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Sorry I’m a bit late to the thread, I built my first workbench in about 1974. Fine Woodworking magazine was brand new and I was studying design at the university. I had a photo in a catalog of a German joiners bench and purchased a pile of hard (sugar) maple. The timber was 16/4, all rough 4...

I’ve had one since the late seventies. Used hard and lightly, furniture and house construction. It’s been grand.

Sure, even scrapers dish somewhat. That’s how come the good lord gave us those lovely (festool) random orbit sanders. Or, lacking that some nice 80 grit sandpaper stuck to a flat board.

You’re correct about the ridges of course but as you get closer and closer to a finished surface you keep lessening the depth of cut. My old Makita is capable of just dusting the surface, very light cuts indeed. Of course you can switch to a hand plane at any time but any sort of convex plane...

I have depended on a jointer thickness planer combo for the last forty odd years. There is however always a project that comes along that is too big for the machines. An example is a dining table I made from local walnut slabs. I have a large collection of hand planes and use them constantly...

Of course you are correct, same here. Traditionally boats go into the water in the spring and spend the year either in the water or close by. Don’t forget that many boats have to “take up” for a few days if they’ve been hauled out for awhile. Traditional clinker planking is much thicker though...

These boats are 15’6” (4.75m) and weigh about 65 pounds. Two women can load one on the car.

The problems I encountered with traditional clinker (we say lapstrake in the US) was in trying to dry sail a boat planked with 5 or 6 mm solid planking. They dry out so much between use that they tend to leak a fair amount when first put in the water. Not so bad the first year, more as time...

There are people building these boats commercially today, the Adirondack Guideboat Company. They advertise online. It appears that the ribs or frames are laminated rather than sawn from crooks. Also the boats are strip planked rather than half lapped. Glass cloth and epoxy are no doubt involved.

There’s a wonderful book, Survival of the Birch Bark Canoe by John McPhee. Tremendously well written and informative.

A Rangeley Lakes boat I built in the early eighties. It was planked with Port Orford cedar, Honduras Mahogany and white oak ribs. Solid wood planking didn’t work well in a dry hot climate and eventually I switched to marine ply.

Those were cut from spruce roots. The forests had been heavily logged and the roots could be ”grubbed out” and sawn up.

I too started building boats, in the late seventies for me. I had found a copy of Building Classic Small Craft by John Gardner and was entranced with the Rangeley Lakes Boat. I did it for approximately twenty years. It was when I was building the little lapstrake fly fishing boat in the photo...

I certainly don’t mean to make light of your opinions Pete, I’m just responding from a completely different perspective. My point is that when I visit other guitar builders I see familiar trends. A tendency to forget to fire up the dust collection for just one or two cuts. One fellow’s system...

I have two yardsticks for gauging the air quality in my shop, neither is particularly scientific. The first is the ray of light coming in through a pair of high windows. The amount of dust in the air is readily apparent, and turning on the air filter clears the air in a remarkably short period...

I hesitate to add my two cents but this is something I studied pretty heavily several years back. Here’s the thing; a good system is a big help in removing the majority of the sawdust but unless machines are perfectly designed and fully enclosed they only get a percentage. If they are too noisy...

Over cleaning planes is something I have been guilty of in my younger days. I try to be much more thoughtful now. The dust though, every month or two I mask up, turn on the air filter and dust collector and have at it with compressed air.

The number 20 compass plane? That’s one of the few, along with the #98 and 99 side rabbets that I use regularly out of that box. Or one of the block planes? They’re all pretty tatty.

Oh, thank goodness. I was afraid it was Stanley; that rapacious entity that swallowed so many tool makers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Microsoft in the last century. And yet the tools I use daily would be pretty sparse without them Thank Goodness, I was worried...

Well, if you’d either clarify or direct me to the pertinent rules page I’d appreciate it.