How I Ended Up With A Split-Top Saw Bench

It all started when I went to the walnut store.  I needed some for a project that shall not be mentioned.  While I was there I noticed that they had a pile of 4-foot long select pine on sale and you know how it is.  You’ve just got to paw wood that’s on sale.  And this got me to thinking – an all too dangerous proposition.  I bought some.

You see, I have had saw bench envy.  I have a saw bench.  I built it long ago, far away.  See here for details.   I built it when I was more of a hybrid woodworker than I am today.  Back then I used handsaws for all my cross-cuts but when ripping stock I uncovered my table saw and, well, let’er rip.

But now I’m not doing that.  My table saw has become a very expensive assembly table and I’d come to covet Shannon Roger’s split-top saw bench, which is great for ripping stock.  Every time I watched him use it to rip stock in his Hand Tool School, I told myself I needed to build one.   Also, I had come to want a bench that was a bit wider than my original.

And so I began one Saturday morning.  The boards I’d gotten were all 6″ wide, 4/4 rough-cut stock.  All of the boards in my sawbench are about 6″ wide, edges planed flat.  I’m not opposed to using a thickness planer so I shoved the boards through it and followed up with a jointer plane to achieve flat surfaces.  I tried to go light on the pieces that became the bench top and those are still nearly an inch thick.  The others a bit less.  The only dimensions I can provide is that the bench top is 32″ long and the bench built to be 20″ high to match my shop bents.

Those were the only two measurements I made.  The legs are two 6″ boards joined together and the sideboards  cut to allow some overhang on the ends.  It took me a little over two hours to generate the rough parts.

It took another two hours of fiddling around, smoothing the surfaces, though not to furniture grade, chamfering the edges of the top pieces, cutting the rabbets in the legs for the sideboards, and finally screwing it together with 1 3/4″ wood screws.

It was fun doing a project without setting up a camera every 20 minutes.  I’m pretty happy with it.  Anyone want an old, used saw bench?

New Saws At Wood’n Bits

Long ago, far away, Bob Roziaeski of the Logan Cabinet Shoppe made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.  He had a source for saw blanks and for almost nothing relative to the time required, he offered to cut/sharpen teeth to my specs.  When the blades arrived they were gorgeous and I set to work creating handles for them.  I finished the cross-cut saw in short order and it has gotten considerable use, though I’ve been somewhat diverted from my shop lately.

The rip saw, however, is another story.  The handle was roughed out and even attached.  I’ve actually cut a couple boards with it but it sure wasn’t comfortable as the handle hadn’t been carved.  Have I mentioned that square edges on a saw handle aren’t a great idea?

Anyways, I am finally clearing the decks for a new project and the first thing I’ve done after finding my workbench, and moving all the stuff it was under, was to carve that handle.  I now have a great set of hand saws that are oh so sweet.  Both perform beautifully.  Thanks, Bob.  Now I really can sell my table saw.

For those into details, the saws have 24″ blades.  The cross-cut saw is 8 ppi, 15-degrees of rake, and 25-degrees of fleam.  The rip saw is 7 ppi, 4-degrees of rake, and 0-degrees of fleam.  And yes, that’s a fairly high toot-count for the rip saw.  I already have a nice 5 ppi Spear & Jackson and wanted something a bit finer.  Likewise, I have a nice 10 ppi cross-cut saw and wanted something a bit coarser.  One can never have enough saws, ya know.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

 

 

 

The Saw Nut Saga From Hell

I just checked and it was back on February 2nd that I received some beautiful saw plates from Bob Roziaeski (Logan Cabinet Shoppe).  I’d rushed down and cut handle blanks from cherry and wrote a blog post about it.  Then I went off looking for my bag of saw nuts.  I’d bought it back around 2000 and had no idea where they were so the shop got turned upside down to find them.  And, I posted, way back when, another post about how disappointed I was with my bag of saw nuts when I found them.  I mentioned then that I ordered shiny new ones from Wenzloff.

This rocky start to my saw handle project must have been a harbinger of how badly this project was to go and now, some 6 weeks later, I’m here to report that I’ve accomplished something that should have taken no more than a couple hours.  Sometimes life serves you lemons and the proverb says you’re supposed to make lemon-aid.  What happens when life repeatedly trips you up?  Build a softer floor?  I wonder.

Saw Nuts Arrive

 

 

 

 

 

It took a while for the saw nuts to arrive as Mike Wenzloff was having some health problems (hope he’s doing ok now).  But they were worth the wait.  On the left are the saw nuts I rejected for use.  On the right are the ones Wenzloff sells.

And as Paul Harvey used to say….the rest of the story

I was excited  to be able to get the handles on the saws so I could try them out, even though the handles wouldn’t be carved.  I ran downstairs, opened my box of Forstner bits, grabbed the 1/2″ bit and the next larger size, and  commenced to drill relief holes for the saw nuts.  This was the result:

Notice the problem?  Yep, the holes for the 9/16″ dia saw nuts are too large.  Guess what?  My Forstner set jumps from 1/2″ to 5/8″ so yeah, if you drill a 10/16″ hole, it’s bigger than a 9/16″ hole.  Woodworking is such a learning experience.  Boy, did I feel dumb.

Quebec City doesn’t provide a lot of choices when it comes to buying bits.  Well, we do have a choice, I guess. I could go to the big-box store owned by people in Quebec or to Home Depot.  The results and choices are pretty much the same.  And those choices didn’t include a 9/16″ Forstner bit.  No problem, says me.  I’ll just order one from my buddies at Lee Valley.  Maybe the most important thing that comes from living in Canada is that shipments from Lee Valley come VERY quickly.  And so I turned off the shop lights and ordered the bit.

