At his Evenfall Studios in Paradise, California, Rob Hanson had been producing top quality shooting boards, jigs, and shop fixtures for the past ten years. Rob is a craftsman, a businessman and a builder, and yet almost unimaginable destruction has entered his life. On November 8, his home and shop, 35 years in the making, were devastated by wildfire. The photo above is what is left of his home and shop.

Rob has written accounts: leading up to the destruction, the aftermath, and how it is.

Rob and his wife Kristy could really use your help. Dear Heartwood readers, please consider, on this Thanksgiving Day, helping them through this tough time by contributing via GoFundMe or Paypal. Every little bit will help in body and spirit.

Let us all be grateful that we can build, and that we can also help others to build, and as life sometimes requires, rebuild.

Thank you.

Elsewhere in this blog, I’ve contended that woodworking isn’t quick, easy, or perfect every time, and false promises of such delights by some tool advertising and sources of instruction can discourage those learning the craft, who eventually encounter the truth but wonder if the difficulties are their fault. Moreover, perfection is an illusory pursuit that can lead to discouragement and loss of nerve, and is better replaced by a knowledgeable pursuit of excellence.

Yet, I think most anyone with strong dedication, good tools, proper instruction, and decent manual dexterity can develop the individual skills needed for excellent woodworking.

So, what makes woodworking difficult? Why is it pretty hard to learn how to make a project turn out the way you hope? What is the missing link that takes you from learning how to cut a mortise and tenon joint to being able to confidently make a table? In other words, what is the most essential thing to learn in woodworking?

I think it is this: putting it all together. This means being cognizant of the context of each step of the process, so that as steel meets wood, you understand what you’re really doing and why. You must appreciate how the skill being executed at the moment fits into the whole construction. That appreciation informs your approach to the task at hand.

For example, when you flatten the stock for casework, you are aware of why it needs to be flat, the range of flatness tolerance required, and the consequences of sloppiness outside of tolerance. You know when to bear down for high precision but also when punctiliousness is, at best, a waste of energy. So, you have a different mentality when preparing stock for drawer sides compared to drawer bottoms.

Here are more examples. You sense how to make that mortise and tenon joint accurate not just for itself but also for how it will contribute to the accuracy of the whole table coming together. You have this sense even when you are marking out (photo above). In the design process, you appreciate how individual elements have to coordinate into an aesthetic whole that you are also capable of building.

And you understand how “perfect every time” is silly.

Of course, you cannot have all the steps of a project top of mind at once. However, with experience (and for most of us, that means sometimes dealing with failure) you learn to absorb the big picture. It shapes a correct mental approach that you carry with you. With this awareness, your work becomes natural and flowing. The cognizant mentality is not at all burdensome but rather is energizing because you know how to value each step in the journey.

Good musicians know this. Playing notes, even if technically excellent, is one thing; making music quite another. The impact, presence, and style of the whole piece inform the treatment of each passage. I suppose being good at anything is like this, but with woodworking it is right there in front of us.

And finally, another thought for another day: how does making something in wood fit into everything else? (And for me, it must.)

I will be teaching a class, Handplanes: Understanding, Using, and Tuning, this coming Sunday, November 4, 2018, 10:00AM – 3:00 PM, at the Woodcraft in Woburn, MA.

This class will equip you with understanding and skills to directly apply to using handplanes in your shop. Sure, I’ll cover the basics but we’re going to drill down way beyond that so you will really know what you’re doing with handplanes. Among the areas we’ll cover:

• Understanding bevel-down and bevel-up designs
• Tuning your plane: blade edge camber for different uses, mouth opening, preparing and setting the chipbreaker, etc.
• How to use the interactions among attack angle, chipbreaker settings (or no chipbreaker), mouth opening, and skewing the plane to get the performance you want
• What’s really happening with blade edge wear
• Blade steel differences
• Planing technique – hands and body
• The quality features that matter in new and used planes
• How to intelligently sort among the many options in jack, jointer, smoothing, and scrub planes

Bring your plane if available, as this class will be hands-on as well as demonstration. If you have a plane in need of rehab, bring that too – I’ll choose one from the group and fix it up.

