A New Vise Because of My Vice
I enjoy using handsaws. I own a table saw but more and more, I use it as an assembly/work table. I just like the freedom and quiet of handsaws.
There’s a problem with handsaws, however. While I can send my table saw blades out for sharpening and it’s easy for me to rationalize this as I don’t have the tools to sharpen carbide-tipped blades, I can’t do that for my handsaws.
First, it’s getting hard to find people who sharpen handsaws. Mark Harrell, at Bad Axe Toolworks will do it. Medallion Tools here in Canada will do it. But this involves packing a saw into a box and handing said box, and a wad of money, to the post office to get the saw to the sharpener. The other problem is that it just seems that I should be able to run a file over the steel teeth and sharpen handsaws myself.
But there’s a rub. One needs a saw vise to hold the saw. I’ve used an old metal saw vise that I picked up at a flea market. It works, sort of. The problem is that the old cast iron eccentric that locks the saw into the vise is worn and no matter what I do, it won’t stay locked. I fight it every time I use the vise.
Recently, while I was resawing, the saw told me that it needed to be sharpened and I decided that the time had come to solve my saw vise problem. I dug out the SketchUp plan for a saw vise created by Popular Woodworking. I used red oak and cut the boards quickly – I even used the rip saw I needed to sharpen. I tapered the jaw pieces using a scrub plane and jack plane but otherwise the parts are all straight cuts. Everything is held together with #8 screws. Nothing fancy here.
As designed and described by Popular Woodworking, you’re supposed to clamp the base to your bench. This works really well. Next you’re supposed to clamp the saw between the jaws and use an F-clamp to apply pressure to the jaws/saw to hold everything in place. I’m sorry but I don’t have enough hands to do that. I tried it and it was a miserable process.
So, I got out my 3/4″ threading kit and created a screw from a hunk of dowel. Then I drilled/tapped the front to accommodate the screw. The hole on the other jaw needs to be a bit larger and remains untapped. A small block, tapped and screwed onto the screw (all the way to the base of the threads) acts as a stop block for this mechanism. This system makes locking/unlocking the vise a one-hand operation and it works quite well. I highly recommend this addition. I suppose you can do it the same thing with metal hardware but I prefer the wood approach.
Looks sort of cool, right? And my rip saw is now sharp again.
Cheers — Larry
168 Holes in a Couple of Small Cabinets?
Only a silly man drills 168 holes in a couple of small cabinets. Meet one silly man. The vanities I’m creating will hold who knows what and so I decided that the shelves, which may be wood or glass, needed to be fully adjustable. I decided that adjustment in 2″ increments would be sufficient but even so, this meant 14 pairs of holes in each of the four side pieces – 128 holes. I also wanted a 5-dowel join at each top/bottom joint which meant 10 holes for each joint for a total of 40 holes. Swiss cheese cabinets, coming up.
Hole Jigs
To accurately place the holes I created two simple jigs. One was a block of wood with a couple pins that projected from both sides and, offset from these, a set of holes to guide a drill bit. The other jig, for the dowel joints was a block of wood the thickness of the side pieces, a short ‘fence’ on one end, and the 5 holes located where I wanted the dowels to be in my pieces.
Shelf Holes
Notice that electrons were burned in the making of these holes. I like my egg beater drills as much as the next guy but my electric drill is just as clean, nearly as quiet and a whole lot faster for this sort of work. I marked out the first two holes 2″ from the bottom of each piece and drilled them. It’s very important to get these right as the jig depends upon their placement. Once drilled, the jig pins were inserted and the next set drilled. Leap-frogging the jig along the side piece generated a nifty set of holes.
Doweling Holes
When I built my last cabinet I was asked how I did the dowel joints; whether I used a _fill in fancy jig name here_ or something else. I guess this stuff doesn’t get talked about much in magazines or in cyberspace.
Let’s face it; dowel joints are frowned upon by many woodworkers as they’ve concluded them to be second class, while still putting James Krenov on the lofty pedestal he and his work deserve. I’ll not attempt to explain that paradox but when design leans to having an overhang on the top/bottom of cabinets, without the use of mouldings, dowel joinery is just the thing to make it happen. I like them and take solace in the fact that Krenov did too.
I clamped the jig to the bench top, with the fence sticking out onto and parallel to the bench top. I slid a cabinet side piece up to the jig, align the back of that piece to the fence, and clamp it in place. With everything fixed in place, it’s an easy matter to drill the holes. I mark the desired depth on the drill bit with a Sharpie marker.
The important thing here is to always put the back edge of the parts towards the fence as the fence is used to orient the jig on the top and bottom pieces by pressing it against the back of these pieces (the front are curved) and lining up the jig to the layout lines.
I’ve seen the fancy jigs, some costing a small fortune. Personally, I prefer these simple jigs as I can custom create them for each project.
Holes Everywhere
The end result is a bunch of pieces of cherry with some rabbets and a whole lot of holes. When I put them together they start to look like cabinets…almost.
Cheers — Larry
You Know You're a Left-Handed Woodworker When…
You know you’re a left-handed woodworker when you prefer your face vise on the right end of your bench. The photo above demonstrates this. That’s Shannon Rogers, the Renaissance Woodworker, showing everyone his newly completed and totally awesome Roubo-style bench. It’s built from ash and weighs about a gazillion pounds so it’s hard to understand why he feels the need to hold it down, but note that he’s using his left hand to do it.
