Fundamentals of Hand Tools Session 4: Angles and Curves

One of the neat design features of this box are the small miters, right at the end of the front and back pieces. These miters make these pieces look thinner than they are. They actually have to be a full half inch thick in order to have enough depth for the joint. But these miters, tapered miters that is, really make the whole thing look thinner and have a nice detail. Now it's definitely possible to cut those miters using a router or some other means of file, what have you, but it's a real difficult setup to make. It's a breeze to do with a block plane. So I'll show you how to do that just in a minute here on the real thing. So here's the end, the front back piece I've plain this smooth, so we don't have to worry about that surface. I've also taken a small square and marked in just an eighth of an inch here on all the top ends of this piece. And that'll tell me how far to cut the taper. Now to cut these miters with a block plane I could just stand the piece up in the vice and kind of go at it willy nilly freehand but that's not so easy to do, instead it's usually easier to guide your plane with something. I've cut a simple miter 45 degree miter on the end of a thick block of wood. Put it in my vice and I'm gonna clamp the workpiece to this block. And that's, what's gonna allow me to plane this miter with no problem at all. The only problem with this whole rigmarole setup is that it takes a little while to get everything adjusted into the right place. I want to have this end, right even with the thin edge of the wedge here, nothing. I don't want to cut anything down at that end. I want to hit my Mark on the other end and at the same time, reach around here and grab this clamp and try and get everything in position. I'm saying this is kind of a pain to do because in a few minutes I'm gonna show you how much easier way to do this but this is no big deal really. So once you have the block of woods set here, pick up your block plane. You don't want to be cutting into the face of this but if you do a few times, it doesn't really matter. We're just gonna use this as a guide. So then you just start cutting away. I'm holding the plane at a skew angle so I don't bump into the clamp as much of anything. And I left the plane set to take a very fine shaving. So it takes more than a few passes to get to where you're going, but it is pretty darn simple to do. And then when you're done, you have a surface that is almost doesn't need any sanding at all which is great because it's pretty hard to maintain all these nice crisp edges if you're gonna sand it as well. So now let me show you a very simple way to do the same thing. And really all I'm gonna do is to replace this block of wood with a different kind of vice that I've built for dovetailing work but I've replaced the square bar that I use in here with a bar that has the same 45 degree angle has that block. And on this vice there are two knobs on either side like this so I can just drop this piece of wood, right between the two faces of the vice quite easily. If I slack this off a little bit of ease and easier. There we go, right down in there. And then I want to hit my marks which is nothing at one end of the side. And that pencil Mark on the other part of the side just line it right up with a face of this thing, turn my two knobs and then it's a simple matter of just planing along with a fine shaving, taking a little bit off the time. Again, it doesn't matter if you cut into the face of this guide block a little bit because you can always cut it over again. But it is important I think, to continually make a fine shaving all the way so that when you're done you end up with this perfectly smooth surface, that tapers as you can see from just a little bit here, the eighth of an inch down to zero at this end, perfectly smooth. Don't need to sand it. You're ready to keep moving on. The next step in making the box is to cut a curve along the bottom of both the front and back pieces. Now in my shop, you could just use a bandsaw, have it done with, be over with it, but you know what? There's an easy way to get there using hand tools like there a lot of other choices. It's not that it gets you there faster or necessarily even better. It's just a heck of a lot of fun to do it. So let me show you the method, a method developed by carpenters many, many generations ago in order to remove a heck of a lot of waste like this very quickly. So I'm just going to put the piece in my vice, clamp it up here and then use a handsaw to make a series of curves that are just as deep. As the curves that I've drawn in here. Curve those a little bit deeper almost to the line. Fortunately, you don't have to be all that particular about hitting your line because this is just a an approximate curve. It doesn't have to fit anything. See that using a pole saw just makes us go very fast. Okay, now that I've made those saw cut in there I'm gonna take a chisel and a mallet and start to bang all these little pieces out here. If I hadn't made these saw cuts in it, I could still chisel this out, but it would be a heck of a lot more work. And you're not sure where all the wood is going to break. When you start chiseling it here. I know that every piece is gonna break at the bottom of every saw cut. I'm gonna hold the chisel with the bevel side down which gives me a better angle than if I held it bevel side up i have to be way down here with my wrist. Instead, I'm gonna be up here. It doesn't really matter where you start. lets just start banging away. I am starting at one end and going down to the middle of the curve and then I'll reverse the piece. Or I could reverse where I stand and continue on. The idea is though you always gonna be cutting downhill when you do this. So lets start back up here. This time start, we are hacking away. Something really satisfying about just cutting wood like this. I'm not trying to make a perfectly smooth curve or anything like that. 