Episode # 10: Hand Tool Appliances 11/06/2009
In the power tool world they're called jigs. In the hand tool world, we call them appliances. Whatevery you call them, they are indispensible accessories that you will use in your shop on an almost daily basis. From bench hooks to shooting boards and winding sticks to pinch rods, you can build them all with nothing more than a few offcuts and a little creativity. Episode # 7: Sharpening Part 3 09/10/2009
Well, summer is coming to an end, vacations are all but over and school is back in session. In this episode I attempt to take some of the mystique out of sharpening your own hand saws. I don't completely understand all of the hesitation that a lot of folks have learning to sharpen their own saws. Really, it's no more difficult than learning to sharpen a plane iron or a chisel. All it takes is a small investment in some simple tools and a few minutes of practice. Hopefully, this episode will convince more folks to go ahead and try it. Oh, and don't worry about giving it a try on one of your high priced premium saws either. In fact, it's probably better to learn on one of these saws than on an old beater. Watch the episode to find out why. I've also attached a .PDF file with some pages from the video. Feel free to download, print and make notes on them if you like. If you are not familiar with saw terminology, they may be helpful to you as you watch the episode. I also apologize for the vibration in a couple of filing clips. I tried to get a bird's eye view of filing the teeth by putting the tripod on top of the bench but in my infinite wisdom, the tripod absorbed some of the vibration and of course it shows bad in the video. The vibration looks a lot worse than it is and in fact there was very little vibration in the saw and vise but the tripod vibration makes it look bad. Sorry. 
Sawing Long Stock 08/23/2009
I received a question in reference to Episode # 4 of the podcast about sawing long stock. The viewer noted that all of the demonstrations in the podcast were done with relatively short stock (which was intentionally done to make filming easier). However, the viewer was curious as to how I typically handled long and/or heavy stock that is too difficult to manage with a single saw bench. So I took a few photos that will hopefully clarify and answer this question.  In order to rip long stock, I use two saw benches rather than a single one. I use the back end of my shave horse as a second saw bench (I intentionally made the saw bench and shave horse the same height for this reason). With the stock supported at both ends, I begin the rip the same as I would for a shorter board.  Unlike sawing shorter stock over the side of the saw bench, I cannot simply keep sawing until I'm done. Instead, when my saw cut reaches the bench, I reposition the stock and continue sawing between the two benches until I reach the rear bench or until I can no longer saw comfortably in that direction.  To finish the cut, I have two options. I can reposition the stock again and continue sawing through to the end or I can start the cut from the opposite end and meet the previous cut. In either case, the "keep" stock and the waste are fully supported throughout the cut.  Crosscutting long stock can be done the same way. If the stock is manageable without clamping, I'll simply span the saw bench and shave horse and hold it with my knee. If necessary, I may also use a pair of handscrews to clamp the board to the two benches. Then just saw between the two benches and both sides of the stock are fully supported. Episode # 4: The Mechanics of Sawing 07/25/2009
The hand saws are the workhorses of the hand tool shop. They're used for just about every operation on just about every part of a project. So it's important to be able to saw accurately in order to be effecient. In this episode, I share three tips I've learned for making consistently more accurate saw cuts. Filing Saw Teeth 06/24/2009
 With the construction of the saws completed, all that was left to do was to file in the teeth. Commercial saw manufacturers typically cut the teeth in with a machine, resulting in perfectly spaced teeth. I don't have this equipment, nor do I wish to invest in it, so I use a file. I think teeth that are hand filed in end up working a little more smoothly anyway due to the minor variation in spacing that results from hand filing in the teeth. The random spacing theoretically reduces harmonic chatter, if only slightly. In my experience using saws in which I've filed in the teeth compared to saws I have with machine cut (but hand filed) teeth, I can notice a slight difference, but it is only slight. I set the tooth spacing by drawing lines with a CAD program and printing it out full scale. I place the piece of paper in the vise with the saw plate and file a small notch at each line. This one happens to be 12 PPI (or 11 TPI).  