Chinese Hand Tool Woodworking

[David Weaver]

I'd agree warren. There isn't any deep burying of the chisel and then trying to lever out something that takes great force, or hard scraping of a mortise bottom or anything. The levering is subtle, like a wrist flick. It's a good technique.

I have no clue what the wood is, of course none of us probably do, but it doesn't look too hard - looks a lot like mahogany. It's interesting that he works straight through no problem and appears to have a nice through mortise.

[Brian Holcombe]

He goes on about the design of his tools in another video, speaking if the hand planes in the ancient style and the Chinese style chisels which are shaped as something of a cross between western and eastern ( though likely older than both).

Or so says my wife. She has trouble with his dialect, but he is speaking Mandarin Chinese.

[george wilson]

No,he's not levering the chisel that much. I don't walk my chisel as I don't want to mark the wood. I put it between the lines.

[Jessica Pierce-LaRose]

No time to really watch this now, but in the Google Chrome browser, I can right click (control button and click on my Mac laptop) on the page and select "translate to English", and get a rough translation of the Chinese text. The same middling-quality translation you'd get from copy-pasting into Google, but saves you a step. I'll have to look at these later, they seem interesting.

[Max Withers]

This is fascinating. If you go to the website in the background, it turns out to be woodworkers forum, of all things. The first thread I clicked on was some similarly fancy m&ts:
http://translate.googleusercontent.c...NHHWTm9U7mG2nw

[Chris Parks]

It has always seemed to me a limiting thing that the internet is divided by language and we only see a very small part of it. Other parts can be explore but not well by using Google national sites peculiar to each country. I am sure we miss out on so much due to the language thing.

[Brian Holcombe]

He's building a gorgeous folding stool in that first video and series that fallows.

[Jim Matthews]

It's Mandarin.

(Putong Hua)

It's also pretty clear, even with my rusty skills I can make out a third of it.
Mainly because he's well miked - he talks pretty fast.

[Jim Matthews]

It's the four-post mortising gauge that really caught my eye.

All four gauge lines from the same reference face,
no fancy widdling required.

I figure even I could make one of those.

What I can't duplicate is the three dimensional memory this guy
has for the layout of joints he's cutting.

That's spectacular.

[David Weaver]

Interesting set of non-secret mitered dovetails. Different than any I've seen, though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSfWyNy8VS4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkztP6AB7QE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN5jR77hubc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45v3Cm9XA1A

In that last video there, you can see that the guy has a signficant appetite for tools - the ten or so minutes of the video, they pan across his wall. There's an entire rack of bowsaws, a lineup of japanese planes to the right and to the left the taiwan/chinese style planes, what looks like about 50-75 hammers and gobs of chisels and files and rasps (and in another video, there's a huge wall of more chisels).

I couldn't figure out in some of hte videos yesterday what all of the blocks with holes in them are behind his bench. I don't know if they're planes or what.

I do like the chinese rabbet plane he has that has the blade in the middle - like a continental plane, it looks to be comfortable push or pull.

[Brian Holcombe]

I've seen those pretty commonly featured on Nakashima cabinets and Mogens Koch bookcases. Incredibly this fellow mitered both corners rather than just the forward corner.

[David Weaver]

making a plane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnG3XKt4hMQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjugyVP0bbU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yvlo3XMv-70

[David Weaver]

Eyeballing the tails.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U42C8tf-Xe4
Notice around 9 or 10 minutes in this video, he's cutting the tails to match dovetails that he made pins for. He's only cutting them, not marking them. He lays his pin board just below the tail board and eyeballs the pins to cut the tails.

[Michael Kellough]

David, did you delete a post on the second page? I was looking at a video from a link there showing his radical technique cutting tails by eye without any layout marks, simply looking at the pins, and when I came back to the thread the post was gone.

[David Weaver]

I don't think I did. I think the post with the eyeballed dovetails is right above yours.

Something else in it to note for folks watching, the toothline on the saw looks terrible, but look how well it cuts. It's not been jointed in what looks like ever, which is no big deal on a frame saw since the blades can be replaced more easily.