Popular Woodworking Magazine: As in all creative endeavors, it’s important to think “outside the box” as much as possible in your woodworking. I mean all boxes – from small jewelry boxes to big box home centers – but for this post I want to focus on a typical woodworking tool box. I have met no woodworker who does this better than Robert Lang. Bob refuses to limit the contents of his tool box to tools you can find at a woodworking store or home center. As a result, he saves money and gets to be more creative than your average Joe Joiner.
7 comments:
This a nice simple article. It doesn't try to write about every great tool out there, and so it can do a nice job talking about the 3 main tools that it focuses on. I know that there aren't a lot of products made just for theatre. Most of the things we use were made to be used in some other industry and we have just adapted them to make what we need to make. This is one of my favorite parts about working in theatre. This article gets right to the heart of taking a tool that wasn't made for you and finding ways that it can work super well in your world. I think that we can all learn from this article, even outside of the wood working world. The one problem I had with this article was that it didn't really explain how you might use a crayon in a way that a pencil wound't me as good.
I find that the most interesting part of this article is the use of a drafting triangle in the shop. While this makes total sense and the sub-article describing how to turn the drafting triangle into a suitable triangle for a shop is really creative and unique, I find it hard to believe that using a drafting triangle in the shop is not quite practical. It seems to me that the drafting triangle would get nicks in it and break constantly from the ruggedness of a shop.
I'm not sure that I agree with this article at all. To me the items discussed here are still very inside the box. I use a CAD program in the shop daily, and now with CNC and other advanced tooling in shops, both theatrical and traditional/commercial carpentry and furniture shops they need the speed and accuracy that hand drafting doesn't offer in order to meet deadlines and customers needs. The crayon is great tool, personally I prefer soapstone and chalk and paint-markers most of the time, but a crayon can be very useful when working with certain materials. Lastly the drafting square, (mind you I'll admit that I did not take the time to read the sub-article) is an incredibly valuable tool in the shop, especially for checking the squareness of saw blades and other tool surfaces. It's much easier to see small variances with a drafting square that it is a more cumbersome and ofter abused rafter square or 'speed square' as it's often called.
I had really high hopes for this article when I read the title, I thought it would talk about cool new tools that are too cool and unconventional. So with that I agree with joe, I fail to see how this author thinks outside of the box. I understand that a pencil is important, that is more obvious than anything else. Also, in my personal opinion AutoCAD and 3D Studio Max are far more useful in a shop setting, though I have not had too much experience, sketch up is more for designers.
And one last thing, I am curious who uses drafting squares all that often in the shop, because I have never seen someone mark a measurement on their material with a drafting square. There are more accurate 'squares' that are used if I am not mistaken.
I Personally I don't find anything new or special about this article. It seems as if the author decided he was gonna reinvent the wheel and then talk about it. We may not use drafting triangles in our shop, but Im sure there are people out there who use them daily. I guess I sorta see the point being made about using typical tools in a unique way but a pencil seems like stretching the idea.
Though I agree that all three of these tools are really useful in a shop setting, I fail to see how they are "outside the box". CAD tools like Sketchup are becoming more and more prevalent in manufacturing and woodworking. Carpenters have used pencils and crayons forever, and in fact you can walk into a Home Depot and buy them. And using a drafting square to design a woodworking square, while useful, doesn't seem that innovative.
I think that the title of this article is totally misleading. I clicked on it expecting to be wowed and to find some magical new tool, only to find three things that I already use regularly when I work in a shop. SketchUp is a fantastic tool that, but there's a reason it's not available in hardware stores. Have you seen the software section in a Home Depot; there isn't one. Besides, it was free from Google for a while. There are pencils and crayons made for contractors, and I have a small 7-inch rafter square that is incredible precise and far less likely to break than a plastic drafting triangle. This article didn't present any out of the ordinary tools, and was rather disappointing.
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