I use flush-cut saws every day. We have a big Ryoba that I’ve removed the set from to handle big jobs. Plus a variety of middle-weight saws for flushing up wedged tenons and other joinery work. But I’ve never been happy using the bigger saws on curved work, such as a chair seat. The blades aren’t flexible enough, so they tend to gnaw into the surrounding wood.
I once tried a bunch of really high-end flush-cut saws from Japan. Those were too expensive and too handmade for my Foghorn Leghorn hands.
A few years ago I got this little Gyokucho Razorsaw No. 1150 from Lee Valley and have been quite pleased with it. The blade is only 4-1/4” long and is only 0.011” thick. That makes it flexible enough to lay flat on curved surface without much pressure.
Like all the Razorsaws, the quality is fantastic. The teeth are keen and well set. And the tool has an exquisite balance for such an inexpensive item (about $20 to $22).
The only downside is it’s a throwaway tool. The teeth are too tiny to resharpen (for me, anyway). And the blade is not replaceable. It is riveted to the beech handle. So when the tool becomes too dull or kinked, I’ll see if I can make the blade into a fine marking knife.
The saw is available from a variety of suppliers. I like to support family businesses, so I buy mine from Lee Valley Tools.
There are many pretenders to the Starrett C 604 RE. Accept no substitutes.
This 6” rule approaches perfection. I will stop everything I am doing in the shop until I can locate it. I bought my first one in 1996 at Aufdekamp’s Hardware in the then-scary Over-the-Rhine neighborhood in Cincinnati. It was about $20, which was a significant sum for me. But the experienced woodworkers with me that day insisted I wouldn’t regret the purchase.
And I haven’t.
What’s so dang perfect about this ruler? For me, it is the graduations etched into the steel and soft chrome background behind them. The soft chrome makes the rule easy to read and won’t reflect light like a mirror. If you buy a vintage rule, avoid the shiny chrome that Starrett used to use. It can be hard to read.
Many other rulers have graduations that are of too-similar lengths – the 16ths, 8ths and 4ths are too close in length, which makes the rule difficult to read. Starrett perfected the graduations, and I can take a measurement with one glance instead of four or five.
The graduations are finely milled into the steel and are filled with a durable black. Many other rules have graduations that are far too wide. And I am not talking about machinist precision here – many graduations on cheap rules are wide enough to interfere with handwork.
Finally, the little scale on the end is a nice feature. Very handy for measuring tenon shoulders, the depths of dados, etc.
It’s not perfect, however. If I could change one thing about the rule, it would be to remove the 64ths. I could probably work fine without the 32nds as well. When I need to get into 64ths and the like, I’m going to use a different tool.
But I cut the rule some slack on this point because it was made for machinists.
As always, I begin this annual gift guide with: The Listing of the Caveats.
In general, “gift guides” are marketing trash that try to trick your family members into buying a set of Silicone Domino Flashy Budgies with Bubble Level.
When a celebrity woodworker promotes a gift guide, it is usually just a list of trash given to them by a sponsor – usually a woodworking store. Sometimes the celebrity gets a kickback from each sale. It’s not illegal, but it’s slimy.
This gift guide is simple. It’s a list of tools I’ve bought during the last couple years that I’ve tested and really like. I paid full retail for these doo-dads. I am not an affiliate with any of these manufacturers (or any manufacturers at all). Also, I try to keep the price of the items in this gift guide low because it might be your kids who are buying this stuff for you.
If you don’t like this gift guide, please start a better one so I can take the Christmas season off for once.
Star-M F-type Bits
From the Japanese makers of the wonderful WoodOwl bits come these incredible little buggers. I was first alerted to these bits by Kyle Barton almost two years ago.
Their claim to fame is that they won’t splinter out the exit hole. You can drill straight through a board without a backing board. Also, the bits in general cut cleanly, aggressively and have a long center point (which allows you to angle the bit quite a bit).
While I’m sure they are sold elsewhere, I buy mine from Workshop Heaven in the U.K., which keeps a regular stock of them and ships them fairly reasonably. They are metric, but they are sold in such small increments that a U.S. workshop won’t notice.
The bits feature a hex shank, which allows them to fit in bit extenders and tools with a hex chuck. I definitely prefer the hex shank whenever possible; it prevents the bit from slipping in the chuck.
I bought an entire set as they aren’t terribly expensive – basically as much as a good Forstner bit. I use them extensively for chairmaking because they work really well at odd angles and I don’t need backing boards behind my work.
