Hand Tool Woodworking

Category: Hand Tool Woodworking

The place to read about my un-plugged woodworking. Nothing beats the sound of a well tuned hand plane making transparent shavings.

Hard maple chisel mallet

August 9, 2009

I ordered some bench chisels earlier this week, but chisels aren’t very useful without a mallet to pound on them with. Instead of purchasing a mallet with my chisels, I decided to save my money and make my own. While watching a cubs game I knocked out this design in SketchUp. It’s pretty simple, the head is a lamination of 4 1/2″ thick boards, and the handle is 3/4″ thick stock rounded over with the router. The only non-trivial  design element was the wedged tenon that secured the head to the handle. Thankfully fine woodworking came to my rescue with this article about wedged mortise & tenon joints.

Assembly was pretty strait forward and only took a few hours  spread out over 3 days. The first evening I spent an hour or so rough milling the stock to size.  I spent about two hours in the shop on the second night.  I profiled the handle on the table saw using my dado blades, and then rounded over the edges at the router table. Making the head was a three step processes. The first step was to glue two 1/2″ thick boards together to make one 1″ thick board, that was then cut in half to form the two sides of the head.  Step two was to route a half thickness tenon into each of the head halves. The final step was to precisely glue together the two halves forming the head with a tapered mortise in the center of it. On the final day (yesterday) I finished up, by fitting the head to the handle, & applying a couple coats of boiled linseed oil.

chisel&mallet2

wedgedmortise&tenon

A Stanley #60-1/2

August 3, 2009

I picked this little beauty up on eBay a few weeks back and finally got around to cleaning her this weekend. She’s in pretty good shape, so after a quick cleaning, lapping and sharpening she is now ready to make shavings.

My new smoother plane

April 10, 2009

I’m a power tool guy at heart, however I have come to the realization that some tasks are easier with hand tools. For example,  face/edge jointing large cumbersome boards. With that in mind, I’ve been learning about hand planes & their uses. Earlier this week I came across this plane on eBay, it’s a Stanley type 13(1925-1928) #3 smooth plane. Since it looked to be in good shape,  I placed my bid and waited.  Since it’s a fairly common plane, & not in pristine condition I picked it up for $21.50. The following pictures show what it looked like when it arrived on my door step. All I need to do now is clean it up.