Wood keeps moving after it is cut
A tree is a bundle of long tubes carrying water up from the roots, and those tubes are the GRAIN. It makes WOOD very strong along its length and much weaker across it, so a PLANK splits easily along the grain but not through it. Tools behave the same way: a PLANE pushed with the grain leaves a smooth surface, and pushed against it tears the fibres up.
Wood also swells and shrinks with the damp. It barely changes along the grain but can move noticeably across it, so a wide tabletop can grow and shrink by several millimetres between a wet winter and a dry summer. Good furniture is built to allow for this, with joints and fixings that let panels move — ignore it, and the TIMBER cracks.
The dovetail is thousands of years old
A DOVETAIL JOINT has fan-shaped pins that lock into matching tails, so it cannot be pulled apart in one direction even without GLUE. The name comes from the shape, like a spread bird's tail. Dovetails have been found in ancient Egyptian furniture and coffins thousands of years old, and a carefully fitted one is still the traditional mark of a skilled furniture maker, often cut by hand with a SAW and CHISEL, tapped home with a MALLET.
Japanese carpenters developed some of the most elaborate interlocking joints in the world, and some temple buildings stand with few or no metal fastenings at all. The wooden buildings of the Hōryū-ji temple near Nara are among the oldest surviving wooden structures on Earth, more than 1,300 years old. Our ancient Egypt page covers the civilisation behind those early joints.
Pull saws and push saws
A Western saw cuts on the push stroke, so its blade must be thick enough not to bend. A Japanese saw cuts on the pull, which keeps the blade under tension; it can be much thinner, and leaves a narrower cut. Many woodworkers now use both.
A LATHE spins a piece of wood so it can be shaped with a cutting tool held against it, making chair legs and bowls. In the beech woods of the Chiltern Hills, craftsmen called bodgers once turned chair legs on simple pole lathes set up among the trees. They share a name with bodge, the word for a clumsy repair, which is unfair on them — they were skilled and fast.
Houses burned down for their nails
Before machines, every NAIL was forged by hand by a blacksmith, and nails were valuable. In colonial Virginia, people leaving a property sometimes burned the old buildings to collect the nails from the ashes, and in 1645 a law offered them nails in return for leaving the houses standing. Mass-produced screws took until the eighteenth century and later to become cheap.
The rest of the grid is the workshop: the WORKBENCH, the CLAMP holding a piece still while GLUE sets, the DRILL, the HAMMER, the SCREW, sandpaper to SAND a surface smooth, and VARNISH to seal it. The simplest woodwork needs only a knife: to WHITTLE or CARVE is to shave wood away, always cutting away from your body.