Essential Woodworking Hand Tools

by Paul Sellers

In this book Paul Sellers has put together the essential information about the tools that he considers to be essential to hand tool woodworking. He describes the tools in use, what to look for when picking them, how to sharpen them as well as tips and tricks for using them. Paul has been woodworking for over 50 years and his admiration and affection for these tools shines through in the pages of the book. The book does not cover building any projects which allows it to focus entirely on the tools. However, you cannot build great furniture without sharp, well-maintained tools. This is what this book covers so well.

Genres: Woodwork

480 pages, Hardcover

Published December 31, 2015

Reviews

[Xxx · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been woodworking for over 40 years. Early in my career I worked in a cabinet/mill shop where hand tools were rarely used and I learned little about them. It wasn't until much later in my woodworking career, when I became a boatwright that I gained an appreciation for hand tools. Wooden boat building demands the use of hand-tools. After learning the hand tool skills I needed to work on wooden boats, I felt foolish for not learning to use them much sooner in my woodworking career. Today I realize that a woodworker worth his salt ought to know how to use hand-tools (and how to keep them sharp) as well as power tools and understand when to choose one over the other.

There have been many books written on hand-tools. In my woodworking library I also have Garrett Hack's Hand Tool Classics Slipcase Set: The Handplane Book and Classic Hand Tools, Fine Woodworking's Bench Tools, and Aldren A. Watson's Hand Tools: Their Ways and Workings. So what makes this book any different?

The book’s title says it all and the book’s introduction further clarifies the book’s purpose/scope. It is not a comprehensive book about all hand-tools, but is about essential hand-tools for today's fine woodworker.

Another reviewer pretentiously commented that this book didn't include workbenches, turning tools, drawknives, frame saws, and even axes. One could argue over what woodworking hand-tools are missing (such as frame saws and drawknives) but that’s simply just subjective. In my opinion, I don’t think that there is a tool in this book doesn’t belong there or that isn’t essential.

Other hand tool books have indeed included workbenches. Yes, workbenches can certainly be thought of as a tool and an essential one at that, but it’s certainly not a categorical hand tool. Entire books have been written on workbenches alone. If you want to know about workbenches I would recommend a book dedicated to the subject, rather than a brief introduction on them in a hand tool book. Scott Landis's The Workbench Book: A Craftsman's Guide to Workbenches for Every Type of Woodworking is excellent as is Lon Schleining's The Workbench: A Complete Guide to Creating Your Perfect Bench. In my own woodworking library I have Christopher Schwarz's Workbenches: From Design & Theory to Construction & Use.

Turning tools are used for the woodworking specialty of turning wood on a lathe, a whole different subject matter. Volumes of books have been written on turning wood and that’s where a discussion on turning tools belongs. Again, I would recommend a book dedicated to Wood Turning if your interested learning about turning tools. In my own woodworking library I have Taunton's Complete Illustrated Guide to Turning.

Axes? I personally don’t know anyone that has used an axe for fine woodworking. Perhaps though… you never know. I did once watch a boatwright accurately cut a fine scarf joint with an electric chainsaw, which struck me as a ridiculous thing to do until I watched him actually do it leaving me quite impressed… so there’s still more for me to learn I guess. None-the-less, an axe could be considered as an essential tool for felling a tree, but most certainly not essential for fine woodworking.

Pencils might seem to be an insignificant topic to the non or less-experienced woodworker. Using a soft leaded pencil to layout marking lines on a wood surface will indeed leave dark lines making it easier to see them, but the line's thickness will vary as the line is drawn, from thin to thick, because a soft leaded pencil wears quickly. A sharp hard lead pencil such as a 2H, as Paul Sellers suggests, will leave a more consistent line thickness, but will be lighter. For accuracy the woodworker needs a fine, crisp, thin, layout line. The problem with thick pencil lines is where exactly do you actually cut along them (imagine an exaggerated thick line of ⅛" thick)? Do you cut along the right edge of the line? The left edge? Down the center? Where a cut is made along the line means the difference between a tight, snug, or loose fit of the work piece you're cutting, planing, or carving. When absolute precision is required, a marking knife or gauge is often a better choice than a pencil. A good article on this topic, entitled Understanding The Three Types of Layout Lines, was written in Fine Woodworking magazine issue #269. The importance of the woodworker using an appropriate pencil are also briefly discussed in this Popular Woodworking article entitled Measuring Marking and Layout Essentials.