And so it goes, we lefties prefer our face vises on the right side of the bench. What’s sort of fun for we lefty woodworkers, however, is that there are few left-handed tools in woodworking. Unlike golf, we aren’t saddled with the equivalent of the left-handed 5-iron. No left-handed hockey sticks or baseball mitts in woodworking. We don’t even have left-handed monkey wrenches to search for.
Oh sure, there are left- and right-handed skewed planes but these have nothing to do with which hand you use to push them. They’re all about what you’re doing and which way the grain runs.
It is true that when making shop appliances, like our workbench (the largest appliance in a shop), we tend to make them left-handed. Appliances like shooting boards and bench hooks generally reflect our “handedness”, or what we lefties like to call our handy-ness because everyone knows that lefties do it better.
But…
…you know you’re talking to a left-handed woodworker when you look at their arms. You see, they hold their newly-sharpened chisels and plane blades in their left hand, testing the on their right arm. Sad but true.
Cheers — Larry
larry@woodnbits.com
A Bit of Boring Activity on the Cabinet
I’ve mentioned a cabinet I’m making in previous posts. This cabinet is destined to hold the client’s spoon collection and so I’ve got to install holders for the spoons. Back when I was selecting wood I cut up a bunch of 3/8″ maple strips to use for this purpose and this post is but a few words about turning these strips into spoon holders.
The first thing I needed to do was cut the strips to length. At this stage I cut them 1/16″ longer than the 17 1/2″ I’ll need as I want to fit them to the inside of the case and wanted a bit of wiggle room.
Next step was to surface/smooth all four sides of each strip. As they came from a table saw it only required a pass or three with a #5 to get them straight enough to please me and some work with a smoother prepared them for finish. I relieved the front two edges just slightly with a block plane to eliminate the sharp edge.
Drilling holes is easy. Getting them in the right place – harder. This is particularly true when you’re going to drill 60 of them and they’ve got to be equally spaced. I chose to elicit the help of a couple easily constructed jigs.
To get 12 holes along a 17 1/2″ stick I needed the first hole 1 3/16″ in from the end and then 1 3/8″ spacing between the rest of the holes. I made a simple jig to position the first hole, and a forstner bit was dropped through the jig hole to create the first hole on a stick.
I also made a jig that had a pin that sits in one hole and provides 2 holes showing the positions of the next two holes. With this jig it was easy to march along the sticks, drilling the remaining holes.
I still have to cut slots into each of the holes and shallow reliefs on each end of the sticks so they’ll fit nicely against the frame-and-panel cabinet back but otherwise they’re ready.
Cheers — Larry
Working with Thin Wood Stock
If you create small things from wood, whether they be miniature furniture or small boxes, you are faced with the need to scrape and/or sand the surfaces of the small pieces you’ve cut. So much miniature furniture is ruined by well-meaning miniaturists who hold the piece in their hand and try to sand it either with a small sanding block or with sandpaper in their hand. Both methods result in edges that are rounded over. Sometimes this is simply an esthetic problem but often it causes the imperfect joinery. I thought I’d show you some of the ways in which I hold thin wood when working the faces of small/thin wood pieces.
I cut a lot of thin strips from standard lumber stock using a table saw. I know there are those who believe their table saw provides .001″ accuracy. Mine does not and often I’ll need to fine-tune the thickness of the results. It’s also the case that the surface itself is simply not smooth enough for miniatures work. I fix both of these problems using a heavy card scraper in a simple handle I made. I clamp the stock to my bench using an F-clamp and then pull the scraper over the surface. The result is a surface that is very smooth (smoother than most sanded surfaces) and I can control the thickness of the wood very well as the scraper removes very thin shavings. Notice that there is no sawdust created, which is a plus for this method.
I also have a couple plywood planing stops, one made from 1/8″ luan plywood while the other is 3/8″ baltic birch plywood. They’re easy to make so having them in several thicknesses requires only a few minutes to create. The two pins lock them onto the bench and you can push against, planing, or scraping wood surfaces.
When working with very thin stock I clamp a metal ruler to my bench, using it in the same way as the thicker stops. Here I’m using a thin scraper on a 1:12 scale table top. Why scrape rather than sand? That’s a subject for another blog post but the short answer is that cutting wood fibers creates a much smoother surface than abrading them. The result of scraping is a wood surface that glows.
For really small pieces, the solution is to have a large block covered with sandpaper. I use 150-grit garnet paper on one side and 320-grit Norton 3X on the other. I use this block in two ways.
If I’m doing fine sanding, I’ll use a sanding block with fine sandpaper attached to it (here it’s 320-grit) and the large block holds the piece in place while I sand it with the finer sandpaper. The second way is to slap a small piece of double-sided tape to the piece to be sanded and to it I stick a piece of scrap wood for use as a handle. Then I can push it around on the large block. This is actually my preferred method of sanding which is why I have 320-grit on the backside of my big block.
In conclusion, when working a small wood face there are numerous ways of holding it in place as you work it. All of the methods above will help you maintain nice crisp edges on your pieces.
Cheers — Larry
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