Workshop Miscalculation

So I bethought me to sign up for the UK Workshop forum Hand Tool Secret Santa, right? 'Cos a deadline by which I'd have had to get in the workshop and make something can be nothing but a Good Thing, right? And it's worked; I've made shavings. And firewood and lots of mistakes... But I made one miscalculation, didn't I? By the nature of the thing I can't blog about what I'm doing. D'oh.

Actually maybe it's just as well. The woodworking gods are taking revenge on me for my neglect with one damn thing after another. The most annoying being that I managed to walk right into the protruding metal angles that the bandsaw fence run on. Result; a deep and painful bruise on my arm which is slowing me up even more. Heigh ho.

Meanwhile the UPS man has called with a pre-production example of the Veritas Skew Block plane. This is an unusual case in that the existence and appearance of this plane is out in the public domain already, so just for once I can say what I'm getting to play with - er, rigourously test. Unfortunately I still have to remember not to say what I think about it! Grrr. Should be an interesting weekend though...

Handy Tool

Is it me, or are Veritas tools getting smaller and smaller? It's either that or I've eaten the wrong side of the mushroom again...

Yes, it really works, honest. Even the adjuster. Click on the thumbnails for a larger pic.

Postal strike

Do I speak of the Royal Mail's approaching industrial action? I do not. Nope, I pun. Viz: I have posted on UK Workshop again. All for the entirely selfish reason of trying to prompt the woodworking juices to flow once more, and ya know, it may already be starting to work. Shhh, now - don't frighten it away...

Run, Forrest, Run

Speed is a funny thing, isn't it? It's all relative, as one genealogist said to another. You can be barrelling along the motorway at a happy 70mph and not feel like it's very fast at all, but come off the slip road without breaking quite sufficiently, and you'll know all about it.

I've been much taxed by speed, or lack of it, with my broadband connection of late. It was crawling along at not quite twice the speed of dial-up at one point; not good. I finally had enough when it crawled to slightly less than twice the speed of dial-up, threw away any pretence at having anything else to do, tackled my ISP customer service and things have been done. As a result currently I rejoice in a speed of 1.8Mb - at least ten times faster than any speed I've enjoyed on this connection ever before. It's absolute surfing heaven. However, as I roamed across the face of the interweb in search of advice and information on the matter, I kept reading irate posts on fora from people bemoaning the lousy 4Mb speed (for example) they were suffering from. See? All relative.

I've noticed the same thing with hand tools. The power tool user will tend to feel someone's telling porkies if they describe such-and-such a hand tool as "fast"? Take forming a rebate. How can it possibly be as fast a router and a suitable bit? Putting aside set-up time, chances are it isn't, especially if you have a lot of them to do. But beating the power tool isn't what makes a hand tool feel fast; in some respects it's the fact it can do it at all. For the amount of input and functional simplicity, the output of a well set-up hand tool is breathtakingly fast. It's all relative.

And sometimes it really is faster than than the powered alternative too. Don't you love it when that happens...? ;)