Using a .05 mm mechanical pencil is an option to obtain a consistently thin line but personally I find that the lead constantly breaks when drawing on a wooden surface as opposed to a paper surface. Cheap pencils with bad erasers and unstable lead break frequently too and you end up excessively sharpening the pencil before encountering lead that's stable enough so it maintains a point without breaking. Personally I use an American Tombow MONO 2H pencil with a Pink Perl eraser. I use a simple, good quality pencil sharpener, from Lee Valley to get a nice sharp point on my pencil.

As far as I can tell, Paul Sellers is a woodworker first, a teacher second, and a writer third, and as such I can’t fault his writing... its certainly very readable to me. In his videos he clearly demonstrates his knowledge and expertise while his teaching style is relaxed, calm, friendly, and disarming which I found to be appealing… this comes across in his writing too.

In the book's introduction section, Paul does not indicate that this book was specifically written with intention of educating beginners/novices as was asserted/questioned by the another reviewer. Rather, and I want to highlight/emphasize this, Paul writes in his introduction about the process of passing on his woodworking craftsmanship skills and knowledge, acquired over a lifetime of woodworking, to the next generation , which is a worthy goal of mine as well. Woodworking is a dying trade. As CNC woodworking machining and 3D printers evolve, I fear woodworking will soon become an extinct trade leaving the person with the soul of a craftsman out in the cold. In the not-to-far future, I think that there just may be little call for skilled cabinet makers, furniture makers, and wooden boatwrights, but just operators and programmers of CNC and 3D printing machines. With that situation, teachers of craftsmanship will dwindle as well, leaving these skills to hobbyists and purists to pass along to future generations. Craftsman/Teachers like Paul Sellers are invaluable in this regard, and should serve as an example for passing these skills to future generations and I applaud him for pointing that out.

The book begins with some discussion on tool sharpening… a good sensible way to start. Using dull hand tools is an exercise in frustration and futility. The need for sharpening hand-tools is emphasized and several basic methods are covered.

I don’t believe any one sharpening method is superior to another, but rather I think its more important to find a method that works best and is most affordable for you. I like using water stones best and I have friends that prefer oil stones above all else, and yet others prefer sandpaper glued to a granite surface plate. Paul Sellers likes using diamond stones best. His reasoning is sound, water stones are a bit messy (I use Veritas’s Stone Pond to address that issue) and they need to be flattened frequently. But on the other hand diamond stones are more expensive than water stones. Some craftsmen prefer hollow ground edges, while others prefer flat edges, and yet others prefer micro-beveled edges. It may be something to argue about which is best over a pint at the tavern but it’s really just a matter of preference on how to achieve a razor sharp edge… that's what’s important, a razor sharp edge, and Paul emphasizes just that.

This other reviewer strongly states that flatting the back of a chisel, plane, or flatting the sole of plane is wrong and ridicules the author about it. This opinion is not only incorrect, but its utter nonsense. A perfectly sharp edge can only be achieved with two perfectly flat, polished metal surfaces coming to a point, not just one. A perfectly flat back is indeed imperative to achieving a razor sharp edge on a chisel or a plane iron. If the reviewer is sharpening his tools by introducing a slight bevel on the back as opposed to flattening the back, he can achieve a sharp edge, but the ability to use the back of the blade as a reference is lost, which is an important attribute for a chisel. Flattening the back as the first step in sharpening is just plain common knowledge to experienced woodworkers that sharpen their tools themselves.

Entire books on the subject of tool sharpening have been written. If you want to learn more about sharpening refer to Ron Hock’s excellent book The Perfect Edge. Leonard Lee’s The Complete Guide to Sharpening is another good one. A personal favorite for me is Ian Kirby’s Sharpening with Waterstones: A Perfect Edge in 60 Seconds.

