In the years since escaping Mordor for the idyllic solitude of Shangri-La (heck, “social isolation” is the normal practice for every day ending in “Y” out here) one of the valued local friendships is that of Tim, an all around cool dude and a primitive skills enthusiast. One of those “primitive skills” is Appalachian long rifle-making and connoisseurship and he has been an invaluable aid in my work on the David Cooley rifle.
In recent months Tim has been engaged in salvaging a couple of mid-18th century log buildings from south central Virginia, re-erecting them on his place a few miles from here to serve as his workshop for making rifles and other tasks relative to 18thC frontier living. Once I learned of this project I proposed building the tool to fulfill his need for a proper period-appropriate gunsmithing work bench. Tim’s rifle-smithing is in the later-18th century English style, so his bench will be a Nicholson.
We picked up the superb southern yellow pine from Virginia Frame and Lumber in Fishersville and over the next few Wednesdays I will be chronicling the project to outfit him in the manner he and his new shop deserve.
Stay tuned. I think you will find this an interesting trip.
Part of my process of refining the raw “slum gum” unfiltered beeswax from the honey factory delivered in a case of roughly 6-inch thick slabs from the bottom of a five gallon bucket, involves a step wherein the coarsely filtered molten beeswax/hot water slurry (removing the bee bodies and gross debris) is poured through fine pasta strainer into a cake pan and allowed to cool undisturbed.
After cooling and decanting the water with any remaining water soluble adulterant, I am left with a big block of beeswax with a fairly uniform layer of sediment on the bottom face of the block. This needs to be removed before moving on to the next step of filtering.
Normally I try to time the scraping off step for when the block of wax has cooled enough to be fairly solid, but still warm enough to be scraped easily with a large knife. There are times, however, when I do not get to this step soon enough and the block of wax with its accretions hardens fully. And with enough cold, it can get pretty hard. Scraping this is not impossible but it is some hard work when I am doing several of them at once.
Recently I had a great idea while rummaging through my “Giant Files” drawer and pulled out this little curved Surform tool. I found that for a fully hardened block, even one that is chilled and rock hard, it removes the precipitant easily and quickly.
That smack is the sound of my pam striking my forehead. Usually in just a minute or less the block is ready to be put aside for the next melt during which time it will be getting its final filtering from me before moving into Mrs. Barn’s domain and one final filtering before casting into blocks.
I am delighted to report that after a few weeks of being out of stock, as of ten minutes ago I am now replenished with Model 296 polissoirs and they will begin shipping again immediately.
Finally it was time to put the new plane all together and give it a test drive. I did not sharpen the iron to ultimate completion in case I needed to change its angle a smidge. I would hate to get it to 8000+ sharp then have to grind off some of that hard won territory.
Using a piece of trued-up aluminum bar stock as my fence and some waste mahogany from the scrap pile I gave it a go.
The results were very pleasing. A half-dozen passes and the work was done.
Now I can take the sharpening to the end point.
I now have no technical excuse to put off making some Japanese planing boards, it is now only a matter of time and priority.
Meanwhile I thought I would give my flea-market 1/4″ shouldered dovetail plane a run. The shoulder feature is mighty nice, but as you can tell the iron needs some reshaping and sharpening. The iron in the tool has been really boogered up and will need a lot of work to get right (sorry for the technical jargon folks).
The final step for the project will be to make a sawing template with a bevel matching the dovetail angle so that the female joint can be cut to match the male joint half resulting from the plane. I will be unlikely to make that a post, unless I have a really slow day and am in a complete idea desert.
In closing let me give a shout out to James Wright whose video on sliding dovetail joints was part of my inspiration for undertaking this tool making project. The other part was this video on making and using a planing board. I am anxious to get the decks cleared of the dozen things in line ahead of it to make my own planing board.
When I posted a request for volunteer readers of my manuscript of A Period Finisher’s Manual I was hoping for a few responses. I was certainly NOT expecting a few dozen responses! Ahhh, the Power of The Schwarz. It is certainly heartening to know that there is that much interest in the project and I am humbled and encouraged by this situation. I am attempting to respond with a “thank you” to every one who wrote me; if you did not get a note from my in reply it is because your email server must not talk to my email server. Whatever that means (I am pretty sure it has nothing to do with shellac so my cognizance is pretty limited). I have received “Could Not Deliver” or “Email address not recognized” notes for a few folks even though I used the eddress they used to send me the original note.
