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I've moved the Galoototron blog to its own domain, galoototron.com! So update your bookmarks and click on through the image below, which comes from the first new post on the new site!

Or, rather, two descriptions. I finally finished the pile o' handles I was working on, and two of the saws on which they belong are complete:



The one in the back is a 28" Disston No. 7. When I got it, it was filed at 4.5TPI crosscut. However, this pitch (and the saw's handle) is far more suited for ripping, so during sharpening, I converted it to a rip saw. For the first time when simply modifying teeth on an old saw, I needed to add some set--there was practically none. Although the surface looks a little funky (strange corrosion patterns), it's actually pretty smooth, and it tears through wood like a bat out of hell. I have wanted this saw to be complete for a long time. I'll be using it a lot.

The other saw is a "Warranted Superior" backsaw from the 50s or so. There's nothing remarkable about it. It's not mine (it belongs to someone in the family), but I've had it for a while because it was in bad need of a rehab. The teeth had been nearly worn off in places. Nasty. So, after refinishing the handle and redoing the teeth, it cuts about as well as you'd hope it to. Interestingly, it's been a while since I did crosscut filing; most of my latest projects have revolved around different varieties of rip saws.

Unfortunately, this thing was on my project list for a couple of years. Now I can finally send it back to its owner.

I marked out the angles on the mortise chisel by "feel," just by sort of looking at all of the pictures I've seen and guessing. With two sides cut away, it looked like this:



I cut out these sections with my larger rip saw. It would have taken forever with anything else. Then I used a block plane to smooth around the oval. I nicked the blade of the plane against the chisel bolster doing that. Boo. Grinding that stuff out is always such a pain.

Following the plane, I used a spokeshave to further smooth the oval shape, then, finally, progressive grits of sandpaper on a block to do the final smoothing. This sequence was quick.

A couple of oil/varnish blend applications later, along with the requisite sharpening, it was ready to use. Here it is with its first test mortise-and-tenon joint (upper left, not that stuff to the right):



It's a lot of fun to use. Best of all, it's fast.

I've been jonesing for a "real" mortise chisel for a long time now. My obstacle, however, has been the irrational cheapskate inside of me. There's been a lot written about the English "pigsticker" style of mortise chisel lately, and I've been trolling ebay for a cheap one or one without a handle. I finally got my hands on a handle-free sample a couple of weeks ago.

Made by W. Butcher, it has a strange width--something like 9/32". This is close enough to 1/4", I guess. Its cutting edge is laminated to a softer metal for the rest of the blade.

Unfortunately, it was dubbed at the tip when I got it, and it was a lot of work to flatten the back (I took the dubbing problem from both ends; shortened it slightly and flattened the rest off). You would think something that small would be easier to flatten, but the steel is really quite hard.

After doing this task, I set out to make a new handle per Derek Cohen's instructions. Putting in the hole for the tang was a real pain in the ass:



The wood is yellow birch. We'll see if it holds up. Next step is to shape it, then finish sharpening the blade.

I'm in the process of making a shoe rack. It will basically be two side frames with three shelves, all done with mortise-and-tenon joints. I have most of the wood dimensioned, and have the boards for one of the sides cut to length now:



There are going to be quite a lot of mortise-and-tenon joints in this project. I've been practicing, and am getting much better. The fun part is that I'm no longer using the "drill and chop out" method of making the mortise. Now that I have no more downstairs neighbors, I've just been chopping the whole thing out with a chisel. It's noisy and destructive and a lot faster than fooling around with the drills.

This wood is some rather cheap mystery softwood. These boards have a lot of knots in them; in fact, they're downright tragic if you look at them whole. However, if you buy 10- and 12-inch widths, you get a lot of sections that have clear wood, and you can get cuts that are quartersawn in this way. This is a pretty common trick with softwoods.

The growth rings are very closely packed in some of these boards, but it's still a rather soft wood, somewhere around the toughness of yellow-poplar (tuliptree). It's always kind of tricky to make joints in wood like this, but I must admit that there's a bit of a charge when you succeed.

I'm in the process of varnishing four saw handles, a plane tote, and a plane knob. Here are half of the pieces.



As usual, I'm not being terribly speedy here. It's been seven months since I started working on that tenon saw handle in the center. Things happen but I like to think that sooner or later, I get back to this stuff. (Especially since I've had the saw blade sharpened almost since I started on the handle and it's otherwise ready to go.)

The larger hand saw handle in the rear is for a Disston D-8 that will become one of my new rip saws, somewhere at around 7TPI. This will be in addition to a No. 7 (I think) that's going to be a larger 4.5TPI rip saw. The handle for that one is also in this batch, thankfully. Both of these handles were glopped over with some awful green paint that I needed to strip before the refinishing process started. What is it with the green paint?

