A faithful reproduction requires hand...

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I must admit that whenever I have to mold a profile, I reach for a router bit. It's fast, it's consistent, and yes, it's a bit noisy. It also won't reproduce exactly the shapes found on period furniture. But then, I don't make exact copies of period furniture.

There's something magical about watching a woodworker use ancient tools to cut and shape wood. It's quiet, the work goes surprisingly quickly, and in skilled hands, the results are remarkably clean.

To build his 18th-century table reproduction, Will Neptune used a number of hand tools including a plough plane, two versions of shop-made scratch stocks and a wooden molding plane.

The scratch stocks (see photo below) were used to cut beads on the corners of the legs as well as the edges of the drawer. Will used two types of scratch stock. For molding with the grain, he uses a wooden style beading tool with a fence and small cutter, made from an old bandsaw blade and shaped with a file.

(For another photo of a small scratch stock, useful for cross-grain work, see next item.)