tenons involved there's rabbits just about every joint that you're going to find in a typical piece of furniture is going to be found in there so what we'll do is we'll go through and show you each aspect of the furniture and then talk about the tools that are needed to do it the way i want to start is what i with what i would call foundation tools those are tools that you're going to use to support your work and to keep your tools sharp now when i say support your work i'm talking two things clamps and a bench and if you're going to do this you have to have a bench mine is a scandinavian style hand tool bench it has a shoulder vise here a tail vise here it's made out of bird's eye maple maple and mahogany and if a new person was looking at this and thinking they had to build that before they get started i can see them getting very intimidated so we look over here at what we call our cosmon bench we'll leave a link in the description below if you want information on it but it's made using one sheet of one inch mdf that stands for medium density fiberboard available a lot of big box stores and one sheet of 5 8 inch baltic birch plywood involves some glue some staples some nuts and bolts a vise and a bench dog and it's everything you need in order to get started in hand tools it's heavy it's flat nice and rugged so there's your bench now clamps and you can't be afraid of spending money here if you buy lousy clamps you're going to regret it every time you use them i like these and i'm going to show you some of the features that i like this pad that pushes against the wood is solid instead of being hollow so it doesn't leave a mark on the board most importantly is these are designed to be adjusted and put into place you get it where you want it and then you when you tighten it up these ones have serrations on six surfaces one two three four five six all that means is they grab instantly if you use the cheaper ones that only have serrations on two spots they have a tendency to slip and slide really aggravating and you're going to need multiple sizes you're going to need some long ones as well and you're going to need some that'll give you the depth of reaching way in like i said you can't scrimp on your clamps and you'll find that this is one of the most biggest expenditures in hand tool woodworking what i used to do is every time i would go to a place that sold them i'd buy one or two and you'd be surprised how rapidly that would accumulate and it didn't seem like a whole lot of money was flying out of your pockets and lastly on the foundation tools is your sharpening and i always advise my students do not scrimp when it comes to sharpening the better the sharpening gear the better the edge you're going to get on your tools i have a very simple system it involves a thousand grit and a 300 grit and i finish with a 16 000 grit now this one is ceramic it wears so you have to keep it flat these are industrial diamond on steel they essentially don't wear what i do is i use the 300 grit side of this to keep this flat it's only a mirror process of three or four seconds before each use and you're good to go so there are 31 pieces of wood in this and we've got to take those 31 pieces of wood from rough this is what i mean if you're planning to do this right from scratch here's a piece of lumber it's the tree was cut down the boards were milled they were dried and you buy them like this so they're rough on all six surfaces what you've got to do is break that down into manageable pieces that you can then process whether they need to be tapered or just be flat smooth and square on all six surfaces and it's a lot easier to saw than it is to plane so in order to get a piece that i'm gonna work with let's say i want a 24 by five inch piece out of this but the first thing i would do and recognize this in the drying process the board is going to lose moisture out the end a lot faster than it's going to lose out the edges of the face and if you look there closely you'll see that there's some what we call end checks and those cracks develop as a result of this area shrinking faster as it dries and this area doesn't so the first thing you need to do is come in here and cut off and get away from those end checks well that means you're going to need a couple of saws when i say a couple you're going to want a cross cut and a rip cross cut have specific teeth designed to rapidly and cleanly cut across the grain so you're going to want to rip apart me a cross cut panel saw so if i was processing that down as i mentioned and i wanted to get this after i cross cut it and i would usually make it maybe a quarter to a half an inch longer than i need and then when it came it comes to ripping it i would probably rip it to be about a quarter of an inch wider and for ripping it you're going to use a rip saw cuts differently than a cross cut designed to go parallel to the grain and also to do it a lot faster all right so here we do here we are we've got our piece of lumber that is now going to be turned into a component on that piece of furniture that means it needs to be flat it needs to be smooth needs to be square in order to do that we use something called winding sticks now you can make these yourself but winding sticks are simply designed in fact we have a whole video on this and we'll leave a link below but by setting one winding stick on the back and one on the front and sighting down the top edges you can tell if there's any wind or twist in that board what's the first tool you're going to use i wouldn't call this an absolute necessity but it is nice to have and that's called a scrub plane nice feature of the scrub plane is you can remove a lot of wood quickly now if i wanted to take this down to three quarter inch board and this in its rough state is almost an inch and a quarter so i've got quite a bit of wood to remove i could go with my scrub plane it has a very large rear handle or tote that allows me to get four fingers on there lots of control it's got a big thick blade it's got a big open throat so the shavings can easily come out of there