So why do I like hand tool woodworking?

In some sense, doing hand tool woodworking seems pig-headed. And the short answer for why I like it is… I just do. I’ve seen people argue that it is more efficient for many types of woodwork than is machine tool woodwork.

In limited, one or two-off situations, a valid argument can be made for the efficiency of hand tools. And contrived situations can be made up at will, limited only by one’s imagination. I delude myself enough as is, so I feel no need to indulge in such creativity. And, of course, there are plenty of situations where a machine tool woodworker may find the use of a hand tool to be the best fit for some small task.

But if you want to make wood products, in volume, at competitive prices, you’re going to need machines powered by liberal amounts of electrical energy. Or… you can just pretend you’re efficient on an industrial scale with your pricey handsaw, plane, and bit-brace. Even if you are just knocking out a set of cabinets for your home, power tools are far more efficient.

Having exposed the fact that I’m hard-headed and opinionated, let me defend my love for hand-tool woodworking.

It’s lovely. When my plane peels off long, translucent curls of wood the thickness of parchment, it feels magical. It is hard for me to resist picking up a long curl, straightening it between my spread hands and holding it up to the light to marvel at the light filtering through it. How can a simple tool produce such a beautiful artifact? And when I touch the just planed surface, especially if the planing occurred along the grain of the wood, the feel of the resulting surfaces delights my senses.
- You can find videos of the popular Japanese hobby of planing competition on the old intertubes. Hand tool woodworking is downright pleasurable. Kezuroukai Video
It’s quieter. Even factoring in chisel work – hand chopping mortises, etc. – it’s still far quieter than machine work.
It’s safer. You can still manage to put your eye out, stab yourself with a chisel, or cut your finger or hand quite deeply. If you rough out small logs with a hand axe, you open a whole new range of serious ow-ies. But powertools amplify the chance you’ll find yourself wishing you’d taken up badminton.
It’s healthier. You’re not going to be breathing sawdust, or listening to the whine of high-powered machinery.
It’s harder. Harder is more satisfying. You can learn to play simple songs on the piano, or you can watch Yuja Wang on Youtube. Guess which is going to be more satisfying? Although, I will admit that watching Yuja play can be an almost spiritual experience. And when she plays the fastest passages, it does not seem like a human should be able to do such things.
- The acquisition of skill over time is just so satisfying.
- The fact that hand tool woodwork is harder and slower also means those who practice it will derive much joy from not so much wood. This is a good thing, no?
- Something that is simple with a power tool can take months, or years to master with a hand tool, e.g. cutting the end of a small piece of wood to 90-degrees with sufficient accuracy to fit and look good. An aside: You won’t find me using the word perfect – to my mind it’s just sloppy talk – the concept of the ideal, the perfect, is important, a la Plato, or Chesterton in Orthodoxy – but it is not in the ken of mere mortals. You have never seen a perfectly straight line, nor a perfectly round circle. If you think you have, well… you probably can’t be helped.
  - If an employee asks, “How straight do I have to get this piece?” and you answer, “Perfect,” you’re just being an asshat. Humans do not do perfect. They cannot. When you find that employee fussing with a five-minute job an hour later, you have only your sloppy use of “perfect” to blame.
- The tools have a simple beauty, and are a pleasure to handle, and maintain. There is, for me, an almost meditative bliss involved in practicing hand woodwork, in sharpening and tuning tools, in marking out things to be drilled, cut, or chopped – and lots of such marking and laying out is necessary when working by hand.
- Hand tool woodwork limits what I can reasonably make: Certainly in amount, and to some degree in complexity, although, there are particular, not so necessary things in which hand tools make possible things that machines do not reasonably allow. An old man using machines can make several hundreds (maybe thousands) of feet of moulding in a day. With hand tools? Maybe a couple or three dozen feet, and that only if he’s a pretty fit old geezer.
  - But it is the limits of hand tools that can make for beautiful, unique work. Consider the musical genre called the blues. What makes the blues unique is what is left out, not what is put in. The basic blues scale has four or five notes. Yet consider how unique the sound of the blues is, and how hauntingly beautiful. I feel the same about certain forms of Shaker furniture as I do about the blues. And the completly hidden dovetails in some small traditional japanese cabinets and drawer chests appeal to me because the end result of the complexity of the joints is the seamless flow of wood grain around corners – what nowadays we call a waterfall effect.