Ambidextrousity
It's better if you can do it both ways
I used to be a baker, and for a time, I was responsible for making all of the viennoiseries at a fairly large bakery. Viennoiseries include all of the laminated pastries like croissants, where many layers of alternating butter and dough lead to a supremely flaky and delicious pastry when baked. Sometimes I miss the days of eating fresh croissants still warm from the oven at 2 or 3 am when ending my shift.
To make this kind of pastry, you create alternating layers of dough and butter by rolling the two out together into a long thin sheet then folding it up and repeating the process multiple times to create the layers. As you can imagine, this involves a lot of butter, which comes in cold cases of one pound blocks, which need to be made into sheets. A hefty French rolling pin is used to pound the blocks into thin pieces that can then be put together to make big sheets. You have to work quickly because if the butter warms up too much, you stop making sheets of butter and start splattering it all over yourself and the bakery. Wielding a 1.5 pound French rolling pin to quickly coax cold butter into shape is hard work.
After my first few weeks of pounding 30 to 40 pounds of butter into sheets five nights a week, I noticed my right arm was noticeably bigger than my left. In an effort to prevent myself from getting too lopsided, I decided to try alternating between using my left and right arm while sheetifying the butter. It was a little precarious at first. I almost smacked myself in the face quite a few times and sent some blocks of butter flying across the bakery. After a few days, I was passable at using my left hand, and within a few weeks, I was quite proficient.
Wielding a rolling pin in either hand balanced me out, which made my body feel noticeably better. Switching off hands after every five pounds of butter or so let me keep up a rapid pace, and sometimes I was just better able to get the perfect thwack on a lump of butter with my left hand rather than my right.
There were many tasks at that job that benefited from being able to do them with either hand, like cracking eggs one handed. We used to race to see who could crack the hundred or so eggs needed for a recipe fastest, and, unless you could crack two eggs at once, you’d be left in the dust.
Even before this job, but especially after it, I was aware that it was important for any often repeated task to be able to do it both left and right sided. I’ve been a little lacking at applying this learning to woodworking till recently.
Woodworking has a lot of left or right hand dominant tasks. Since I mill all of my lumber by hand, pushing a plane is probably the most common one for me. In the past few years, there have been a number of times I’ve thought to myself, “I should probably learn to drive a plane with my off hand,” and even started trying to do so, but since I was slow and my shop time was limited, I wondered how much benefit there could really be.
Over the last six months, I’ve carved out a lot more shop time, so a lot more of my life has been spent pushing a plane through wood (and recently tough species like oak and beech), and so it seemed time to actually start working at this in earnest.
It's always hard easing yourself into doing something with your off hand. Planing is especially hard because it needs both a significant amount of strength and very fine motor skills. My first thought was to do more rough work off-handed, like scrubbing off lots of material when thicknessing a board, but it wears me out too quickly and I don’t take off material evenly, which makes more work when getting close to final thickness.
Going to the opposite end of the spectrum and planing corners off short square chair spindle stock to make them octagons has been a much better entry point. There’s very little resistance since not much material is being removed, which makes it easier to work on the fine motor skills. Next, I moved onto doing the same for chair leg stock, which added more material and a longer stroke to continue building my strength and control with my left hand. I’m definitely not great left handed yet, but passable for many tasks.
As I’ve been building up my left handed proficiency, I’ve already come across a few examples where it genuinely makes working easier—usually when a workpiece can only be reasonably clamped in one position, and you have to accommodate the grain orientation, however it runs. I’ve been making some big underbevels on two benches, and there is really only one good way to clamp the bench tops to my workbench (which is up against a wall) to plane down the underbevels. It just so happened the grain on both tops ran such that planning left handed was required. Rather than faffing around trying to figure out another way to clamp, it was nice to just switch hands and get to work.
My current plan is to continue improving my left handed planing, and then I might start working at left handed sawing. How nice would it be when resawing big boards with an aggressive rip saw to switch off hands when one side gets tired?
This post particularly resonated with me as a hobbyist baker of viennoiseries, woodworker, and southpaw living in a right handed world haha. Thanks for sharing!