Test Driving A New Rip Saw On A Mountain Road
You know the feeling when you get a new tool but don’t have a reason to use it immediately? If you’re like me that means you go to the scrapbox, find a willing piece of wood, and apply tool to wood… with no goal other than to play. I did that with the two new handsaws I just completed but somehow, for saws, this sort of thing doesn’t satisfy in the same way as the scrap box play with a plane, spokeshave, or most other tools.
So, when I realized I was going to need a bunch of thin walnut panels I decided to use my new rip saw. I didn’t build it for resawing and it may be a bit fine for such things, but…new tool…new task…sometimes a hammer gets used to drive screws.
Frankly, I was surprised at how well this 7 ppi saw worked to cut these panels, each is just shy of 2-feet long. Took me a couple hours to create this pile. Had much fun.
Cheers — Larry
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.
Why I’m a Lee Valley Loyalist
I’m old fashioned. I admit it. And what my old-fashioned self has seen over the decades that I’ve been on the planet has been a change from stores that worked hard to provide customer service and a customer-friendly ambiance to stores who only look at how much cheaper it is to hire a kid who knows nothing of the products rather than someone knowledgable about the products being sold. Somewhere along the line stores stopped worrying about satisfied customers. I guess they figured they’d “make it up in volume,” as the saying goes. And, of course, they all blame it on something other than themselves. It’s the Internet. It’s consumer price sensitivity. It’s never “We’ve simply lost sight of the value of repeat business.”
There is irony in the fact that in our modern online shopping world, we’re hearing that consumer friendliness is making a come back. The pundits tell us that online buying is very sensitive to how potential customers feel about the people and stores where they shop. Odd, isn’t it, that it takes shopping through wires to cause that to be acknowledged. Truth is, this has always been true and probably always will be.
Some companies take advantage of this fact. I guess I first walked into a Lee Valley store sometime in the early 90s, back when Lee Valley’s Ottawa store was a smallish affair and their catalog was much smaller than it is today. Even back then, though, Lee Valley’s emphasis was on quality and customer service. Rob Lee seems endowed with “the customer is everything” gene that so many of his competitors lack. Anyways, Lee Valley is now one of the largest sellers of woodworking supplies and high quality tools in the world. Justifiably so. And it’s important to note that they haven’t done it by making their products cheaper as many have done. In point of fact, they done it by continually making their tools better, smiling, and saying “Yes, how may we help you today?”
And that’s why I’m a Lee Valley loyalist. I have dealt with no finer company on the planet and here’s one example of the sort of thing that keeps me loyal to this company, quite beyond the quality of their products.
The Case of the Missing Contents
On May 10th I reached into my mailbox and withdrew a standard size envelope from Lee Valley. I love getting mail from Lee Valley so excitement ensued. Until I opened the envelope. It was empty. Odd, I thought. Maybe it was a package of rabbets or dados that I’d ordered and forgot about. Some pilot holes, perhaps?
Anyways, I went to the Lee Valley website, clicked on customer service, and asked them what they were sending me. Heavens, you never want to use a rabbet when you need a pilot hole. Better safe than sorry. THIRTEEN MINUTES LATER I received a response from customer service. They apologized for inconveniencing me (yeah…the guys at Bell Canada never said that when they’ve kept me on the phone for an hour over a problem) and explained that the attached PDF was what the envelope should have contained. It was sent to me because I owned a Lee Valley router plane.
The PDF was about an upgrade part for the router plane. They had taken advice from users of the product and changed the depth adjustment mechanism and they wanted to let me know that I could do this upgrade on my own router plane the next time I ordered by adding part number 05P38.11 to that order. The document went on to explain that it would be sent for FREE.
And, as if I don’t have a Lee Valley wish list as long as your arm, they gave me reason to order something so I could get my FREE upgrade. They’d also listened to we loyalists whine that we wanted some narrow blades for our router planes. As a result, they were adding three new blades to the catalog – 1/8″, 3/32′, and 3/16″ and since I was such a great guy for accepting their FREE upgrade I could also buy these three new blades at a discounted price if I did it by June 6th. I did it, just as quickly as I could punch the keys.
It is now TWO DAYS since I received my empty envelope. This morning I received a very full one, only this one was padded. The FREE upgrade is fantastic, though I never quibbled over how the old depth stop operated. The blades a very welcome addition to my toolbox as I often need to work narrow rabbets and dados.
Thank you, Lee Valley, just for being you.
Cheers — Larry
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
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
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