(cheerful music)
Marc: Well you know what?
Since Kaleo is here he has a much stronger
grasp of some hand-tool techniques and things
and I figured it's something that
I tend to gloss over it a little bit.
I don't really get a chance to go over some details.
None of this was planned ahead of time.
We're just gonna kind of grab a few tools off the wall
and hopefully review some real basic things
dealing with hand-tools whether it's
even chisel technique or sawing technique,
block planes, very basic stuff.
We're really just-
we're not trying to make
the dude work while he's here.
He's only here for a couple hours,
but we're just gonna have some fun with it
and see what we can do.
I'll probably wind up mannning the camera
because Nicole is busy and we'll just have some fun.
Kaleo: Yeah-yeah.
Marc: All right. Cool.
All right, so Kaleo is going to show us-
I think we're going to start with
a mortising for a hinge
just chopping out a little hinge spot there for you
so pretty simple,
but I think this is one of those things that if you
don't review these simple things you can
kind of pass it up and think it's easier than it is
so it's nice to get these foundation things
under your belt.
Kaleo: Yeah, you know, I think sometimes
we get too caught up with the big techniques,
you know, you got to, you go to
know the milk before you can eat the meat.
Marc: Amen to that, that's nice.
I'm gonna have to use that.
Okay, so I'm gonna man the camera.
Kaleo: Okay.
Marc: I'm gonna let Kaleo do his thing.
Kaleo: Yeah this is just-
I'm not even doing this by measuring
I'll just draw a little-
let's see a little mortise.
Marc: Just a hypothetical mortise.
Kaleo: Yeah.
Now I guess normally you use a nice marking guage
and a marking knife and all this good stuff.
Marc: So that if you did-
well I have it here somewhere,
but we probably don't want
to search everything down,
but if you want normally you would use
some sort of marking knife to-
Kaleo: Yeah traditionally I do just to get
that nice shoulder beginning shoulder line
on each of the mortise for the hinge.
Marc: Okay.
Kaleo: So traditionally you write that down.
Then you also do the depth of the hinge on the side
so you have a shoulder to sit the chisel in.
So I always go in-
with the marking knife you get that nice line
so I always stay off that line a little bit to start
and you always put the bevel to the wayside
and you just want to try
and keep your chisel straight.
Give it a nice little tap
and work around real quick.
And I always use a chisel that's
appropriate for the job so, you know,
if you have a nice long stretch you got to go
use the biggest chisel you have.
Marc: There is a wider one there
if you feel like using it.
The one all the way on the right.
The big daddy.
Kaleo: The big one.
You just do that so you have a nice straight line
the whole time and you don't even
need to actually pound it.
And this is how I cut dovetails, too,
I come in and I pair off that shoulder line
right to that line you just created.
So it just kind of gives you a reference mark
the whole way around.
Marc: So just that little tiny tapping you did
went deep enough that now
you could just pare away.
Kaleo: You can pare away a little bit of the material.
Marc: Okay.
Kaleo: Just so you can see-
I don't know if you can get in there,
but you can see there's a nice little shoulder line
there now around where that marking was.
Then you can go back and clean up.
Get a little bit closer to that line.
Ultimately you won't touch that line
until your very end and you'll know
when you need to chop back down some more
because the chips won't come off as nice
as they, you know, you come down here right now
they just fall right off.
Marc: So your initial scoring cut
you're pretty well inside your line at that point.
Kaleo: Yeah, at this point I'm really inside the line.
The other beautiful thing about-
you know, you want to keep-
you spend all that time flattening your chisel backs
and this is why so you can keep your chisel
nice and flat as you're paring this away.
Marc: Just a real basic review.
Kaleo: I'll go grab the saw.
Marc: Just a real basic review.
I think a lot of us have a saw, you know,
that doesn't necessarily mean
that we know how to use it,
so anything you could teach us
and stuff that you learned,
proper holding technique and-
Kaleo: This is my favorite saw.
I have this one too.
Marc: Okay.
Kaleo: And I like this saw.
I like pistol grip saws personally
because my hands are a little bit bigger
some of them I can't get them into the other saws.
I always check the set on my saws too.
I usually mark a few lines on a board.
So let's see let's take this board out.
Marc: Just if you could describe for anyone
who might not know what set is.
Kaleo: The set is the teeth of the saws
when they file these saws the set is the kerf.
Basically the distance of the kerf of the saw
so sometimes when you get a brand new saw
you track it so you-
just like a bandsaw you draw some lines on a board.
It would probably work better
on the end grain actually if you do it
with the dovetail saw.
