A Sawing Contest (And Other Odd Stories)

When Adam Cherubini bounded into the Hand Tool Event organized by Lie-Nielsen Toolworks on Saturday, I thought I heard someone gasp.

Not because they were stunned by Adam’s sheer size (he’s at least 2″ taller than my 6′-3-5/8″-high frame), but because they thought that with all those sharp tools sitting around, that this little visit was going to end with some bloodshed.

After all, Adam (the contributing editor who writes our Arts & Mysteries column about 18th-century woodworking) doesn’t much care for metal-bodied handplanes. And he’s mocked them on Internet forums on occasion. And the Lie-Nielsen show in Philadelphia was probably the largest accumulation of bronze and ductile iron tools the city has seen.

Oh, and I neglected to mention that John Economaki was also exhibiting at the show, which was held at the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop, a private woodworking school run by Alan Turner and Mario Rodriguez. John, the founder of Bridge City Tools, also makes fine metal-bodied planes and is (understatement follows) an outspoken guy.

So Adam stepped up to my bench and announced that he’s going to show us a plane he made, which he called “A Lie-Nielsen No. Minus 5.” The wooden-bodied plane was constructed using parts from several tools Adam had acquired off eBay and then adapted, Orange County Chopper-style, to turn them into a roughing plane that looked straight out of André Félibien’s “Principes de L’architecture” (1676).

Adam had just sharpened the plane’s iron on his sandstone grinding wheel, and it looked quite nice. On the other hand, the mouth of the plane was gaping and the sole looked a bit rough, though I didn’t get a chance to put a Starrett straightedge on it and check it with feeler gauges.

But that was Adam’s whole point that day. He took a piece of maple and started working it diagonally and then with the grain with his plane, taking off some quite fine curls. Then he reached for his mallet (which he joked was his “micro-adjustment system”) and knocked the iron in position to take off some serious meat.

Adam takes a swipe at the maple board, which was a warm-up to the nasty hickory.
It was about then that Tom Lie-Nielsen walked up to the bench and shook hands with Adam. Adam handed him the plane and they discussed its unusual front knob and tote. Tom took a look at Adam’s piece of maple and then sneaked off for a minute.

The Nasty Board

He returned with a big slap of curly wood. As soon as I saw the board, I knew what it was. After traveling around to shops for the last decade, I’ve found that every hand tool-oriented shop has one board that is just nasty to work. I think this particular one was hickory. These are boards that are good for really only one thing: heating your shop in your wood-burning stove.

Tom put the board on the workbench and stepped back. Adam took up the challenge and began working the board with his No. Minus 5. The tear-out was so bad I thought I actually could hear the grain ripping, especially at one end of the workpiece. We turned the board 90° (usually a good strategy) and it got worse. We turned it again to work against the grain (usually a no-no) and it got even worse. I tried to plane it and gave up after about five minutes.

So I picked up my Lie-Nielsen No. 8 jointer plane and gave it a try. The plane was freshly sharpened and had a fairly tight mouth. I took a lighter cut than I usually would with a jointer plane and the tear-out began to recede. When the board was flat, I picked up my Lie-Nielsen No. 4 in bronze with a 50° frog and tried to clean up the remainder of the tearing. This plane has let me down only once (that story is for another day). The tear-out disappeared, except for in one spot that I had gouged out deeply with the No. Minus 5.

Adam shows off a planed board that he would consider suitable for the interior of a piece of nice casework or the exterior of a piece of average-quality. 

Here’s that same board held up to the light so you can see what it looks like.

I felt pretty good, but it was Adam who really won the hearts of the attendees. They lined up to learn to adjust and use the funky-looking No. Minus 5. Adam gave each person a quick lesson and then demanded that they surrender their bags to him so they could try the plane. Adam is a natural showman – he’s a demonstrator in the jointer’s shop at Pennsbury Manor – and so with the crowd enthralled, I sneaked off to the back room where sandwiches were waiting.

When I returned, Adam had a boy of about 5 using the plane on the floor of the school, planing the maple board against a stop that was secured at the foot of the bench. Nice move.

A contestant tries his hand at sawing a thin piece using a Lie-Nielsen carcase saw, a 14-point crosscut Western-style backsaw.
When everyone had tried the plane, Adam suggested we hold a sawing contest. He grabbed a piece of poplar and put it on my bench hook. The object of the contest, he said, was to crosscut the board so the waste piece was as thin as possible, uniform in thickness and whole.