Advanced woodworking with and without power tools

I have spent a lot of interest and time on good tools for better and simpler woodworking results. In that pursuit, I have come to invest in some of the more expensive hand-held power tools that are made, like Festool, and Bosch blue professional series.

The reason for the investment has been to make the work faster and with higher quality. In spite of all those tools, I find myself more and more frequently solving the problem using hand powered tools, like, for example, an old-fashioned hand-held plane. Again, the tool is used to make the work more efficient. It is interesting to note that even with a lot of power tools, efficiency may be best achieved with a hand tool.

The picture shows such a situation. I had used the Festool Rotex to finish the table surface of the just built garden table on the picture. It turned out to take too long time, and as usual, the sandpaper makes the surface smoother, not flatter. The hand plane did a much quicker job on flattening the surface.

Joinery

Another interest is joining the wooden parts without screws or nails. I am using different older joinery methods. However, here I find that using power tools makes such joinery easier to do (in fact it becomes quite easy), and with a high quality of the joint. One of my favorite power tools is the router, which excels amongst other things for joinery.

This section of the web focuses on such things as using Festtol and Leigh to do good and quick mortise and tenon joinery, how to use things like Leigh to achieve good repetitive measurements when working in wood. And different tips for routing with Domino and routing with Festool CMS.

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