Logan Cabinet Shoppe

With the built-in finally finished, I had some time to work on a few shop projects I've been wanting to do for awhile. The first was the saw vise that I completed a couple of weeks ago. This weekend's project has been something I have wanted to make for awhile now but continued to put off because there were other ways to accomplish the task this tool does. After the recent sale of my old long steel rulers, I decided the time had come to finally make these.

If you are not familiar with them, they are called pinch sticks, pinch rods, and I'm sure several other names as well. Their sole purpose is to aid in squaring up cases. To use them, you place the pair of sticks inside the assembled box, extend the sticks until the points on the ends nest into the inside corners of the case and lock them down with the captured wedge or thumbscrew. If one diagonal is longer than the other, it will immediately be obvious using this tool. You then simply adjust the case until both diagonals are the same at which point your case is square. Of course you could do this with a long ruler, but with the pinch sticks there is no measuring involved so there is very little room for error. I made several sets in different sizes that will let me use them to square diagonals anywhere from about 8" up to about 60".

Here's a closer picture of the middle set to give you a better view of how they work. The middle block is simply a square block with a through mortise bored and chopped through its center. The mortise is sized to the width of the sticks and their combined thickness. I cut all four blocks from a single piece of wood. I bored and chopped all of the mortises prior to cutting the individual blocks apart to provide an area for holding the stock while cutting the joinery. At the top of the mortise for the sticks on the two smaller pair, an angled wedge mortise is cut and chiseled for the captive wedge that locks the sticks at their setting. I made the blocks from ash and the sticks and wedges from oak. The sticks on the two smaller pair are each about 1/4" thick by about 5/8" wide. The wedges are 1/4" thick.

The sticks on the larger pair are made thicker, about 5/16" thick, so they flex less along their long, 30" length. Since the sticks on the longer pair are thicker, the mortise had to be bigger. Because I cut the blocks from the same small piece of wood as the blocks for the smaller pairs, there was less supporting wood left for a captive wedge mortise to be cut. I was afraid that there would be insufficient material left to support the wedging force without blowing out the end grain on this larger pair so I used brass thumb screws cross grain in place of the captive wedge. The difference is that the blocks end up oriented differently when the sticks are inserted. The wedging forces of the captive wedge need to be in line with the grain for maximum strength. On the other hand, end grain does not tap well so the holes for the thumbscrews needed to be bored and tapped cross grain for maximum strength. I bored and tapped a hole centered on each mortise for a #10-32 brass thumbscrew. To keep the screws from marring the faces of the sticks, short sections of 1/8" oak dowel were put in the holes before putting the screws in. The dowels will then provide the clamping pressure on the sticks, not the screws. This picture was taken before the two blocks for the large pair were cut apart.

This was a long overdue project and I see these tools getting a lot of use in the future.

The doors for the built-in have been done for over a month now. For the last several weeks I've been waiting on the hinges to arrive. I can tell you that this is the last time I will special order anything from the particular outfit that I ordered these hinges from.

At any rate, I thought I would snap some shots of how I cut hinge mortises. For some reason, butt hinge mortises seem to intimidate some people. I'm not sure why as they are super easy to do but maybe it's the thought of cutting a perfect mortise that scares some folks. So here's my method for cutting hinge mortises. Hopefully it will help someone.

I start by laying out the position of the hinge. I take a really simple approach to this. If you look at the picture, you can see how I position my hinges relative to the rails of the door. For the hinges at the top of the door, I align the top of the hinge leaf with the bottom of the top rail. For the bottom hinges, I align the bottom of the hinge leaf with the top of the bottom rail. This usually means that the top and bottom hinges are not the same distance from the top and bottom of the door but I find that the look is better when the hinges are aligned with the rails rather than placed an equal distance from the ends where they may not line up with the rails.

I use the hinge itself to define the length of the hinge mortise with knife lines. I use a try square to extend these knife lines and make sure they are square to the face of the door. I position the hinge on the edge of the door to gauge how far I want the barrel to project past the front of the door and using the hinge as a gauge I make a light mark with my knife to denote the hinge mortise width. I set a marking gauge pin in the knife mark and lock the fence down. I then use this gauge setting to scribe all of the mortises to the same width.

A second gauge is set to the thickness of the hinge leaf and is used to scribe the depth of the hinge mortise on the face of the stile. Care must be taken when scribing the depth not to scribe past the length lines. Since the faces of these doors have already been finish planed, any scribe that goes past the hinge mortise will not be planed away and will show in the finished door. This is not a big deal on the edge since the inside edge of the door will not be seen once it is installed in the cabinet.

I begin the hinge mortise by making short, shallow paring cuts to raise some chips. This is very similar to chopping a joinery mortise, just much shallower. Instead of pounding with a mallet, I hold the blade of the chisel in one hand and I hold the handle of the chisel against my shoulder with the other hand. I push with my upper body weight using my shoulder, not my arms. This offers a lot of control and prevents the chisel from slipping or cutting too far because you are restricting it's movement with your lower hand. I am actually not left handed but the lighting was better taking the picture in this orientation. I usually place my right hand low, my left hand on the handle and push with my right shoulder.

