I spent about a million years applying varnish to the handle, and despite many distractions, I finished and rubbed it out today:
Since I was on a roll, I decided to finish the job today, too. First, I cut off the old handle, filed out the notch where the back fits into the handle, and drilled the holes:
Finally, I filed off the rough edges, put the blade into the saw, and inserted the mounting hardware.
I haven’t had time to really test it out yet, but it seems to feel okay in the hand.
Though I did this a couple of weeks ago, I haven’t had a chance to post it until now. I managed to acquire a small bench vise for metalworking, and bolted it to a board, which I then, in turn, clamp to the bench when needed.
This was necessary to cut the saw screw/nut hardware for the new saw handle:
I used a mini hacksaw to cut these “furniture joiners” down to size, and then a file to smooth them. Then I used a brace to bore the holes in the handle (holes not shown here, but I think you know what holes in a handle look like).
The handle is now in the finishing stage. I’m using a clear satin varnish. It’s almost done; I screwed up the last thick coat, so I’ll need to sand that level and apply one more, but I should have the end product ready next week.
May 5
I suppose that I owe you some photos of the current stage of the apple handle. Here it is with the shape outlines, but before I started shaping:
And here it is with the shaping mostly done, and the blade kerf cut:
That applewood, yum.
Apr 19
I decided that since I had the momentum, and that since I had the drawing ready, that I would start a new saw handle, this time in apple. It will be for one of my small tenon/carcase saws, but I’m not sure which one yet.
First, I cut a piece of the board and fit the pattern:
Then I milled the board. Here’s one face flattened:
The entire board is mostly clear, but the pith runs near the center. So when I cut the piece out, the pith is on one side. This is, in theory, not a problem.
At this stage, it was evident that apple is unlike any wood I’ve worked with in the past. The grain is kind of wavy, but it’s not a problem with sharp tools. The grain is also very fine, and when planed, it is very smooth.
It was also unusual because I did not mill the board four-square. Rather, I made the faces trapezoidal, just taking care to get the edges square to the faces, and that the thing was of course of uniform thickness. Once that was done, it was easy to transfer the pattern to the wood.
I still used a coping saw to cut out the pattern, but I used a few other saws to mark out sections. This made sawing easier.
It still wasn’t super-fast, but again, I don’t have power tools. But I did finish sawing today.
Feb 21
I decided to rub out the finish on the scrub plane last night, and call it “finished” for now.
I had remarked to my friend how much rubbing out a finish changes it. In this case, there are a lot of minor finishing screw-ups that somehow got less bogus in the process.
Looks aren’t everything, though, and in this tool’s case, maybe it isn’t even ugly enough for its intended task of hogging off wood. In any case, I have a new toy, and I want to try it out tonight.
I did the final shaping and glue-up of the scrub plane’s tote a while back. That, along with the edge chamfering, left me with this:
I tested it, and found it much to my liking.
Because the tote will likely see heavy use, I decided to varnish it, and before doing that, I decided to stain it. I had a can of “golden pecan” (a pigment stain) in the cabinet, so I tried it out on a test piece of beech. It didn’t seem horrible, so here is the plane after two coats (with sanding between):
There is a little blotching. I believe that I should have probably done a washcoat. It seemed to have avoided a lot of problems on that old saw handle.
Though passable now, I feel that I should sand and do another coat of stain. The second coat evened things out a lot, so a third should do it most of the rest of the way?
After that step, I would like to even it out with clear varnish. Satin polyurethane again? It’s worked well for me so far.
I decided to attack the long, wide groove to fit the tote today. I wasn’t too sure how to approach this, so I decided to see if a router plane would do what I needed it to. Having never used this tool (a Millers Falls #67 with a Lee Valley blade), I sharpened the blade and tested it on a piece of Douglas fir that usually sees test victim service. It seemed to work, so I set out clamping the plane body to the bench, marked the sides, and sawed down as much as I could:
Then I attacked it with the router plane until I got to the bottom. I had to remove the last part by chisel. (Next time, I will try to design the tote so that I can do the whole thing with the router plane. This was a severe pain in the butt.)
Finally, I shaved the edges of the groove so that the tote would fit snugly:
This could have turned out a little better, I guess. I was a little paranoid about trusting my lines when I sawed down, and it turns out that I shouldn’t have–they were dead on. In the end, there’s sort of a small gap on one side of the groove between the tote and the body. All in all, though, this went a lot better than the complete disaster that I expected…
Faced with a dearth of time to work, I’ve been flailing around at shaping the tote/handle for the past several days. I’ll get home, take a few whacks at it with the rasp, file a little down, and so on.
Today, I decided to cut the “razee” part of the body. Seems to have gone okay. Here’s the body, along with the current tote:
The tote isn’t exactly the prettiest thing in the world right now, but it is at least comfortable. I haven’t gone far beyond this level of finish because I haven’t decided which tools to use now (can’t use the rasp any longer because the finish is too rough). Files? Sandpaper wrapped around a dowel? A scratch stock? Anything I can find?
I think I used too much glue when laminating the plane body, creating a slightly larger gap than I was expecting, but that’s life. It does seem solid, and that’s the important part.
Yesterday, I cut a triangle out of a board for the handle, and today, I traced out the rest of the handle from the printed drawing. Then I knocked out the inside and back with a coping saw. Coping saws are a pain, but a having a solid workbench is a godsend, and nowhere was this more evident when I roughed out the outline with a rasp. I’ve never had much success at using a rasp before, and I realize now that it was due to having a bench shake all over the place.
That’s a somewhat-maligned cabinet rasp there. It seemed to work fine, and it also didn’t cost me anything (woot). Of course, the real test will come when I use it to shape the oval profile of the grip, but it doesn’t seem like it will be a problem.
Truth be told, cutting out the handle was a lot more fun than I expected. If the rest of the shaping goes even half as well as this, I’ll really have no excuse for not getting to work on those saw handles.
Jan 5
I had time to work on the scrub plane today. I already had two milled pieces of wood ready to go, and the drawing was done. So I set out on the somewhat complicated task of cutting the various tapered slots. I made the wedge first. Then I marked out the blade’s bed (at 45 degrees), traced the wedge shape onto both body pieces, and cut out the housing for the blade and wedge:
That’s all fine and good, but you sort of need a path for the shavings to come out. This is the tricky part. You have to maintain a significant portion of the wedge/blade housing, but still open up the area in front of the blade. In addition, you have to open this area to the full width at the mouth. Here’s what I’m working with now:
The area for the shavings is a bit narrow, and the tapered path for the shavings is a rather high angle, but this is probably okay, because the shavings on a scrub plane are not really supposed to be as wide as the mouth anyway.
When assembled, the body is supposed to look like this:
With the blade and wedge inserted, it looks like this:
From below, we have this:
Fine. So I was happy with all of that and decided that it was time to glue up the sides. It was not terribly easy, and looked kind of ridiculous when clamped up:
At least I got it aligned. I’m starting to think that it might have been easier if I had glued it up first, then cut out the various parts. Then again, I wouldn’t have been able to use my saws. Oh well, the price you pay when you don’t have any thick pieces of wood lying around.
Then I sharpened the blade. First time sharpening a cambered blade. Hmm. Well, it could have been worse, I guess.