OSU55

Some form of woodworking for 30 years. Up until ~2006 it was more finishing/refinishing furniture with a few building projects thrown in. Then my son started woodworking class in high school which got me more interested in design and building projects. I played with hand planes and scrapers some, but have become pretty engrossed with them over the past couple of years.

I arrived at hand planes because I wanted furniture tops and other surfaces to be flat. I built a cross slide for my router, which could get surfaces pretty flat, but then I learned about tearout (wondering why the grain pattern was all fouled up after planing with the router). After some research, I decided a 30"+ planer probably wasn't in my future, but I read a lot about what hand planes could do. It took a while (many months of fiddling in the shop) but I finally learned how to set them up, how to get a good sharp blade edge, and how to get a surface flat and smooth. I have a working collection of Stanley style and Veritas iron bench & block planes and various wooden "oriental" style wood planes (which work quite well properly tuned). Learning how to adjust wooden planes has been interesting (& fun at times!).

I use power tools for all the grunt work - board planing, jointing, grooving, sawing, edging, etc. The planes and scrapers primarily take the place of sandpaper - no scrub planes for me ( I do have one I use to make chips for my smoker!).

My workshop/garage shares space with my other main hobby, motorcycles. I turn part of it into a spray booth when it's time to put the finish on. I've become pretty good in the finishing spectrum, and am now bringing the design/building side up to spec.

I'm a degreed mechanical engineer from Oklahoma State with 30 years in product & process design, testing, quality, manufacturing, and management in those areas. There is a good chance your home (and shop) AC or heat pump unit has one of our Copeland Scroll compressors in it!