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A couple of years ago, I wanted to make some seaton-like chisels. Not copies for the first ones as what if they weren’t very good to use? They are the apple handled chisels that are on the front page.

I made those out of 26c3 and at the time, a little too chicken to grind them that thin, I left them around .08″ at the tips. One of them was a touch soft and I later found that one to be 60/61. For 26c3, to have a chisel that soft is pointless -it evades the usefulness of the steel, which is to have good (not great, but good) toughness or resistance to breakage at relatively high hardness. something like 64/65.

I thought they were all soft because of that, though i can’t recall why. But you can tell when a chisel isn’t where it should be based on how the burr responds, at least if you have some familiarity with what it should be like. I put these chisels in a drawer and gave one to Warren, and he used it for a week or two and said “I wouldn’t want it to be any harder” and brought back the one he was using. Warren doesn’t like really high hardness tools and i thought all of these were soft, and later tested a couple and they are 64/65 or maybe half a point harder than that yet.

The soft one, I probably got impatient while thicknessing and that’s that, or I may have had a snafu tempering by leaving something not fully protected by a mass sandwich (a mass of aluminum that is) in the toaster oven.

I pondered throwing these away and almost did, just because it does get aggravating sometimes to have stuff around that you think is only half good. Fortunately I was wrong, and fortunately i didn’t throw them away before getting a hardness tester. And I also learned that I spoofed Warren unintentionally by giving him a 64.5 hardness chisel that he had no trouble sharpening, so that made for a nice bit of proof that alloying means a lot when it comes to sharpenability.

I’ve made some other closer to Seaton chest reproduction chisels and am slowly getting around to making a set for another friend who I have no business making tools for in the first place. But with all of the sharpening stone box making and now a couple of planes, I’ve come to appreciate a thin chisel.

The apple handled chisel here that’s in the middle did all of the excavation in this plane as well as the rosewood jack that I last posted. rosewood is a nice working wood, but it’s still a lot more punishing than beech and I don’t baby the chisel. I’m sure I could break it by trying to pry great amounts, but that’s stupid, anyway. chisels sever and the real usefulness for prying is getting little bits out of corners or thinner bits split off by rotating. This is borderline abuse, but nothing was suffered here.

The Difference

The big difference using this chisel and going a little slower – something I need to do with rosewood anyway so as not to waste it or leave garish chunk outs on side grain, is that this chisel can be sharpened indefinitely with two stones and never see a grinder, and never cost the user any time.

In wider work like dovetails/half blinds, etc, it wouldn’t be any slower and if the corners need to be gone, the edge is so thin at the front that it could be done easily by honing a slight bevel on the sides. Not a big wide flat one, just one that’s subtle. That is, after all, on some of the chisels in the seaton chest pictures – a user-added very small side bevel, but one that’s functional.

The amount of time to sharpen this chisel sans grinder is not more than a minute and a half total including stropping or buffing and to do each of these planes, I sharpened twice. For cherry dovetails or something like that, the edge would last an eternity.

I’d have been worried about breaking a chisel like this – this particular one is at least 65, and also wooed by the discussions of Japanese steels and that steel is always fragile at high hardness. It isn’t. these very chisels are going to make for an interesting comparison against hitachi white 1, as I suspect that the 0.25% of chromium in 26c3 is probably a benefit and not a detriment, but we’ll see when I finally get a set of solid steel chisels made out of hitachi white 1. It may not be until later this year unless I get laid off or who knows what else.

If I do, there will be a toolmaking bonanza for a little bit. I’d prefer not to get laid off, of course! But there’s definitely not enough hours in the day to make just the things I want to make let alone make a few more things for other people.

As with many things, the experience here using this chisel has really made me think some things just from function and feel that I would not have guessed. Yet another thing where informed or experienced opinion is just far better than supposing.

I know the answer for mortising in general is that a chisel should be thicker than this one. This one wouldn’t tolerate that much hard forces because it just isn’t thick enough for that, and it wouldn’t rotate in a mortise. but I’m starting to get a sense as to why cabinetmaking didn’t require or prescribe any “firmer” chisels in the sense that people errantly think of them now. It required firmer chisels as Nicholson described them – chisels strong enough to form wood.

What I really don’t have any need for is chisels that were designed to survive uninformed hands on a construction site. When I first started woodworking, I would’ve called stanley 750 chisels “delicate”. Things change over time.

That would be part fore, part Jack, and part try. The reality is, I don’t need the plane, but I need what it offers to build the plane, which is just the same kind of three dimensional satisfaction that you can’t get by reading about things or having to sort out real problems. That’s the draw of the shop for me.

There are some ulterior motives. I wanted to make the iron and cap iron and see if I can make them to a standard that ward would. Jury is out on that. And also, i’ve always just loved running a jack and try plane through wood, but once in a while, a full sized try plane can be a little much. So this tweener plane really has the most potential use as a smaller try plane. if it fails at that, it’ll just be set less aggressive than my usual jack and used in its place.

The reality is this role is also undertaken well by a stanley 6. But it would take a long time for me to figure out how to make a Stanley 6 and it probably wouldn’t be that great.

This is what it looked like originally. I like what walnut does as a wedge – it’s protective of the abutments but also far better at confirming to little differences in the abutments themselves or the top of the cap iron. I really don’t have any interest in putting the iron and cap iron together and then belt grinding the top so that the spring in the cap is straight along the top. It’s not needed, but with a rosewood wedge – as I found out – there isn’t enough give in the wedge and fingers and along with fiddling with grip, I was afraid I’d get stiff at some point and split an abutment.

