Bob Easton

Basswood – Tilia Americana

close cousins: Lime in the UK, Linden in Europe

Project objective: undisclosed for now. Speculation allowed.

Oooops, wrong song.

I was out working some rail fence on “the back 40″ a few days ago. Dropped something on the old hatchet and broke off its head. It was a very old and very inexpensive hatchet, no doubt purchased from whatever “home centers” were four decades ago. It’s amazing how light the handle is with no head, very dry and light. No, I don’t know what kind of wood it is.

Of course, it happened immediately after sharpening the blade to the sharpest it has ever been, and it was cutting very well as I trimmed some rails.

What to do? Well, “Mend it Dear Henry. Dear Henry, mend it.” “With what shall I mend it…”  OK, enough of that. A neighbor’s birch tree was split and felled in a storm early this year. I salvaged a few bits of it and they’ve been peacefully drying over in a corner of the shop. How about a small branch of that stuff? Yeah, I know. It’s not hickory, but it’s not something soft either.

There’s not a lot to making a new handle. So, no step by step, just a few random pictures. Most of the work was done with a spokeshave. The first and most important step was making flats on both sides so the workpiece could be held in the leg vice. I got close to the traditional hatchet shape without spending a lot of time trying to refine it to perfection. Nor, did I do a lot of fine finishing work. The surface is exactly what the very sharp spoke shave left. (No sanding!!!) There’s enough of a bulge on the end and slenderness in the middle to make a secure and comfortable grip.

The tennon for the head was chisel work of a trial and error (plentiful error) sort. It fits well enough; certainly not perfect but secure. The last bit of securing the head was reuse of a wedge I found in the old handle. It’s not the usual straight wedge, but a hollow cylinder with a conical shape. (I didn’t  take a picture of it before hammering it in.)

Last step, BLO.

“Oh no, not again!” were my first words on hearing the news of two people who lost their lives in the apartment above the carpentry shop that caught fire. Before hearing the exact cause of the fire I speculated about oily rags. Sometimes we really don’t want to be right about our speculations.

The location was Villach Austria where our daughter and her family live. We heard the fire alarm early one evening last week while we were visiting them. A few minutes later, a second alarm. The next day, our son-in-law came home from the hospital where he works and told of how the efforts to save two burn victims failed. It was then that I learned they lived in an apartment above the carpentry shop and a fire in that shop was the reason for hearing the double alarm the evening before. The two people were elderly and did not get out of the building before it was completely engulfed.

Two days later we found the follow-up article in the newspaper:

“The fire was caused by spontaneous combustion of oil soaked cleaning material … that had been dumped in a dustbin in the carpentry shop.”

None of us knew the people who died, but all understand the tragedy of lost life from a preventable accident.

Please, please, please remember that oily rags can combust very easily. Always spread them out to dry, or better yet, immerse them completely in water. Never, ever, toss them into a pile or a container. Save some lives. Keep this accident from happening in your shop.

Spread the word. Tell everyone who might ever use oils for cleaning or finishing about the hazard. It is so easy to prevent and so sad to hear about.

Nope, not a boat, but a very special project.

Walnut blank - the seller draws outlines on the blanks.

Done - ready for shipping

My daughter in law decided to ski a biathlon this coming winter, and started training some months ago. The biathlon is a combination of cross-country skiing and shooting, a fascinating competition. She will likely use an Anschütz 1827 target rifle, the gun that 95% of all biatleletes use. She wants a “dummy” gun to carry while training, and one that can also be customized to fit the way she wants to hold and use the gun. We decided to make a custom stock that could be modified as wanted.

This will be a more detailed post someday, showing some step-by-step work. For now, we have beginning and ending photos. For those really interested in details, a Picasa photo album contains more pictures.

Inspiration from Roy Underhill, Kari Hultman, and Dan Lauder. THANKS to all! (click any image for a larger version.)

