One of my Favorite Garbage Tools So Far

Not the plane, not the float, but the file handle screwdriver.

Have you ever used a narrower screwdriver to find that it’s marking and chewing up a fairly soft chipbreaker screw? What about the case where you buy one of those boutiquey things like LN or LV make (I either have or have had both – still have at least one of them), only to find that some older screw isn’t wide enough or in the case of the LV version, is too large around? Plus, you feel the obligation to keep those things nice…

I like a long handled screwdriver with a wide blade – and you can find them sort of easily, but I will generally have one and then lose it, and do nothing for five years but wonder where it went. In the middle of making the iron and cap iron set for the pictured plane, I thought maybe if I make a dump screwdriver, I’ll have incentive to not lose it. Plus, I can make the handle wooden and just use an offcut of the high carbon steel and hammer out the tip and then grind it after heat treatment. The whole thing should take about 10 minutes as long as lazy fitting of the shaft into the handle is done. In that case, it’s drilling the center out of the file handle and just flooding it with epoxy. If it breaks later, who cares, I’ll make another one. That did all take about 10 minutes and I did it spur of the moment because the pan of sand that I use to stabilize temps in the tempering oven was hot from tempering the iron.

Same steel, same tempering, whatever. The other quirk here is to accommodate the largest number of screws possible, and not break easily, the blade of the screwdriver is very slightly convex, and the tip is fine. If the whole thing was hollow ground, the tip couldn’t be that fine, so the compromise here is even though a convex face screwdriver isn’t what you want in general, when you’re working with a bunch of wide screws and sometimes they are old and the slot appears to have been swaged or chiseled in, convex isn’t so bad.

And, oh yeah, what’s a dump tool?

It doesn’t mean the tool is dumpy, it means it’s made of stuff that was headed for the dump. I made the mistake of referring to a knife I made for someone as a dump knife at one point when they showed a picture of it. The peanut gallery missed the fact that I made it and thought I was insulting the poster and it was more a matter of the poster extolling the virtues of just how much better it sharpened and worked than a two cherries chip carving knife, puzzling over why the steel was so much more friendly and crisp for the user….than it was talking about the wonderfulness of the knife. The result of not thinking about that? “you’re an asshole – just because someone else doesn’t make something perfect, you don’t have to be such an asshole about it”. Yeah, we’ll I made it – it’s a dump knife. It was heat treated with a quick heat and quench, then tempered and the materials were headed to the dump. This is a dump screwdriver. I’d have parted with the handle a little less easy, but in a per-handle purchase of a bunch of file handles off of Ebay, it’s a dollar. The offcut is hard to find a use for.

Back to the Dump Screwdriver

This will perhaps expose my laziness, but I had no intention to do anything but use this as a screwdriver. In a pinch, I’d knocked the corners off and filed the shaft of the screwdriver ahead of time. That means everything on it was slightly convex in general, and then the corners are eased just enough to not make them uncomfortable.

This turns out to be a gold mine for card scrapers. It’s not a matter of whether or not this will dominate the other scraper burnishes that I have, it’s just how much rounding of the corner is needed. I ended up polishing the almost flat faces and then stoning the corners now and buffing them. you can flatten an already-there burr with the width or thickness and then roll the handle ever so slightly to introduce the corner and a burr is had effortlessly.

I am so lazy, existing within a hobby that does have a lot of physical exertion, that something little like this is the nugget of gold that I always look for. you don’t even have to squeeze the scraper tightly on the bevel side, you just rotate the screwdriver shaft a little and introduce the back corner to the edge that’s being turned to a burr (or drawn out) and finding just the right amount of edge aggression to cater to laziness is easy. The screwdriver itself is around 64 hardness, so it’s indifferent about scraper edges, and it’s tough enough that it’s not going to break easily as a screwdriver.

I’m happy to have not made it any nicer than it is, and am now somewhat curious about perhaps making some nice screwdrivers out of round or square stock and maybe making them octagonal and much more carefully filed on the metal parts. They won’t be 125cr1 or 26c3 as long shafted screwdrivers- they’ll be something a little lower carbon for toughness. And if I lose this one, I’ll feel no guilt – the ultimate time spent on this was closer to 20 minutes due to honing the screwdriver shaft and hastily slathering varnish on the handle. I can do that again faster than getting too and from home depot in a busy retail corridor and then doing stupid things like “come on, now the stub screwdriver is $10 instead of $6, and it’s made in China?”.