The look of the wedge is a bad match, though, and it’s not aesthetically very good, either. It’s just OK.

So, keeping track, this is the original wedge. I needed to make another one no matter what to address a few feed issues, and then I made another one out of rosewood but never managed to get to profiling the top due to its behavior, so I don’t have a picture.

At the very least, making a new wedge, staining the walnut a little darker with earth pigments. I don’t like coloring wood, but I’m willing to do a cheesy job here for a specific reason. Walnut gets lighter with age and sun exposure.

Notice the iron. somewhere I lost track of how close it was to the handle due to either a layout error or something logical in terms of what I was marking off of. that leads to jumping to conclusions, but now that I’ve had the chance to refit, refine the feeding so it doesn’t clog for any reason or even hold the shavings in the mortise temporarily, I realize that the iron is clear if the handle front (just barely) and it has no impact here, so there’s nothing to fix.

I’ll sludge up the pores in the wedge with french polish and it’ll stand out even less.

Making something is a process of making little mistakes and avoiding big ones, and then even if you make big ones, seeing if you can live with them or learn from them.

The handle position and gouge cut at the end of the chamfer stick out to me. I used a gouge that wasn’t what I normally use and had to correct it and widen and flatten the cut. I made the others kind of bland and boring just so they’d match. I’d rather see it or someone else see it and say “i don’t prefer that look – a smaller gouge cut and steeper with a bigger step looks better” than why don’t they look relatively similar?

This is a rare case where that’s all I have to say. It was really nice to conquer making a tapered iron and a hardened cap iron and the tapered iron also has the very classic back curvature in it, so there’s nearly nothing to bedding. It was over in a couple of minutes and the bias points are stark – there’s no contact with the bed other than at the bottom at the top.

The whole thing is already getting cruddy from handling and touching things up, and that’s a point where I like tools to be. Near perfect starting shape and trying to preserve that is a huge burden. Not a fan.

The billets are in the background, because I think it might be nice to make a matching style coffin plane.

I set out to make a handle for the rosewood plane, and of course, you wouldn’t want the handle to be pine. I have some nice rosewood that’s 8/4 quartered, but it really should be saved to be resawn for a guitar top or acoustic guitar backs – which is what it’s for. I thought I had a pile of 8x8x3 and 6x6x3 blanks, but I don’t. I have a couple.

Over the years, I’ve tied to buy quartered and rift blanks when I see them because they give you a lot more options than one with the typical flatsawn C pattern in the ends. When a handle has wood that shows evidence of that, it looks weird. My best choice is this:

I have a terrible habit of getting a few blanks and then one is like this. What can you do with it? it’s a bummer as it’s sawn off center two ways and if you get obsessed with a 6x3x3 blank like this trying to get every cent out of it, the work suffers. I guess something like this with shipping and tax is about $50, but you can’t just go order 10 because stock pictures mean you’ll get all kinds of nonsense when you want quartered or rift.

I’m growing up a little and instead of procrastinating, the real answer for this is I hope to make stuff nice enough that I can have some waste from resawing this kind of thing into the right orientation and the rest of it be damned. If I spend 15 hours on this rosewood plane and try to save $25, and then don’t like the way the handle looks, it’s not a good decision. I guess that becomes the challenge – if the wood is too nice to waste, but still not good enough, make the work nice enough that you will want to make the wood right.

You can see pencil marks on both the sides and the top. Ultimately, I don’t have much for power tools any longer, though I do have a nice big dolmar chainsaw!! Unfortunately, this isn’t big enough for that. so by hand it is, which is good, because it’s what I want – I want to cut the wood, feel what it’s like, get a chance to look at it. My brain is slow and because of that, my work by hand is better than work that I used to do with machines. The opposite of what most people will tell you will happen.

This is especially true shaping the handle. I have a sort of routine, but it is not end to end step by step with lots of repetition. If I were to try to speed up handle making with power tools, it would result in errors or chipouts, etc, or just not enough time to look at what I’m doing – and my eye is pretty good for a hack, but it’s not good enough to look at something briefly and just slash wood away.

Now…the ends of this leave some decisions. The top left corner is near the pith. that side of the blank is closer to the center of the tree so it doesn’t have grain running vertical into the top of the handle. The wood on the right does.

I have no idea what I meant with the O and the H when I marked this, but I want the wood with the O to be on the back of the handle. Of course, this runs out into the side of the plane quickly, so it’s the right side that gets kept here. The trade is on the other end of the blank, the wood that’s visually nicer and getting cut off here is what’s kept on that side – so the far face on the ends is the back of the handle.

It does take about 20 minutes of hand sawing something like this with a rip saw to get what you want, but it gives me time to consider. If I had a bandsaw, what would it take? Not long, but dealing with dust and changing blades, etc, isn’t time free and at least doing it by hand, I’m working the wood the whole time.

Contrary to popular belief, a normal disston d8 rip set up for anything else cuts this just fine.

I have two thin wedges from the top and bottom not in the picture and the other two shown here. there may be a use for them at some point and if there isn’t, they can go in the scrap bin. The thin ones are ideal for ripping long boards by hand. hard wood with a really slight taper that will hold boards open, so I put them with the handsawing gadgetry just for that.

I left this a little fat – a little less than a quarter just to make sure there are no surprises, planed it and squared off the ends so that they wouldn’t be a bear with bench dogs, and then thicknessed it with a jack plane and smoother.

Resawing something like this can be a little awkward, but you can figure it out. Black rubber drawer liner – the holey kind, not the thin slick stuff – is nice for something like this as the wood is hard enough that it’ll be slick on a bench top and you’ll be whacking the holdfasts endlessly.