and the end of the blade actually has a curve on there which facilitates rapid stock removal if you don't want to go and get a scrub plane you could actually do the same work with your jack plane now this is my go-to in fact i'm going to suggest that that piece of furniture could be built entirely with this in terms of planes you need this is a little better than 14 inches long designed more for close work but you could certainly do some course work with it as well pull the frog back open that throat up and go at it now once you've got that processed so that it's flat smooth square all six surfaces now you're going to do that in this case 31 times this is one solid piece so after i've dimensioned it i need to make sure that these two opposite sides are parallel to one another and that's where you're going to introduce something called a panel gauge so this is a marking gauge it's got a cutter that's adjustable and the head of the tool runs against the edge of the work to put a line that would be parallel to it but the panel gauges is just a larger version of that so if i had a board like this and i was wanting to make sure that that opposite side was going to be parallel to this one even though this might reach out there be very difficult to use because there just isn't enough reference surface along here so and don't pass out when you see me use my little square as a hammer what i do with my panel gauge is adjust it to what i want lock it in place by driving in the wedge a little rabbet here runs along this corner of the edge that wants to be followed and that'll leave me a nice scribe line on the opposite side it will be absolutely parallel now the underside of this top has a bevel and that can all be done with the five and a half so everything that we need to do to prepare this top we could do with the tools that we've already mentioned now we'll go to the legs and we're going to cut a taper in them well that too can be done with the five and a half the layout has to happen you can use your marking gauge on that because it's small enough pieces of course you're going to need some squares and i suggest that you could probably get away with two combination squares one is a 12 inch and one is a six now what's nice about these is you can adjust them this way for measuring the inside to see if something is square you can move it over like that to measure the outside it's got a bubble level on there that you can actually use it as a level and you can also use it to mark a 45 in fact you can even use it to adjust depths by having the beam come down below the head of the tool and why the six inch well they're going to be times when this is going to be just a little bit cumbersome and that's a nice tool to be able to use particularly things like dovetailing that'll replace all of your other squares so we got our legs done we're not going to talk about the mortise and tenon joints just yet the side pieces are going to be done the same way our planes panel gauge for getting the edges parallel we'll square up our ends again using our five and a half and in that case you're going to want to use a shooting board and that's an item that you can build yourself i'll just briefly touch on it this is what i would consider to be probably one of the most important shop built tools that you can have and the reason is by setting your board on the shooting board if you have made this fence square to this track over here as you move that plane along there it will give you a perfectly square edge square in this direction and square in this direction definitely a must have all right let's flip this over and talk about some of the parts that you don't readily see there's a framework underneath these aprons have to be attached firmly to these sides that's going to involve mortise and tenon work and of course we're going to have our drawer work but let's talk about this first if you're going to cut mortise and tenon joints you're going to need a cross cut saw a tenon saw you're going to need a mortise chisel you're going to need a mallet you're going to need a mortise gauge and you may actually want to use a small router plane as well so here here's how we go if we always want to cut our mortise first the mortise is the square hole that we have on the leg in this case i actually have two but that's another story the tenon is going to be the part of this piece that gets reduced at the end that is made to fit those square holes in cutting those square holes you want a mortise chisel and a mortise chisel is square and cross section while your mortise chisels have parallel sides that are square to the bottom and i like them to be at least square and cross section gives you lots of reference area you're going to want a good mallet my preference is what we would call a carver's mallet there are ma there are hammers type but i find that they they have to be very directional when you hit this i can hit the chisel without even thinking about it and it just always seems to land exactly where i want it these ones have resin impregnated heads to add weight and also really toughen up the maple and the handle is taped like a hockey stick why so you get a good grip the older you get the more you'll appreciate that so you're going to need mortise chisels my ref my suggestion would be a quarter and a half as a minimum if you think about the way we typically lay out a mortise and tenon joint we always do it in thirds so if you're using three quarter stock your tenon is going to be a quarter of an inch you're going to have a quarter inch shoulder on either side if you're using inch and a half stock your tenon is going to be a half inch you're going to have a quarter on either pardon me a half inch on either side that's the reason why the two chisels now you're also going to need a mortise gauge and the mortise gauge is going to be used to take the measurement of the actual chisel so whatever type it is there should be some way of setting that chisel in between the two cutters and then adjusting it so that when you remove the chisel you have the exact dimension of