The book goes on with chapters categorizing essential woodworking hand-tools. From marking and layout tools and then logically advancing through the categories; Chisels, Planes (volumes of books have been written about planes alone), Saws, Scraping Tools, Drilling tools, and Striking tools. He talks about what they are, what they do, why the are important, and how to use them in his own relaxed, friendly manor. Having a proper presentation of each hand-tool and gaining a thorough understanding of them is the goal of the book and is quite valuable knowledge to the woodworker… but the best experience is actually putting them to work yourself.

This book contains 425 pages of pictures and information about the essential hand tools a woodworker ought to have in his shop. I wish I had read something like this early in my woodworking career.

For both the novice and experienced woodworker this book, in my opinion, offers valuable hand tool information, presented in a methodical manor, in a relaxed easy to read writing style. If you enjoy Paul Sellers' many videos on Youtube and are interested in woodworking hand tools, then this is a must read.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 3 out of 5]

Noted metal abrasion fetishist and Youtube sensation Paul Sellers strikes out on his own, with the expected result.

While the subject matter of the book is clear from the title, its purpose isn't always. Is it supposed to be an introduction for beginners, as Sellers pretends at various points? If so, he typed way too many words that are guaranteed to confuse, and should have made a greater effort to separate pure preference from genuine instruction.† Is it supposed to be a comprehensive guide? Then too many tools are missing, and not just because Sellers is a myopic nationalist who thinks Anglosphere, and especially English, woodworking is representative of ``the [W]estern tradition''.‡
Regardless of what he's trying to accomplish, it's a great pity he chose to focus on hand tools, both because hundreds of writers have done the same before him, and because it misses out on the most important tool of all: the workbench. Figuring out work-holding is 90% of what a novice woodworker who's still pulling together a workshop will be doing, and a lot of aspects of common workbenches—including English workbenches—are non-obvious. I feel like much of the blame for this goes to the fact that Sellers doesn't actually know how to use his workbench, in practice always relying on his overbuilt vice and misunderstanding, for example, the apron of his English-style bench to the extent that he actually put a drawer in it but no holes.

Because it is Paul Sellers, there's also the expected horrifying advice on sharpening and flattening and generally wearing down your tools before their time. Really, it's a small miracle we have any pre-War tools available at all—if there were only a few more people like Sellers, they all would have disappeared into swarf decades ago.

On the whole, though, this exact book has seen worse executions in the past. If you enjoy Sellers' voice even a fraction as much as he does, you could certainly enjoy the book, even if none of the information in it will be unexpected to anyone but complete beginners. It is, in short, exactly what you would expect.

----------------

† I recognise that a lot of this is YMMV, so here's a quotation that's representative of the form, on pencils:

As a general-use pencil, I use an imported, US-made, #2 pencil, which generally, but not always, equates to the UK's HB grade. There are different grades and colours of pencil but, for work on woodworking as well as taking notes and drawing, this is my essential pencil.

When I arrived to live and work in the USA I liked the way they attached erasers to the ends of their pencils. We do now have them more commonly in the UK, but only on a fifty-fifty basis so far. I like attached pencil erasers but it is also important to realise that not all erasers are created equal and some erasers do not work well; they leave behind a deposit of the eraser, damaging paper and leaving unsightly marks on wood. I have found that there are several better quality pencils available that have consistent graphite values, cedar wood casings, and a top-notch eraser. My experience tells me that, in no way, are all pencils of the same quality and you should test a variety of pencils to find one that works for you.
[MANY MORE WORDS FOLLOW]

Now, because everyone is already familiar with pencils, we recognise this as tongue-in-cheek banter or, at the very least, empty bullshit—would a novice recognise the same when it comes to tools they've never used?

(FWIW, I prefer softer pencils for wood if I can find them, because they leave more clearly visible lines without denting softer wood.)

‡ In discussing saws, Sellers sees the woodworking world divided between Western and Eastern/Asian traditions, but what he actually means is English and Japanese. Notably missing from a discussion of Western woodworking saws is any trace of frame saws, which, while less common than they were, are certainly still more common (in various forms) in Europe than, say, metal planes.
Also missing are drawknives, axes, and any turning tools. Are they not essential? I use my drawknife much more often than I use my gouges, which are included.

[Christopher Hachet · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was helpful. Paul sellers gets right to the point. Worth putting in your workshop library.