I always print out the handle profile I want, which is always a picture from straight on either as found or in this case, I took it from a plane on my shelves.

to get the right size, I handle a plane like this – surprisingly it fits my hand, which is kind of narrow – 3.5-3 5/8″ across the knuckles. it’s a snug fit and someone with a larger hand would have to work with a finger or two over the side of the plane. In this case, it’s about 3.7″ to the top of the horn. I want 4 1/8″, just by experience.

Anyway, I use windows paint, print the picture as a % of size as a guess (i guessed 50% in this case, just eyeball it with print preview) and then measure the result. From there, you can adjust the 50% by ratio and hit the mark right on the dot with a second printout, and then you can save the picture with the size and % print scale and not have to do it again in the future. For example, 56% in this case makes a handle 4 1/8. If I get some big handed oaf who wants a plane and likes the handle but it needs to be 4 5/8, then 4.625/4.125 * 0.56 = about 0.63.

I affix the picture of the handle by making it wet with water base finish. it stays on better than glue dries pretty fast and doesn’t have much penetration. if you don’t get the picture to stick right away on the wood blank, you can just brush a little more finish on top of the picture-it’ll go through the paper and contact the wood without issue.

After a few strokes of some tools, and then filing and a little scraping, we arrive here. The level of finish isn’t perfect, but it’s about where I stop with handles on planes that will be used. I’ll probably correct just a little more. No power saws, no routers, no sandpaper, and so on – just something that’s to make by hand, and again with my level of infrequency, things appear slowly enough working by hand that you don’t end up wasting the wood.

I see things that could be better in terms of lines without being stupid. Stupid is a really long flat horn that comes out almost to a point. It serves no purpose but to be broken later. But I also have left the horn a little fat because the break rate at my mailing address for horn tips – for no good reason but carelessness – is a little high.

By the time I’m done with this handle, there’s about 3 hours of work in it. I know that’s garish to some people. I stopped trying to be a factory long ago, and because of that, the work was really pleasant to do. In the end, I’m glad that the wood isn’t just running out in weird directions all over the handle, even if it may not have broken from being made like that.

I’ve dabbled with making mortise chisels off and on the last two years. Pardon if I end up repeating anything I’ve already said on here, but before even getting into it, what makes a good mortise chisel?

1. Proportions – they need to be good both for feel in terms of chisel length and stiffness in the right place, and the height needs to match the purpose. Really tall mortise chisels rotate laterally pretty far and don’t do well in short or shallow mortises, for example.
2. Toughness vs. Hardness as well as edge stability. We’re dealing with mortise cutting, not paring, but you will find pretty quickly that if you can get a steel that has good toughness at high hardness, the edge will hold up better. Not worse.
3. Taper – part of proportions, but the taper needs to be something that helps the performance of the chisel , doesn’t create a bind by getting less tapered moving toward the bolster, and it can’t be so much that the chisel rotates too easily in the cut or is narrow at the top. Narrow just results in you bruising the ends of mortises. Interestingly, other than that, there is no magic level of taper. I can’t find anything to suggest that and a look at some similar ward and payne mortise chisels to the ones in this post shows that W&P at some point in the early to mid 1900s, applied all of the taper to one side of the chisel and the other was square. In practice, you end up with the taper even and the bottom isn’t square to it. it doesn’t seem to matter, but I’m looking to apply it to both sides of the chisel for looks and would prefer that.

To-date, I’ve made mortise chisels of O1, W1 and 52100. They’re all “good enough”, but it’d be nice to have better. The problem is, my better is 26c3 and probably 125cr1. Translated to english, these are water hardening 1.25% carbon steels. One is remelted (26c3) and the other is not – so in theory and probably in practice, not quite as uniform. Remelting also removes sulfur, which creates a problem called sulfide inclusions or stringers in steel that lower toughness. My recollection is the higher the carbon, the bigger the problem this is. Both of these steels from the suppliers I buy from have sulfur at .001%.

For reasons I don’t know, my 26c3 samples test better than the furnace schedule results say they should. That is, my samples in 26c3 were well harder than O1, but tougher (harder to break laterally). They actually have toughness numbers above anything I’ve seen for A2 and 52100. Of the chisels I’ve forged out of round bar, I guess they’re all fine but 52100 seems to be slightly better. A2 obviously isn’t on my radar, but it has nothing to offer here, anyway.

Not being able to get the 1.25% carbon steels in anything but flat stock of 3/8″ or less is limiting, though. There are other options (sourcing enormous old square files), but the steel would be questionable in terms of how clean and composition, and surprise, when you buy all of the 7/8″ square good files off of ebay, nothing in the money-makes-sense range reappears quickly.

125cr1 It Is

I can get 26c3 in stock up to 0.25″ and 125cr1 in 3/8ths Which means I can make mortise chisels up to 1/4″ in one and 3/8ths in the other. that make the decision pretty easy. I think it’s not hard to find a use for 1/4″ and 5/16″ mortise chisels in cabinet work. 3/8ths is also useful, but less so to me at least on door and face sticking. It looked like one of those cargo airplanes with the nose open, facing straight up. Snap.

the toughness data suggests that shouldn’t happen for my stuff, but you still wonder if you make something hard will it break. It’s a reasonable bias.