it and then you can transfer that for laying out your tenon and you can transfer that for laying out your mortise but it's precise and there's no guesswork your mortise chisel dictates your joints width why the small router plane it's probably the most accurate way to go in and make a final adjustment on the thickness of the tenon as i said you always cut your mortise first because that's determined from the width of your chisel now when you're cutting your tenon if you didn't get it right from the saw and i should mention that as well a tenon saw is designed to give you greater depth you have to remember this when it comes to saws the farther away your cutting teeth are from the heavy brass back the more instability you're going to have up here so on a dovetail saw we have a tendency to keep those fairly narrow typically they're not required to cut very deep so by having these teeth close to this back you get lots of stability well the tenon's going to be longer so you need greater capacity here you want what i call an open pistol grip why because the way you hold it your index finger and thumb give a lot of stability this way if your fingers were down in here that has a tendency to turn in your hand but the index finger and thumb lock it and provide lots of lateral stability that'll take care of the rip cuts that you do on four sides of the tenon but now you've got to cut off the shoulder and it's where the shoulder meets the face of the opposite piece that's what you see that's what has to be precise so for that job i use what's called a cross cut saw or a joinery crosscut saw these teeth are designed specifically to cut across the grain very similar to the panel saw but again smaller saw closer distance between the teeth and the solid brass back a lot more precision and much easier to control hopefully you can get to a point where you'll be able to take your joints right from the saw if you can't or if you mess up one or two then that's when you're going to need something called a shoulder plane and i'll address these right now by comparing the shoulder plane to the block plane and to the five and a half if you look at a block plane we'll talk about a little greater detail shortly the blade doesn't go all the way to either side if you look at the five and a half the blade doesn't go all the way to either side both of those planes would not allow you to work right up to a vertical surface if i needed to fix the face of that tenon so that it would come up tight to the face of the board that has the mortise in it a shoulder plane the blade goes the full width so you can get right into a corner and you can address that shoulder so it'll come up perfectly tight against the opposing piece now talk about block planes i consider this to be one of your essential planes for the simple reason that there are times when you've got to be able to have a one-handed tool there's two options here you can get the low angle or the standard angle if you take the lever cap off you'll notice on the block plane the blade the bevel is on the top side on a low angle plane the blade sits on a milled surface that measures 12 degrees from the sole so you put that in there you add that 12 degrees to the 25 degree bevel on your blade and you're planing somewhere around 37 to 40 degrees that's considered low angle the standard angle the blade is sitting on a 20 degree surface you're going to be planing at 45 degrees or higher but the biggest difference i find is where the top of the lever cap and the bottom of the plane are because the higher this is the more uncomfortable it is the lower it is the better it nestles in your palm the more control you have on the plane so my preference is always a low angle and if you need a higher angle approach you can simply buy a second blade grind a higher angle on it and that'll take care of changing the pitch f so let's talk about the drawer construction well first thing you're going to do is think about is dovetails so you're going to need a dovetail saw and you want a dovetail saw that you can control by that i mean a saw that when you put it on the line it will allow you to start right there the better your saw and the better you are at sawing the fewer additional procedures you're going to have to do if you can take your joint right from the saw you win if you have to go back in and try to fix things with the chisel that's going to add a lot of frustration to it so get a good saw you're also going to need a marking gauge and i can't stress how important a precise marking gauges you want one that is razor sharp so that it severs those fibers and doesn't crush them i prefer the wheel style they're a lot more convenient to use they're easier to sharpen you can adjust the depth or you can set the measurement or the thickness of your board by simply placing the gauge on there letting that drop down and locking it and that gives you that in my opinion is the easiest and most accurate way to measure the thickness of a piece you're going to need a square there's where your small square comes in you're going to need some chisels you don't need a ton i'm going to suggest a quarter a half and three quarter and if i were to throw one more into the mix i would say you'd want to pick up an eighth of an inch there's going to be times when you just need something smaller than a quarter inch any of the larger chisels can also fill a larger area but you can only go so small for the layout i use a pair of dividers and you we can leave a link in the description below on how to layout dovetails using a pair of dividers it's very precise you're going to want a dovetail marker something to actually lay out the lines across the end of the board and down the face the angled slope you're going to need some form of a dovetail marking knife i like to use a little pallet knife or an artist palette knife in order to apply the glue i find it very precise you're going to want a fret saw it's an inexpensive tool but what this allows you to do and this isn't a coping saw we're going to talk about coping saws later but a fret saw has a very