Paul Swets, the unbeliever, laments :

>This being said, I don't believe Paul's claim.  I _want_ to believe it,
>but I can't imagine that the wood knows whether the jointing, for
>instance, was done by a loud, finger-eating monster with a plug-in tail or
>by a strong, silent-type with a thin mouth and a frog behind its throat. 

You haven't seen my hand-dimensioned boards :-)  Wind, cup, tearout.
If I'm lucky slightly hollow faces to a board, if I'm not slightly
rounded faces.  I love beautifully smooth surfaces as much as anyone
else, but I don't always get them and it doesn't mean that the board
is perfectly flat.

While writing what I did this morning I kept hearing the voices over 
in rec.ww last year where the discussion was : "if a craftsman is so
good that he can produce the perfect surface, what would be the 
difference between that and a machined-perfect surface ?"

My answer is that there would be no difference.  If you're after the
perfect surface, you might as well use a machine and do it this year
instead of waiting to the end of your life when you're good enough.

There's another thing with using handtools.  I'm getting more and more
into the habit of producing and fitting one piece at a time into the
eventual whole of whatever I'm working on.  With this approach, it 
doesn't matter if things are perfectly square, straight, flat or plumb.
I make fewer mistakes since I usually mark a piece from its neighbours
already in place.  The result is that the entire piece is not perfect
dimensionally, but the pieces fit much better together that if it was
(unless I did it by machine to thousandths tolerance like I used to).

It is the sum of all these slight imperfections that I find softens
the look of the wood and gives depth to a piece.

Paul P   (who keeps forgetting to add on that extra P)

Montreal (Quebec)