So, I made two. It’s not important other than to note – the uniformity of 26c3 does make it a little easier to heat treat. As in, it seems to land at the same hardness without as much heat as 125cr1, but there’s still plenty of wiggle room to get a good result. I would figure given the choice, I’d rather have 3/8ths in 26c3 because once you get to a bigger cross section and a steel that needs to be quenched quickly, you are apply cold liquid to the outside of the chisel (OK physics people, the heat is flowing from the chisel into the quenchant), and the center of the chisel is still providing heat until it finally finds a cold adjacent neighbor to travel into and then out. This is what causes some thick cross sections to not harder, or in other cases to be shallow.

I’m fairly sure when we get to 1/4″ thick irons and 3/8this mortise chisels, we’ll be conceding a point of hardness, and maybe that’s not unfavorable if it means some toughness retention.

I ended up with these – and aside from all of the above, the complication is added here that I need to forge on a bolster as I don’t have a round bar to work from to just draw out the steel on both sides of what will become an integral bolster. For whatever reason, this turned out to be harder than I expected as the forged on bolster absorbed the current from the induction forge and the tang of the chisel didn’t get much. That’s kind of a pain, but we’ll figure something out so it’s not quite as dicey as it was here.

If I have to think about anything, the first one always comes out wonky. the short one in the back has a very long tang, as I was fighting the bolster, I drove it on a little too far, then forge welded it on and then checked to see if it was in the right place. Nope, it isn’t. Not grinding it off and doing it over on a test chisel.

The one in the front is going in the mail later this week. As I suspected, the first one is fine for my use and the second is what I wish the first one would’ve turned out like. So be it. I also got a box of carpenter pencils in the mail, so there’s no ulterior motive other than that was the cleanest spot on the whole bench at the time, and I step on carpenter pencils all the time and cannot have one or three around or it will be none very soon.

These chisels are both 63 hardness after a pretty good double temper session at 400-410F, and they did come out of the quench 1 1/2 points lower than I’d have expected on a thin chisel. The compromise seems to be fine. The edge is more stable than I’ve had on a mortise chisel of any kind, and I’m sure they could be broken, but they won’t be broken in reasonable use.

I still would rather draw them out from round rod – the two ways take about the same amount of time, and forging is more pleasant than fighting differential heating with the bolster and the chisel, let alone getting out a brazing torch to heat the junction point.

I have cut a dozen mortises with the dumpy chisel in the back of the picture. Works great. The front chisel is just all around nicer. The handle is gombeira and the varnish is a slightly long oil amber varnish.

This one hasn’t hit wood yet, but the snapped sample of grain off of the tip looked good under a scope. It’d be surprise if it was bad. And unlike 52100, it is not on the edge of being a couple of points softer and suffering due to too much toughness.

I do kind of wonder if hand tool woodworking had held on, and by that, I mean to keep the legitimate toolmakers in the past working – what we have now is a bunch of subcontract it all and CNC follow – ons, it’s not the same – would we have seen offerings in steel like this? It would be difficult to do the same thing as i’m doing with an electric or gas heat treat oven, but i’m sure it could be done by induction in a production environment or salt bath.

There’s some second guessing in that statement, too. As in, if I’m perceiving better results with these two 1.25% carbon steels, why does it not appear in anything but razors and files historically?

…to screw this up.

So, what is it? Obviously, it’s a plane. At one point, I thought I might make a lot of planes, and compared to the average woodworker, I’ve made a lot. Especially if usability counts. As in, I know a lot of people make an LV kit or a krenov plane or something, but I doubt they see 1000 board feet of wood and 100 sharpenings. I made those, too, they were just single iron more classic style planes out of whatever I had around and I ended up throwing them away.

Because of the whole chisel thing, I usually will buy turning blanks when they are a good deal. Last couple of years, I found 3x3x18 Indian Rosewood blanks for $40 if you bought 3. About half were dead straight and the other have weren’t. I couldn’t understand how they could sell blanks that cheaply, and the last time I looked, their website returns nothing. too bad.

this blank is straight in parts, but other parts not. I don’t make push chisels, so the wood really has to be used for something else. Really, you’d want a dead straight or certain specific biases to make a plane, but these blanks will be used as their fitness will allow. This one is probably good enough for an 18″ plane. By the time you square them, they could take about a 2.3″ iron. I’d love something slightly larger, but that’s what’s there.

So I’ll end up with a weirdo plane that’s 2.25″ wide iron, just over 18″ long and with a closed handle as I don’t need a jack plane. Too, I wouldn’t want a try plane made of rosewood, so this gets relegated to making a pair of smoothers (will do that with another one) or in this case, something that seems like it might have limited usefulness. A plane that can be used on harder woods when a 2 1/2″ try plane just beats the shit out of you. And if you have hardwoods with runout, it takes a lineman to do that with the same ease I’d do with straight wood. So that’s the point of this one.

The other point is to use some of my tools to make tools that I’ll use or that someone else might. I need to make a bathroom vanity and rather than being smart and buying one that’s on sale, i’ll make one out of solid wood instead, and varnish it.

Iron and Cap Iron

The other thing at play here is I’ve learned over the years to make stuff out of metal. Early on, Larry Williams told me basically that without spending $3k, I’d not be able to make a tapered iron worth having. He wasn’t saying that to be mean, he was saying it because that was his experience and his lens was making an iron like the blanks that LN sells – the moulding plane blanks at that time.

So many people told me that you can’t heat treat hand and eye that I’ve lost count.

Both of those made me want to figure out how to do them and then get good results that meet my goal. Which isn’t “i have to be better than everyone” or any of that kind of chest thumping, it’s to make something that isn’t obviously amateur done. When you use or sharpen an iron that I make, it shouldn’t have faults and you shouldn’t immediately think “well, it’s decent for an amateur”.