Once I've filed a notch at each gullet location by making one or two passes with the file, I remove the paper. I then go back and make several more passes at each notch to deepen the gullet and rough shape each tooth. At this point, I'm just trying to get close to the final rake angle so I don't use a guide to set the angle of the file. In fact, I'm just trying to keep the front of each tooth vertical at this point (i.e. 0 degrees of rake) and I do this by eye. I file just until the flats on top of each tooth disappear or almost disappear and no further. I file the initial notches and shape all the teeth from one side of the saw plate, prior to setting the teeth. Once all of the teeth have been rough shaped, I set the teeth. I use a plier type saw set for this. I begin at the heel of the saw and work toward the toe setting every other tooth. I'm just trying to set the top 1/3 or so of each tooth, not the entire tooth. If you try to set the entire tooth, you might break them off. Once I've reached the toe, I flip the saw around in the vise and set the remaining teeth so that each tooth is alternately set when I'm done. If you make a mistake and set two teeth in a row in the same direction, don't worry about it. It won't affect the performance of the saw and it can always be fixed at a future sharpening if needed. Do not try to set a tooth in the opposite direction of it's original set or you are about gauranteed to break the tooth off.  After I have set the teeth, I like to joint them lightly with just one or two light passes with a 6" mil file. I hold the file tight to a block of wood which acts as a fence to keep the file square to the tooth line. This seems counter productive to the initial shaping I just worked so hard to do, but jointing lightly after setting the teeth ensures that each tooth will be the same height after sharpening, even if the set is a little uneven. It also provides a reference flat on top of each tooth to guide my final filing.  Another aid for doing the final filing of the teeth is to darken the flats from jointing. You can use a permanent marker for this, and I did for years, but the teeth tend to chew up the marker tip pretty quickly so you never really use a marker until the ink is gone. Machinists layout dye is another good option, however, it's awful messy. My solution is to use an old planemaker's trick, a candle. By running the saw teeth back and fourth several times through the flame of a regular old candle, you coat the saw teeth with a thin coat of soot. The dull black soot covers well and provides a good reference for teeth that have been filed and those that have not. You don't hold the candle in one spot for so long that the saw plate heats up (this could ruin the temper of the steel) rather you keep the candle moving continuously to "paint" on the soot.  With the teeth coated in soot, I begin the final filing and sharpening of the teeth. Now that the teeth are set, I can't just file all of the teeth from the same side. I need to file only the teeth that are leaning away from me. I also now use a guide block to guide the angle of the file in order to set the desired rake angle. Here, it's about 4 degrees. The guide block is simply a small scrap of soft wood with a small pilot hole drilled centered on each edge. I then draw a line tangent to the hole at the desired rake angle. The rake angle should lean toward the handle. So in this picture you can see how I've noted on the guide block which side the handle needs to be on. The rake angle leans toward the handle from bottom left to top right at an angle of 4 degrees from vertical (the opposite edge of the guide block is a mirror image of this edge). I insert the file into the pilot hole with the right side flat parallel to the rake angle line. All I need to do now is file with the wood block held level and I will maintain the 4 degree rake angle. Again, I start at the heel and work toward the toe, filing every other tooth (only those leaning away from me). I file straight across (90 degrees) the saw plate because these are rip teeth. I make only one or two passes on each tooth until the flats on top of each tooth are smaller by about half. Be careful because this goes faster than you might think, especially on these smaller teeth. It takes only one or two light strokes of the file.  Here you can see where every other gullet has been filed as noted by the shiny gullet. The candle soot remains on the unfiled teeth. Once I reach the toe, I flip the saw around in the vise so that the unfiled teeth, which were leaning toward me before, are now leaning away from me and the saw handle is on the left. I NOW REVERSE THE GUIDE BLOCK ON THE FILE. The opposite side of the guide block is a mirror image of the first side. It has an arrow pointing to the left where the handle should now be and the rake angle is tangent to the left side of the hole and should lean from the bottom right to the top left at 4 degrees from vertical. The file is inserted with it's left edge parallel to the rake angle line. This is an extremely important step. If you keep the guide block in the same orientation as before, the rake angle will be all wrong and when you file the teeth you'll end up filing them into little toothpick points, so make sure you reset the file in the guide block so that the rake angle is correct.  