After a few times going to the resort, or driving down the road and seeing a piece of tree that might be useful, I decided to set up a small kit of hand tools that I would keep in my pickup so I would always have them with me.

This week, I ended up putting that kit to the test, and added a few things to make it a nearly complete (if minimal) woodworking shop on wheels.

Here's part of it:

From top to bottom: a hand screw, because work-holding is the most important thing with hand tools; a pencil; a Big Boy folding branch saw, which is handy for rough cross-cutting; one of the birch-bark handled carving knives I made, with the sheath from MaFe; and a fine (32tpi) gents saw, which is nice for finer cuts.

Not pictured (yet) are a block plane, a hatchet, and a knock-down frame saw.

I'm moving across the country, and the movers picked up the bulk of my stuff the other day, so I didn't have a shop left. And then I noticed that there was a soft spot on the threshold of my side door. When I poked at it with the knife, there was some pretty serious rot. Apparently a boot-heel had chipped the paint at some point, letting water into the wood, and bad things happened.

So I used the folding saw to rough out a scrap of wood. Used the gents saw and knife to fine-tune it, and the knife to clean up the hole. Once I had a pretty good fit, I glued the patch into place and “clamped” it with a couple drywall screws. Split the patch, because I hadn't drilled a pilot hole, because I don't have a drill (will add one soon). Filled the gaps with wood filler, then used the block plane to match the profiles.

Three coats of shellac (wiped on with a rag) later, it's ready for paint. I'm happy I had a set of tools in the truck, and I feel better about being able to do useful work without a full shop. It's not the best repair, but with a fresh coat of paint on it, it'll at least keep the problem from getting any worse.

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I've been making stacked birch bark knife handles lately, and found a couple tools that made the process much easier.

Note that the basic tools needed are something to cut the birch bark to size (unless you're buying stacks from Russia, which are a pretty good deal, but a little short to do a complete job), and something to scrape the papery bits and any fungus off the outside of the bark. A card scraper will do just fine for the latter. You'll also need something to put holes in the bark. I use a leather punch. It works pretty good, but about every three or four pieces of bark I need to clear it out, since the bark doesn't fall out the way leather does.

As you're stacking the bark pieces on the handle, you want the holes to be big enough that you're not splitting the bark, but tight enough that the bark stays in place. Near the blade, this means punching three overlapping holes using the middle size on my punch, then two overlapping holes using the middle size on my punch, then finally a single hole using the next smaller size on the punch.

I put a handle on a piece of 7/16” tubing so I wouldn't beat up my mallet when hitting it. It also got a screw-eye so I can hang it up when I'm not using it.

Every dozen or so pieces of bark, I'll slide the tube over the knife tang, then give it a good whack with the mallet to push everything down tightly. It gets me a tighter stack, which means less fiddling around later.

Partway through building the stack, I'll take a break to thread the end of the knife tang. For the mora 120 knife blanks I will use a 10-32 die, followed by a 8-32 die, and I thread the last ¼ inch of the tang. That seems to be plenty. I use a stack of a ¼” washer, followed by a ¼” copper washer, then a #8 washer, followed by an 8-32 nut.

After I have built the stack, but before I put on the washers and nut, I will press the stack, and bake it for 2 hours at 225F (110C). I use a couple pieces of scrap wood with some all-thread and washers and wing nuts as a press. Baking the bark will soften up any birch pitch in the bark and glue the stack together a little. It'll make for a nicer handle later.

Then it's time to shape. I use a bandsaw followed by a belt sander.

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I got a post drill in mid-2018. Traded a woodworking buddy in Minnesota a spare laser engraver and some pictures of dead presidents for it. If you don't know, a post drill is basically a hand-powered drill press, and I've had a few projects where such a thing would be handy, especially since I haven't managed to find a completely straight 3/16 or 4/16 auger bit yet.

Anyway, yesterday morning I headed up to Siwek Lumber bright and early and came home with four “stud grade” 2×6x104” studs. Screwed one of them to the wall of the garage, resting on the sill plate, and with a half-dozen deck screws going into the stud in the wall. Then screwed two more to that, so I have a rectangular post firmly attached to the wall of the shop.

Then I got my neighbor's son to come over and help mark where the holes for the post drill needed to go, and after I drilled two pilot holes, he helped hold it in place while I got the screws in. Once the top two were in, I drilled the holes for the other four and popped in the bolts and it's ready to go.

I needed to pull out one of the set screws in the handle which is stripped and drill and re-tap that, but that was a relatively quick job.

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While building my octagonal box for the swap, I wanted to put some banding around the top of the box. This would mean cutting the ends of the banding at 67.5 degrees (90 – 22.5), and I figured I was unlikely to get that uniform with a saw (at least not without a nice miter box, which wasn't in the budget at the time), so I built a guillotine for cutting that angle. I used a couple scraps from around the shop, a hinge from the hardware store, and the blade from a utility knife.

The results were good enough that I used them on the top of my box straight off the guillotine.

It's a useful tool, and now hangs on the wall, waiting for my next octagonal project. I've since made a similar guillotine for cutting edge-banding for a hexagonal box. For some reason, I haven't yet made one for plain-old rectangular corners, though. Huh!

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I used this shop-made jig while cutting dovetails for 135 degree corners (for making an octagonal box). It's just a piece of 2×4 cut on the diagonal, then glued back together. The piece on the left above slides onto the piece on the right, and then the whole thing goes into a vise to hold the piece you're working on at a 45 degree angle so you can saw on the level while cutting 45 degree angles in things.

