Marcus Sly - Furniture Making and Design

One sometimes hears woodworkers claiming that there is no real difference in work which is produced with hand tools or by machine.  While it's true that it is hard or impossible to tell the difference between, say, individual hand-cut and machine-cut mortise and tenon joints, that’s not the whole story. One joint doesn't make a piece of furniture.

Hand tools have their own “logic”. There are certain operations which are easy and straightforward using them, and others which are more difficult, time consuming and "illogical". Machines have a somewhat different logic. If you make the decision to use predominantly hand tools while still aiming to be efficient then you need to follow the logic of the tools you are using.  This is going to affect everything you do, from the design and timber selection onwards. One doesn't design a piece of furniture with no regard for how it's going to be made.  The methods open to you are a huge part of the decision making process. A design to be made with hand tools will, in a project of any complexity, end up quite differently to how it would if you were intending to use machines.

Producing good work efficiently with hand tools rather than machines is possible (except for initial ripping and thicknessing), but not if you try and mimic machine made work.  Accuracy for it’s own sake needs to be jettisoned; you only need to make things perfectly straight, square, flush or smooth where they have to be. You quickly find the true worth of the face side and edge system, which enables small errors to accumulate in places where they don’t matter. The rule of thumb that “if it looks right, it is right” comes into it’s own, because the skill is more about juggling imperfections so that the eye doesn’t notice them, rather than trying to be geometrically correct.

This difference in approach may seem quite subtle, but put a lot of subtleties together and they become more pronounced. Work that is made with hand tools, and with hand tool logic rather than machine logic is, to my eye, different in character to work made with jigged machines, and the more detail you add, the more different it becomes. Looking at Sidney Barnsley’s chip carved hay-rake tables in the Cheltenham Museum it’s hard to imagine them being made by machine.  That's a big part of their appeal - they feel more personal and human.

Another approach to hand tool use is that of woodworkers like David Charlesworth, who seek to equal or exceed the accuracy of machines with hand tools.  Their hand tools are used with the precision of an engineer, with the thickness of shavings being measured to the nearest thousandth of an inch!  It’s great to see people pushing the envelope in this way. However it’s worth at least being aware that it has very little to do with how woodworking has been done historically. One doesn’t need extreme accuracy to make lovely things...

This post was based on one I wrote in response to a discussion on the UKworkshop hand tools forum.