I’ve gotten to the point that I can taper a full sized plane iron like this one with a belt grinder and contact wheel accurately, make the back slightly hollow like the old ones and hammer out any straightness issues along the way (so forget a clean surface ground type look) in about 20 minutes. All told, the pair here took about 1 1/2 hours from bar stock to a little further along than the final result *and* I still need to buy the screw, so I can’t quite say I made everything in the whole plane. I’ll think about doing that another time as I can’t think of an efficient way to make a screw without a lathe, but I can think of a way to do it grinding down round bar.

This is the shop made pair. The screw needs to have length cut from it, obviously, and I need to do some aesthetic things. With the oxide left on, I don’t need to consider grinding out all of the little hammer marks from adjustment – that part is nice, and I don’t think it looks bad. The carnauba wax stuck in the maker’s mark might be!, and the business end of the cap iron needs about five or ten minutes of bulk filing to get the final shape set, but we’ll get there.

This whole process also gave me the chance to harden the cap iron, which I like, but in sampling my planes, is only seen a small % of the time on older english stuff. As in, it probably doesn’t matter or it would’ve been done, but it costs me nothing more than five minutes of time with an induction forge and then a torch to blue the iron to spring, so I’m going to do it.

When this is done, if I don’t screw it up between then and now, I should have exactly what i’m looking for. The iron is 63 hardness 1.25% carbon steel, or maybe half a point harder, which is nice, and I’ll have a handle that I like and I think the wedge probably will be walnut just to start as it’s softer, won’t stand out too much and will have a little more give and grip.

Sometimes, it’s nice to make something just because the materials are on hand and it puts accumulated past experience to use. I think not enough of that is emphasized in the hobby – make something ten or 30 times instead of 1 so that you can do it better than you feel like your talent will allow. I don’t have that much talent compared to real makers, but you don’t have to make something unparalleled to be able to at least call it nice work. My work comes up short of fine, but “nice” is good enough.

Not much posting lately. I’ve made a few things, like my first hot formed and hardened chipbreaker as it just seems like a good idea to make an entire plane end to end:

That turned out well, and the first is good enough that the second will be exactly what I want. And it leaves just making screws without machine tools. We’ll see about that.

But turn of the year with some family obligations and kids in their mid to later years of youth before going off to college pinches time.

I don’t need much as far as woodworking goes. I need to buy steel occasionally, and getting rid of unused stuff is more important than getting more, but I did two things in the months before Christmas up through Christmas. I bought a bunch of boots to wear in the shop (did I mention that already?). Some new, some very little used – all US made stuff to try out various pairs. It’s perhaps not normal, but rather than buying a pair or two of shoes a year, I usually buy a glut of shoes every half decade to a decade. If it’s casual work shoes, I’ll track down five pairs and those will go at least ten years if they’re good shoes.

So, the boots are the same. Thorogood moc toes and a pair of redwing heritage boots. I don’t know why I never thought to look closer at them, but it was a chance thing replacing one pair with some heel pain courtesy of daughter getting better at tennis – I can no longer keep up, and putting the boots on to replace one other ratty pair of boots only to find they are more comfortable than any shoes I’ve ever worn. To see how the different boots are made, especially the simplified by really high quality redwing heritage stuff (smaller in profile, with your pants over the laces, they just look like shoes – solves shoes and boots at the same time). Great – it fits something I like to do, which is to make something you have to do something you like to do. You have to shave, or probably do. Shaving with a straight razor is a nice way to do it, one that you eventually look forward to. I need shoes – and dread finding out how crappy the stuff floating around really is as nothing is sacred in shoes.

Anyway, the tools:

I figured I’d like to get a forkstaff plane since I’ve never had one, and I found some from England and bought all three. They seem to be slow movers!! for the uninitiated, hollow sole, bench plane with a double iron. They sell for pennies and would be pretty difficult to make, especially because the cap iron matches the sole profile.

I quacked out one of my good calipers by getting tung oil in it and not noticing it until it was dry, and replaced it for now with two older vintage mitutoyo calipers. I know, no woodworkers need a dial caliper. It’s a nice thing to say. They’re awfully nice to have making tools, though and having older high quality ones that cost the same as new ones that are garbage is a far better idea – you don’t have to fight them or get annoyed with their function. And they’ll do better than new cheap ones even if they’re already used.

And lastly, I found this style of marking gauge on ebay – I knew there were a couple, but found out later that they’re pretty common:

these were apparently made by marples, but there is no name on them. As far as I can tell, there is a length of threaded rod, but it’s extremely close tolerance with zero slop, and there is some boxwood inside the brass tube.

I can’t vouch for all of them, but this one has the feel of a hydraulic clutch in a car – it is just worlds different than the average mortise marking gage, and it was about $65, I think, to get it shipped here from England. The cost of shipping is really something from England. One seller will ship something like this for $45 and the next $15. The former probably won’t find a buyer in England and because of the shipping, they won’t find one outside of England either.

But this gauge is just dandy, and I really have no interest in making one like it, so it is the rare pickup. Everything on it is just superb, and I can leave it set for 1″ work with my favorite mortise chisel and maybe use the adjustments for sport just to appreciate them.

Jeez

And as I sit here typing this out, I realize I also got a try plane or long plane that’s probably from about 1780-1820 – all depends on whether the iron is original, as well as a pair of ward mortise chisels that I should’ve left in England, but they are the kind of thing that I really thought someone should make, but are really uncommon to find. They’re a sash proportion chisel, but with more height for actual cabinet mortises, and moving toward the oval bolstered type in design – long bevel, tapers, etc, but without the heft.