One thing that I've learned about hand sawing
is your stance is really important
so you want to keep the saw-
I hold the saw with my pistol finger
like your trigger finger out like this
and get a good stance not too wide,
but one foot kind of in the back of the other.
You want to keep your arm
so your arm is moving in a straight motion.
and I always-
you let the saw do the work.
A lot of guys will try to start off-
If you try to start a saw off by pushing so hard
it jumps across the wood,
but you let the saw do the work
and I always start-
I always use my thumb as a guide
and you always just start with that kind of
one backward pull to get that nice little kerf
for the saw to rest
and then you just let the saw do the work.
You don't have to push too hard.
And you just try to cut down that line you did.
That line you made you try to cut straight
and the reason you had that line is so that
you're cutting down.
If your saw tends to wander you know where
the set is too heavy
and then what I always do if the set is too heavy
on one side I just take a waterstone
with any grit and just kind of swipe along real quick.
Marc: So essentially you remove that set
and what it winds up doing is creating almost
a razor thin line that always seems to track straight.
Kaleo: Yeah.
Marc: I mean if you're off at the beginning
you may have an angle,
but you're never gonna really curve very much
because the set is so thin.
Kaleo: Some guys will take this set
completely out of their saw.
I don't do that because the set is there
to help remove the waste and sawdust
so I don't take it completely out,
and the other thing you have to remember is
as I was teaching for the first week the students
since last few weeks ago.
The students kept coming up to me
and asking "oh, you know, my saw
"is not cutting straight, my saw is not working well,"
and I'm like, oh, here, let me see
and I mark a few lines and bam, bam, bam,
straight down the lines
and I'm not tooting my own horn, but, you know,
I would just say no, no, it's not the saw man
you got to practice more and hand their saw back
and it's really true it's about practicing
especially cutting straight
and you want to cut straight, you know,
your dovetails if you've got to hand cut
dovetails you need to be able to cut straight.
My other little tip that I like
is when you're cutting dovetails
you always mark the base as far
as you can go down so when I cut
I always cut up like this at an angle
so that I know
as I'm watching my saw here
get close to my baseline
I know that it's nowhere here near
because I'm not looking.
Marc: Right.
Kaleo: You know, so then as I get close here
I just kind of tilt the saw forward
and I pull the saw out and 9 times out of 10
you're right on that line.
Marc: Great.
Kaleo: Right at the bottom.
Marc: Very cool.
Kaleo: Next, we're going to go over some
ingrain planing. Ingrain typically is just
a pain to plane so that kind of rhymed real quick.
Marc: Yeah.
Kaleo: So you can see this is some
of that beautiful Tiger Maple that Marc
used on his latest creation.
Marc: That's my backup board in case
I screwed up really bad.
Kaleo: Well it's beautiful.
I haven't seen nice maple like this for 2 years.
So on the end grain I always like to use
a block plane or specifically a low-angle block plane.
I have a nice Veritas number 6 low-angle jack plane
I think it is that I use too,
but I use a low-angle block plane.
Now some of the keys to planing end grain
is as you're planing across you're gonna notice
right here at this edge it's really fragile
so what a lot of guys will do is just come in
and just slightly shear off that edge.
Nothing too extraordinary just because-
so then you can plane down
Marc: That's a lot of end grain.
And I didn't pick the best board for this.
Sorry about that.
Kaleo: Maybe I'll just focus on this side over here.
Marc: Yeah, that's fine.
Kaleo: You can't get that part
because I can't get over there,
but you'll notice that there's no real chipout
on that edge and we were planing pretty aggressively
to get there and so the farther you do down,
you know, you got to come back.
If you need to plane some more
then you have to go back
and check for that a little more and keep going.
Marc: Okay.
Okay, so for anybody who doesn't know
Kaleo does a podcast This week in wood
and I think in the future
from what we were talking about
it sounds like you might be venturing into
some videos which will be really cool
so if you want to plug your stuff
let everybody know what your website is
in case they don't already know
because we talk about you all the time.
Kaleo: Yeah, KaleosWorkshop.com
I'm starting to get better content on there.
I've been kind out of school, out of a shop
and moving so.
Marc: Well moving back to the country.
Kaleo: Yeah.
Marc: And just having a kid I think you got
your hands full.
Kaleo: Yeah-yeah.
Marc: A little bit so.
Kaleo: I'm really looking forward
to getting the shop set up and then doing like a-
I really want to do hands-on type of stuff,
teaching things, and things like that
so check back often.
