Saws, squares, and some current happenings.

Oh my, what a beautiful day out today!  I tired myself out.  I have the position of the shop pretty much nailed down now.  Friday I put in the paper work for the building permit.  Small town living, the guy was out and will get to it next week.  No hurry, there are a lot of things to do before nails start getting pounded in.  I have 2 quotes in now for the building material and I am going with our local Rona store for my supplies.  Also today I got out to the shed and grabbed the old chisels that are sitting in there and chopped a couple of mortices and cut a couple of tenons for the new saw bench.  I am really happy with how it turned out.  These are pretty much my first mortice and tenon joints by hand and relative dimensioning.  I had one for the top a bit loose, so I glued a shim on it and did a bit of chisel work and it fits fine now.  So, I decided to do a short stretcher for the legs.

To get the location of the stretcher I just made it 4 widths of the stretcher down.  I carefully marked out the mortice with a double pin marking guage set to my 1/2" chisel.  The same guage marked the tenon from the same side face.  

The brace in the photo was not used.....it just has not been put away yet.....tsk tsk!

But the joinery all worked out OK!  The whole end assembly together....

The top to leg joint, the one on the left is the one I had to fix.

The legs with the short stretcher.

It is far from perfect, but perfectly fine for shop furniture.  Great practice too.  There has been very little measuring on this piece and I don't think there are two pieces of wood the same size or perfectly square.  Everything is pretty much dimensioned from what has already been done, and it is all left over construction material.  

So I left you last time with some saw stories.  I found a few more pictures of my saws that I converted to rip pattern.  

That piece of maple I used for the saw vice jaws is a nice looking piece of wood.  The saws perform pretty well as you can see how thin a slice I can rip.  I paid $2.00 for 4 saws, and these are the two without the Disston Buttons.

I also improved my bench vice's functionality by boring a couple of dog holes and making a planing stop to fit to them.  

......and that piece of walnut?

THAT piece of walnut?....  That piece of walnut is a long term project that I will get into as we go along.  It is still under construction.  Instead I will show you some smaller pieces of walnut and a beautiful piece of maple like this.

A project of precision.  I am making a couple of squares.  I cut a bridle joint in the walnut and slipped in the maple after it was dressed square.  To ensure accuracy I took a straight edge and kept drawing lines and then checking with the square turned over.  When the blade of the square lined up with the handle either way, I knew that was the line to use.

You can see it took a few lines to get one that was truly square.  I then glued it up and put it in the vice.....checking with my reference line of course.

I made a pair of them.

After a bit more work and some shellac.

Both sides of the blades are square to the body and they are wonderful and light to hold and handle.  I truly treasure these little squares.  I have used these photos in a few other places.  Something about the shine and accuracy of the squares against the rough beaten yard sale find bench.

I hope you enjoyed this little tour.  I am working two time lines.....getting up to date and what is current.  I at least hope you are finding a bit of entertainment in my story.  Again and as always.  Thank you so much for dropping by!