So, Jeez -I guess I bought more than I could remember at the start of typing this ten minutes ago, but remember now. No wonder there’s a space problem here. I’ll have to check the gig rules for taxes on ebay, because as a never-made-profit type person, the last thing I want to do is unload a bunch of my stuff and then get stuck trying to figure out the value of it to offset the gains. How stupid.

I mentioned in the last post that I wanted to explore something more interesting with the boxes, like a furniture-like shape. I thought this would look like a couch without the back. Which my daughter came down and quickly blurted out “that’s an ottoman”. Which made me also realize that I missed the opportunity to do this style of box with one of the turkish oilstones. The two I have are permanently seated in something already and they are very irregular in shape, so that ship has sailed.

I think this is an interesting shape, but it’s lacking something a little bit and could be more interesting without much more work. Maybe another time. It’s the same boxwood substitute – Castelo Boxwood, which is interesting because it doesn’t stand out as much at first and could be confused for Maple. It’s harder than maple, but in some ways, easier to work by hand.

The ends are rounded over and the bead goes all the way around. I don’t scratch bead much and this curve on a wood that’s fairly hard isn’t trivial, so I had to sort of figure it out. There’s one other box that appears to be made of mahogany with curved ends online and when I first decided to try this, i took a closer look at it and the beads on the ends are pretty shitty. That box has interesting little carved details, and the maker of it was likely never intending to show pictures online. The trick to getting a beading blade to work across this was to sharpen the bottom of the profile to a point, otherwise it would just ride on the wood and not sink in.

the filing on the rounded side that goes onto the workpiece- the left flat – is pretty crude and it doesn’t need to be totally sharp. the center, this is a tiny bead and I don’t have files that would do it so much at a reasonable angle to the profile, but a small chainsaw file held at a very shallow angle did a good job. Night and day. It will bead anything now, even some of the 3000+ hardness central American woods.

The varnish on it is not the full set of coats, and It’ll get as much again more along with some steel wooling or sanding to try to make sure it stays level. This varnish is set with japan drier so that it can be brushed on two or three times a day. Two if no light box or warm box, and it really could be brushed on four times a day with the light box. So, it looks a little funky because it’s right off of the brush.

The stone housed in it is charnley forest. These all vary a little and this one like most is just OK as a finisher. It’s easy to see why hard arkansas stones took over for the few who needed them (dentists, engravers, some carvers) and the washita took over the end below them. They’re not a stone you need no matter what – they’re a little slow and most of them can take gouging with stuff like engraving tools.

Years ago, I bought the two handled beader that Veritas made just because I was in that phase where you’re doing a little woodworking and buying stuff that looks like a good idea, which is maybe too quick. the beading blades for this thing are decent to start with, but the beader is good for something I haven’t yet figured out. it’s pretty much garbage for this box project and there’s a handle in the way of everywhere you’d really like to put your hands to make sure the fence never leaves the side of the work, a long lever to help you accidentally spoil a bead if the beader catches, and enough cast iron and fence stuff to both trap the shavings and stop the beader from cutting, and also increase friction to 90% of the effort you’re expending.

I wonder if it was designed by the same person who decided chipbreakers don’t work. Whatever the case, I had to make a small very jiffy (fraction of an hour) stock to do the concave parts and then just turned to using it for all of the beading. It’ll be worth making a flat version of the same thing for more general use. I don’t think LV makes this tool any longer – which is too bad – too bad that it’s not lie nielsen where out of production means increased value.

So, What was my Diatrabe of the “Freds” About?

If you haven’t read the prior post, there’s no need to. Fred is a household term here for someone who doesn’t do anything, but always has an opinion on what you should do, what’s doable and how it should be done. There are polite well-intentioned Freds, but more common are the passive aggressive know it alls who really celebrate around them if nobody else enjoys themselves or accomplishes anything.

The last thing this hobby needs, or really any of us as individuals – because our intentions and wants as individuals are more important than the hobby itself. That should make sense – the hobby can be anything, but each of us wants to do something or nothing. The something could be making, researching, reading, whatever it may be. The hobby will be what it is around that. None of us has an obligation outside that. you don’t have an obligation to buy $1900 chisels or $200 router planes from China. You have an obligation to yourself – to figure out what you would like to do most and do it if you want. Very little of the information you get when asking or getting information unsolicited, will be useful to you, and most of it will be from people who are less qualified to give it than you.

Similar box. I posted a picture of the prior boxes on reddit and reddit is not exactly a site for much average depth – it’s a sign of the times…well, a decade ago when people started moving to devices vs. PCs. However, folks are usually positive there, except there’s often one or two people who are critical. I think they are Fred critical. Fred is an esoterica name in my parent’s sphere, a term for someone who can tell you the right answer for everything, offer an opinion, imply comparability with accomplished people and disappear if having to prove anything.

Freds on internet forums, reddit, whatever, are the folks who drop in on threads and disagree about something, get upset if you challenge them to offer a relevant suggestion or show something they’ve done. In my parents’ sphere, Freds also often like to tell you ahead of time you shouldn’t bother trying something because it won’t turn out well or whatever you might do will cause problems, so don’t bother.

You don’t know the Freds we do, but we know more than one person named Fred who has these qualities. Thus the name. Freds are fascinated with what you may have wasted money on (wood) or wasted your time on (making things with wood), offering unsolicited coaching as you’ll often find. People who talk the most about wasting time with something are not atypically the same folks who do nothing useful with theirs.