Sigh. To err is human, but a really big mistake takes a compewder and a government committee.
Have you ever encountered an instruction manual that was so poorly written that it left you more confused and less knowledgeable than when you started to read it? I have suffered through this experience many times, mostly with instruction manuals for electronics and compewder stuff. Frequently I have wondered why this is the case, and reached the conclusion that the reasons may be many, including:
The instruction manuals are written by the creators of the product, for whom communicating in standard English is not a highly developed skill set. There is a reason why compewder geeks are stereotyped.
The manual writers resent the task of creating an explanatory tutorial for their work, and expect the readers to be less intelligent than they and are thus held in contempt, unworthy of even explaining their work to the end-user.
The manual writers are so familiar with their own product that they can unconsciously fill in any informational voids with their own working knowledge. I have literally called “Help” lines when I could not understand something, and received a reply, “Oh yeah, I guess that [vital piece of information] really should be in there since the product will not work unless X, Y, or Z is done this way,” an informational nugget absent in the manual. I do mean literally receiving this response.
The instruction manual is written by someone who is a competent writer but does not know the subject well enough to explain it, and there is no back half to the information loop whereby a technical expert reviews and corrects any mistakes.
What does this have to do with woodworking?
Well, I will soon be at the point in in writing The Period Finisher’s Manual where I am ready to begin sending out sections for review. I have the back half of the review covered, with my erudite friends MikeM and LenR volunteering to look at it from a technical/wordsmithing perspective. But they are highly skilled experienced finishers and are thus not the people to necessarily focus on what is not present in the text or visuals.
What I need is a small cadre of readers, preferably no more than two or three, who are literate but not so experienced in wood finishing that they can fall into the trap of Step #3. I need to know if the verbiage I am creating is actually comprehensible and useful to the less experienced finisher, such that they can read and understand what I am writing with the result being their ability to integrate what is in the book with what they are doing at the bench. Getting back to the compewder analogy, I encounter this whenever my webmeister or daughters give me some instruction for my laptop. I recognize that they are using English words but have no comprehension of what they mean.
These reviewers would not be paid, and their commitment to the project must be such that they will read critically and comment back to me in a timely manner so that I can make revisions as necessary. Creating a book is a long haul, often tedious and thankless. All I can offer is my public and private thanks and acknowledgement in the book, along with a couple copies of the book itself once finished, and perhaps a nice gift basket of wood finishing swag from The Barn On White Run. Oh, and a substantial credit in the Bank of Don, previous beneficiaries of which I hope would confirm is not without value.
If this sounds like you, let me know. If you have my email, use it. If not, try the Contact function on the web site. If that is being temperamental leave a Comment to this post, these remain private until I review and post them so you can leave your contact information with confidence that it will remain private.
My friend Justin sent me a note about this workbench yesterday and I thought I would pass it along to you. It looks like a beauty and the price seems eminently reasonable to me.
With the dovetail plane configured the way I wanted it was time to add the brass plate to the newly beveled sole. I grabbed a piece of brass from the scrap drawer and sawed it roughly to fit then drilled and countersunk screw holes for attaching it to the plane body. When I placed the screws the wooden body was too brittle (several cracks) for me to have confidence in that being the only method of affixing the plate.
Instead I cleaned the contact surface of the brass plate with 60 grit sandpaper and slathered it and the wood contact surface with G-flex epoxy to bring it all together.
Since the gluing surface was beveled enough vis-a-vie the plane body that clamping was problematic I simply got the pieces in place and executed and old fashioned “rub joint,” making sure there was intimate contact and at least a partial vacuum between the adherends and the adhesive and then just let it sit to harden. I’ll know tomorrow if that worked out well.
Next Day
The “rub joint” with epoxy worked perfectly! I was able to trim and clean the new sole relative to the wooden body so that they configured nicely, first with a Vixen file followed by sanding.
