Some People Call it Hybrid

There’s a term that’s been bouncing around for a while now: “hybrid woodworking.” I don’t know if he coined the term, but Marc Spagnuolo defined the idea in his book Hybrid Woodworking (Popular Woodworking, 2013). The concept is simple: hybrid woodworkers use a blend of both hand and power tools.

The approach is usually explained like this: machines handle the grunt work, like ripping long boards, thicknessing stock, and making multiple, repetitive cuts. Getting this stuff knocked out with the machines leaves the craftsman free to do the detail work and the more enjoyable tasks by hand. The hybrid woodworker will run his/her boards through a thickness planner, but will reach for a smoothing plane rather than a random orbital sander to take out the mill marks. The hybrid woodworker, like woodworkers going back for generations, will also reach for hand tools to cut joints, smooth edges, and do final surfacing. 

Of course, there’s a lot of wiggle room built into the concept of “hybrid.” You might do 95% of your work with power tools, but cut your dovetails by hand. On the other end of the spectrum, I can think of several hand tool purists who still own a thickness planner, because taking ¼ inch of thickness off a white oak board by hand is completely doable, but it’s also tedious and time-consuming. Even hand tool fanatics realize that the woodworker of old was rarely a solo operator like most of us are today. Cabinetmakers worked in shops and there were apprentices to handle at least some of the donkey work, while the journeymen and the master handled the fine work. These days, machines are the apprentices.

I am often surprised by how much people’s personal prejudices determine how they get their work done. Some people just feel like machines are always easier and more accurate. Power-tool specialists tend to feel like hand tools are either old fashioned or just too much bother. My experience has been that these people are self-taught woodworkers with little exposure to hand tools. And of course, we all know traditionalists who hate anything that plugs into a wall. These people will pick their techniques based on what’s more “traditional” or what’s more “historic” and they talk about machines robbing all the “soul” from woodwork. In both cases, I think people are being pretty irrational. Certain tools excel at certain jobs and whether they are hand or power tools doesn’t make much difference.

I’ll be honest; this whole “hybrid” thing just seems like nonsense to me. It’s the way I’ve always worked and it would never occur to me to come up with some fancy name for using both hand and power tools. Like most people, the table saw and the band saw are the heart of my shop. These machines handle the dimensioning and even some of the joinery. If I have to do a lot of mortise and tendons like on a recent door project, I’ll set up the machines for accurate and repeatable operations.

But there are a lot of things that power tools just don’t do very well. For instance, I think power sanding is hugely overused in the modern wood shop. Many leveling, straightening, and smoothing tasks are much better handled by planes. A good smoothing plain will take a mill marks off aboard and have it finish-ready in a few passes, whereas the random orbital sander will need to run through four or five grits before it achieves a similar result. In this case, a hand tool IS the faster and more efficient one.

Hand tools can also save you an enormous amount of time setting up guides or building jigs. Except for the band saw, which can handle freehand cutting both safely and effectively, most woodworking machines need to be tightly controlled in order to work safely and accurately.  Want to cut really good mitres on your table saw? Better build a jig. Getting sick of your puny and ineffective miter gauge? Build a cross-cut sled. Your table saw can also do box joints, tenons, and rabbets. But you’re going to need to build some jigs.  With a hand-tool, you don’t screw around with giving the machine a set of instructions in the form of some complex fixture. Instead, you just grab the tool and do what you want to the work. Consider the joint below. I cut it with a dovetail saw and chisel in about 5 minutes. Doing it with machines would have been either way more complicated or just impossible.

I think with woodworking, like any other craft, the craftsman should just pick the tool that will work most efficiently and give the best results. Often, this is a power tool. Other times, it’s a hand saw or a plane. The craftsman can shift back and forth between hand and machine tools effortlessly. Some people call this hybrid woodworking. I just call it woodworking.