The Case of the Missing Saw Nuts

In my last post I talked about creating handles for two new saw plates.  I mentioned that I had saw nuts somewhere in my shop but that I didn’t know where they were.  I do hereby confess to the crime of understatement as “not knowing where they are” doesn’t quite cover the energy I expended to find them.

Like most “where are they” stories I started rummaging through cabinets, opening drawers, shoving stuff here and there.  When I had done that to every cabinet and drawer I stood in the middle of the room, hands on my head, looking around.  Where could they be?.  I repeated the process – twice.  After an hour of looking I said…  No, I’d better not say what I said.  Anyways, I gave up and scuttled off to do something else.

The next morning I decided to take drastic action.  I went to the same cabinets, the same drawers.  Only this time I emptied them onto my workbench.  When that was full I covered my assembly table, that used to be my table saw, with stuff.

When that table was covered with debris I did the only useful thing of the entire venture.  I “invented” a takedown table.  I set up my shop bents and snapped together some tongue ‘n groove pine slabs and created a new table.  I will, forever more keep these pieces of pine around for just this purpose as it works great as a take-down table.

Eventually, after three hours of emptying and another hour of replacing everything, I found my saw nuts.  They were in a ziplock bag, wadded up such that they didn’t look like saw nuts.  They didn’t look like anything.  As Sherlock Holmes once said, “You simply remove everything that is not a saw nut and what remains must be the saw nuts.”  I might be paraphrasing here.  Anyways, victory was mine.

Not exactly victory.  I learned that, as the philosopher said, “time sifts” and in this case, the memory I had of my saw nuts was different from reality.  Here they are in all their, uhm…glory.

As you can see, these are  saw nuts with slotted, ugly heads.  They’re also quite the worse for wear.  The arrow points at one I tried to clean up and it is possible to get them to shine but quite impossible to remove the deep scratches without distorting the heads as to make them worthless, if you can make them any more worthless than they are (grin).

And so I did what any self-respecting woodworker would do.  No, I didn’t make them.  It is certainly possible to do so but I needed half a dozen and without a machine shop, doing them one at a time by hand would take me more time than I cared to spend.  Rather, I headed to Wenzloff & Son’s website.  There I could buy saw nuts that match those in my Wenzloff saws, which are beautiful.  And I did.  They haven’t arrived yet but this is what they’ll look like when they do.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

Yippee…My Saw Plates Have Arrived!

First, a question. Can a retired guy get fired? I’ve got a long list of ‘gotta dos’ that I should be doing today. Maybe tommorrow.  Mr. Mailman visited me this morning and under his arm was a long, skinny, flat package from New Jersey. Inside were these beauties.

As I mentioned in my last post, Bob Roziaeski did me a big favor and made these saw plates for me.   I do want to discuss the whys that motivated this transaction but I’m just too excited right now so instead I’ll talk about making handles, which is why I haven’t done any of the stuff I was supposed to be doing today (grin).

Making a template

The first step was to make a handle template.  I like the shape of the handle on my big Spear & Jackson rip saw so I used that to create a template.  This is a pretty straight-forward tracing task but because of the sculpted handle edges, I had to be careful to keep the pencil tip directly below the most outward edge of the handle, which is a bit harder than it sounds.  I think I got close.

Lay out the parts

I had some cherry set aside for the handles and  I shoved it through my planer a couple times so I could better see the wood grain.  I started with wood about 1″ thick.  While I would have preferred to have quarter-sawn wood, finding it around here is as likely as getting Wall Street hedge fund managers under control.  I traced around the template twice and layout was done.  I’d cut out the finger hole before doing this so I could draw the interior as well as exterior of the handle.

Remove what isn’t a handle

I used Forstner bits to drill a couple holes in the top and bottom  of the finger hole and then stuffed a #12 reverse-tooth blade in my scrollsaw and went to work removing everything that wasn’t a handle.  I could have used my bowsaw, of course, but I could sit down at the scrollsaw and I do enjoy running it as it’s quieter and more relaxing than other powertools.

Adjust saw handle to blade

These new blades are not as deep at the rear as my Spear & Jackson saw and when I put the rough handle on them this became an evident problem.  I admit that this is where I started working without a net as I have no clue when it comes to proper saw hang.  What I did was get every saw I own (not many) out of my saw till and started looking at how the finger hole angle related to the toothline.  I also gave some thought to where it was vertically relative to the the toothline.  For this last dimension I used my 24″ Disston as a model.

The result of all this suggested to me that I needed to remove some of the top of the handle and angle it a bit.  And so I did.  I’d like to provide precise logic and dimensions for this but I can’t.  Aside from looking at my other saws, this was a TLAR (this looks about right) process.

Cut Centerline and slot the handle

There’s a lot of shaping to be done but the need to remove equal amounts of wood on each side of the handle centerline will persist throughout the process.  I set up a rolling marking gauge to mark a centerline and I ran it around the entire handle.  I darkened the cut with a tiny pencil in the hopes that it would show up in the photo.

I used my Wenzloff tenon saw to cut the slot for the blade.  Sorry that I missed a photo of that process but I just stuck it in my face vise and cut to the line.  The saw plate of this saw gave me a tight fit for the larger 24″ saw plates.

I’ve repeated this process for the second handle and now I’m ready to break out the rasps, spokeshaves and maybe a gouge or two and make it a bit more shapely.  Oh yeah…and I’m tearing the shop apart looking for the bag of saw nuts I have somewhere.

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com