Family Handyman: Sure, wood’s a pretty tough material all around, but it’s still highly susceptible to temperature and moisture fluctuations from the surrounding environment. This phenomenon, known as wood movement, can result in contraction and expansion across the grain. When humidity is high, wood absorbs moisture and swells. When humidity drops, wood shrinks.
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Reading about these 10 lessons made me reflect on the balance between education and experience for woodworking and other skills that involve fabrication and manufacturing as while most of these lessons are true and helpful, I’m sure that if several carpenters were to comment on these lessons, their exact implementation and phrasing of each would lend itself to varying answers, claiming each to be the best practice for the work at hand. For example, with #5 of fixing miter joints by using the shank of a screwdriver to flatten each piece of wood to make it cleaner, I would have never thought this and upon presentation was surprised that advice like this would be paired with other pieces of good advice within the article. It seems that the particular background and experience one brings into theses fields (which themselves are based on a particular criteria for their work) highly influences the methods and best practices that we can never seem to fully agree on.
I have been woodworking for 8 or so years. I’m sure I was taught a lot of stuff 8 years ago, but now my brain goes into autopilot, so most of the practices I do, I’ll do subconsciously. Half of the stuff in this article I thought was valuable advice and the other half felt like really bad advice.
I’ve actually never sharpened any of my tools, and to be honest, I should really learn how to… I’ve been woodworking longer than I’ve been doing theater, and I only really learned about nominal dimensions when I got to theater. I think it is probably because I wouldn’t build such large scale/mass produced things. I would mostly build small furniture, and random table-top things. I never thought about flattening the corner of a miter joint, and I sort of disagree with that one… I don’t think it will look nice with that “folded” edge. I also don’t agree with drilling pilot holes with nails, that feels like a very bad idea.
I have always liked skimming these types of articles because they are basically a redirect to several other different articles. Each Tip listed in the article is barely talked about but below is a link to an article that allows you to go more in depth on the specific topic. This article specifically has some Tips that could be very rudimentary but act as a reminder to the reader of things that may or may not have been taught in a shop class they took in their younger years. I was particularly interested in how to use a Hand Plane tip because I have very minimal knowledge when it comes to that tool. In this specific article there was minimal details on the process of using a Hand Plane but the article it redirected me to had an in depth description of the parts of the tool and how to use it.
These are all great general woodworking tips. Sharpening tools, for example, sounds stupidly obvious but it can be easy to forget, overlook, or just neglect for time. Some of these are certainly applicable to a theatrical shop, but others are more for proper woodworking (more akin to what you would see in the prop shop). I don’t think there’s a single hand plane in our scene shop, but I guess I wouldn’t know anyways. It took me an embarrassingly long time to even get proficient at using a hand plane, but once I did I loved doing it. It’s great fun to be able to practice fine, precision woodworking but it’s just not what we usually do in the scene shop. Likewise, their tips about wood movement and miter joints are something we just wouldn’t do in theater. If I fixed every miter joint in John Proctor up with a screwdriver, I’d still be building it.
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