“Each generation hopes to pass on the torch to the next generation burning a little brighter than it was when we got it.”

Those who knew my father sometimes ask if I inherited my woodworking skills from him. The answer is yes, but only indirectly. Over the years I have learned many techniques Dad had no use for because he was a carpenter. I am a cabinetmaker, in the English sense. In this country, cabinetmaker has come to mean one who makes only kitchen cabinets, but the English view cabinetmakers as one who makes any piece of furniture, millwork, or other fine woodworking inside the home, in addition to cabinets—as opposed to the carpenter who works only on the house itself.

Both carpenters and cabinetmakers use wood, of course, but they put it to different purposes and have different views on the methods to be used. But a fine carpenter can influence another to become a fine cabinetmaker.

It was Dad who showed me how to put a framing square on a piece of wood to check it for square. “Now what you want to do here is just run your thumbs along the edge of the square and the wood to make sure they’re flush. That’s called ‘truing the edge.’ Take your time with it and make sure it’s right.”

And another image that remains with me is when Dad took apart one of his wood planes to remove some chips. “See how this works? You lift this tab and the lock lever comes off. Then you can use the blade of it for a screwdriver to take apart the rest of the plane. That way we can sharpen it.”

When I began my woodworking classes at Palomar College, they told us that one of the most useful hand tools is a wood plane. But we couldn’t use it as it came from the box, they said. There was a long process of conditioning the plane—because modern manufacturers don’t finish them as well as they used to, and we now have to remove scratches and the like from the sole of the plane. Then they said that the very best planes, if we could get them, were the old planes you sometimes are lucky enough to find in someone’s garage.

And I thought at once of Dad’s planes, which had ended up in my youngest brother’s garage after Dad passed on. He wasn’t using them and was happy to pass them on to me, albeit with an apology. “This is how they were when I got them, Joe. Don’t blame me for the rust. I guess Dad just got to where he wasn’t using them any more. I asked Uncle Paul about them, and he said we should just use them for firewood, but I couldn’t do that with any of Dad’s tools. So, here they are.”

Well, sir.

I knew that if anyone could help me repair them, it would be my instructor at Palomar College. When I showed them to Chris, he said, “Ah, excellent planes. Stanley Baileys. Probably one of the best planes they ever made, but they haven’t made them for forty years or more.” Then he told me how to bring those planes back to life.

The next day I took them apart and examined them. The wooden handles were splotched with paint and badly chipped in places. One of the handles was broken where it screwed to the sole plate, but fortunately, all the pieces were still there. Another handle had a large chip missing from the end. All of the metal was orange with rust, and the blades were hopelessly dull.

First I stripped the handles down to the bare wood. Then I carefully sanded them by hand, removing the chips, but taking care not to deform them by over-sanding. The broken handle was repaired with epoxy glue and is now stronger at the break than the wood itself.

Then I got some WD-40 and wet-dry sandpaper of various grits. By then we were into the winter, and that particular year it rained a lot. I particularly remember one day when I sat at the kitchen counter the entire day and worked on that rust.

Finally, all of the rust was gone. I then took them to school and my instructor told me how to re-sharpen the irons (in a plane, the blade is called an iron—don’t ask me why!). Over the years he had them, Dad had simply sharpened them by hand on a whetstone. But it is almost impossible to maintain the correct angle when you do that, and the irons, as consequence, were now misaligned. First I ground them for a long time on the grindstone until I had a burr that went across the entire iron, which indicated that it was now ground at a dead ninety degrees to the iron and from front to back. Then I took them home and worked on my Japanese water stone (much better then whetstones!) to hone the edges until they were as sharp as a straight razor, and stronger, because of the steel in them.

Then I got some tung oil and put down a hand-rubbed finish on all the wooden parts. The No. 4 plane had handles of mahogany that had been stained, but I no longer wanted that look, so I finished them naturally. The No. 5 plane had rosewood handles that soon came to look like ebony. Altogether, I gave those planes six coats of tung oil.

Finally, I was ready. It had required about thirty or forty hours of work, but I had completely repaired the planes, using only the original parts. They now looked much as they must have looked when Dad first used them before I was born.

I assembled the planes, adjusted the irons, and took them out to the garage. There were a few false starts until I got them adjusted exactly right, but then it happened. I put my hands on the same handles that had been inside Dad’s strong hands for so many years and ran the No. 4 plane all the way down a board for my first true cut. I was rewarded with the aroma of fresh-cut pine and a shaving so thin you could read a newspaper through it.

Because he preferred carpentry, Dad never did much in the way of cabinetwork, and I seriously doubt that he ever made an edge-to-edge glue line—because that is something only cabinetmakers have occasion to use.

It is not easy to join wood seamlessly. Oh, anyone can glue two pieces of wood together, but you can always find the line where the glue went, unless you learn how to do it correctly.

It takes a lot of patience and persistence. But most of all, you have to have a good plane. Saw two pieces of wood on the table saw. Then get some yellow wood glue and glue the edges together. You’ll see the line because the saw doesn’t leave the wood smooth enough. You may not see it when you dry-fit the parts, perhaps not even when you glue it up. But the moment whatever finish you use dries, you see it: a slight gap where the glue resides, where the two pieces of wood came together, the glue line.

You can take it a step further and run the edges through a jointer. But even then, there will be very tiny ridges all along the edge where the jointer blades passed over the wood. If the jointer has just been sharpened, the results are fainter than with the table saw, but you see it all the same, the glue line.

But a well-sharpened wood plane with good steel that holds an edge will remove two or three shavings that run the entire length of the piece, and that wood will then be absolutely dead flat. And when you glue it up, marvelous things happen.

When I made the vanity for my wife, I had occasion to join quite a bit of wood together, because that is what the project called for. When you see it now there is an arched mirror that appears to be one piece of wood. The truth is that there are four pieces of wood in that arch. I slip-matched the grain and planed the edges of the wood. And now I cannot myself find those glue lines—and I made them!

In one of his many letters to me while I was in the Army overseas, Dad wrote, “Each generation hopes to pass on the torch to the next generation burning a little brighter than it was when we got it.”

If I now make a finer glue line than Dad ever did, it is because I have his wood planes—and the lessons he taught me in his many letters, lessons of life, really. I do think the torch burns brighter for me than it did for him, but all that means is that he did what he set out to do when he spent so much of his life with a typewriter and his children. There is a Jewish saying that makes my point: “If I am standing higher than my father, it’s because I should be. I’m standing on his shoulders.”

Joseph Freenor