Roy Underhill, author, Colonial era woodworking master, and proprietor of The Woodwright’s Shop, opened his 2009 season with the making of a palm sized grease pot that used a sliding lid and dovetail latch to secure its contents. Some of us live in parts of the country “too sophisticated” to carry a back woods woodworking show on TV. (New York City’s last country music radio station shut down in April of 1983, giving way to light jazz or some other kind of funk.)

So, along comes Kari Hultman, The Village Carpenter, to tell us about her replica of Roy’s little grease pot. Like Kari, I had that project on my to-do list. She got there first with a very nicely made box and some great construction photos.

It was Dan Lauder, and an approaching birthday, that moved the project to the top of the list with his discovery of an 1879 pencil box. While a bit different than the grease pot, the pencil box shared a similar 3 part construction of interlocking parts that qualifies it, like the grease pot, as “clever.”

The lid slides in a dovetailed track. Sliding it out reveals the top tray. That action also unlocks the top tray so that it can swing sideways revealing the bottom of the box. As an aside, the box that Dan discovered had a little pocket in top layer. I don’t know it’s purpose, but in my version, that pocket is now a resting place for a good luck charm, the happy little pig.

OK, let’s look into how it was made. The lumber was stuff on hand, some tulip poplar. More about that later.

That roughly drawn sketch was my only “plan.” Like Kari, I used only hand tools. Unlike Dan, I don’t have a huge choice of planes, so I routed the pencil grooves with a scratch stock. It was slow going, but worked out OK. It needed more than one scratch. Use your sharp eyes to find my first error. It’s in the very first photo.

The sliding lid is about 1/8 inch thick. A router plane provided the space for it, and another small scratch (no photo) made the dovetailed tracks.

The bottom, and the piggy’s nest, were excavated with forstner bits. Back to the router plane for cleanup. The last photo in this sequence shows that error corrected.

Finishing took more time than building. That’s because I don’t have a clean room for finishing (blame the tools) and I used a very slow drying paint. I wanted to use the same color as the gift recipient’s (not-yet-done) boat, a slow drying enamel. I call it “siren paint,” because as it dries it is constantly singing “Come to Me” to every dust bit in the building. To counteract the dust, I used a hand rubbed finish technique. After a few coats, that technique highlighted the fact that sharp edges need to be rounded to hold paint. So, correction and more coats. As an aside, the Norton tack cloth is a very handy aid. No more waxy cheesecloth.

Briefly, my hand rubbed finishing regime included: wet sanding with 600 grit, fine sanding with 0000 steel wool, rubbing with pumice, then with rottenstone, and lastly several layers of paste wax to bring to a high satin sheen. For service veterans, “spit shining” is the paste wax method that works best.

Lessons Learned

• Double, triple, quadruple check that angled cuts lean the right way.
• Hardwood would have been a better choice and avoided a few little “dings.” A lot of labor gets invested, and why invest in anything less than the best quality wood?
• Double, triple, quadruple check that angled cuts lean the right way.
• Make the sliding top thicker to lessen bow and give more “meat” to the dovetails.
• Double, triple, quadruple check that angled cuts lean the right way.
• A shellac sealer would have been better than the white sealer I used. The white really shows brightly when edge finish wears.
• Double, triple, quadruple check that angled cuts lean the right way.
• Slow drying paint gathers more dust than fast drying paint. (Doh!)
• Double, triple, quadruple check that angled cuts lean the right way.
• Finish gets really thin on sharp edges. Rounded edges hold finish much better and will wear better. I’ve often read this, but needed to wrestle with the problem myself, and ended up reshaping the work after several rounds of white undercoating showing up as I polished the finish.
• Double, triple, quadruple check that angled cuts lean the right way.
• Hand rubbed finishing takes a lot of time. Well actually, waiting for paint to dry firm enough for hand rubbing take a lot of time.
• Starting 4 days before a birthday isn’t enough time when finishing alone needs 16 days.

We’ve had plans and lams. Now we have gams. OK, legs … and maybe some feet too.