The initial finish on these two handles was a mix of "colonial maple" stain, some satin polyurethane, and tung oil, for an oil/varnish blend (this makes the rays in the beech look nice). After a few coats of that, I'm now putting on satin polyurethane. I like the way that a top coat of polyurethane feels on the other handles I've done (as opposed to alkyd varnish and oil/varnish blends), and it seems to hold up better. It takes a little more effort to get polyurethane to look decent, but it's not that bad.

I think I need one or two more coats on the handles.

The knob is from a Millers Falls #22 jointer plane that's been waiting for restoration. I did not use the oil/varnish blend on this (or its accompanying tote), because the ray structure in this tropical wood did not seem worth bringing out. I may be done with the plane parts; I'll evaluate that later.

I made a shooting board a couple of weeks ago. As with the bench hook, I don't know why I did not do this earlier.



As it turns out, there's a repeating pattern of things I don't know here. I have no idea why I dovetailed the lip onto the front. I did this on the bench hook, too. It didn't take long and it wasn't hard, but why? I also don't know why I decided to do two little pieces for the front lip instead of one big piece.

The Veritas low-angle block plane works fine for shooting stuff of this width. You could use a low-angle jack plane for this, too. But I now see why people like their miter planes. I don't really see myself spending so much cash on one of those for this purpose, though.

I need to make a rack for my chisels and small saws. The bench is a mess.

Here's a shot of the rebuilt bench in the new shop. I suppose it doesn't look much different than the old bench, since most of the changes are on the side (big lower side stretchers and 2x thickness on the legs).



Yes, those are shavings on the top. I managed to do a tiny bit of wood prep on that piece of spruce or fir or whatever on the left (it's mystery cheap softwood from Lowe's, surprisingly not too bad).

Also, there's a new bench hook over there on the right that I made a little while back before moving. Yay for bench hooks!

I haven't made much in the past few months because I moved. That's always a pain. However, I now have a shop. This seems like it will be a pretty big improvement.

In preparation for the move, I rebuilt the base of my workbench. I replaced the legs with 4x4s, widened the depth of the side stretchers, and replaced the lower side stretchers with much larger timber.

No pictures at the moment, though. I'm still getting things organized. There's a lot to do here.

Here's a quickie project for a co-worker, a crepe spreader. It's 5x7 inches.



It uses a sliding dovetail joint to connect the two parts. The joint came out better than I expected but I don't think I will use it for any future crepe spreaders. A wedged through mortise and tenon seems like it would work better.



It's pictured without a finish. I'm going to give it a very light once-over with some sort of oil (probably olive oil) just to make the surface a little easier to clean after use. Otherwise, it's not worth really giving it any sort of extravagant finish because it will see a fair amount of wear anyway.

Well, this is more or less done. I haven't decided if I should apply varnish over the oil/varnish blend that I put on it, but it looks decent enough right now.

Well, it was a long time coming, but I finally finished this saw.



It has 13 teeth per inch, filed rip at a 0 degree rake angle. It cuts smoothly, but not super-quickly, as one would expect for a saw of this size and pitch. The finish on the handle turned out pretty well. I guess it had better, after, what was it, 10 coats of varnish?

And even though this one is done, there's another one for a 16" tenon saw in the works.



Those tools to the left are the Shinto saw rasp and the Gramercy sawmaker's rasp.

I've been messing around with hide glue in preparation for assembling the dovetailed box I've been working on for centuries now. That stuff may be smelly, but it does seem to work quite well if you have the patience.

For whatever reason, I messed up one of the corners and managed to make the joint out of line. The joint fits fine, though. I must have slipped when marking out the tails from the pins on that one joint I did in reverse. Oh well.

I got two of the joints together (badly), and then realized that the panel should have probably gone in after one joint, because the frontally-exposed grooves were stopped. I worked around it by bending the sides enough to slip the panel in:



At this stage, I realized that I am clamp-challenged or just silly, because I wasn't able to jam the tails in far enough to get rid of some very small gaps on that side, even though I knew it was possible to do that. When I glued the front on, I used my WorkMate and the one bar clamp I have to get rid of that problem on the other side, at least for the most part:



It's pretty obvious, though, that I'm going to have to provide some clamps and cauls for this kind of thing.

I somehow forgot exactly how I did the holes in my last saw handles, and I just had to do it again, so I'll enumerate the steps so that I don't have to remember the next time. Basically, you need to bore holes in the handle, with one side of the handle having larger holes than the other, because one side needs to house the saw nut, which is wider than the screw on the other side.

So here's how (it assumes that you've already cut the sawblade kerf):

1. Secure the handle with a sacrificial board underneath.

2. Mark the holes on the screw side with an awl, using a template (or by hand).

3. Drill all the way through with a brace and bit sized for the screw.

4. Clean out the holes and sawblade kerf, flip over the handle, and resecure.

5. Place a piece of paper in the sawblade kerf.

6. Using a twist bit sized to the saw nut in the brace, enlarge the holes on the other side. Slowly ease your way in to prevent tearout and keep the hole centered.