This class has been very well received in the past. In fact, a past attendee recently commented, “I took this course several years ago and it changed my woodworking.”

Please call the store directly at 781-935-6414 to register, and see their website for the location and details. You’re welcome to email me directly with questions. It would be great to see you there!

Dark red meranti, pictured above, is a generally uninspiring reddish brown, rather uniform looking wood that does not therefore find its way much into fine woodworking. If you have not come across it as solid wood, you likely have seen it as the skin of middling quality plywood, where it is referred to as lauan or Philippine mahogany. It is about the same density as khaya and genuine mahogany, but a bit softer. It has several cousins in the Shorea genus, including the softer and even more forgettable light red meranti. Any claim of these woods as “mahogany” is untenable.

There is, however, one more wood that does have a strong claim as a mahogany substitute: utile, also known as sipo. Entandrophragma utile is in the same genus but not as hard as sapele, and easier to work. It is a generally consistent but not boring wood that can look quite nice, especially flatsawn, where you otherwise might have used genuine mahogany. Its darker ray lines sometimes also add interest. I’ve also seen some wild ribbon striped quartersawn utile.

The volumetric shrinkage of utile is 11.8%. That’s pretty good but no match for genuine mahogany’s freakish 7.5%. Still, with a nice T/R of 1.4%, you can expect utile to behave quite well.

Unfortunately, dear readers, I do not have any utile in my shop at this time, so I cannot offer you a photo. However, this is a good time to refer you to the magnificent resources created by Eric Meier. His huge website is a treasure trove of well-organized information, including beautiful and useful photos. As good as the website is, I highly recommend also buying his book, Wood!, which I think is the best book on wood available, and one of the best books in the entire woodworking field. [As always, my recommendation is unsolicited and uncompensated.]

If you are contemplating using any of the woods discussed in this series of posts – “genuine” mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla), African mahogany/khaya (Khaya spp.), sapele (Entandrophragma cylindricum), or utile/sipo (Entandrophragma utile), I offer these suggestions:

• Consider each on its own merits rather than trying to imitate some other wood, namely “genuine” mahogany.
• Pay close attention to the particulars of each board, including color, density, figure, and, of course, the orientation of cut from the log. There is much variation within each species.
• Watch out for defects, especially compression failures. For this reason, and the point above, consider buying these woods planed or at least hit-or-miss planed if you can.
• Scraping is a good way to tame the interlocked grain on quartered surfaces.

Enjoy building!

Sapele, Entandrophragma cylindricum, stands out as significantly darker, redder, heavier, and harder than the others in this bunch. Though it would often work in the same context as genuine mahogany, I suggest not thinking of it as a substitute for the venerable old boy, but rather as a wonderful wood in its own right.

The species offers some spectacularly figured wood. Most common is the neat ribbon stripe in quartersawn boards. The striping is finer and bolder than that of khaya, and can be obtained quite reliably. The pieces pictured above are unfinished, fairly middling stuff, but the ribbon figure will pop pretty well with oil-varnish mix, and the color will deepen considerably.

Also, consider ribbon-stripe face veneer plywood, which can be found reasonably priced in a variety of thicknesses, as a nice backing for a cabinet or for drawer bottoms. You know a wood has reached all-star status when you see it as fake veneer in an elevator in a fancy downtown building.

Sapele can also produce spectacular curly figure and pommele figure. The latter is similar to blister maple, sometimes in a finer pattern. The wood is popular with instrument makers.

On the other hand, flatsawn sapele, without special figure, is a decent wood but not something that really excites me on its own. Still, it may fit the bill as a predictable, diffuse-porous, reddish wood that can finish fairly dark and will darken further with time.

No pushover like genuine mahogany, sapele is about as hard as white oak and sugar maple, and nearly as dense. It machines pretty well as long as you take precautions to avoid planer tearout on the quartered rowed surfaces and burning from ripping on the table saw. For smoothing to a finished surface, I suggest skip the handplane and go with scraping and sanding.

