Sharp

  Like most people my shop is filled with blades: planes, knives and chisels mostly.  I also take a serious interest in the blades in our kitchen as well as the gardening tools. 

  If you are vigilant in your tool maintenance your blades will seldom need to be really sharpened, they only need to be touched up (honed), because the edge has been slightly rounded over in use making it appear more dull than reality.

 The two most common ways to hone a blade are the traditional butcher's steel.

  With experience and practise a honing or butcher's steel will do a good job of keeping knives in top shape. It is easier to use with the longer blades you see in a kitchen.

  Another excellent way of honing blades, and the one I use with my wood carving knives and chisels is a leather strop.

   My carving strop is similar to this one, it is leather, glued to a flat pieces of wood and charged with green polishing compound.  In the old days when barbers used 'cut throat' razors they all had a strop hanging from their chairs and before you got shaved the razor was honed on the strop.  Cut Throat razors disappeared before my whiskers appeared so that is an experience I missed. (like many childhood diseases, an experience I am not sad to have missed)

  Neither the steel or the strop is very convenience to carry about and so I used a small ceramic stone (about a 2000grit) for a few years as a pocket touch up stone.  I had a couple of reservations with the ceramic stone:

one: is it heavy and wants to pull my tool belt or pants pocket down, and,

two: if a ceramic stone hits a cement workshop floor the result is modern art in the form of pieces of a once expensive sharpening stone, and so it becomes a detail to be fussed over and worried about while trying to work. I found myself putting the stone away in a drawer and finally it ended up in the tool box containing my carving tools. Not handy at all.

  The solution presented itself about a year ago when I was visiting New York state and stopped into a Rockler store.

DMT credit card diamond stone

  I bought a fine stone and stuck it to a piece of 3/4 inch oak with double sided tape.

  The wood backing provides a place to grip the stone and I have painted the wood red, like all my shop made jigs and tools.  This little honing tool weights almost nothing, is a good size and is unbreakable.  Those characteristics mean that this tool is close at hand when I am working. It is good for touching up an edge without interrupting the flow of the work. 

  I expect to buy another one the next time I am in a Rockler store, in fact. Then I will have one for the bench top and one for my tool belt.

Two Tips

  I was preparing a couple of pieces of walnut for a small project.  As I squared up the piece I reached for my yellow pencil crayon to mark the wood.  The first cheap quick tip for today is use white or yellow to mark on dark wood.  If you've got kids there are pencil crayons laying around, if not check out an art supply store and buy a single pencil.  While a standard graphite is visible, yellow is Hi-Vis.  

  My second tip:
  I have always found taking the bottom bag off my dust collector easy, getting the bag back on; directly challenging gravity, not so easy.  Some times it became a swearing situation.

  After going out of my mind every other  month for a couple or years I hit on a way to reduce the agony.

    I put one of those big yard waste bags into the bottom bag.  The heavy paper provides enough support to the cloth bag so that I can get it replaced on the bottom of the dust collector and the tension ring around the bottom of the dust collector tightened up. (with much less trouble)  I had tried the bungee cord trick but never had a cord of the right length for it to really work. Having the yard waste bag in the dust collector means not having to dump the saw dust into a bag later too.

Draw Knife

I have the luxury of some very good second hand tools.  One of these tools came from my Grandfather's workshop via my Father's workshop.

This draw knife  came in handy when I wanted to remove bark from some of my found wood.  

soon to be a walking stick

  With the wood held in the vise I was able to quickly and easily remove the bark.  The other use for a draw knife is to do the preliminary  shaping before putting a spindle onto your lathe.

  This draw knife has been around for many years and since it is used so seldom it is still very sharp.  The end is preserved by careful(?!) wrapping in a custom sheath.

  Just because it is custom doesn't mean that it is hand stitched albino kangaroo hide.  The wooden slabs are held in place by the large hair elastics that you buy at the $ Store.  Protecting the edge of blade tools is good for them and for you.

  It is finally garden season and as much as wanting to share photos of projects, I have a garden photo to share.

ciematis in the Kids garden

  It was a long cold winter but the glory of summer is here.

  

Auger Gimlets

  When I started buying tools for my shop from Lee Valley, back before the internet I had to decide on the tools quality and use based on reading their catalogue and occasionally finding a reference to the tool in a magazine or book.

 One such set of tools was Auger Gimlets.  I bet most shops not longer have a set of gimlets, and in truth you will get along fine without them. However I like my set:

auger gimlets

  My set is now 20ish years old and has been ignored for months at a time. But....when I use them they are really the only tool available to do what I want.

                                              

  These are a pocket truck and a larger wooden toy being held up for spraying with arousal varnish.If you look under many of my smaller carvings you will find the tell tale hole left in the bottom.

  I have used various gimlets for creating pilot holes in many projects where I was driving a small/short screw or a screw eye.  The gimlet gives the screw thread on the screw eye enough to get started.

  Today I used my gimlets to drill a hole in a material I have never worked with before.

 

  A number of years ago a friend, Karen, gave me two deer antlers that she found while out walking in the forest near her old house.  Needless to say I was happy to receive this thoughtful gift, I had no immediate plan for the horn but I was sure that one day I would make appropriate use of it.  That day was today.

  The gimlet connection is the fact that I used a gimlet to drill the hole in the antler in which I set knife blades. I began the process with an electric  drill and bit but almost immediately decided that drilling was too aggressive for what I was doing. The gimlet allowed me total control and to taper the hole by using different sized gimlets as I augered out the centre of the horn.  By the way the antler smells "funny" when it is sanded.

  These knives are antler handles with custom blades made by Stefan Heldt of Sweden.  I was told by the clerk in Pasadena AB in Stockholm where I bought the blades three years ago that Mr. Heldt was a blade maker of high distinction in Sweden and had recently won an international competition.  I don't imagine that these two tiny blades are his very finest work, but they are spectacularly fine/sharp blades.  If I ever decide to take up doing eye surgery as a hobby I think these blades will be up to the task.

  I encourage you to check out his web site. 

             http://www.stefanheldt.n.nu/

  It is my plan to try to write an entry in this blog once a week or so.  I don't plan for it to always be wood working, because I many loves, food, baking bread, riding anything with two wheels,and family. We'll just see how it goes.

cheers, Ian W