r/greenwoodworking

What surprised me most was how much the beetle work told me about the tree itself. You could feel where it had leaned into the wind for years, denser and more resistant to the split on one side, softer and more willing on the other. Never noticed that kind of thing when I was just cutting boards on a bandsaw. Riving it by hand makes the whole history of the tree kind of obvious in a way I wasn't expecting.

Going to let these billets sit under a tarp for a couple weeks before I touch a drawknife to them. If anyone has a rule of thumb for how long green oak billets need before they're workable on a shaving horse without tearing out, I'd take the advice. Right now I'm just going off vague memory of something I read once about a week per inch of thickness, but that feels like a guess more than a rule.

Been doing green woodworking for about two years now, mostly chair parts and some spoons, and I keep noticing my tool use has narrowed down quite a bit from what I expected when I started.

The drawknife gets used constantly. More than almost anything else. I do a lot of shaping of chair legs and rungs straight off the log, and having green wood that peels cleanly under a drawknife is one of those small pleasures that never really gets old. A sharp one on fresh-split oak or ash just melts through the material.

Froe and mallet for splitting out blanks, obviously. I resisted getting a good froe for a long time and used a hatchet for everything, which worked but was slower and wasted more material. Now I split first and hew second almost every time.

The tool I underestimated going in was the spokeshave. Once I got comfortable with a flat-bottomed one, it became my finishing tool for almost every cylindrical piece before it goes to the shave horse for final sizing. The adjustment on a lot of vintage ones takes patience to dial in, but once it is set right on green material it is genuinely satisfying to use.

Curious what other people find themselves reaching for most. Do you do much with a side axe, or do you go straight from froe to drawknife? I have been going back and forth on whether a proper carving axe would add much to what I already have.