'Cause I'm gonna smooth it out later with another tool. I do wanna get approximately down to the line. How is that look, maybe one more shot. Okay, having done one side, pull it out of here, reverse this around. Oops, tackle the other side. So you can take off pretty big chunks, no big deal as long as the wood doesn't split badly on you, down into the line. Ooh, that's splitting. So let's tackle this one this way. There we go. Okay, that's close enough to where we need to go. From here on in I'm gonna use a spokeshave to do the rough cutting and then a few other tools to finish that up. But obviously to get in here with a spokeshave I need to have a spokeshave that has a very slightly rounded bottom to it. The standard spokeshave with a flat bottom, can't get down into this curve. Another standard spokeshave with a round bottom the kind you would see in a catalog has too much rounding to it by rounding I am talking about this shape right here on the bottom of the spokeShave. So flat one won't work a commercially made round bottom has too much of a curve. You don't have an adequate control with it. So what are you gonna do? Well, it's not that hard to modify the spokeshave in order to give it this ever so slight round bottom to it. I'll show you how to do that. Just a second here. I got to say that as you really get into hand tools like I have years ago, you find yourself just buying more and more of them as you need them for specialty occasions. They're not all that expensive. And what I'm going to be modifying is an old Stanley number 151, which is pretty inexpensive to buy. I've set it up over here on these two blocks of wood just so I have it at a comfortable working height, clamped it down so the down thing doesn't move at all. And of course they've taken the blade and everything else off of the spokeshave. So all I'm left with is the body of the tool. Now, as you know, hand tools like this are made out of cast iron, which is a fairly soft material and it's easy to cut with a file. So in order to round the bottom this way on the spokeshave, I'm gonna take the file and push it along the length of the bottom. And with every stroke, I'm going to start rounding it, rounding it and rounding it and check my progress as I go. I don't want a whole lot of curvature to it. It doesn't have to exactly match the curvature of my curve. Just close enough, a little shallower then will be fine. So here's how the strokes of the file work. This is called draw filing. When you push a file sideways like this and it creates a flatter smoother surface then is if I use the file long way, this is too awkward to do anyway. I also want to check every once in a while to make sure that I'm filing straight and check with a square to see that I'm getting the right curvature. Just keep going at it until you're done. It shouldn't take very long, 15 minutes or so. You have yourself a modified tool, one that you can't buy? So back to our jewelry box side, here's a spokeshave that's been modified like that, slightly round bottom latest standard on it, nothing fancy. And let's just go at it. Of course, with all hand tools you have to plane with the grain which would be going from both ends towards the middle. I've set this pretty fine. So that I don't get any major tear out. I've also set the tool so that it's cuts deeper on one side then on the other. And that way I can just slide the tool side to side until I get the right shavings. In fact, I think I'm gonna set this just a little bit deeper and to do that you just unscrew this a little bit and gives us a little tap, something like that, back to work. You just hear how it cuts deeper, tackle this side. I wanna take this curve all the way back to the side of this tenon that we cut on the table side. And there I got a little tear out. So I have to reverse direction and take this curve back on this side. And feel how smooth that's getting. That's not too bad, but I tell you it's nice as a spokeshave is there's yet another tool that I love to use that will do even a finer job than this in the final stages of it. You don't have to use one of these things. It's called a chair scraper. You can use at this point a file, sandpaper, what have you to finish this thing out? There is no problem at all. But when you have some of these tools in your hands you can do such cool work. This tool is really just a scraper in a wooden body and it allows you to make super thin shavings. No tear out at all because it acts like a scraper. So if you get any little bumps along here from your spoke shaving, a finally set tool like this you can see the little shavings that it's making is really the way to finish this thing out. And you know granted this is the bottom of the box. Who's gonna pick the box up and look at the bottom, see how nice it is. Well, I would probably almost anybody else would as well but to finish this thing out, I'm just going to take a sanding block that I've modified, just like the round bottom spokeshave over here, glued a piece of cork to a piece of plywood and then sanded the cork on both sides until I got a nice curve and using that block I can finish sanding this out. Just like this. Know just around bottom piece of pinewood would work just as well, but all sandy blocks work better when they have a soft bottom on them than when they have a hard bottom on it. I don't know the reason why, but they do. So I'm using 220 quick paper, a pretty fine paper. 'Cause that's all you need after you've used the chair scraper to finish this thing out. So back and forth like this, we go and done. Now wasn't that more fun than using a bandsaw?