Whenever I have a metalworking file that gets to the end of its usefulness, whether for sharpening saws or just shaping metal over at the fabrication bench, and regardless of the cause of its infirmity — is it worn out or just boogered up? — I never discard the old tool. It is almost always a great source of very hard tool steel so it goes into my scrap inventory for me to make something out of later.
This habit and experience served me exceedingly well recently when we were up visiting L’il T (and his parents, of course). I carved out a little work station in their garage and just invent projects to occupy my time when I am not puttering around with house chores. Well, this trip I was making a tray for the traveling tool kit I bring with me. Much to my aggravation I realized at a particular point that I had not brought a dovetailing chisel for the small dovetails I was cutting into the ~5/16″ cypress stock I was using. My first attempt to chop the dovetails with my 1/4″ bench chisel did not yield a satisfactory result.
Since I am not at home on these trips I make a frequent, almost daily, pilgrimage to their local excellent hardware store. I set the project aside and figured I would see if the hardware store had a decent rack of steel bar stock I could use to make myself one of the triangular dovetailing chisels I like so much for small work. I have made several and find them indispensable for making tight petite dovetails. Although the hardware store did not have any bar stock that struck my fancy, I noticed their file rack nearby, and that they had a triangular file that would certainly fit the bill for about $7.
Sold.
I brought the file home and set to work on it. Yes, it probably was a travesty to use a brand new file, but that’s all I had access to. My first task, undocumented alas, was to fashion a tapered octagon handle from some cherry in my scrap stash. I drilled and then drove the file tang into the handle. A little too vigorously, as it turned out. At some point soon I will fit the handle with a bronze ferrule, but I have not got there just yet.
Using a Dremel tool with a cut-off wheel I chopped the file roughly in half.
It was time to reach for my new-ish extra coarse diamond stone and get busy grinding off the file teeth and creating the bevel. This is exactly the kind of task this tool was created to accomplish, which it did surprisingly fast.
Once the coarse diamond stone had done its work I switched to the finer combination diamond to bring the surface to the place where it took only a few strokes on the 10,000 grit water stone to bring the bevel and the back to perfection.
In battle the new soldier performed with valor. You can see the blow out on one of the dovetail shoulders resulting from using the 1/4″ bench chisel. The rest of the joint shoulders were fashioned with the new tool, which is rapidly becoming one of my favorites. The fact that I fabricated it myself by re-purposing something extant only enhances my affection for it.
1/4″ bench chisel vs. the new tool
With the box and doors constructed the slow task of arranging the interior of the tool cabinet interior will unfold over the next several months. I have at best a vague master plan other than to “compose” the interior space slowly and deliberately, with no doubt a detour or eight along the way.
My overall scheme reflects the capacity. The drawing above demonstrates the plan of the tool cabinet with its four interior hinged panels, yielding 12 panels on which to mount tools. In addition, there will be eight drawers at the bottom of the case interior, four on each side.
At the moment my organizational strategy is as follows:
Panel 1 – carving chisels
Panel 2 – spokeshaves and other carving/shaping tools
Panel 3 – bench chisels and joinery mallets
Panel 4 – layout/measuring tools
Panel 5 – smaller planes
Panel 6 – larger planes
Panel 7 – larger saws
Panel 8 – smaller saws
Panel 9 – layout/measuring tools
Panel 10 – files and rasps
Panel 11 & 12 – don’t know yet
Check back in a year and we’ll see how close I stick with this plan.
In total, Panels 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11 &12 combine to provide 48 square feet of hanging tool storage, and Panels 4, 5, 8 & 9 add up to another 18 square feet. We’ll see how much I can stuff in there.
In case you were wondering, and even if you were not, many of the tool fittings will be screwed from the outside of the case. Hence, I think the decorative parquetry is still a ways down the road even though I have already begun designing that as well.
