Let me introduce myself

[Ron Brese]

I am new to this forum so I thought it proper to introduce myself, My name is Ron Brese and I am a self employed studio furniture maker. I haven't had much time to spend on woodworking forums as of late due to the 3 year design and build home project that my wife and I have been undertaking the past three years. Why 3 years? Well I had to take time out to make a living and luckily had some pending commisions backed up in the shop. Enough about the house. My professional background before entering full time woodworking was in the engineering field, more specifically in the contract sheet metal industry. The reason I choose this topic catgegory to introduce myself was due to my love of hand tools. I have quite a drawer full of old Stanleys mainly pre WW2s, a Lie-Neilsen or 2, and have been quite advidly making myself some assorted infill planes as of late. I will try to post some pics of some my work and planes as a get aquainted intro. I like the neighborhood here, hope I will fit in.

Ron

[Louis Bois]

Beautiful work Ron. Welcome aboard!!!

As for fitting in here, don't worry...we're all just broken human beings on the island of misfit neanders...all it takes to fit in here is to have a sense of humour, patience and some sharp bits of steel to cut stuff with...

Looking forward to seeing photos of the house project!

[Steve Wargo]

Welcome Ron. Welcome to the Creek. I love the clock. Very nice and slender. Welcome.

[Steven Blunt]

Welcom Ron - nice stuff you have there. I especially like your infills. I've been beating around the bush to build some infills and just haven't had the time to get everything together. Did you use brass sides dovetailed to a steel sole? I can't quite tell from the picture. If you wanted to show some details and a little information on your process, I sure wouldn't mind... ;)

Welcome aboard,
Steve

[Martin Shupe]

Welcome, Ron, you will fit in very well. I love early American and Shaker stuff. I am looking forward to more pics of your work. It looks beautiful.

[Jim Becker]

Great work, Ron! 'Looking forward to learning from you!

[Glenn Clabo]

Enough about the house. Ron

Ron...First of all... WOW! Beyond nice work.
Finally...NOT enough about "the house". I want know more about what you have done...plan to do...etc.

From someone who loves woodworking but who is remodeling this old house...more is better.

[Dave Anderson NH]

Welcome indeed to the hand tool side of things. From the pictures it looks like you'll fit right in here. I'm always glad to see another period furnituremaker show up, the modern guys I just tolerate.:D :rolleyes:

Your friendly moderator who is now just 2 working days away from a trip to the Philadelphia Furniture Workshop and a few days at Colonial Williamsburg.

Dave

[Don Bullock]

Welcome Ron. Please feel free to jump in and help us out. Obviously you have some skills and talent that will be helpful.

[Howie French]

Welcome Ron - Beautiful work, I really enjoy furniture of that style.

Howie

[Ron Brese]

Thanks to all for the warm welcome and the kind comments. Several of you had comments and questions, so I will respond to those in separate post.

Thanks again,

Ron

[Jerry Olexa]

Beautiful work...Welcome!

[John Timberlake]

Welcome. I particularly like the lowboy. Nice graceful legs.

[Michael Fross]

Welcome to the creek! Your work is beautiful. I especially love the infill planes. Very impressive.

Regards,

Michael

[Ron Brese]

The Lowboy was one piece of an entire bedroom commission that included a matching flat top highboy, a turned post bed and a snake foot candle stand.

Ron

[Zahid Naqvi]

What an introduction, Ron you will fit right in. Looking forward to learning from you.

[Dan Forman]

Welcome Ron. Yes, I think you just might fit in here! Lovely planes and furniture. Like others here, I would like very much to make a plane or two, but have no background in metal working. Anything that you can show us will be greatly appreciated.

Dan

[Tyler Howell]

Welcome.
Great bunch of folks here:cool:

[Alan Turner]

Welcome to SMC. Like moderator Dave mentioned, always nice to see another period guy here.

Tell us a bit about your shop. I assume you handle planks and such with electrons, but perhaps not. Do you use modern joinery such as loose tenons when appropriate to save time, or is all of the joinery strictly period appropriate?

Good looking infils, by the way.

[Ron Brese]

Alan I buy all my material in the rough but could not possibly make any money doing all the processing with hand tools. Therefore I have a 8" long bed jointer, a 25" Woodmaster planer retrofitted with an insert head, 17" Bridgewood bandsaw, 10" 3hp cabinet saw, Grizzly lathe, Delta miter saw set in it's own workstation with left and right beds and dust collection, 2 Bosch routers and other assorted hand held tools, besides quite a collection of hand planes, spokeshaves, etc., and to keep clean I have a 3hp cyclone and 2 air scrubbers hanging from the ceiling. I have a separate finishing room, 3 hvlp compressor driven conversion guns. Where joinery is concerned it depends on the piece and the client's budget. I have recently built a mortising jig for loose tenon joinery. It is made up of 2 small torsion boxes and works remarkably well. Most of my pieces feature drawers with variably sized and variably spaced dovetail construction which is accomplish using machine tools for excavation and hand tools for refinement. I made my own router table jig for the machine part of the dovetailing that utilizes a Jointech incremental postioning machine, however I threw the templates that came with the Jointech in the back of a shop cabinet and devised my own method of creating the variable size and spacing that I spoke of.

My methods of work are pretty straight forward, lately I have taken to using bench planes and infills in conjunction with each other and have found that it saves sharpening time. I typically set up my L-N #4 to a little heavier cut to take down the high spots and get the piece flat and then follow up with an infill for final smoothing. This spreads the work over 2 tools and lengthens the time between sharpening. The larger smoothing infill has a 50 deg bed pitch and the iron is ground to 30 degrees therefore a lot of heat is generated at the edge, this heat can dull the iron so spreading the work load helps keep me working not sharpening so often.

I have a great love for tool building and my next infill smoother will feature a 2 3/8" wide Lie-Nielsen iron, a .250 tk bronze sole and .187 tk sides, with a bronze lever cap made from .5 tk bronze, it is in process and I think it will be major eye candy if I can just find time to get it finished. Funny thing my wife Julie seems to think having doors on our kitchen cabinets should take precedence over plane making.



Ron

[Charles McKinley]

Wow!

Welcome Ron,

Great stuff! Look forward to much more.