A particularly good question we got asked was
about or why did we use a chisel to cut our walls on our housings over a saw.
And this is a very good question, it's a very open ended question also, the same could go
to whether to remove the waste of a dovetail with a coping saw or if you chisel that waste
out.
And I think the reason I use a chisel goes back again to my training, I had a very I
suppose it was quite a difficult apprenticeship really it was, my old man used to make me
saw with my left hand because one day I'd need to do it and I have done, I have needed
to do it.
I had to hammer with my left had, I had to learn how to do it, and it was all because
there are scenarios that can be very easily fixed by using just your left hand for knowing
how to do it, it's a very valid skill to learn.
Planing with your left hand, that's another good one.
And my old man's motto was very much to teach the methods that would get the job done 100%
of the time.
And a good example of this is the housing, so if we were going to cut a little housing
in here, now this is a very narrow piece, this I would say that sawing a housing in
to here would be far quicker than a chisel because it's small, you can take a normal
saw you know, you've got plenty of stroke in there.
But when it comes to doing a piece that was much wider say you was doing an 18" piece,
all of a sudden this saw is useless, you've got to move on to something much more like
this, a bigger saw a much more expensive saw, an extra tool to be lugging around in your
tool kit.
As beautiful as that saw is, you don't need it, and that's because you can just master
the use of a chisel and that'll do it every single time.
So I thought what we'd do is just cut a couple of lines really, we'll batter out a couple
of rebates or housings, we won't finish the joint this isn't about how to do it but it's
just to see them next to each other which is the preferable one.
Now as with I would say 99% of any joint I do I like to mark it with a knife if I'm going
across the grain so what we'll do is we'll just score, I know this is a piddly little
bit but it's only for demonstrations.
We'll just score a few lines in, good deep ones.
I'll just hole that down.
So most of the time either way if we were sawing this we would probably want to put
like a little trough in it just to establish the saw, so again, we're using a chisel right
from the off, we can take our saw, obviously we'd have depth lines, put it in to that trough
and away we go.
Get it started.
So that's pretty quick, and it was quick because it's narrow.
When you start getting really wide and you're trying to make that shallow cut I find it
very difficult to keep the saw on the track it sort of wants to jump out a bit.
So if we do this with a chisel now next to it, so we'll just chop this, I tell you what
I'll come over here because we're in the same direction then, there's no complaints about
the direction we're using.
Still chop that out, then we just sink the chisel in, I normally use a much wider chisel
as well but this is just what I picked up.
Now we've got to come in and remove a bit of that waste, I can't do that in one go,
and go again and we'll be about the same depth.
So looking at that now you'd kind of say I was an idiot to use the chisel because the
saw was probably considerably faster but when you start to look at the next step of the
joint, and that's, what we want to do on the next step.
Let me find a pencil.
When we're wanting to remove this waste, so lets say we've also cut this one out, this
line here and this line.
This one's been chiselled this one's been sawn, what you want to do is, you can't just
come willy nilly with your chisel.
Lets cut it, lets just bloody cut it, stop wittering about as if it's been done.
Again we'll saw this one.
Now if I just come along with this willy nilly with a thinner chisel and just hogged that
out, with it having a flat top, I tend to find that it tends to break out rather than
cut out, so what we'd normally do anyway, and this is very common practise, is come
in with the chisel and actually put this triangle in to it.
And now what we can do is come in with the chisel and there's not much risk of it doing
that, it's breaking out thing, You know we're hogging right down there now.
Lets just say that was our depth line, now I just spin it around I'll knock that out
for clarity now.
And we do it in that process, as well as this has already got it's triangle put in from
the actual process of using the chisel, we've had to relieve that waste so we come straight
in already and plough that out so that's where you sort of start to catch up a bit.
To clean this up again, in the very basic form you would just use a chisel, just pare
that, just take light cuts until you get that right, just scrapping it, and you've done
all of that with a chisel or you've needed multiple different tools, you can then if
you want, and I do this now, now I've got one I come in with a router plane and you
can just scrape over the top of that.
I'll just adjust that and we'll see how that works.
But again, if you've only got one little bag you want to carry of tools you don't want
to be lugging all of this about.
This is very precise, you just come in like that taking an extra layer off until you get
to your line.
But again, it's not an essential tool but it's just nice to have.
So that's really the reason that I like to use a chisel over the saw I tend to find that
one chisel could pretty much do, you know, and infinite size of joint, I'm never going
to get to a job and go I should have brought my bigger saw, as well as when you start to
saw you rely on so many more tools, you'll potentially want to make sure you put a cross
cut pattern on the teeth, I just rip file all mine, I don't need to worry about that.
You know all these different size saws you need, as well as you can just do it with a
chisel.
It kind of comes also on to another point, I call these, this is a housing joint, that's
because I'm in England, in America I believe that's a dado.
We also call, if it's on an edge and it's only got one wall, this has the two walls
that's a housing or a dado.
If it's only got the one and it's at an edge, whether it be at the edge of a piece or even
long grain we call that in England a rebate, and I believe in America it's called a rabbit
so there's a bit of terminology difference there but they're the same thing.
So if I was to pick then which was the best the sawing or the chiselling it comes much
down to the individual and your circumstance, I'm kind of a trained minimal woodworker minimalist
woodworker and once you've been taught something and it's been hammered in to you it's hard
to break.
These days I like to do more of my furniture making, I build the workbenches for my living
that's my bread and butter now and the furniture making has become much more of my hobby should
we say, so I've really been enjoying experimenting with different methods and buying saws and
doing all the things that hobbyists get to do but I just can't break these old habits,
no matter how much I try I always come back to the most simplest way and it just shows
how training really nails it in to you an you can't avoid it.
And I'll show you this, this is pretty much the only panel saw I need I do most of my
ripping, probably 90% of my ripping, it's only deep stock that I would consider moving
up to a coarser rip saw and the only sort of tenon saw I have is this little dovetail
saw it's an Adria and it's a lovely little thing, before that it was that sort of thing
I was using, but you know, as a professional or even if you're getting started as a hobby
you know, to think that you can do most of your work with just these two saws, it's astounding
really.