With the guide block on the file switched to its proper orientation and the saw flipped around in the vise, I can now file the remaining teeth. Again, I start from the heel and work toward the toe filing straight across because these are rip teeth. I file only until the flats on top of each tooth disappear and no further, even if the teeth are different sizes (the size isn't important, the final height is). Once I reach the toe, the filing is complete and the teeth should be very sharp. I perform one final step prior to using the saw. I like to joint the sides of the teeth to remove the filing burrs and smooth the teeth out some. To do this, I place the saw plate on the edge of my bench and with an oiled hard Arkansas slip stone, I make one pass with light pressure from heel to toe, keeping the stone flat to the side of the saw plate. I then flip the saw over and joint the other side the same way, making only one pass from heel to toe.  Once I've done the side jointing, I'm finished with the sharpening. I use a little turpentine on a rag to clean the remaining soot from the blade and the saw is ready to go back on it's peg until it's called on to cut some tenon cheeks. Here's a shot of the finished rip teeth. They're not perfectly spaced, not all exactly the same size and likely not all exactly the same rake angle, however, they don't need to be perfect and hand filed saws never are. In fact, the imperfections are what make hand filed saws such a pleasure to use. They cut smoothly with no vibration or chatter and seem to glide through the wood. If you don't already sharpen your own hand saws I hope this will encourage you to give it a try. It's really not that hard to do and if you just take it step by step and go slow it's very difficult to ruin a saw and near impossible to take it beyond repair. If you make a mistake, it's a simple task to rejoint the teeth down and start over. Oh yeah, and the obligatory test cut was smooth, fast and straight. Can't ask for any more than that ; )!  18th Century Style Tenon Saws Part II 06/22/2009
 With all of the rain we've been getting here on the East coast, I had some time to finish up my saws this weekend; well, except for filing the teeth. We left off the last pst with the backs finished and the plates cut to size and the bluing sanded off. Now I needed to insert the plates into the backs. I used a method described in the Grammercy saw kits by using a softwood "bat" to tap the plat into the back. I started at one corner and worked it down gradually.  This isn't as easy as it sounds. You have to tap and pivot and tap some more trying to keep one end in while you tap the other end down. The back holds the plate very tightly so you need to get it in exactly the right spot when you start it. It's too tight to slide the plate down after it's started without buckling the plate. It's sort of like West Side Story...fighting and dancing at the same time.  I did finally manage to get both done. The second one was slightly easier than the first, but not by much.  With the saw plates and back assembled, I turned my attention to the handles. I glued the templates I made to a piece of straight grained walnut with liquid hide glue.  I bored holes to locate the concave curves and finished cutting the blanks out with a turning saw. I cleaned up to the template lines with carving gouges, bench chisels and spokeshave. I also bored the holes for the split nuts and cut the kerf and mortsie for the saw plate while the stock was still flat. It's much easier to do this now.  With all the holes bored and the kerfs cut, all that was left to do was finish the shaping. I used a rasp, file and several grits of sandpaper to do this. This is the fun part. The best thing about making your own saw handles is that you can make them fit your hand perfectly. No sharp corners or pinch points, just a perfect smooth fit to your hand. I finished with a coat of linseed oil and I'll add several more over the next few days. I didn't take any pics of making the split nuts, however, the Norse Woodsmith has a good writeup on that and I used his method. The only difference in my split nuts is that I used lock washers in place of the square nut, ala the Grammercy saws. It's easier in my opinion and they aren't seen anyway. Now I just need to file the teeth. 18th Century Style Tenon Saws Part 1 06/16/2009
A few months ago I borrowed the book "Tools: Working Wood in the 18th Century" from my local library. This book was written by James Gaynor and Nancy Hagedorn in conjunction with Colonial Williamsburg. In that book was a picture of a group of tools, one of which is a saw by an unknown maker.  I have never been thrilled with my current tenon saw and have wanted to replace it for some time. Not having the money to spend on the style of saw I want, I decided to make one. Some time back I made a couple of dovetail saws as practice for the larger saw. When I saw this saw in the Williamsburg book, I knew right away that was the style I wanted to make. Based on the typical size of a dado plane, I estimate this saw plate to be about 19" long. I think that might be a little long for me for routine tenon work so I decided to make mine about 16".  So I ordered a piece of 0.025" thick 1095 spring steel from McMaster Carr. The cheapest length of the steel was enough for three saw plates so using a pair of aviation snips I cut the spring steel into a 14" piece for a crosscut backsaw, a 16" piece for a rip tenon saw and a 19" piece for a future saw TBD at a later date (maybe a 19" long Kenyon style tenon saw). I filed the cut edges to remove the rough cut edges and the deformed steel resulting from cutting the steel with the aviation snips. The steel comes blued but I decided to sand the bluing off down to the raw steel.  