Marc: Do you think the podcasting is going to
take control of your career? Like it did to mine.
Kaleo: No, I don't think so.
I don't think it will get to that point.
Marc: Yeah, that's always an interesting path to take,
but it will influence it though I can tell you that
just by doing it and talking to people
about your work and especially if you start
showing your projects as you build them
it definitely changes the dynamic a little bit.
It's thought provoking for sure.
Kaleo: It's really good. I really enjoy interacting
with everybody and, you know, getting comments
and getting the feedback on things
and it's really interesting to hear
other people's stories and other people's
views on things, I mean, I know
you experienced it with that table.
Marc: Uh-hum, big time yeah.
Kalea: It's really good to get people's opinions
on things because a lot of times
you might get stuck in a rut on something
so people can offer you help
and you can bounce ideas off of people.
March: Yeah definitely.
Do you find like as you're designing things
in the school did you get a lot of feedback
on your design in terms of you're going down
a certain route and maybe your instructor
doesn't think it's the right way to go.
I mean did they confront you in that way
or they just kind of let you be what you want to be
and make what you want to make?
Kaleo: It was really interesting.
I had 2 different heads of school while I was there.
The first one he was a master craftsman
so we learned a lot of great techniques with him
and he's a great designer,
but the new guy, the second guy,
or president or whatever you want to call him
he is a designer and he's a furniture maker too,
but he's more into the design
so it was really interesting talking design with him
because they would ask you build-
my one project was a cabinet project
and I didn't want to build the traditional cabinet
so I built this coffee table that contained
a cabinet and all these weird things.
You could see it on my blog,
but as I talked with him
he would always give me feedback
that would be positive, but also push you more
so it was always why are you doing this?
Why do you want to put that there? Why this?
Because you want to be able
to justify what you're doing.
You don't want to go oh well
because I think it looks good.
No, you're putting this there because
this curve here accentuates the straight lines here.
Marc: Okay, all right. So you have to justify?
Kaleo: Justify your designs.
Marc: Yeah, not just design for designs sake
it's form following function or something.
Kaleo: Yeah there's a medium in there
a happy ground there where you justify everything,
but at the same time you can do things on the fly.
I'm more that way.
I more like to start building something-
I'll draw an initial concept and as I'm going
I'll go Oh, I don't like that so much
I'm changing this now.
Marc: Sure, just be flexible.
Kaleo: Yeah, whereas sometimes the program
was more get everything out,
get it all down on paper,
get it all technical drawings, everything out done,
then build it and I wasn't, that's not,
I'm not that way.
Marc: I find that harder.
I think once you start seeing things in 3D space
it suddenly changes your impression
and you can see things now that
you couldn't see on paper
and you couldn't predict it until you got there
so you have to have a little bit of flexibility
in your design because if you just kind of,
you know, go toward the finish line
and only follow your plan
you may miss an opportunity I think.
Kaleo: Yeah, and at the end
you might not even like it.
Marc: Yeah, after it's all said and done.
Kaleo: I designed a chair and I did the whole thing
just like that I did this chair
it was all designed I got 6 weeks into the chair
and just completely hated it
so I threw it away and started it new.
Marc: That's rough.
Kaleo: Yeah, it makes you cry.
Marc: Yeah, I'm sure it does.
Well Kaleo we are all very excited I'm sure
to observe your journey into
the world of woodworking and we'll be-
I'm sure a lot of people
will be checking it out and hopefully-
Kaleo: Well thank you. Thank everybody else.
It's been a pleasure being here.
Marc: Yeah, it was great.
Believe it or not Kaleo just flew out for the day
from San Diego and he's flying back tonight.
It's not that far, not that big of a flight.
Kaleo: No, it's like an hour flight.
Marc: But still though to me to get on a plane
that's a big deal I'm a baby like that
so I appreciate you coming out here.
Kaleo: Hey anything to come meet
the Wood Whisperer.
Marc: Yeah hey, but no one else can just Kaleo.
Thanks for watching everybody
and keep your eye KaleosWorkshop.com
Kaleo: .com yeah.
Marc: And lots of good stuff there, so cool.
Kaleo: Cool.
Marc: Peace.
Kaleo: I get to play with all these tools.
It's been so long. What happened to Marc?
Marc: I was replaced. I'm very replaceable.
They sit on the wall for decoration
so it's nice to have somebody actually use them.
Now the question I have for you is
do you find that sandals help you cut straighter?
Kaleo: I find that sandals.
Marc: [unintelligible]
Kaleo: While flying are the best.
Marc: Okay (chuckles)