Sapele is about as stable as black walnut, with a volumetric shrinkage of 12.8%. The T/R is a nice 1.5, but that offers little advantage when using quarted boards for the ribbon stripe.

Shopping at different dealers, I’ve had good luck with the sapele being fairly consistent, and it has seemed safe to buy in the rough. (However, check the comment in the first post in this series – compression failures may lurk.) I’ve also found it more expensive than khaya or utile but still significantly less than genuine mahogany. It is a popular wood.

How do you pronounce it? I’d been saying sa – ‘pay – lay (like the legendary soccer player), but most often I hear sa – ‘pee – lee, and sometimes, sa – ‘pell – lee.

There’s one more post coming up in this series.

Next up is khaya. The wood available to us may be any of four species in the Khaya genus: K. ivorensis, K. grandifoliola, K. anthotheca, and, less so, K. senegalensis. Ask the guy at your lumber yard what species he’s selling and he’ll probably look at you the same way we look at an 88° try square, even if the importer had kept the species distinct. In fact, you’ll probably create confusion by asking for the “khaya” bin because it is more commonly referred to as African mahogany.

And so, this is the only wood comparable to genuine/true mahogany (Swietenia) that generally bears the “mahogany” name. Botanically, it is in the same family (the next major grouping above genus), Meliaceæ, as Swietenia. It comes to us from West African countries.

Just like true mahogany, when African mahogany/khaya is good, it is indeed a very good wood. The problem is that I have had just as much frustration with inconsistency in density and color in khaya as with true mahogany. There is variation among species, but also with the geographic source of the tree, and the local conditions in which it grew. Therefore, as a practical matter, I suggest that you not be too concerned with the provenance of the wood, but evaluate each board on its own merits. Khaya is about half the cost of true mahogany, and there is some great stuff available.

Some khaya is less dense, and quite light in color – an uninspiring pale pink hue. The flatsawn wood looks particularly anemic. When quartersawn, these boards often have a hairy surface that can be difficult to finish. They come off the planer with hairy rows that are hard to tame with planing, scraping, or even sanding.

I try to avoid these boards and instead look for darker, denser boards. Many quartersawn khaya boards exhibit a fairly coarse, beautiful ribbon stripe. The boards in the photo at top are a good example of dark khaya with great ribbon stripe. Look how nice it finishes:

More quartered African mahogany:

The color below is a bit more red but also very nice:

Good flatsawn khaya is also very worthwhile. In some case, it is difficult to distinguish from high quality true mahogany. In general though, I’ve found that true mahogany’s legendary chatoyance is harder to find in khaya.

Unfortunately, khaya seems to be quite susceptible to the dreaded compression failures that I discussed in reference to mahogany in the previous post. With the possibility of these defects, as well as the great variation in the other properties of khaya, I suggest buying your boards S2S planed or hit-or-miss planed, if possible. Look them over carefully.

Coming up: sapele and others.

Fasten your seatbelt as we ride through the world of mahogany! Our tour will be mostly about woods that are similar to mahogany, and sometimes referred to as “substitutes” for it, but are better considered on their own merits.

We start our journey with “genuine mahogany,” aka Swietenia macrophylla, big-leaf mahogany, Honduran mahogany, Central/South American mahogany, or if you want to live and buy dangerously, just call it “mahogany.” Just the name sounds, you know, classy. People, including people who buy furniture (such as you might build) but know nothing about wood, are almost always impressed by “mahogany.”

Note that in the rear-view mirror is Swietenia mahogani, aka Cuban mahogany, the best of them all, once used for building ships and furniture, but long since essentially unavailable. You might find a bit of it for sale that was rescued from the occasional tree downed in a storm in south Florida, and there is a plantation operation on a South Pacific island. I once read that it works like “cold butter,” and having had a tiny piece of the stuff some years ago, I can confirm that description.