Once you have a series of chips raised from one end of the hinge mortise to the other, begin lightly paring the raised chips away by working across the grain. At this point I do not work to the full length or width of the mortise. Often times, there is very little material remaining at the back of the hinge mortise and trying to make the mortise full width right away will cause you to break out the back of the door. Also, in order to keep the ends of the mortise crisp, I don't remove the waste all the way to the ends of the mortise right away, just like making a joinery mortise. I will square up the ends with final paring cuts with the chisel placed right in the knife lines.

This picture should give you a better idea of what I'm trying to describe. Here's what the hinge mortise looks like after two or three rounds of raising shallow chips and paring cross grain. The interior of the hinge mortise has been pared clean to final depth but I still need to pare the ends back to final length and I also need to pare the back of the mortise back to the marking gauge line to final width.

Once you've made the final paring cuts with the chisel placed in the scribe lines, your hinge mortise is done. Your hinge should fit tightly in the mortise with just a hair to no wiggle room at all. The precision comes from using the hinge itself to lay out the mortise rather than trying to measure with a ruler. Some folks like to level the hinge mortise with a small router plane but I've never foud it necesary. Plus, there is very little material for the plane body to ride on making it very unstable in use.

It's not often that I can honestly say I find a gloatable tool. In my mind, in order to be gloatable, the tool needs to meet 2 criteria. It needs to be a special find at a special price. It can be a new tool or old tool but if it doesn't meet both of these criteria, I don't consider it gloatable (i.e. buying a new LN plane at full retail price is not a gloatable purchase in my mind; now if you get one for $50, that's another story).

For awhile now, the only smooth plane in my tool kit has been this one that I made by laminating together two pieces of purpleheart. The two piece design came from John Wheelan's book "Making Traditional Wooden Planes", which I highly recommend if you are into wooden planes. The wedge abutments can be sawn in this arrangement and the design is easier for a first time plane builder to make than a traditional one piece design. Plus, you don't need to find 12/4 stock for the two piece design. You can make do with 6/4. The wedge in this plane is made from a piece of African mahogany. The iron is a double iron made for wooden planes that I purchased from Garrett Wade many years ago (they no longer offer them) and is about 1/8" thick. It's not a bad iron but when I build a new, more traditional plane to replace this one, it will be a single iron version with a laid steel iron from Galoot Tools.

Don't get me wrong, the plane performs fantastically and with it's iron bedded at 50 degrees (York pitch) there are few domestic hardwoods this plane can't handle. It's just not as traditional as I would really like. Prior to building this plane, I used a Stanley type 11 #3 and a Stanley type 9 #4 as my smoothers. However, when I made the switch to all wooden planes and sold off all of my metal planes, my home made smoother became my only smoother. This really didn't bother me because the smoother really isn't used that often in my shop. My fore and try planes are used much more often than the smoother so I was willing to wait for just the right smoother before pulling the trigger on one. I considered the Clark & Williams smoother but my budget just won't allow it. So not needing a new plane, I waited until the perfect deal arrived..

Well, the day finally arrived. While perusing Ebay as I do every now and again, I came upon a smoother that caught my eye. The picture (there was only one) was not terribly good, but there were a few things that jumped out at me that led me to believe that this plane had seen very little use in it's lifetime. The first thing was the crispness of the chamfers. There was very little dubbing of the crisp lines, the wedge looked unmarred and the plane overall looked very clean. The second thing that caught my eye was the height  of the plane. Most old wooden planes are pretty worn and have been reflattened a few times so the plane becomes shorter. This one looked unusually tall in the picture, which to me again meant very little use and possibly a good mouth. Unfortunately from the one picture, I couldn't see the mouth but I decided to take a chance.

Well, I'm glad I did because I was right on all accounts. So, for the princely sum of $11 plus shipping, I got my hands on a basically unused, common pitch smoother. When I got the plane I was very happy at what I found. The bed was basically untouched and still had some soot marks left on it (at least that's what they appear to be to me) where the iron was fitted to the bed (and fit very well I might add). The wedge was pristine with nary a mark. The iron had just a slight hint of mushrooming which was easily removed with a little filing and the iron and cap iron had zero pitting and only extremely minor surface rust. Once cleaned up the iron and cap iron looked brand new. You can actually still see the black left on the iron from the hardening and tempering process.

The plane was shipped with the iron and wedge removed from the plane (which I greatly appreciated) so the last thing I needed to do was put the iron and wedge in and check the mouth. As tight as it was the day it was manufactured. No mouth patch necessary on this baby. I cleaned up the mild dirt and dust (there really wasn't much) with some turpentine and gave her a coat of linseed oil as some parts looked a little dry. It's pretty obvious that this plane has sat indoors on a shelf for a long time. This does bother me some because this sometimes means that the iron was heat treated improperly and won't hold an edge. We'll see about that in a little bit after the oil dries. I'll sharpen it up using my normal hollow grind to about 25 degrees and hone on oil stones method and see what she can do. Even if the iron is heat treated improperly, I think I would send it out to be redone because this plane is so nice that I think it will easily become my go to smoother for normal use. Not a bad find at all.