davepolaschek

I have written a number of articles about handy woodworking tools I've found over the years. This is where they're collected. A number of them are things I developed myself to build a special project (such as an octagonal box I built for a swap in May 2018).

• 45 degree jig for workholding
• Adjuster Knob for MicroMark drum sander
• Angled Carving Rest is also for holding pieces at a 45 degree angle.
• Bedan for a Buddy
• Bowl Horse
• Carving Skew Gouge
• Circular Saw Track Guide
• Curved Strop
• Dovetail Marker
• Dovetail Saw Handle
• Fast Phone Holder
• Fixed ⅜” marking gauge
• Fixed Fence Kerfing Plane
• Fixing Loose Ferrules
• Hand Cranked Grinder
• Handle for Crucible Engraving Tool
• Ixion Eggbeater Drill
• Katalox Spokeshave
• Little froe and doweling plate
• Mini Marking Square
• Mirror for cutting dovetails
• Miter Jack
• Octagonal Guillotine
• Post Drill
• Quick Mortar & Pestle
• Sharpening a miter jack saw (aka a scie à recaler)
• Scratch Stock
• Scrub Plane made from a Stanley Global #3
• Sharpening Shelf jig for sharpening carving gouges
• Small Miter Box Bench
• A pair of squares
• Stacked knife handle tools
• Stanley 77 Dowel Maker
• Stitching Pony / Clamp
• The Truck Kit

To be continued...

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In late 2017, I bought a miter jack, thinking that I would need to be making some 45 degree miters for the box swap in early 2018. Since then, I've changed my plans for what I'm going to build (I got better at dovetails, mostly) and might not be doing miters, but figured that I would play with my miter jack a little before I get started on the box construction for the swap. After all, who doesn't enjoy a little procrastination?

For those who aren't familiar, a miter jack is basically a vise with angled jaws. I've read of ones that have both 45 and 60 degree angles, but the one I found on eBay just had 45 and 90. That's probably just as well. I don't plan on making hexagonal boxes. And the 90 will mean I don't have to dig out my shooting board as often.

While waiting for oil to dry on another project in February 2018, I set it up and took it for a spin. I clamped a piece of ½”x6” poplar in the jaws, got out my jack plane (pretty sure the jacks aren't related) and started removing wood.

It works pretty well. One thing I need to watch out for is some spelching if I don't chamfer the far end, but that mostly gets trimmed away when I get down to level with the jaws. The other is that if I'm not paying attention, I can end up planing off a bit of the miter jack, which might change the angle from a perfect 45°︎ over time. Shouldn't be too tough to avoid though, and I can see where previous owners have dinged up the jaws a little.

But if I do my part, it looks like creating near-perfect miters is pretty easy. Here are my two test pieces of poplar, just standing up next to each other on the bench. That's a good enough miter that I should be able to make a nice box corner with almost no extra tuning. And while it's basically just another configuration of shooting board, having it be a vise means that I don't need a bunch of extra hands to hold the piece I'm working on.

Finally, my square says that's 90 degrees. It's just the photograph that looks a little off because of the extreme close-up.

Bob Summerfield wrote a good post on sharpening a saw for use with a miter jack.

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I noticed a socket wrench caddy that Jim Jakosh wrote up a while back, and said to myself, “I should make one of those!” This is the result.

The caddy is five-sided, which added a few challenges, mostly getting the box clamped together and aligned while gluing the five sides together. I built flat sides from plywood, with full length glue-blocks on the sides of them to angled “corners” made from cherry.

The cherry corners have various designs on them. I carved running chains of “thumbnails” into one (you can see it to the right of the yellow panel above), and experimented with four different plunge router bits on the other four. Not having a plunge base for my router, I had a few issues, but overall this is a decoration technique I’ll use again.

I initially planned to join the sides to the corners using dowels, but even having built a jig for drilling the holes for the dowels repeatably, I had just enough alignment problems that I couldn’t get everything together, so I cut off the dowels and tried again.

In the end, both the plywood and the cherry had slots cut into them using my table saw (which has a ⅛ inch wide kerf) into which I inserted some ⅛ inch ash veneer (or micro lumber) I have on hand for just this sort of thing.