But back to S. macrophylla. When it’s good, it has a lot going for it. Boards with good density and color are a pleasure to use in your projects. It usually planes easily on the flatsawn surface, while the quartersawn surface often exhibits attractive “ribbon-stripe” figure due to interlocked grain. This is difficult to plane but quite manageable with scraping and sanding. The wood is soft enough to saw and chisel easily but firm enough to hold detail.

The stability of mahogany is legendary. Radial shrinkage is 2.9%, tangential 4.3%, yielding an excellent T/R of 1.5, and paltry volumetric shrinkage of 7.5%.

Then there’s the chatoyance – that wonderful shimmery gleam, lovely but not overpowering – that mahogany does so well. You know, classy. A shellac and wax finish looks great.

Unfortunately, big-leaf mahogany is a big pain in the neck. Why? First, because it is expensive. I cannot find even the drabbest mahogany for less than $10 per board foot. Yet it is extremely variable in quality. Some boards in the bin will have that nice density and color, while others are junk wood – light in color and density, or often with defects. In fact, I suggest avoid buying mahogany in the rough; look for S2S or hit-or-miss planed stock.

In the photo at top, all three boards are genuine mahogany. Yup, the real thing. The top one resembles sapele (more on that in an upcoming post), the middle board is what I consider nice flatsawn mahog, and the bottom one is genuinely trash wood, as far as I’m concerned.

The most notorious defects are compression failures, sometimes called “windshakes.” These are jagged cracks across the grain, usually through the full thickness but not the full width of the board. The fibers are broken, rendering that part of the wood useless. It occurs in the tree from severe wind forces, snow loads, or, what I suspect is mostly the case with mahogany, when the tree is felled. Beware: this defect is very difficult to notice in rough boards, where it lurks to disappoint you when you bring the wood home and plane it.

See the defect in the board below? No? Neither did I before I took it home.

Here is the other side of the board, with the compression failure clearly visible after I skimmed it on the jointer. The defect goes through the full thickness of the board.

S. macrophylla is listed in CITES Appendix II, and on the IUCN Red List as Vulnerable. We are probably encountering mostly plantation grown wood, and the quality is uneven at best.

And so, regrettably, mahogany is nearly off my list of good options for wood. Next, we’ll look at a common alternative, Khaya, aka African mahogany. There’s that word again.

And the topic is: WOOD!

You must understand wood to successfully make things out of it. I will present this 5-hour class at the Woodcraft in Walpole, MA (about 10 miles southwest of Boston) on Sunday, September 9, 2018 from 10:00AM – 3:30PM. You will be equipped with the practical knowledge to use wood intelligently to maximize the quality of your projects and avoid the pitfalls that lead to disappointment.

In the woodworking instruction sphere, there are very few classes available on understanding wood, and most of those are small parts of much more extensive general woodworking courses. This freestanding, concise class is a great way to get the know-how you need. The store has an excellent teaching facility.

Go to this link and scroll down to September 9 to get sign-up details.

Among the areas we’ll cover:

• From log to board: Come to really understand grain and figure. Learn to astutely use figure to enhance your projects, especially curved work.
• Wood movement: We’ll cover practical understanding and applications, so this issue won’t catch you by surprise or riddle you with doubts. Try out pinless and pin moisture meters.
• Understand and see what really happens with resawing.
• How to buy and store wood. Spend wisely. How to spot and avoid defects in boards.
• Bring: your sharpened plane, card scraper, handsaw, and chisel/knife to make shavings and sawdust as you sample the working properties of 20 species of wood.

And I promise, the learning will be fun!

Double-coated tape earns Shop Miracle status for its simplicity and problem-solving versatility.

I prefer SpecTape ST-555H 1″-wide (Woodcraft item #15D25). This is a tough cloth tape with strong adhesion, yet it removes cleanly. It has a stiff, smooth paper backing that is easy to remove. I have used other tapes with soft paper backings that were annoyingly difficult to remove.