I made the backs like the backs for the second dovetail saw that I blogged about some months back. I started with 14 ga. steel angle and used an iron bench vise to close the bend. These 1" angle pieces were a little more difficult to completely close than the 3/4" angle and needed to be finished with a hammer on the anvil of my machinist vise. Unfortunately this left some marking on the backs that I had to file out.  So I clamped the back to the bench and draw filed each side to remove as much of the hammer marks as I could remove with moderate effort. This picture is part way through the process and you can see some of the low spots and spots that have been filed.  This picture shows where I stopped. There are still a few marks but they would be too much work to remove and require too much metal removal which would weaken the back too much so I decided it was not worth it to remove them. I also cut and filed the decorative curve into the front of the back and filed some small chamfers on the lower edge and around the curved front edge to dress it up a little and remove the rough sharp edges. Finally, I polished the back slightly on a stitched buffing wheel on the grinder dressed with emery compound. New Article: The Saw Bench 05/05/2009
 After years of [ab]use, my trusty saw bench is ready to retire. However, before I can retire the old I must make a new. So that was the project this weekend. A New Saw Vise 03/29/2009
 The built-in doors are done and I ordered the hinges so I've had some free shop time recently. So I've been cleaning up the shop and making a lot of small tools and items for the shop while I wait for the hinges for the built-in doors to be delivered. After putting up some items for sale last week, I was a little surprised that the cast iron saw vise sold as quickly as it did (thanks Dave!). I have had a wooden saw vise on my list of shop projects to build for awhile now. Selling my old iron saw vise caused that project to move up to the top of the priority list so this weekend I cobbled one together.  The entire vise, with the exception of the screw is made from red oak from the B.O.R.G. The top jaw is about 18" wide, twice as wide as the iron vise. This will allow me to file all of my backsaws without constantly repositioning them in the vise. The tops of the jaws stand about 15" above the bench top when clamped in the bench vise. This gets the saw up to a comfortable height for filing while standing up. The vertical member of the front jaw is about 12" long. The vertical member of the rear jaw is about 18" long. This allows the saw to be removed from the saw vise without removing the saw vise from the bench vise (the saw vise is held in the bench vise by the rear jaw only). The vertical member is tenoned and drawbored into the upper jaw with 3/8" oak pegs.  Here you can see how the back vertical is about 6" longer than the front. The front vertical member has a 1-1/2" through hole bored in it and the rear vertical member has a 1-3/8" hole bored and tapped for a 1-1/2" wooden screw. The head of the wooden screw is made from a piece of an old maple hand screw clamp that stripped out. The screw itself is made from a 5" long section of 1-1/2" birch dowel that had threads cut with the 1-1/2" woodthreading kit from Woodcraft. I then added glue to the screw head and screwed the screw into the head. After the glue dried, I drilled a 1/2" through hole through the head and screw for the 1/2" oak dowel handle. After the hole for the handle was bored, I cut the screw head to an octagon shape and filed and sanded it. I bored a 5/8" hole in the bottom of the rear vertical member so the vise can be hung on the wall on a peg when not being used.  With the vise disassembled you can see how the clamping forces work. There is a 1/4" thick piece glued and nailed to the inside bottom of the short vertical member and also to the corresponding location on the long vertical member. I only glued these pieces at the center nail location to allow for wood movement. It's hard to see in these pictures but there is also a 1/4" thick strip glued to the top inside of each jaw. This piece is beveled from top to bottom so that all the clamping pressure is exerted at the very top edge of the jaw. This piece is also planed slightly hollow at the middle so that the outside edges contact the saw plate first and then the compression during tightening of the screw ensures that the saw plate is held securely along its entire length. I finished the entire thing with a coat of Minwax Puritan Pine stain (because I had it from a project from several years ago) to give it a slightly aged look. I may put on some linseed oil tomorrow, however, if I do I will not oil the inside of the top jaw to keep saws from slipping. Mark another one of the round tuit list! A Pair of Saws 01/25/2009