The ash turned out to be just a little too thick to easily fit into the slots (by about 1/64 inch) so I needed to build a small jig to hold each piece of ash and plane a tiny bit off the surfaces to thin it.

With the splines fitting correctly now, I used some twine string and a couple short pieces of oak to twist them tight to pull the sides and corners together. It worked out pretty well.

That done, I added glue blocks to the top and bottom of the sides to glue the top and bottom of the caddy to, and cut the top from a piece of quartersawn sycamore, with an added purpleheart pentagon, and a smaller apple pentagon to decorate it. While rounding over the purpleheart with the router, I had a couple places where I burned the sycamore with the router bit’s bearing. Oops!

The bottom was just a piece of plywood, with a shallow indentation in it for the lazy susan bearing.

To hold the sockets, I bought three sets of “socket rails”. Once they’re fully populated, the quarter, ⅜ and half-inch drive sockets will be organized into SAE and metric, with two rails on the yellow side for the deep sockets I have in both quarter and ⅜ drive.

I made numerous brackets for the sides of the caddy from 1 inch by 3/32 inch tool steel. Each piece had the appropriate holes drilled into it, then I used a countersink to chamfer the edges of the holes, and then finally bent the bracket in my bench vise, using my 8 oz ball peen hammer.

All of the brackets were laid out and attached to the sides of the caddy before I had assembled it. I attached them all using #6x½ inch brass wood screws, and then removed them all before painting the sides. This gave me pilot holes for all the brackets, and any mistakes had been filled with wood filler and hidden under paint, so things looked good.

The colors are all colors from Real Milk Paint. The red is actually Persimmon, the green is Lily Pad, the blue is Lakeview Blue, and the yellow is Fresh Lemon. They all have a coat of tung oil and two coats of linseed oil applied on top of them.

The final bit of assembly was attaching the base to the bottom of the lazy susan bearing. The trick I figured out for this is that I used machine screws from the bottom of the base (inset into holes) and nuts on top of the bearing. The gap between the base and the bottom of the caddy was just big enough for an open end wrench with a nut taped into it. I only got three of the four screws and nuts together, but if that’s not good enough, I can try to put another screw and nut in. Just not today.

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Once the saw was “done” I still wasn't quite happy with it. I decided it needed decoration. With the light yellow of the citrus wood, the dark brown of coffee grounds made a very pretty contrast. Kolrosing (or kohlrosing) it is!

I decided to do a more linear pattern on one side, and a more curvy, or floral pattern on the other, mostly to get more experience and figure out what I like better. I started with the lines.

That was yesterday morning. This morning, I made curves.

In both cases, after carving the lines, I rubbed finely ground coffee grounds into the lines, then lightly sanded the surface to remove my pencil marks and coffee that wasn't in the lines, then coated the wood with tung oil, which should lock everything into place.

So there it is. Fin.

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So at the urging of a few people who wanted to know how the saw would cut, I put it together this morning and cut a curve in some ¾ pine. Nothing tricky, but the kind of thing I end up doing a lot.

I put in a new Pegas Coping Skip 6.5” 18tpi blade, and tightened it up. I took it to about an A#, just above A440Hz. That's an octave below the tension I normally have in the metal-framed coping saw, but it feels more solid. I'll tighten it up further after I re-tie the string a little tighter. Currently it took over a dozen turns to get to this tension because the string is fairly loose when straight.

The saw cuts reasonably well, and while I didn't hit any places where I was turning so sharply it would bind, the tension in the blade would've kept that from happening.

The two things I noticed were that it has a shallower throat (not surprising, that's how I built it) so I had to approach the cut differently, and the wood flexes less, which makes it feel more solid in use.

I'll keep the metal framed coping saw around, probably with a coarse blade for wasting away wood in a hurry, but I suspect this one will get a lot of use in the future.

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I decided I didn't like the little spots of tear-out and places where the grain left me with a rippled surface, so I spent an hour today going after the pieces of the saw with a card scraper.

I also cleaned up the shoulder on one of the tenons on the cross-piece. That makes the arms of the saw sit more in-line with each other so the saw blade won't be stressed more than it needs to be.

