Lost Art Press

I am a connoisseur of bit extenders. I have spent – easily – a couple hundred dollars on a wide variety of them, new and vintage. 

Most bit extenders suffer from one of the following maladies:

• They don’t hold the bit and it falls out in use.
• They hold the bit but it wobbles in the extender, making a dog’s dinner of your work.
• The diameter of the extender (or its chuck) is so large that it’s ridiculous and unwieldy.
• They are not straight, and so the whole shebang wobbles like a one-legged pigeon on a bender.

I have not found the Bit Extender of the Gods as of yet. But I have found one that I like. The Bosch Daredevil DSBE1012 suffers from only one of the above defects. And it has a mild case of it.

First the good news. It’s cheap – about $7 – and is available at most good hardware stores and home centers. You won’t struggle to find one or to feed your family post-purchase.

It holds hex-shank tooling like the dickens, thanks to the two set screws in the chuck. The set screws are tightened and loosened with an Allen wrench (included and losable), which I keep rubber-banded to the tool when it’s put away. I have never had a bit fall out of the Bosch extender during the last few years I’ve had it. 

The chuck is only .520” in diameter, making it the smallest I have used. 

The bad news: The shaft is never straight enough for my taste. To be fair, the tool recommends you not exceed 600 rpm in use. And if you do obey that speed limit, the wobble is minimal. I’d rather use a faster rpm to help keep my holes cleaner, both going in and out. (So many jokes.)

I’d pay $14 (twice the price of the current tool) for a little more straightness, which I know I’ll never get.

It’s a good, simple and cheap tool in a world of garbage. Just don’t expect the world of it, and you’ll be happy.

—  Christopher Schwarz

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.

— Christopher Schwarz

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.

— Christopher Schwarz