If you've been reading my blog for any length of time you know that I like making and using my own tools. However, up until now, most of the tools I've made were mostly made of wood or at least mostly wood. But for some time, I've wanted to replace a couple of my saws with something better. I was just never really happy with them the way they were. As much as I would like one, my tool budget doesn't allow the purchase of a premium saw. I also didn't want to go majorly modifying my current saws. My dovetail saw was shorter than I wanted anyway so modifying it still wouldn't get me what I wanted. So I did what any good Yankee would do, I made them.  The first challenge was the back of the saw. I had never made one before but I did know what I wanted. I didn't want a milled back, I wanted a folded back. While milled backs are very beautiful and function as good if not better than a traditional folded back, they just aren't very traditional and I like the traditional styled tools. The problem was that I had no specialized tools for bending metal. I had read the Norse Woodsmith's article on making saws in which he makes a bending brake for folding brass backs but I didn't want to go through so much expense and trouble to find that I really didn't like making saws. I wanted to do this as inexpensively as possible and with as few specialized tools as possible.  The next thing I had to figure out was how to finish bending this stuff into a folded saw back. At first I tried to play blacksmith and cold forge it with a 3 lb. hammer on the anvil of my machinist vise. After all, this is likely how saw backs were originally made in the 18th century. It worked eventually and I did build my first saw that way but the process of folding the back was slow and inacurate. I ended up with a lot of bends and twists in the back that I spent a lot of time and effort removing. In the end, removing the bends and twists resulted in a lot of dents and dings in the steel back that just would have taken too long to remove. I had to find a better way to bend the back for my second saw.  So I started by cutting a piece of the steel angle to just slightly longer than the length I would need for the back of the saw. Leaving it a little long would allow for some filing to clean it up later. I placed the steel angle in the vise with the open part of the angle right down against the guide bars of the vise. I slowly applied pressure and began closing the bend. After just a little bending, I opened the vise, shifted the piece down and did the same on the part of the steel that extended outside of the vise jaws. I continued this process of bending and shifting the steel back and fourth to make sure I closed the bend evenly. Trying to close one end too much more than the other results in twisting and bending in ways that you don't want a saw back to twist and bend.  After doing this about four or five times, I had the bend about half way closed. I had to move my clamps to keep the vise from shifting under the extreme tourque being applied but after moving the clamps everything seemed to work ok. I removed the piece from the vise often to make sure I was not introducing unwanted bends and twists like I had done with my forging attempt. Everything looked to be going well so I continued onward. I flipped the back over and finished closing the fold with the open end facing the top of the vise (which would actually be the floor in my setup. My vise had a small recess at the bottom that helped to finish closing the fold. Again, I worked slowly to close the fold evenly. Don't want to mess it up now.  Success! The fold closed evenly and the back stayed straight. I ended up with a very nice saw back without all the cussing and fussing of the first one. Another benefit was that the steel was relatively unmarked on the sides. On my first attempt of cold forging a back, I did a lot of damage to the back that I just was not able to remove from the finished back without removing way too much metal. So I left it in. This back came out amazingly smooth and free of blemishes. Bonus!  So I had one nice, straight, practically blemish free saw back. This picture was taken before I did any filing of chamfers or sanding to clean up the back itself. All that was left to do was tap in a piece of spring steel saw plate, fit a handle and some split nuts and file in some teeth. The back was the hard part and now it wasn't so hard anymore! Sweet! I was so thrilled I tried it again with some 1", 14 gauge stock I was planning to use for some larger tenon saws. The process worked equally well for a 16" and a 19" piece of 1" steel angle. Excellent!  So here's the final result. A pair of matching saws. The handles are made from the last of a piece of bubinga that I had. The split nuts are built using the Norse Woodsmith "Poor Boy Split Nuts" method with a minor modification. Since I don't have the ability to silver solder or braze the brass, I used cyanoacrylate glue to attach the bolt head to the threaded brass rod. I also stole an idea from the Grammercy saws kits and used a lock washer under the bolt head to keep it from spinning instead of the traditional square shaft with matching mortise. Much less work and you can't tell the difference until you remove the bolts. | CategoriesAll
October 2009
       
       
        
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