With one end of the head now embedded with the turned padauk plug I fired up the lead smelting cup. To make sure the opposite end of the head was plugged I clamped a scrap of plywood over the end with several layers of aluminum foil as a gasket, and poured in the molten lead.
Since the lead shrank on cooling I had to dribble on a bit more of the molten material to fill the void to a slight excess.
I filed the face of the mallet flush with the margins of the plumbing fitting, then epoxied on some 3/16″ cowhide.
Trimming that flush with the edges of the face let me move on to the final assembly of all the plumbing parts.
After saturating the padauk plug with dilute epoxy, the final step was to apply a couple layers of sharkskin to the handle. Just because.
In the end, it was a fun project but I am not persuaded of its efficacy due to the ungainliness of the head; it seems too long to me. I’ll probably make another one with a fatter and shorter head.
Stay tuned.
the had now filled with cast lead it was time to finish the assembly and wrap it up.
A while ago I commented on the mallet that Bob Rozieski was using in chopping some joinery (later identified by several readers as a Lee Valley tool), I mused about making something similar myself. I tend to enjoy making tools myself, sometimes even more than using said tools, so making a steampunk mallet could be a blast. In addition, my location in the hinterlands, where the local feed/seed coop/hardware store has both limited inventory and limited hours (and our one local auto parts store is closed on Saturday!), as a result I keep a solid inventory of hardware on hand. Thus the odds were pretty good that I had everything I need on-hand to construct the tool.
Could I turn a pile of pipe fittings and scrap wood into a usable mallet?
Let’s see.
In browsing through my inventory it was clear that I had most of the parts in-hand and needed only to buy a couple of double-nipple 1/2″ NTP fittings and one reducer. I assembled the head fittings together as tightly as possible using my big pipe wrench and a piece of long pipe to act as the handle extension.
So far, so good. Now I just had to figure out how to add some heft. How could I do that? Oh wait, I have several hundred pounds of lead under the gunsmithing bench. And a lead melter; I could fill the head with molten lead. But first I had to plug the ends.
I had already decided to make the mallet to have one end-grain wood face and one leather faced surface. I might as well go ahead and make the wooden face now to use it as the plug for one of the ends. I found a square scrap of padauk in the scrap box and tossed it onto the lathe to turn one end to the taper needed to screw it into one end.
Once that was accomplished i could turn the actual face of the block and drive (screw) it in.
Viola’, I was halfway home.
A couple months ago for my birthday Mrs. Barn gave me this remarkable tool to keep handy. I’ve had many headlamps over the years as my fading eyesight is always seeking more lumens, but this one is the first that I’ve tried that is actually comfortable, high performance, and long lasting. The combination of the LED illuminator plus the 2 AA batteries being located at the rear of the unit giving it a perfect balance, I can wear it all day long with comfort. I cannot tell the lifespan of the two ordinary batteries as I have not yet had them go dark after almost 60 hours of use.
She says she bought it at the local feed-and-seed coop, so I am guessing it may be available at Ace Hardware stores.
The tool cabinet is really three big boxes, one being the main box of 48″x42″x14″, and the two outer hinged boxes are each 48″x20-1/2″ x 4″. I built the big box first and outsmarted myself some, a lesson I learned in time to change the way I built the two door boxes.
Beginning with four pieces of 48″x24″x3/4″ Baltic birch-ish plywood panels from the big box store, I ripped them all to 14″ wide and sawed rebates on the back edges to accept the 1/2″ back panel. I ripped a fifth 3/4″ panel to be 1/2″ narrower than the outer box elements in order to allow for the 1/2″ back panel since it serves as the center stile.
It was at this point when I outsmarted myself and wasted a lot of time to no great purpose when I decided to miter the corners. This was simply unnecessary and a step I avoided when building the matched door boxes. Given the set-up of my shop the only way I could cut miters on the ends of the box panels was to use my battery-powered circular saw, which is an excellent tool that works just fine. The time sink was in getting the 45-degree cut just right in order to accomplish the 90-degree corner. After some test cuts I got it right and had the four outer panels ready for assembly.
