Ahmmm-well, I am gonna wander a little on this one, get a mite more general than just answering that one specific question -
See, Paul does indeed use a laminate trimmer. For a lot more than that.
Paul is, by trade, a cabinetmaker, stairbuilder and at the shiny edge of carpentry and woodworking of a practical nature. And he has and uses a different kit than I have and use. Me, I’m basicly a boat carpenter, used to the old fashioned stuff and I use a laminate trimmer with a flush cutting bit for laminates, sometimes, and with a roundover bit in it mostly for rounding over edges on heavy pieces of timber that a commercial fisherman might bang his head into. Either way, we both of us have more time in with laminate trimmers than most people seem to have with woodworking in general and power tools in particular, so we do stuff our own ways.
Let alone other power tools, hand tools, clamps, hold downs, you know, all sorts of stuff. You know, when you use a tool a long time, you not only know how to use a tool and get the results it was designed to produce, you know how to misuse it some and get results they didn’t dream of when they built 'em.
Take power planers. The Skil, the Rockwell, the Hitachi and others. None of 'em was designed for surfboard shaping, some have been adapted with better or worse results, some have been used stock and they work just fine. And of the three I mentioned, I have used 'em all for woodworking on big boat stuff and I wouldn’t buy anything but a good used Rockwell or Porter Cable. That’s me. It may not be true for you.
On a more plebean level, I have several block planes, some of them are low-angle block planes. Including two stanleys of the same model…and I like one a whole lot better than the other. It fits my hand better and I do better work with it. Same way, I don’t use Makita or Black and Decker/DeWalt power tools. They don’t fit my hands and the few times I have tried to use 'em I have done what I think of as lousy work. My power tools are almost exclusively Milwaukee and Porter Cable ( or Rockwell, which haven’t been made for over 20 years) . I do better work with them, they fit my hands and style of work better, or maybe using 'em all this time has made my style of work fit them.
And ya got the Japanese chisels, planes and saws which work differently than the Western types. I will even admit that they are theoretically superior to the Western designs, concept-wise. But I’m too old a dog to learn that set of new tricks, especially when I can already turn out acceptable work with the Western style tools I have spent …lets just say ‘a long time’… with.
Okay, so what does that mean to you? Use the tools you are most comfortable with and can do the best job with. And monkey with the concept some if you have to, to make it work better for you. Paul started building the hollows, well, he designed and built 'em to fit his style, his tooling and what he was comfortable with in terms of material and construction methods. Were I building a hollow wood board, and operating in a vaccum, with no Paul Jensen before me, I’d build something quite different in a lot of ways. I have different tools, a different shop, different experience at work. I’d approach the problem in other ways. Which one is right? Ya got me there… I’d go with ‘both’.
If I was a new/novice woodworker, I’d go with the hand tools for now. Get good ones but not great ones - the Lie-Nilsen planes for instance are silly expensive toys - and get good with them. Get to understand them, and then power tools will be an easy step.
that help any?
Oh, and on the bulkheads in a hollow, I would go thicker than 1/8" ply. While it might, structurally, be plenty strong enough, there is the question of gluing surface - if it’s too narrow, there won’t be all that great a bond, and you could get nasty things happening.
hope that’s of use
doc…
