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Little Teeth Filed for… Who Cares?

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Recently, a woodworking colleague suggested to me that saw teeth designed for crosscutting are an invention of modern marketing.

Early saws, he suggested, we’re probably filed for basically a rip cut. But because the teeth were hand filed, they probably had a little fleam, which made them cut more smoothly than a pure rip tooth with no fleam.

It’s an interesting argument that has no real answer – until we find the DNA of an 18th-century saw filer encased in some amber and decide to open a theme park on a deserted tropical island (sign me up).

Other woodworking authorities I trust have suggested that saw filing patterns were actually more complex in the 18th century than they are today. In other words, we are the primitives.

All I know is that they can take away my Zona Razor Saw from my cold, dead hands. Or they can take it when it’s kinked – whichever comes first.

The Zona Razor Saw is a marvel of modern manufacturing. Made in the USA for the price of 2.5 chai lattes, it’s a 24 tpi backsaw with a .01”-thick sawplate that cuts on the pull stroke. I use this $11 saw for almost everything. Rips. Crosscuts. Miters. Whatever.

The magic of the saw is not in the fact that it’s filed for a rip cut, but that it has 24 tpi. Once you get to teeth that small, it really doesn’t matter so much how they are filed. This saw leaves glass-smooth surfaces when it rips and crosscuts. It tracks beautifully. It is comfortable and balanced.

But before you think it also is going to mow your lawn, paint your house and raise your kids to be truthful and wise, it know that it has a fatal flaw. The sawplate is easily kinked. I’ve had one since 2006, and I have been using it on every project. The cherry-red-dyed handle has faded to pink, and the sawplate has a subtle wave to it.

It still tracks fairly straight – straight enough for most joinery. But this weekend I decided to try to fix the plate. I bent it this way and that with my fingers. I tapped it with a hammer on an anvil. I tweaked it with pliers. And eventually I buckled under and ordered another one from Lee Valley Tools.

If you haven’t tried the Zona Razor Saw, I highly recommend you get one for your tool kit.

By the way, the vast and insidious Zona model-making consortium did not pay for this blog entry. Just so you know.

— Christopher Schwarz

Heavy Metal Mallet

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Like every woodworker, I have a short list of tools that I wish were still widely available today. Most of these are tools that have wound up in my shop and proved themselves useful.

About five years ago I got a cool mallet that was common in England but not so much here. It has a heavy brass head, wooden striking faces and a nice chamfered handle.

The whole thing weighs more than 3 pounds – my wife weighed herself with it on our digital scale. Then she weighed herself without the mallet. (That is what passes for both love and entertainment in the early 40s.)

This is not a tool you want to wield all day. In fact, mortising with it wears out my forearm after only a couple mortises.

However, it is great for assembly tasks. It knocks dovetails together with ease. I use it for driving drawbore pins – both through a dowel plate and into the holes. I use it for knocking together mortise-and-tenon joints. If you want to see it in action, check out this video on YouTube. Anytime I need force with finesse I reach for this tool.

Well, I used to.

About a year ago, the wooden striking faces dropped out of the brass head like two rotted teeth. They had shrunk out just enough – friction was the glue. I set the mallet aside on my bookshelves until a month ago. I decided to try to fix the thing.

I considered fabricating new wooden faces, but their shape is complex. So I decided to first try to get the pyramid-shaped faces back in their holes. The staff at the magazine suggested removing a little wood from the back of the faces and driving the faces back into the brass. The hope was that this would compress the wood, and friction would do its job again (lazy friction).

I tried it. It didn’t work. Another suggestion was to drill through the brass head and pin the faces with a metal rivet. I wasn’t sure I wanted to do that kind of implant surgery.

So today I took a different tack: high-impact epoxy. I glued and clamped the faces in place this morning, and now I’m just waiting for the clock to make it around the horn again so I can take the thing for a test beat.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I know that Australian toolmaker Chris Vesper has this tool on his drawing board. If you’re interested, you should drop him a line through his web site. To see a photo of his prototype mallets scroll to the bottom of this page.

On Copying

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Let’s play a game I call “Stupid or Ethical?”

The first time I interviewed Robin Lee, president of Lee Valley Tools, I asked him a few questions that readers had been asking me for years. Robin’s answers are paraphrased below, though I’ve heard him say them so many times in the last decade I could almost quote him verbatim.

Q: Why doesn’t Veritas come out with an inexpensive Bed Rock plane to compete with Lie-Nielsen?

A: That wouldn’t be fair to Tom Lie-Nielsen. We’d rather produce our own line of planes instead of copying his.

Q: Why doesn’t Veritas come out with a line of less expensive Stanley 750 chisels to compete with Lie-Nielsen?

A: That wouldn’t be fair. Besides, we have our own line of chisels already and might do something different in the future.

Q: Why doesn’t Veritas make an infill plane to compete with all these makers who charge thousands of dollars for a plane?

A: That’s their market. We’d rather build our own planes than copy someone else’s.

Q: Why doesn’t Veritas produce a less-expensive brass-back dovetail saw….

Well, you get the idea.