Once that was done I cut the dadoes in the top and bottom panels to receive the interior center vertical panel, cutting the shoulders with a Japanese saw, excavating with a router plane then finishing it off with a small dado plane.
I assembled the back panel from two pieces of 48″x24″x1/2″ plywood, using PVA adhesive and pinch dogs to hold the together while the adhesive sets. Pinch dogs are one of the treasures I discovered in the pattern shop, along with using nails and screws for clamping stacked elements together for painted curvilinear structures. In this case it’s not painted stack laminations, but the surfaces will be obscured entirely by veneerwork.
With all that complete the entire structure was assembled using PVA adhesive (I cannot assure that the tool cabinet will always be in the best atmospheric environment) and deck screws. I chuckle with the gasping and pearl clutching I am sensing out in the fruited plain. I augmented the corners with full-length mitered glue bocks using nails and PVA.
I learned my lesson with the bog box so I assembled the doors with butt joints and glued-and-screwed.
Whew, all the pieces fit together. The thing is so big I shoulda called it “the tool closet.”
Like many hand-tool woodworkers I am continually refining my sharpening habits. Not my technique: I don’t jump after any fads since settling on my sharpening protocols a few decades ago (I am mostly a free-hand sidewinder but will use a roller jig to help establish the bevel). Rather, I seek to systematize my sharpening habits to address the cutting edges before they need anything more than a thirty second touch-up. My problem always comes when I am not diligent in this habit and let things go too long, or when I accidentally whack into a piece of store or metal with a keen bevel. Yes, it does happen and once the foul language subsides I grumble my way through the process of essentially starting from zero on the edge.
The only new sharpening tools I’ve adopted over the years are the LNT honing jig to get a badly damaged edge into the right configuration, and diamond stones, which are now the workhorses of my sharpening preps. I still finish everything off with an 8000 or 10,000 Japanese ceramic stone, and occasionally will strop the edge on a rigid board I’ve infused with agglomerated microalumina.
My “go to” approach for a badly damaged edge is to re-establish the bevel with some 60-grit on a granite block. Works just fine. Recently I obtained a new tool that may reduce my time on the trueing granite a fair bit. I am a frequent customer of Woodcraft (I have no other relationship with them) and get their flyers in the mail regularly and I always browse them quickly before discarding. Every now and then there will be a sale for something I’ve wanted and now it’s discounted. The most recent flyer included a tool I did not know they had, a twin diamond stone that is coarse (180) and extra course (120).
Up to now I have always stayed with DMT diamond plates but this time I decided to take a whirl on the Wood River wagon for this utra-coarse diamond plate. If they are of acceptable quality and performance this pair of diamond abrasive surfaces will spare me a lot of time on the granite block which, being dry abrasion, generates enough heat that I have to wear gloves to keep from blistering my fingertips. Given that I will use water on the diamond stone while re-shaping the tip of whatever it is I am working on, heat will not be an issue now.
This function will definitely come in handy as I am currently re-beveling a Japanese plane blade that was 1/8″ out of whack. Oh, and some chisels that had unfortunate encounters with screws.
When it comes to large scale furniture making, or at least when there are large expanses of flat elements such as sides, doors and backs of larger cabinetry, one of the constant challenges to makers is adapting to the movement of wood through the seasons by means of various assemblages. Long ago I developed the attitude it would be more efficient and more successful to use wood re-formatted to simply not move in response to environmental moisture. In other words, to use good quality plywood. That might make me a heretic in the fine woodworking world, and I will give that accusation all the consideration it deserves.
Okay, I am done with that consideration. As pundit Mollie Hemingway once remarked, “My spiritual gift is not caring what you think about anything.” That pretty much summarizes my attitude towards plywood as a legitimate fine construction material.