Here is the exit hole when I tried to force feed the bit through a piece of cherry to attempt to blow out the backside. Not bad. If you aren’t a Thundarr about it, you’ll get even cleaner exit holes.
If you make staked furniture, you’ll probably want to try the 16mm bit, which is close to 5/8”. I’ve beat the heck out of this particular bit and can report that it is still dang sharp after almost two years of use and maybe 30 chairs.
There’s got to be a downside, yes? Yes. Sometimes the bits seize up as they cut the exit hole and activate the clutch on your cordless drill. Turn the clutch off when you use these bits (or better yet, use a corded drill without a clutch). But that’s the only criticism I’ve got.
Star-M does it again.
— Christopher Schwarz
If you want to read some of the older gift guides, the 2013-2018 entries are here at Popular Woodworking. The guides from 2019 to the present are here.
After Popular Woodworking and its parent company were taken over by the second or third (I forget) venture capital firm, they hired some online marketing geniuses. This group of simpletons had one plan in their playbook: Have a special blowout sale for every holiday and national observance.
And so we got great marketing emails with headlines such as:
“You’ll Fall MADLY IN LOVE with our Valentine’s Day Sale!”
“Our St. Patrick’s Day Prices will Make you GREEN with Envy!”
“You’ll SAVE the DAYLIGHTS out of Woodworking Books During Our Daylights Savings Sale!”
The holiday that broke me, the one that made me call them and yell (I never yell) was:
“Don’t Let These Savings PASS you OVER – Our Big PASSOVER SALE!”
So as we enter the season for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Pan American Aviation Day, I’d like to run a fun little contest to create the absolute worst holiday sales pitch. Pick a holiday – any holiday. Here’s a good list. Then write a terrible, horrible, awful, funny sales pitch that takes advantage of that holiday.
Keep it clean. Children and Megan’s mom read this blog.
Post your sales pitch in the comments before noon Eastern on Friday, Nov. 20. The worst/best sales pitch (determined by me and my stupid sense of humor) will win a $100 Lost Art Press Gift Card. Don’t forget to enter your email in the commenting form so we can contact you if you win (your email will not appear in the message).
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. The 2020 Anarchist’s Gift Guide starts on Wednesday.
By the 18th century, there were lots of people throughout Europe who were writing about the material world and how it worked. Thanks to people in the French Academy of Sciences in general and individuals such as Denis Diderot, A.J. Roubo and Henri-Louis Duhamel, people began documenting mechanical practices, such as woodworking.
And so we have a wealth of information on how woodworking was practiced from the 1700s to the present. As we look further back in time, however, there are fewer and fewer sources.
So when researcher Suzanne Ellison and I began looking for images of workbenches from the 1400s, there weren’t a lot of sources. There is no “Big Book of Woodworking During the Hundred Years War.” Though I wish there were.
I don’t know how, but Suzanne got the idea we should be looking at misericords. These small wooden seats in European cathedrals were many times intended for choir members to rest themselves. And they were sometimes carved with different scenes. Because the carvers were woodworkers, sometimes those scenes were of woodworking. And so we began searching the image files of every church’s website we could find.
Suzanne hit gold with a misericord in the Chapel of St. Lucien de Beauvais in northern France that was carved circa 1492-1500 of a woodworker planing on a thigh-high workbench. Take a look at the photo above.
It is built with square legs that are vertical to the top (it’s not a staked bench with legs that rake and splay). The legs are pierced with holes for pegs or holdfasts. There is a planing stop. But what else is going on in this image?
Does the bench have stretchers? I think it’s difficult to say with any certainty. There is a big timber below the bench. Is that a stretcher that is joined to stretchers that we cannot see between the front legs and back legs? Or is it just a big board underneath the bench? It sticks out at the front of the bench quite a bit, but not much at the back. My guess is it’s a board that is unattached to the workbench.
What about the structure that is between the front leg and the benchtop that is angled at 45°? Does that prevent the bench from racking? Or is it a part of the carving left to strengthen the carving itself against damage?
My guess is this is a bench much like what is shown in the famous Stent Panel. No stretchers. But I could be wrong. In any case, stretchers for workbenches are definitely on the way. Soon.
— Christopher Schwarz
P.S. This blog entry is an expansion of my work in “The Anarchist’s Workbench.” You can download it for free here. We don’t have any physical copies of the book in stock as of now.