Its top uses in my shop are:

• Template work on the router table
• Bandsawing legs with three-dimensional curves: For taping the waste back on to restore the layout lines, double-stick works much better than wrapping tape around the leg.
• Mock-up designs: Lightweight parts can be rearranged easily.
• Bandsawing curves in wide boards: Tape an extra squared board to the back of the work piece for stability.
• Holding small/odd-shaped work on the bench

Here’s an efficient way to work with this tape. While applying the piece of tape to the wood, fold up a tiny corner to create a little “ear” of separated backing. Rub your fingernail over the main area of the backing paper to seal down the tape. Then grab the ear to pull away the backing.

Clear packing tape

This works well as a glue barrier. For example, I wrap tape on the tops and upper sides of the wooden support strips used for gluing up panels. The forms and clamping blocks for bent lamination work also get covered.

Oh, and of course this is essential equipment for returning that tool you bought that didn’t turn out to be as cool as it looked in the online catalog, or that, nope . . . ya just don’t need.

Cloth friction tape (rightmost in the photo)

I wrap, hockey style, my coping and fret saw handles with Ace Hardware black Cloth Friction Tape to greatly improve my grip and reduce hand fatigue. I also flat wrap some clamp handles such as the outer handle on wooden hand screws.

This stuff is grippy without being too rough on your hands, as can be anti-slip tapes. It can leave a bit of black residue on your hands when new, but not significantly as the wrapping inevitably gets sprinkled with wood dust. It does not leave sticky residue on your hands.

[3M Cloth Friction Tape appears similar but I have not used it. 3M 1755 Temflex Friction Tape is different – it’s coated on both sides.]

Silicone “X-Treme Tape” (Rockler) (second from the right in the photo)

This interesting stuff stretches a lot and bonds to itself without adhesive. It is useful for some dust collection fittings where it makes a nice tight seal. However, it really only sticks well to itself, and therefore needs contour on both parts of the fitting that it can tightly conform into, and so create a mechanical lock.

Funny that tape is even used in the woodshop where we sweat over joints, glues, and fasteners to keep things together. Nonetheless, a variety of tapes serve all sorts of duties, and it pays to be familiar with the options. From among 3M‘s numerous tapes, here are the ones I have found useful, working from left to right in the photo.

The workhorse is the #2093EL blue painter’s tape, rated “medium adhesion, 14-day removal,” very similar to the original #2090 but with Edge Lock (EL), designed to give cleaner paint lines for painters. This is handy stuff – as a drill bit depth indicator, marking the floor locations of machines, reminding myself not to reset a gauge, and on and on. For shim purposes, it measures .004″ thick by my calipers. 1″ width is versatile.

Second from left, #2080EL “low-medium adhesion, 60-day removal” is smoother and thinner at .003″. I like this one better for taping off areas to protect them from glue squeeze-out. It’s not a big difference for our purposes from #2093. The EL tapes do seem to lay down to a neater edge.

The green tapes are interesting. The thinner green roll is Scotch #233+, which 3M renamed to #401+. It has significantly greater adhesion than the blue tapes, and it is stretchy. It was developed for heavier-duty use such as conforming and holding to auto body contours. For woodworkers, it makes a great light-duty clamp in situations where regular clamps are awkward to arrange, such as gluing edge trim or small miters, especially with CA glue. It is much better in this regard than the blue tapes.

However, the green #2060 (fourth from the left) is more widely available than #401+, and can be found in home centers in a variety of widths. #2060 is practically as good as #401+: adhesion and tensile strength are nearly identical, and at 8% elongation before breaking, it almost as stretchy as 401+, which has 10% stretch. Both remove cleanly.

The beige tape on the right is #2040 Solvent Resistant tape. I use this infrequently to mask off an area from a solvent-based finish.

Surprisingly, the tensile strength of all of these tapes is about the same, from 24-27 lbs./inch of width.

So, let’s simplify. I suggest go to the orange palace and get a 1″ roll of #2093EL for general use, and a roll of 1 1/2″ #2060 for stronger adhesion and clamping. I covered the background info and the other options in case you need them.

Next: other tapes including . . . the Shop Miracle.