Woodwright Workout

Seeing as I am an overambitious, yet obessively compulsive, woodworker I recently found myself in an uphill battle with a massive slab of oak. The bench in the shop at work has been used and abused for as long as I have been alive. Word on the street is that it hasn't even been flattened since it was first built...so I took the liberty of flattening it myself.

20+ years of grime, sweat, and I am pretty sure some blood.

I started going transversely with the grain with a flat iron and things were going well, that was until I reached the far left hand side of the bench, which has been used as the sharpening station for quite a while. All that oil, metal particles, sandpaper grit, rust, and god knows what else really sunk into the wood because after five strokes my iron was dull as a doorknob.

Windows open with a nice cooling breeze, I can think of a lot worse things to be doing.

Switching to a heavily chambered iron sped things up considerably, and even when the iron dulled, the heavy chamber helped to muscle through with the initial planing. After one pass I switched to 45 degrees with the grain, pushing the plane body at a skewed angle helped slice through some of the rough grain and knots.

Getting a bit closer, you can see the scalloped track marks from the last flattening.

I finished up going with the grain (as best I could) and planing the front of the bench to be square with the top. Overall it was an exhausting project...most people aren't stupid enough to flatten a knotty, old, 16 FOOT!!! workbench their first time around the block, but I am just the right kind of stupid.

There is still plenty of character in this bench, but now you can use it reliably to try boards!

So if you are ever looking for a new workout routine, I would recommend going into the massive workbench flattening business.

My workhorse plane, I might follow up with a longer jointer in the future, but I am not sure it is necessary.

PS. I am just being melodramatic...it really only took about two hours and one sweaty t-shirt, and that included re-honing my iron twice.

A Silk Hat

A very talented carpenter that I worked with at my previous job had a saying that he liked to use on not-so-high end projects:

"If you put a silk hat on a pig, it's still a pig."

I always enjoyed this statement, and was reminded of it when I was working on my hook knife recently. As I have touched upon previously I have become addicted to spoon carving. It is a maddeningly complex skill set that at first glance appears to be stupid simple. I bought the most inexpensive set of knives I could find because I am cheap (or poor). The straight knife I got works like a champ but the hook knife cuts like, for the sake of my anecdote, a pig.

Original profile with hard, blunt bevels.

Seeing as I am an obsessively compulsive nut bag I took it upon myself to see if I could make a silk hat, and turn this $17 knife cut like an $80 knife. First I took a file to the blade...this was a bad idea and ruined a perfectly good 8" mill file (I guess these knives are hardened fairly well). So my second attempt took me to the sandstone grinding wheel I have at work. This was really slow, but very effective.

Next was sanding, sanding, and more sanding. I started at 120 grit, and then progressed up through 220, 320, 400, 600, and 1000 (did I mention how compulsive I am?). I used a block of wood on the back of the knife, and then wrapped the sandpaper around a dowel for the inside surface. Finally, I stroped with a little bit of rouge polish and leather mounted on a block of wood to normalize and polish the edge.

Polishing the blade really makes the maker's mark pop.

I should have sanded more, if you can believe it, but the edge is fantastic. I might do some work to make the whole surface polished like the really nice hook knives I have seen from makers like Pinewood Forge, Hans Karlsson, and Svante Djarv. It was a lot of work, about a weeks worth of lunch breaks, but it did greatly improve the overall smoothness of cut and sharpness of the knife. 

More polishing on the outside might cause less friction in the cut.

You can see that I ground into the ferrul by accident while re profiling on the sandstone...my OCD is getting the better of me and I might re-helve this knife with some apple, or beech, oooo or boxwood, or...calm down Jason, you have a problem.

Rouded profile makes for cleaner cuts

If you have time, or have already purchased this knife and are unhappy with its performance, I would recommend re-profiling, but if you have money just buy a high end knife. I have tried several of the knife makers I mentioned above thanks to Peter Follansbee, and I can say without a doubt my re-profiled knife is still a pig

Remember, you can't polish a piece of sh...or maybe you can.