Before I get started showing how I made rather big mortise and tenon joints, let me preempt a question. Someone is bound to ask why I didn’t make much easier half-lap cuts in some pieces before I laminated them. They would be so much easier than cutting big mortises. Simple answer: when I started laminating parts, I had a good idea of general dimensions, but had not yet decided on which style of lathe to make. Should it be one with the wheel sitting back behind the ways, or one with the wheel centered on the headstock? They have completely different construction.

I’ve decided. The lathe will have the wheel centered on the headstock, similar to those by Steve Schmeck and Stephen Sheppard (see the Plans and Lams entry). This makes the contraption a bit more compact while simplifying construction.

This part of the work started several months ago with tool acquisition. No, I don’t think I’ll ever need huge mortising chisels more than once, so I didn’t look for them. I did look for, and took a good long time watching the market, a set of Russell Jennings double spur auger bits. A set of these pops up on eBay about every 4 days. A set is 13 bits ranging from 3/16 to 16/16. They are packaged in either a 3 tier wooden box or a canvas roll and date to sometime prior to 1944 when Stanley bought out Russell Jennings. The eBay offerings are often missing one bit and range from mediocre to almost unused condition. Prices vary accordingly and are remarkably predictable if you watch for a while. I waited until I found a complete set that needed only a little cleaning and was lingering around with no bids. My one bid brought it to me at a price I clearly liked. Overnight in some white vinegar cleaned the bits up to near new condition. All were sharp. The smallest was a bit bowed but easily straightened. The chisels in the photo are Narex bench chisels, great value at an affordable price. The mallet is shopmade from black locust.

The uprights / legs are 5 inches by 3 inches in cross section. The feet are 3 inches by 3 inches in cross section. I’m not a tenon engineer and don’t know the optimal size for this application, but I decided to make the tenons 1 inch by 3 inches in cross section, and of course three inches long. Mortises first, or tenons first? I did the mortises first. If one were to do a lot of these, a great big 1 inch mortise chisel would be the tool of choice. I don’t think I’ll be making many more, so drills were my choice. Layout was easy since the centers could be placed on the lamination line. Just find the center of the workpiece and layout the 3 inch extent of the mortise. Drilling by hand, without a drill press, needs a bit of practice and several sighting references. It’s really not too hard to make holes that are vertical within the precision needed. Drilling by hand does have some limitations. One cannot overlap holes as can be done with a drill press. Even getting two holes close together can let the bit cut through a thin wall into the nearby hole and “drift” astray. I drilled two one inch holes, one at either end of the mortise and a 3/4 inch hole in between. When working with spur bit augers, the practice is to drill until just the spur starts to exit the far side of the workpiece. Then, turn the piece over and complete the hole from the other side. This technique makes a nice clean hole with no blow out. Waste removal was now a small enough job for bench chisels. Mark a very clean outline. Chisel away waste until half way through. Turn the workpiece and repeat.

The last large tenons I made were for the stretchers for my workbench. They are serviceable, but not pretty. My sawing skill is slowly improving and I think I can make better tenons than before. Yet, I decided to try a technique that I saw on Steve Branam’s “Close Grain” blog. He did a riff on a Chris Schwarz technique using a simple jig and a ryoba saw. It works well, as the picture shows. I varied from the technique Steve shows by using the reflection technique to make the absolutely square shoulder cuts. Note how the edge of the workpiece reflects in a straight line on the saw plate. I added a blue line in the photo to highlight what to look for.

This cut, by the way, is a first class cut and needs to be very clean. Although I don’t show it in the pictures, I marked the cut with my wonderful Czeck Edge marking knife and then reinforced that marked line with a shallow chiseled “V.” That provides a starting notch for the saw while keeping the edge very crisp.

The ryoba saw is a simple one from the BORG, inexpensive and useful. I saw a question posted in a forum recently from a guy with analysis paralysis on how to best spend $100 for a new ryoba saw. He got no answers while the rest of us are busy cutting up lumber.

The joints fit together very nicely, snug, not sloppy. They will be completed with hot hide glue and drawboring. Lot’s of people have written about drawboring, so I won’t repeat all that here. It’s simple and it works.