Frankly it is not a concern for most of my projects given the scale of my work. That said I have begun experimenting with home-made plywood even for some of my smaller work, consuming my copious inventory of veneers and marine epoxy to make nearly indestructible plywood like this. I will be blogging about this undertaking in the near future.
Sure, I know how to make frame-and-panel furniture and use it when it is stylistically appropriate, but otherwise I move on using good plywood for the panels of my projects. This becomes even more imperative for me when the ultimate purpose of the project is to express the decorative surface, either marquetry or japanning/fauxrushi. I just want the seasons to unfold with the carcass substrate not even noticing.
Over my 50 years of restoring and conserving ancient furniture I have seen far too many instances of a solid wood carcasses tearing apart the decorative surface to go down that road in my own work, as in this 19th Century French desk. Given the prominence of decorative veneerwork on my cabinet this phenomenon was one I did not seek to replicate.
This brings me to the construction choices for my tool cabinet, in some ways to be the culmination of my “making” undertakings. In point of fact this will be a huge (for me) simple box measuring roughly 48″ high x 42″ wide x 15″ deep. The cabinet has two purposes; 1) to hold as many woodworking tools as I can possibly cram in there on 12 (!) swinging panels, and 2) express the aesthetic of traditional Roubo/Roentgen parquetry (outside) combined with HO Studley’s inspirational aesthetic (inside). For this reason, I need a structure that is both robust and exceedingly stable if I want the cabinet to redound to my descendants. This pretty much means that I build the box and its doors out of Baltic birch plywood, for the most part 3/4″.
When you merge that preference with the additional facts that I am not set up to do large scale millwork combined with the ready availability of 24″ x 48″ “project panels” at the Big Blue Box store, my path forward was pretty self-evident.
Now the only real question is, “How many months with this adventure consume?”
Stay tuned to find out.
I do not pretend to be any kind of expert in hand saws, old or new. I only know what I like and when it comes to buying vintage saws what I like is a full, meaty plate with no kinks or distortions.
A much used saw being readied to lose its tip and become a panel saw. In this case I will remove the final six inches by striking it repeatedly with a carbide stylus until I can snap off the extraneous material.
If a saw is generally nice but the plate is too thin at the tip, indicating a great many re-sharpens, I might pick it up and chop off the tip to turn it into a panel saw (such a tool will be featured in a coming post about my traveling kit).
Recently while outfitting my under-construction tool cabinet, I was installing the saw rack I had modified from its earlier wall-mounted configuration. This provided the opportunity to once again review my inventory, to see what I was missing or needed to upgrade.
Most saws. old or new, bear some sort of marking to indicate the tooth spacing. This can be either stamped near the handle, just above the teeth, or etched into the plate insignia.
This particular saw plate is a mystery to me. What does the “27” mean? It is certainly not a 27 tpi saw. Perhaps there is a special nomenclature of which I am unaware. In point of fact the saw is an 8 tpi cross-cut saw.
Somewhere in the misty memories of the Mesozoic era I picked up a blacksmith-made petite curved adz head, probably at a PATINA tailgate tool swap. At the time I fashioned a handle from a broken shovel and sharpened the head to a keen edge.
I used it from time to time but not as much as I thought I would. Unfortunately, the tip was convex, rendering it almost useless for any task I might have. So, I decided to reshape the tip into one that would be more useful to be, one that is at least flat, maybe even a bit concave.
In few minutes on the bench grinder the shape was established, but the ~1/8″ cross section at the new edge was presenting me with the potential of several hours hand grinding and beveling on the inside curve with round slips or sandpaper wrapped around a dowel.
Instead, I had a flash of inspiration and took the top shield off the belt sander in order to access the roller. Miraculously the roller size was absolutely perfect for grinding the new in-cannel bevel. That one thing cut the work time from several hours to several minutes. I like innovations like that!
I reattached the handle to the head and gave it a test drive.
Me like.
Recent Comments