The tools required for rustic furniture can be broken into the different stages of the building process. The different stages include the harvesting of materials, preparing the harvested material, and the construction of rustic furniture.
Many of the tools required for building rustic furniture can be found in most wood working shops, although some specialty tools would have to be added to the shop list. Different tools can sometimes be used for more than one stage of construction.
Harvesting the Material
To build rustic furniture you must first harvest the material. This will require heavy tools and a trip into the bush to harvest different sized materials, depending on what you decide to produce.
If you require larger posts for beds or tables, a chainsaw is the most efficient tool to produce a volume of material. A manual saw, such as a box saw, can also be used.
Smaller materials, which are used in such projects as chairs and twig furinture, can be harvested using manual saws, such as box saws or hand saws. An axe or large knife can also be used when harvesting smaller material.
Preparing the Material
The harvested of green wood must be cleaned up and prepared for the construction stage. Tools used to harvest the wood, such as the axe and hand saw, can be used in preparing the material.
An additional tool for preparing material is a drawknife which is very efficient in removing bark from freshly cut trees. It is also a good tool to use when adding texture to the material.
If you are preparing material on site with access to electricity, an angle grinder is very useful. It can be fitted with a sanding disk or a lancelot( a wheel that holds a small chainsaw chain) to achieve quick bulk removal, or shaping.
Tools for Constructing Rustic furniture
When constructing rustic furniture, it is critical that the material be dried first. Natural air drying or kelm drying are two ways to dry material.
Air drying is the process of drying the wood naturally over time. The problem with this process is that it takes at least a year, and in colder climates, the wood will not likely dry below 12% moisture.
The best way to dry wood is in a kelm, since it can be dried to 6% or less in a small amount of time. I frequently use both methods by first using natural drying to remove most of the moisture, and then use the kelm to remove the remaining moisture.
A small kelm can be built by constructing an insulated box with measurements of about 5'x5'x10'. An electric heater is placed on one side, and a dehumidifier on the other. A hose is placed on the end to remove the water from inside the box. The kelm drier and a moisture meter (which measures the moisture inside the wood) may be the two most important tools used, when building rustic furniture.
Many of the tools used in the harvesting and preparing of material can be used in the construction stage. The first tools to be used are the kelm drier and the moisture meter. This ensures that the material is dried enough to avoid problems from occuring after construction.
The angle grinder (with either the sanding disc or lansulot) and the drawknife and axe are useful at this stage, to shape and form the material. A hand saw can be used during construction to cut the material to length, although a chop saw or mitter saw may also be used.
In the construction stage a low revolution drill is used with a tenon cutter to make the tenons in the material. A hand drill (brasion bit) may also be used if electricity is not available. To achieve morisions a drillpress, as well as the drill or brasion bit, can be used with an auger or frosber bit.
Other tools I have found useful in building rustic furniture include: band-saws, chisels, planers, and jointers. Each rustic project is unique and offers up its own set of challenges, which in my experience, can be overcome with these tools and some hard work.
The tools I have mentioned here can be purchased at most hardware or tool outlets, athough some specialized tools may have to be ordered from specialty shops. If you are really creative, tools such as drawknifes or chisels can be created from scratch.

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