thin blade that allows you to go down the kerf left by the dovetail saw get to the bottom cut right across the bottom remove about 98 of the waste quickly leaving you just a little bit to clean up on the line with the chisel very convenient now this is called a skew block plane and i use this as part of my dovetail procedure you'll see that in the video below but it's also a great tool for cutting rabbits because it exposes the blade on one side it has an adjustable fence so whenever you need to cut a rabbet which is removing a piece of material along the edge of a board this is a great tool for doing that you're going to want a hammer i use a little 12 ounce why well because if your joint doesn't fit and can't go together with a 12 ounce you probably have a problem with the joint not a bigger hammer and of course you need your mallet in order to drive your chisels now there's one more tool we're going to need when you build a drawer which is essentially a box without a lid you have a drawer bottom and that needs to slide in there somehow and the best way is to have it fit in a groove so we have a little plane called a drawer bottom plane and it's designed to cut a quarter inch groove three eighths of an inch up from the bottom of the board and it does a very precise job it's actually a very soothing tool to use and that'll be your drawer all the other parts will be processed with the planes and saws that we already talked about now i want to go through because that pretty much brings us to an end in terms of the various pieces in this in this piece of furniture but i want to go through and highlight a few other tools that you may want to consider strongly consider if you're going to build furniture with hand tools this is a coping saw if you're going to build a piece of furniture that's going to have curved pieces you can't do that with a panel saw but you can do it with a coping saw you simply loosen the handle adjust your blade to whatever you need in terms of being able to have clearance from the back side of the frame and this cuts on the pull stroke and you can go in and do what you need to do not a precise tool but it will get you close and you can come in later with another plane or a spoke shave to clean that up i think you're going to want a straight edge it's nice to be able to work i use my measuring tape a lot but if i want to be very precise i'll go in with my straight edge and i like this particular one because the markings are very clear and easy to see now the last thing we'll talk about is your drilling tools you're almost always going to have to drill holes when you're dealing with building a piece of furniture so this is called a brace and these are bits and this is actually an antique one but you can buy them new as well this is designed to go in there's a screw in the front and it will pull help pull the wood in easy to work using soft wood a little bit harder in hardwoods in fact sometimes you may actually have to go in and drill a little pilot hole first but it'll drill a nice clean hole and it typically is going to be what you use to drill the larger size holes now i don't have it up here yet because i haven't finished this cabinet but there's a few other drills that you may want to consider one is a yankee drill and the other is an eggbeater style drill talk about the yankee drill first i think this is a great tool relatively inexpensive if you loosen this collar there's all your different drill sizes in here they're easy to install you simply pull the collar out take the drill out put it in drop it back in it works by plunging down from a straight line which means if you're in a cramped quarters and you don't have room to spin something around by just doing this you're drilling your hole great for doing pilot holes now this is an egg beater style drill i found one that has a three eighths inch chuck which is nice because i have up to a half inch drills but my half inch has the shank is only 3 8 of an inch so it will fit in there and this i think is actually one of the nicer versions of this particular style of of a drill you've got a fairly large crank so you've got lots of torque on there in fact this one even has a removable cap on the top you can store other drill bits up in there they're not that expensive new and you can find them quite readily on the used tool market as well that's a lot and it's uh it will may take you a while to accumulate all these tools but let me finish by giving you a word of advice on quality if you buy inferior quality tools you're going to regret it every time you use them in fact a lot of times what it'll do it'll frustrate you the point where you won't want to do it at all you buy the expensive tools i like to say you only cry once every time after that it's a pleasure to use them you never have to replace them why buy a tool that you know at some point you're going to want to replace and you're going to replace seems to me it's a lot better and smarter money is spent in buying the best tool the first time and only buy it once if you enjoy my method of work and like my style of teaching click on any one of these videos to help take your woodworking to the next level now i've always said better tools make the job so much easier if you click on the icon with the plane and the chisel it'll take you to our website introduce you to all of our tools that we actually manufacture right here as well as our workshops both in person and online good luck

Channel: RobCosman.com

Views: 28,356

Rating: 4.9523811 out of 5

Keywords: Hand Tools For Beginners Woodworking, hand tools for beginners, hand tools for woodworking, best hand tools for woodworking, hand tools, first hand tools, woodworking hand tools, woodworking hand tools set, woodworking hand tools starter kit, woodworking hand tools you must have, woodworking, hand tool woodworking, woodworking tools, woodworking tools you must have, beginner woodworking tools, traditional woodworking, basic tool set, rob cosman

Id: 5TCZiiI8e5A

Length: 27min 12sec (1632 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020