So…

Being notified that these boxes are a waste of time and money, it makes me want to make something more elaborate. I did want to first use stock nicer than the other wood I’ve used- which was cherry, padauk and walnut. Nothing wrong with those, and the padauk under varnish has surprisingly pleasing color. But I wanted something less common looking:

This box houses a stone that has been on a shelf in my bathroom – it’s an oilstone, but I have used it only on razors. It’s a nice burr chaser, maybe as fine as any natural stone I’ve ever used, but it’s slow cutting. I don’t think stones like this were even really used much for razors – they’re a little too slow for even that – but this one would be excellent for engraving tools or chasing burrs on profiled tools. That’s a little beside the point other than to describe why it doesn’t make it to the shop – it’s too fine for anything other than perhaps as a base for 0.5 or 1 micron diamonds.

The wood is castelo boxwood. Gilmer wood sells it on a regular basis and it’s a relative of lemonwood. It’s not cheap, but there are more expensive woods and it is divine to work. After planing the first of two blanks I bought years ago, I bought 5 more. Surprisingly, this billet has some brownish stuff in the middle, but not at the edges, so that kind of dictated the orientation of the grain here. I’d rather not see the stuff you see on the bottom at all, but on the ends is better than on the front and top, so it’s flatsawn looking on the side and at first glance, looks a little like maple.

The box is plain, I think done well enough that I want something a little more challenging in terms of uniqueness and that’ll mean difficulty.

The Freds of the world would declare it’s a waste of time, and I’m not the accomplished type who turns out something never seen before on a continuous basis – more the type who quickly responds “what have you made lately?”

Sweet Spot

I can make tools well enough now that the tools would have some open market value. But I think this box adventure has been sort of the sweet spot of what I like to do. There is no “make one” and it should be perfect sort of internet idea, nor is it something I want to do just kind of half shitty half OK in one example and move on. this box makes it five of the type with a carved bottom after what I really started out with was making several plain flat boxes to use oak that my dad had milled long ago. They left me feeling like I could make something nicer because it’s annoying for me to just make things and not think much about it other than fighting a power router or something. The difference between me and the difference between me 15 years ago wasn’t so much skill as it was tolerance to figure things out. I guess there is a lot of trivial knowledge gained, but the mindset is more important. If I was less talented, I’d make less nice things. If I was more talented (and pretty much every pro and lots of amateurs are more talented), I’d make much nicer things than just plain boxes like this. But I would be just as happy either way.

I’ll get back to chisels and cutting tools soon – it’s still nice to make those. I think I can do things more interesting – maybe subtly – and better than what I’ve done so far.

Padauk. I’ve got some padauk I bought back when it was inexpensive and you could get blanks kiln dried. which is a blessing and a curse. Dried purple heart, padauk, etc. is miles away from being anything like green turning blanks, but it’s also nowhere close to being stable as tool wood. I learned that making a skew infill shooting plane in the winter and then having the purpleheart infill swell a small fraction and telegraph all of the dovetail in the steel plane pretty seriously. Not a big deal. but for something like a fitted stone box, I’d also bet the kiln dried turning blanks cut to a close fit would be split within a year or two. The stone certainly isn’t going to change.

I have been drying the varnish on these in a UV box – it speeds things up nicely. Two or three hours, the box is up to 95 degrees, and you can remove item in question, wetsand if needed (every two or three coats) and brush a fine coat of varnish and keep going at it. The stone boxes that I’ve been making get tight just from being in that heat, and a scraper to the sides is all it takes to relieve things.

So, anyway, even this padauk, which was KD and probably 6 or 8 years old through a lot of dry winter cycles still shrinks in that box a little. when it was new, it may have shrunk enough to split the box in days. Too, I never found a use for padauk and have two 14x14x3″ quartered to rift blanks. They’re ideal. Why? wood is a funny thing – the smoothness of recently dried wood is one thing, the stability isn’t there. Once wood is decades old, it changes in feel, and I’ve started to realize that having wood that I may not use for another couple of decades will mean that maybe the wood won’t be as cooperative in certain ways. Cocobolo, for example, is just dreamy for handles if you find it really old. More than half of the cocobolo I’ve found is a little over 50 years old. Compared to newer oily seeming cocobolo, it’s almost unrecognizable. it’s agreeable, though probably less easy to plane to a perfect finish and the oiliness that it would’ve had has long since disappeared. Those volatile oils that make dry newer cocobolo kind of cakey probably aren’t stable over decades, and we already know the wood itself changes over time to be a little more brittle but much more stable as the volatiles are gone.

So I’d better use the padauk, and when you buy gobs of wood that you find on a deal, if you do, it’s probably good to treat it like a prepper pantry. It’s nice to have stuff around, but it can’t sit forever. (not a prepper, by the way, but I get the sense that preppers need to eat out of their stash on a regular basis and rotate it so as not to get to the end of the world and find something that looks like a WWI military ration).

Padauk in this case, again hand tools only again, same tools, just with a shot at making the lid thicker and the top rounded.

Padauk is supposedly around 1700-1800 hardness. it definitely has straws that aren’t terribly easy to plane expanses of on end grain easily, but it’s not intolerable. This one again has silica in it!! Too, the profile on the top is cut with little sandpaper, but unlike the other boxes where none is used, after planing, rounding and filing the profiles to near finished state, I did sand them to try to make them look as uniform as possible. I hate sanding – the mess, the boredom, etc, but on a round profile like this, it’s the easiest way I know to not have stray marks. The same beading plane worked fine again across the end grain, it has not been resharpened and the fact that it’s held up without beating up beads or leaving lines on anything is a testament to us often being off the mark about needing abrasion resistance vs. understanding geometry of edges.