The next day I cut a new handle blank so I’d be ready when the bit arrived and when it did I headed for the shop.  I was on a roll now.  The bit showed up and I was back in the shop.  Nothing was going to stand between me and my saws.  Except…

Except that I had eight relief holes to drill with that bit and as I started to drill the fifth one, the bottom of the bit just stopped turning.  Huh?  When I raised the quill on my drill press the top of the bit went with it, leaving the bottom stuck in the wood.  Grrr…grumble…say it ain’t so.

I contacted Lee Valley, explaining the situation, telling them I wanted to buy another bit and wondered if their bits carried any warranty (I didn’t expect they would).  Rather quickly I got an email from their support staff, which is an understatement about what these guys do for their customers.  Rob Lee should be proud.

I was told to pitch the old bit and that they’d put another in the mail to me.  They did.  In fact they expedited that shipment to me so this morning I drilled the rest of the relief holes and this is the result.  Thanks so much to Lee Valley.  It’s so fun to do business with companies that care.

I won’t bore you with the details of my fight to poke holes in sheet steel.  It involved titanium bits, cutting fluid and what seemed to be a stressfilled amount of time.  But I have the handles mounted.

As you can see, I still need to carve and shape the handles but I got to put sawteeth to wood this morning and…   Hey, Bob, can you come in here for a minute?  Yeah…it’ll only take a minute.  Stand right here, Bob and look out at the two people who read this blog.  Folks this is the guy who sharpened these saws and produced the nifty saw nib on each of them.  Take a bow, Bob.

I apologize for not documenting the process better but geez…I was having soooooo much fun.

Cheers — Larry

 

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

Making Wooden Roubo Try Squares

Chris Schwarz showed us how to make Roubo-style try squares  in the February issue of Popular Woodworking.  These have the virtue of being easy to make in any size desired, are half the weight of a purchased square, and because they’re made from wood, they will not scratch the wood pieces being squared.

I thought I’d take advantage of this article as everytime I watch one of Rob Roziaeski’s podcasts I get square envy as he uses Roubo squares in several sizes and I just like the looks of them.  The more I use tools made from wood the more I want to use them so I see a fair amount of tool-making in my future.

Materials

I looked at what materials I had in the scrap box and came up with some hard maple, some cherry, and some red oak.  I cut enough pieces to make half a dozen squares, though I really don’t need that many.  The key, it seems to me, is that you must ensure that the faces and edges of each piece are flat and square to each other.

I’m fairly confident that maple and cherry will make good squares but I included the red oak as an experiment.  Red oak is known to move quite a bit which is not an attribute you want in measuring devices.  Time will tell whether this is a problem or not.

Making a Bridle Joint

The squares are pretty simple, involving a 1/4″ thick blade and a 3/4″ thick handle.  They are connected to one another with a bridle joint, which I pinned with a couple 1/4″ dowels.

Laying out a bridle joint is easy as the blade width determines the depth and the blade thickness the distance between the two saw cuts.  If there’s a “trick” to bridle joints it is to have practiced sufficiently with your saw to cut square and true.  I used my dovetail saw to make the two cuts in each of the handle pieces.   And I only screwed up one of them.

Some might wonder why I don’t use a tenon jig and run the handles through my table saw rather than do this slot chopping.  Truth is, it simply takes too long to set things up.  Doing it by hand is really fast as the two photos above indicate.  You simply hit downward on your chisel vertically.  Then, coming in from the end with the chisel and you can remove 1/4 of the material that needs to be removed.  I repeat this twice more, and then flip the stick so I can access the other side.  When I hit the piece with vertical chisel blow the last fourth pops out.  If you’ve made your cuts correctly, you’re done.

Glue the Joint

Obviously, if you’re going to rely upon a square to check square, it must be itself.  Thus, it is imperative that you glue the bridle joint absolutely square.  I use hide glue for this, knowing that I can easily undo the joint with steam if the result isn’t square.    Once glued, I left the squares overnight to completely set and rechecked them again before pinning the joints.

Pinning the Joint

I’m sure there are various opinions about how to determine where to put the pins.  I simply laid a straight edge between the inside and outside corner and measured in 5/16″ from each corner.  This looked “right” to me.  I drilled 1/4″ holes through the joint and used a wooden mallet to pound cherry dowels through the joint.  I used a flush cut saw to trim the dowels on each side of the joint.

One piece of advice for those who don’t own a flush-cut saw and want to buy one.  Avoid the Stanley saw.  Flush-cut saws should have no tooth set on the side of the blade that is flush with the surface.  The Stanley has set on both sides of its blade and it’ll scratch up your piece every time.  I use the saw from Lee Valley and it works great and costs only a few bucks more than the Stanley saw.

Making Them Fancy

At this point the squares will work just fine but they aren’t yet “kewl.”  I drew out some guidelines for cutting trim on the ends of each piece and then us my scroll saw (fret saw will suffice) to cut the decorative trim.  Absolute accuracy is less important than cutting smooth curves and square corners.  It’s ok to make happy sounds as you finish up this step.

Final Form

All I did to finish my squares was to give them a dose of boiled linseed oil.  I’d given the wood a couple swipes with a smooth plane before I started joining blade to handle and so no sanding was done.  Notice how I assembled one of the maple squares backwards.  Without screw ups, how else can one appreciate when things go well?

Cheers — Larry

larry@woodnbits.com

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