Using my granite block and sandpaper I got the sole pieces flat and coincidentally planar.
Re-drilling the previous screw holes, now filled with epoxy, and drilling new holes on the front half of the sole I got everything copacetic. I left the screw heads slightly proud and abraded them off smooth.
Now the tool is ready to assemble completely and give it a test drive.
Given the intrusion of outside reality into the world of the workshop made manifest in the cancellation of the recent PATINA tool soiree; the cancellation of our regional Maple Festival, the social and commercial center point for our little county every year; the cancellation of some teaching I was scheduled to undertake in LA in mid-April; the closing of all schools and prohibition on public gatherings for the foreseeable future; the growing impetus for national quarantines — I was considering the coming near future for projects in the barn. My temperament is amenable to the isolation integral to this routine, probably for an unhealthy length of time. And, I realized that in many instances I am already my own workshop-related general goods store due in great part to the fact that the hardware section of the local feed and seed is better than it was but still only okay, and closes at 4.#0 weekdays and noon on Saturdays. The closest good hardware store is thirty miles away with the same restrictied hours, and it seems that I mostly need something at 5.30.
Sure, I’ve got thousands of board feet of lumber from which to make stuff. Even more I’ve got almost all the other things I need for a whole lot of projects.
My own little hardware store, mostly tucked into the space beneath the stairs, includes fasteners of almost every description along with a host of other fabrication supplies.
This is augmented by my stock of metal bar stock and similar stuffed up between the ceiling joists of my studio and in tubes next to my Emmert die-maker’s vise. As long as UPS keeps rolling, delivering my frequent orders from McMaster-Carr, the only thing limiting fabrication is time and energy.
I’ve still got hundreds of pounds of shellac in the barn basement. I’ve got hundreds of pounds of beeswax and shellac wax I can process. I’ve got everything I need to make cases of Mel’s Wax.
Mrs. Barn has the gardens underway, and is often in need of my help.
I’ve got a notebook full of sketches and ideas of things to make or try.
I’ve got several manuscript to work on.
Whether we are facing a “crisis” or a crisis remains to be seen, but with all of these aforementioned truths I guess I am ready to keep busy and productive for the coming days and weeks.
Recently I was corresponding with a reader who asked my opinion about bench top bandsaws, a preferred option for him because his career led to frequent moves. I answered him that I have two benchtop bandsaws I use frequently, one a 9-inch Delta bandsaw that must be close to forty years old by now, and a 10-in Rikon I bought about fifteen years ago from either Highland or Woodcraft, I honestly cannot remember. Each bandsaw has a critical role to play in my work, the Delta is my tool for sawing veneers for parquetry and the Rikon for pretty much everything else of modest size. (I also have a free standing Delta 14″ and a Taiwanese 14″ with a riser block for resawing.)
In the back-and-forth of our correspondence once I understood his situation I recommended he look into the Rikon.
Some not-too-long-ago maintenance on the machine confirmed my overall impression formed several years ago that it is a superb tool. Last year during a workshop the saw broke a tire, and after setting it aside for the 9-inch Delta for the remaining days a new tire was on-hand and eventually I replaced the broken one.
Swapping out the tire was the easiest time for that task ever. After removing the retaining ring on the axel of the wheel and cleaning off the detritus of the tire I started the new tire at one point on the wheel then placed that section of the wheel in my Emmert metalwork vise and was able to install the new tire in approximately one minute.
Since I had the wheel off I gave the lower section a through cleaning then did the same to the upper section including scraping the upper tire with a boxwood carving tool with a knife edge to remove the accreted crust but not cut into the tire, then put on a new blade and readjusted all the guides so that it ran perfectly. Unlike my other bandsaws I have found that the factory originals work just fine.
I know that in the coming decades this might be my only power machine (along with a drill press), and I am confident that the little Rikon will serve me well. Even now I cannot think of any recent project that it could not have completed. Perhaps not quite as fast as some ther machinery, but it would get the job done. I keep a variety of blades on hand to use whatever suits the task best, and find that a 3/8″ blade suits me 95% of the time.
I’ve have recently added a nice standard feature enhancing the machine’s utility immensely.
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