On the other side of that fence, Lie-Nielsen has stayed out of Veritas’s back yard on a number of occasions. During one visit to the Lie-Nielsen Toolworks, I saw a prototype of a bullnose plane. When Veritas came out with its bullnose shortly thereafter, Lie-Nielsen shelved its plans.

The question isn’t about the legality of copying tools. It’s much more important than that. Some might contend that this sort of behavior is stupid. Shouldn’t these companies be out to grab as much market share as possible? Or is it somehow ethical to steer clear of your competitors’ ideas and instead push your own ideas (assuming you have any) forward?

My bias is obvious. My work gets ripped off everyday. People copy my articles, put them on CDs and sell them on eBay. They post them for free download on Russian sites. They place my copyrighted text whole cloth on their foreign web sites and claim it for their own.

Just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s right.

For me, copying tools is a simple issue. Ask yourself one question: Will the copy confuse the reasonable consumer? If the copy looks so much like a competitor’s that it is going to confuse buyers, then it’s dishonest.

I’m not saying you can’t do it. Or that you’re violating laws. I’m just saying that I won’t support you with my dollars.

— Christopher Schwarz

P.S. For those who haven’t been reading WoodNet and the debates on copied tools, try this link. Or (if you have four hours of your life to spare) this.

Factory-Fresh Millers Falls Bench Stop

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We call them “tool pushers” in the collecting world. People who find out what sort of stuff you are interested in and feed you a steady stream of it until your wallet is dry.

One of the worst tool pushers is Slav Jelesijevich, a Chicago area tool collector, cabinetmaker and cat-loving wild man. Get to know Slav just a bit and you’ll receive photos of his cats (some of them in attack mode) and you’ll get leads on old tools that are new in the box. That’s his specialty. I bought a 1970s-era Rockwell band saw from him. In the box. A Work-Mate (in the box). Hammers with 1970s-era Super Bowl tags on them. And too many rasps and files to mention (I guess I just did mention them).

At Woodworking in America, Slav sold a lot of stuff. And a lot of it went home with the other toolmakers on the selling floor with him.

While I was yakking with someone (Harrelson Stanley?) Slav walked by and dropped something in my pocket. Then he disappeared. I knew that whatever it was, it was going to cost me.

It turned out to be something I’ve always wanted: A never-used Millers Falls bench stop. It is the height of gizmo-cool. Sure a simple block of wood can be your planing stop – you Philistine. Or you can get this remarkably sophisticated spring-loaded, quadra-sided piece of tool engineering awesomeness.

Here’s how you install it: Drill two holes in your bench – a 1″ hole inside a 2″ hole. Screw the stop in. You’re done.

Here’s how it works: Loosen the screw and the stop goes loosey and bouncy on a spring. Rotate the head until you have the type of stop you want. There’s a flat stop, a V-shaped slot, one with four big teeth and one with 10 little teeth.

Set the stop at the height you want – anything up to 1-1/8″ and then turn the screw to lock it. Done.

I’ve seen these in old catalogs, but I’ve never seen one in person. And now I own one that’s never been used. But that last part is going to change.

— Christopher Schwarz

How to Use How-to Information

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When I was in high school, my father gave me a great gift: a leather vest.

I wore the snot out of that thing. I wore it when I dated my future wife in college. I wore it when Steve Shanesy interviewed me for my job here at Popular Woodworking. I have – quite literally – worn the buttons off the thing.

Last year, I realized that my beloved cow covering was a catastrophe. Frayed. A bit smelly. Unusually soiled.

So after 20 years of faithful service, I retired that vest and decided to buy myself a new one. My new vest is well made, but it’s shiny and stiff. I am neither.

So I sought out some way to age the finish on the vest. I found a lot of advice out there: Drag it behind my car. Put it in the clothes dryer with some rocks. Sand it. Wad it up, stuff it under the bed and sleep on it over and over.

As I considered all this advice I noticed something about the givers. None of these advisers had actually done this to their precious skin-based garments. They were just repeating things they had heard or were making up things that “should work.”

So I dug deeper until I found the stagehands. According to these people, they used denatured alcohol to age leather costumes for plays about pirates, bikers and S&M-loving citizens. Their instructions were specific and consistent: Put alcohol in a spray bottle. Spray a large surface and then wipe it down. Instant age.

It sounded like wood finishing advice, so I was instantly skeptical. So I decided to do what any wary woodworker would do: I tried it on a hidden area of a non-essential garment.

It worked. So I went to town on my new vest with a squirt bottle and a rag.

Now I have a vest I’m more comfortable in, and a new appreciation for how-to information. You see, whenever I write something about woodworking, I strive never to repeat things as gospel that I haven’t tried. If my name is on it, I’ve done it. Or I’m quoting someone I trust.

This isn’t always the case in any journalism (including knitting journalism and ferret-training journalism). I have read enough garbage in my lifetime to know that some people just repeat other people’s garbage because it has been repeated enough times that it has to be true.

This is the long way of saying that we should do what Virgil (70 B.C. – 19 B.C.) recommended: “Believe one who has tried it.”

— Christopher Schwarz