7. Stop when you hit the paper. After enlarging all of the holes, pull out the paper and clean out the sawblade kerf again.

8. If necessary (this depends on your hardware), carefully use a countersink to countersink the holes on either side.

I suppose that it isn't strictly necessary to have different-sized holes with the hardware that I'm using, but you definitely need to do it with older-style saw screws and nuts.

I haven't been working on anything major lately, but two little projects that I haven't mentioned before are coming close to completion:



On the left, a handle made out of cherry. The template is identical to my apple handle, and the saw will be identical as well, except that it is filed rip instead of crosscut, so I will be using it for tenons and perhaps larger dovetails.

On the right, a cutting gauge made from scraps of beech. When complete, it will have a captive wedge to hold the arm tight, and some sort of wedged blade that I haven't figured out yet. I'll probably give it the same finish as my mallet.

The next task for the box was to cut the grooves where the panel will slide in. The only somewhat appropriate tool I had for this task was my Millers Falls #67 router plane. This is more or less a copy of the Stanley router plane, but without the fence. Unfortunately, the fence is what I really needed. So I decided to make one. The first attempt was just a piece of wood attached to the bottom through the hole in the plane sole. That didn't work very well.

I decided to get a little more serious about this, and made a combination shoe/fence out of masonite and a strip of yellow-poplar.



This was a nice excuse to use my overly expensive countersink to keep the brass screw heads below the various mating surfaces.



It's still not the easiest tool in the world to use; to cut a groove, you must move the adjusting nut down between passes while keeping the blade in the same lateral position. You can accomplish this by doing the adjustment while keeping the blade inside the groove you're in the process of cutting.

There's just one bit that you can't get with the shoe/fence attached, and that's the very end of the stopped groove on the pinboards where you start the cut. There's a "swimming pool-like" recess there that you need to cut deeper (see the first photo above at the bottom right). To get to that, just remove the shoe/fence and cut in the opposite direction. You don't need the fence for this because the shallow groove that you already cut guides your blade.



So now I have the four sides and we're nearly ready for assembly. It's probably time to complete that bottom panel.

Unsure of what I was going to do next, and with little time to do it, I sat around doing very little for a while. Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that making a dovetailed box will help me improve my technique. So at the most glacial pace imaginable, I milled a board, cut it to width, then cut out four pieces for the box sides.

Then this weekend, I made the joints. I was really slow at first, but gradually gained a little confidence.



That turned into "too much confidence," because I sawed the wrong thing when making the tails of the very last joint, which screwed up a lot of things. After looking really stupid for a little while, I decided to salvage it by shortening the tailboards. However, if I simply made a new joint on the opposing tailboard, I would have had to shorten the pinboards too.

So I decided to just try re-making one set of tails by marking them out from its pinboard. It was a little unnerving, since I'd never done it that way before, but it seemed to work out okay. I'm slowly getting used to sawing straight with that little dovetail saw, though I have to admit that it's a lot easier and natural-feeling with the saw I made a handle for.

The box was originally supposed to be 10 inches on each side; now it's gonna be 9.5"x10".

Next step is to make the grooves for the panel (which I've already milled but have not assembled).

Last week I did some milling in preparation for a dovetail attempt. Having fooled around with various things for a few days, I decided to finally give it a shot today. I followed the instructions in Korn's book pretty much to the letter, and wouldn't you know, I ended up with two pieces that looked like a tailboard and pinboard.



The most interesting part is that the pieces fit on the first shot. I sawed and trimmed the pinboard just up to the lines, and after the cleanup:



I decided that I wanted to glue and clamp it up, so let's see how it looks once I plane off the ends (maybe tomorrow).

I spent about a million years applying varnish to the handle, and despite many distractions, I finished and rubbed it out today:



Since I was on a roll, I decided to finish the job today, too. First, I cut off the old handle, filed out the notch where the back fits into the handle, and drilled the holes:



Finally, I filed off the rough edges, put the blade into the saw, and inserted the mounting hardware.



I haven't had time to really test it out yet, but it seems to feel okay in the hand.

Though I did this a couple of weeks ago, I haven't had a chance to post it until now. I managed to acquire a small bench vise for metalworking, and bolted it to a board, which I then, in turn, clamp to the bench when needed.

This was necessary to cut the saw screw/nut hardware for the new saw handle:



I used a mini hacksaw to cut these "furniture joiners" down to size, and then a file to smooth them. Then I used a brace to bore the holes in the handle (holes not shown here, but I think you know what holes in a handle look like).

The handle is now in the finishing stage. I'm using a clear satin varnish. It's almost done; I screwed up the last thick coat, so I'll need to sand that level and apply one more, but I should have the end product ready next week.