I started using it “head-on” but quickly realized it was useful in other directions too.

Not much to it, but as I've discovered in my first couple years of woodworking, 90% of hand tool woodworking is figuring out the work-holding. If you can hold the piece you're working on steady, everything else gets a lot easier, and so it was with this jig.

Thanks for looking!

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Not quite a project, but definitely a handy tool. While making the box for the 2018 box swap, I decided I needed to add a little ornamentation, so I built a scratch stock to put a bead along the edge of some of the pieces. Because there were concave curves to follow, I needed to make the end rounded (I used a ½” radius to match the curved pieces I'd made). Then I cut the wood in half, stuck in a piece of steel filed to a profile I liked, and screwed the wood back together.

Here's a test piece I did in some walnut to see if I could follow a curve and to get a little practice before starting to use it for real.

I can pull out the blade and make at least three more profiles on this one piece of tool steel, and I can adjust it in and out, depending on what I need. Turns out to be a darned handy tool.

To use it, you just push or pull it along the edge of a piece of wood, letting the end of the metal take off a thin shaving of wood with each pass. You sharpen it by simply filing the edge square. Very simple, but a lot quicker and quieter than ordering a new router bit, waiting for it to arrive, and then setting up the router, the dust collector, and routing a profile in an edge. I'll do that too, but there are days when the scratch stock comes out and I'll spend some time making a new profile that previously only existed in my brain.

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As I attempted to get better at dovetails, one of the things that frustrated me was that I was continually cutting the back side either too low or too high. When I would stop cutting to look around the back, I would find that I had changed my position, and it would take me a stroke or two to get everything lined up again and that caused troubles.

So I got a great little tool for $6 at the drug store. A folding stand mirror I can set up behind the dovetail I'm cutting so I can see the back side of the cut without changing position. It made a huge difference in getting my initial cuts to the line without crossing over. Sometimes the simplest things can make a big difference.

Now, almost five years later, I mostly don't use the mirror any more, but I still keep it handy, and some days when I'm having troubles, I'll set it up and get myself settled down again.

I think it was Chris Schwarz who said :

...everyone on the planet is born with a certain number of sets of bad dovetails in their hands. And the only way to get rid of those bad dovetails is to make them. Eventually, you run out of bad dovetails, and you're set for life.

Some days, I guess I need to get some bad dovetails out of my system, but setting up the mirror helps get me back on track.

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I put a handle on a big froe last year, but I've been wanting to make my own dowels lately, and that's too big for splitting off small chunks of wood for dowels. So I asked my friend Jeff for a smaller tool. The result was this little froe.

When combined with a doweling plate from Lie-Nielsen, I can split a piece of oak or ash off a scrap, run it down the sizes to 3/16” and trim it to length in under ten minutes. I did a half-dozen this evening to peg the French cleat into my rasp and file till in under an hour, and that included the time to drill six 3/16” holes, too.

The main problem with this setup is that longer dowels aren't really possible with it. A length of more than a few inches tends to wander a little and not be straight. But the solution for longer dowels is a Stanley 77, which I'll write about later.

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[Originally written by Bob Summerfield in February of 2019]

I should probably say a little about sharpening this type of saw for anyone who may come along later and wonder. I researched the topic as best I could with the scant information available. One nationally prominent saw sharpener, whom I respect a lot, documented his approach. He sharpened the saw with “peg teeth”, that is with an equal rake angle on the front and back edges of the teeth. That would equate to a 30 degree rake angle, which would normally be thought of as extreme. The rationale was that the saw would then cut equally well on the push and pull strokes. That is true, but equally well doesn't translate to efficiently. It wouldn't cut great on either the push or pull stroke. He also put no set in the saw, so that it wouldn't scrape the miter jack. That might work fine in thin stock, but it seems the saw would bind in thicker stock.

If you think about a miter box saw, they could be filed to cut on both the push and pull stroke, but they are not. There's a reason for that – to cut more efficiently on the push stroke. They also have a light set.

In examining Kevin's saw, it was quite dull, but the teeth were very well sharpened (equal size and spacing). I doubt the saw had ever been resharpened since it was made. In looking down on the saw with the toothline pointed up, the teeth were pointed right to left with what appeared to be a “normal” rake angle for a crosscut saw of around 12 to 15 degrees. I would call this configuration suitable for a right hand push stroke. That is, if you grasp the handle in the right hand, with the toothline pointed to the right, the teeth are shaped to cut best if the saw is pushed away from you. Kevin's saw also had a very slight set.

I looked at as many pictures of this type of saw as I could find on the internet. You could see the teeth on several of them, and they were all shaped just like Kevin's saw. Based on these observations, I concluded that a standard crosscut sharpening with very light set is what these saws were supposed to have. All that I saw were sharpened for right hand use. But what if you were a left handed sawyer? Then you would either have to use the saw on the pull stroke or have a left handed saw made for you.

I hope that is helpful information for anyone who may have a need to sharpen a French miter jack saw, or scie à recaler.

To further illustrate the above, I'll use this picture from the Lee Valley website. If you were standing on the left side of the picture, you would be using a right handed grip (though both hands may be on the saw) and a push stroke. If you were on the right side, you would be using a left handed grip and a pull stroke.

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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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