The citrus looks a nice yellow with the tung oil on it, but I've decided the frame of this saw is going to get decorated because it really looks nice with the coffee colored lines on the yellow, so I started sketching ideas. Have a few, but nothing I'm willing to commit to the surface of the wood yet. Built a couple bookcases, and I'm out of pine 1×6s now, so I phoned the lumber yard to get more, which I'll pick up in the morning, then unload, and then I'll start finishing the three built cases that are sitting in my shop. Probably be Wednesday before I even get back to sketching design ideas for this.

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I got the bow saw completed today. I still want to decorate it, but it's together and functional now.

First on today's menu was getting the arms shaped. They don't really need to be thinner, but making them a little thinner will make the saw more comfortable to use. I used a drawknife to get the other dimension thinned down and smoothed.

With that done, I mixed up some epoxy and glued the pins into the handles.

Then some quick chamfering on the corners of the arms, mostly for comfort, but also to clean up a couple spots of tear-out where the grain wasn't cooperating with me.

Then a coat of tung oil on the parts I had done.

And I disassembled a paracord boot-lace to get one of the strands of nylon string out of it. That'll be the cord that tensions my bow-saw. And yes, I'll need to tie a knot better than a square knot.

Then I cut a toggle out of one of the citrus offcuts left over from turning the handles, and put a groove in it so the string wouldn't slip off it.

And I tried a little kolrosing on the side of the toggle. It looked pretty good, but my carving skills still need work.

And that sorta finishes the saw. Everything needs to cure, and I want to decorate the arms and cross-piece, but that'll be another day.

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My next shop session was spent shaping the cross-piece and the arms. First up, taking a spokeshave to the cross piece to thin it slightly in the middle, and make the ends match the arms nicely. It's not going to be a huge taper, but just a little bit looks a lot better than none. Plus I get to smooth out the surface now. I don't think I'll be doing any sanding on this saw, so I want to fix any little spots of tear-out from cutting and planing the pieces.

Then I used the spokeshave and a knife to chamfer the corners, giving the piece a slight octagonal shape. Again, lots of grain-reading, as there are some funky reversals in this wood.

Next up were the arms. It's time to round over the ends where the pins for the saw will go. I basically mark an equal amount on the top and side, then use a rasp to round over, removing my pencil marks. If it doesn't look right, I'll add more marks and remove a little more.

Then I took a knife and chamfered the corners on the part of the arms which will hold the string. I didn't want to do too much, as I also need to shape the lower parts of the arms, but that's a job for tomorrow.

And that's it for today. I've got a day and a half in, and other than sharp corners on the lower parts of the arms, the saw is usable and not looking half-bad,

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I decided I don't like the metal-frame coping saws. I find that the far end of the saw will often twist when I don't want it to, and I'll end up cutting a curve when I don't want to, or cutting a straight line when I want a curve. So I decided I'd make a bow saw that uses the standard coping saw blades to complement my bigger turning saws ( 1 and 2).

First I cut the arms out of a piece of citrus I got from AZWoody a couple years back. Then I drilled holes in the arms for the pins (from Gramercy Tools) and inserted the pins with one of the coping saw blades I want to be able to use in this saw. This let me figure out the length of the cross-piece. The important thing is to remember to leave material for the tenons that will stick into the mortises in the arms (DAMHIKT).

With that done, it's time to chop the mortises in the arms.

Just chisel work with a ¼” chisel. Aim for about ⅜” deep, because I'm working with ¾” stock.

Then it was time for a little break, so I fired up the lathe to make the handles. The citrus turns pretty well, I think.

Time for some tenons. Cut them to match the mortise, then pare with a chisel to make them fit. They can be a little loose – the shoulders carry all the load.

Do a test fit and mark the pieces for orientation.

Then it's time to start shaping the arms. I do one dimension at a time, roughing with a coping saw, then a spokeshave, then a knife, and eventually maybe a rasp (if I can't get a nice finish with the knife).

Then it was time to take a break and get some food. Next up will be shaping the other arm (they don't have to match exactly, but they need to look good together) and the cross piece, then doing the same in the other dimension for all the pieces. Also need to epoxy the pins into the handles, find some string, and carve a toggle to tension the string.

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This is a project I built in December of 2020. It's one of my most-used saws in the shop.

• First Day's Construction
• More Shaping
• Wrapping It Up
• Cleaning Up The Surfaces
• Test Run
• Kolrosing

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