Fundamentals of Hand Tools Session 3: Cut to Length and Clean Up the End Grain

Next I'm going to saw five degree angles, on the ends of our front and back pieces. And you can certainly do this on the table saw adjusting your mitigation to five degrees. That's a breeze, but you know what? It's kind of fun to do it by hand too. And you might think that, Oh, I could never do this. I could never get a straight cut, but let me show you how simple that is. First of all, I'm going to lay out these angles, using a pattern that I've made. And because I make a lot of these boxes all at the same time, it's a lot easier, to draw everything using a quarter inch Mdf pattern than it is to lay out each one individually. So I'll just lay the pattern on the piece, and center it by eye. The piece is just a hair longer than the pattern is, so I don't have to worry about sewing right to the corner and the exact position, isn't all that critical to within a bazillions of an inch. So again, just doing it by eye is good enough. So just draw the angles on here to help guide my saw line. And the pattern also has the curve of the bottom of the box, so I'll draw that in. So let me show you this simple way to cut these angles. First, all I need is a backer piece to lay the piece on. So I don't saw into my work bench and then I'm just going to clamp a guide block right along the line and clamp this down. Okay. I'm going to use a pole saw, which cuts every time I pull it towards me, it cuts incredibly fine and incredibly fast. Here's all it takes. Just hold this all like this against your guide block and just start cutting. Here we go, pieces off. It's a pretty smooth cut, pretty straight, but we're going to make it even better using another hand tool. But before we move on to that, let me show you a different way that I saw these angles without using a guide block and clamp and all that. So we can do it much faster when I'm doing a lot of these boxes. So here's an alternate way to doing it. I've made a miter box that has both of these five degree angles cut into it with a thin curve blade. Now it's that blade is not as thin as the saw, so it's not the perfect guide, but it works really well. This miter box is just made out of scrap pieces, even these holes mean anything. They're just pieces of wood that I just happened to have around, but I've screwed and glued of piece on the bottom here to the miter box so I can set it, in my vice, Like so, tighten that right up, put my work piece in here. You notice that there are two cuts in this miter box, both angling toward each other. You can't cut these kinds of angles, just using one angle alone on your miter box, but it's pretty simple. You just cut one on one side, one on the other. The difference, I mean the distance between the slots is not important, 'cause we're gonna reposition the piece quite easily. Now to secure the work piece in there, miter box, I made the box specifically for this project, it's just a little bit wider inside here than the piece itself is, but to keep it from rattling around in here when I saw, I've made some wedges, that will lock the piece in. So let's put the piece over here on this side to follow that line. Just eyeballing it as good enough. Stick the wedges in here like this and like this. And then we can just start sewing using the saw cuts in the miter box as a rough guide with pole sides, most efficient to stand like this, two hands on the saw one in front, one in back and just keep pulling right towards your center That's all it takes. The result once again, is a really nice, smooth surface, pretty straight, but we're going to make it even better with a block plane later on. I'm going to use a block plane for this operation. Why a block plane? Because it's nice and small. It fits in my hand well, and has an absolutely minimum amount of vibration because the blade is bevel side up and fully supported by the frog underneath it. There are basically two different styles of block planes; a low angle block plane, and a standard angle block plane, planing angling like this. It's cut at five degrees, but let's assume that it's angling anyway. There is a job for a low angle block plane, because ingrain is very difficult to cut. takes a lot of force and by lowering the angle of the cut less force is required, behind the plane. And since I don't have a whole lot to grab a hold of, the less force I need the better. So, let's start planing. I'm gonna hold it in two hands. My fore, the left-hand is going to squeeze the front like this to keep it tight to the work. And my backhand is the muscle. I've clamped it up like this, so that there's a backer board here, that's cut at the same angle that I'm planing that prevents the end of the board from chipping out. If this board were not here, something horrible would happen. I just get a big chunk of wood tearing out. So you gotta have this and it's clamped tight to the workpiece so that, there's no chance of chip out. Let's go back at it here. Skewing the plane, just like a regular bench plane, also helps to effectively lower the cutting angle and you have a less effort required as well. So we're almost done, one more. And we be should be through. Here we go. Nice and smooth squarish, like trying to hold the plane as level as I could as doing it, and now we're ready to move on to the next step.