Of course, the same design on the bottom after the above, and after pore filling with FF pumice mixed in a long oil varnish, the finish is almost gloss.

Almost gloss here, which you can see if you look closely suggesting that I didn’t build a big thick finish and the sand and rub out what’s left. Rather, it’s just applied and then wetsanded and after the last wetsanding with relatively fine paper, the final coat is just as brushed with a small fine artist brush. thin so that it will have minimal brush marking or stria.

It’s interesting that in making this box, I used some of the least abrasion resistant tools that I have and never once felt like they were limiting at all. For the gouges, if the tools were more abrasion resistant, it would’ve been aggravating.

Oh….

An after the fact edit – you can see the chip on the corner of the box in one of the pictures, or maybe several. You’d think that’s from chiseling or planing, but I was actually filing the end grain. I really like planing and then filing end grain – it’s miles better than sanding end grain, but it will break out the dry brittle grain that I mentioned, especially on padauk, which is really chippy at edges. I can’t imagine it would’ve been like that just after being dried. I did nothing about it – no repair, no attempt to glue the chip on and hide it because it’s a stone box. I’d be nice to make a jewelry box or something like this style and really tart it up for real – no damage, and build the finish and make it look nicer than the off the brush finish in this case. For stones, there’s no use…..why? As soon as you have swarf on your fingers, whatever you touch in terms of finishes will get deglossed by the metal grit. When these get deglossed, I’ll just hit them with 4F steel wool and wax them with carnauba. What I really want out of the varnish, and what it’s great at, is ignoring any alcohol or oils or WD40 that’ll be used on the stone – it’ll keep the wood clean.

Just a little bit more.

I wanted to make a few carved bottom boxes just to get the experience. No big plans, but it’s hard to guess into carving stuff and I’m not going to start with some kind of sculpture and get lost.

you can do this a million ways, and a little flat combination ogee like this is quick. You can just mark it and chisel it off. Turns out, sanding is the shits on something like this (which is great!), so sawing a depth line to the center and then just carving in from the edges and across followed by draw filing. as these scrolls get deeper, it would make sense to saw some of them out, but not the way you might be thinking.

I don’t have a bandsaw and I know it’s tempting to want to saw a series of saw cuts all the way along the profile, but you have a great chance of sawing one or two through the lines and spoiling the whole thing.

No electricity and no sanding with any of these boxes – the scroll itself is just too much end grain and sanding would slow everything down.

A flat file and a triangle saw file both end up being really useful – the flat files will ride their edges in the concave parts and you can run them very slightly diagonally in areas – especially on the curved part of a bastard file at the top end. A fine saw file can do the same thing – not much for material removal for each, but you can get close enough with the gouges and a chisel to have not much work left.

The cherry boxes look like this:

Each has an ultrafine India, and the reason for the shallow scroll is partly because the cherry stock I’m starting with isn’t thick enough to do anything more without leaving the inside of the box bottom thin.

These boxes are finished with varnish, and the dull one is steel wooled and waxed. This is a waste of time for finishing a box instead of just finishing with shellac or something, but it gives me a chance to experiment. I’ll use these stones (already am), or at least one of the two.

It seems like a bead would be nice, along with a deeper carve, so I tracked down some very dried out and long forgotten walnut – you can see it to the left in the picture above.

Sawed in half with a rip saw, of course. The sawing seemed weird, but I marked this billet and sawed it accurately There’s no need to do that, but I think it’s a good idea if you’re going to work by hand – it takes little longer and makes you better at it when it counts.

Resawed with the same saw and then planed the wood, which immediately let me know the wood is full of silica. It’s straight on two corners and grain running diagonal on another. Must be stump wood or close to a stump.

Since the picture isn’t big enough in this format to see the silica, you can zoom in on this link.

This gave me big enough wood to make a deeper carve. How do I come up with the profiles? First of all, I don’t know anything and can’t draw that well, but there are four ogees in this – two on each side, and a business card is probably good enough for a pattern. I have some cheap plastic curve templates and snagging curves off of different parts of them allows me to make something that’s not just perfectly symmetrical, resulting in this. something a little more radical yet would be nice, and after making this box, I realize that it would look better with the bead either in the bottom (it’s in the lid) or with a taller lid. next time!

You always hope for each one to get a little nicer, and this box is still all kind of freehand, but it’s a little nicer than the others.

The bead is just planed in it, of course across the end grain, too, with a griffiths beading plane. it’s safe and easy and a router would probably do this OK, but I don’t get out of bed to use a power router.

I’m going to try a cheesy way of filling the pores on this one, which is to use pumice and 1000 grit sandpaper in thinned varnish to pack the pores. Shellac would work, but varnish is better at showing depth in wood.

I should be making tools – I can actually make things people want doing that, but this diversion was something I had trouble resisting, and I couldn’t explain why. Since woodworking is a hobby, I try to follow the scent like pepe lepew did rather than trying to justify what I like or come up with a reason that I should like pointless little ventures…..like making chisels, for example.

Edit to Add Later

In the process of varnishing this box. Pore filling was pretty mediocre and varnish is a finish that favors rough surfaces so it’s seemingly harder to get coats to level vs. something like lacquer. I can’t tolerate the stink of the brushing lacquers indoors, though, and they’re hard, but not tough, and would chip.

but when I turned this box over, it’s not like the scroll is ground breaking, but it’s probably the best feature of the box and will pretty much live a life of use hidden out of view.

Too, notice the color response of the wood when varnish is involved. Varnish and buttonlac are two finishes that I really like – both – based on the tone they impart. They make everything seem more colorful.