The auction for the 17-inch Red Oak Jointer Plane and doussie and brass adjusting hammer ended at 9 PM EST tonight. The winning bid was $375. Thank you Matt! This sale generated $320 for the College of the Redwoods, James Krenov Scholarship Fund.
Until next time,
df
Before with continuing neck shaping, a quick mention: tonight, 9 PM EST the benefit auction of my 17-inch red oak jointer plane closes. The current high bid is at $355. The beneficiary, the James Krenov Scholarship Fund at the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program. See my News and New Work web page for details on participating.
The heel is roughly carved:
Then the neck/peg-head junction:
The neck is planed to near final thickness at the peg-head end.
After tapering the neck uniformly to the heel, shaping the contours with draw-knife and spokeshave begins.
More refinement with a variety of cutting tools.
Closing in on the final heel shape
Neck/peg-head transition rough shaping
Shaped and polished.
The heel has been final shaped. Final fit of the heel to body is double-checked.
The neck is completely shaped and has its first of several coats of oil and varnish mixture finish.
Until next time.
df
David Finck Woodworker Spring 2012
Notes From the Bench…
An occasional (very occasional) newsletter
Project Blog
In October I started chronicling my daily work in the form of an ongoing photo essay. I hope you’ll find time to stop by for an occasional visit: http://www.davidfinck.com/blog/.
You’ll see what I am currently working on, gain some insights into my woodworking methods and madness, and keep up with my plans for the future. I’d also welcome your comments if you feel inspired.
I have always felt motivated to share my woodworking knowledge. I guess it’s in my nature, but there is also a sense of obligation to the taxpayers of California who many years ago funded my woodworking education (and continue to school many others) through the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program. The blog adds to my book writing and teaching activities in that spirit. Right now you can follow my progress on Guitar Number 26 (an OM body style, acoustic steel-string with Macassar ebony back and sides). Upcoming plans include a rocking chair, viol da gamba, and then, a couple of violins.
Making and Mastering Wood Planes – the movie
A few months ago, woodworker, videographer, and good friend, David Esposito spent a week with me in my shop shooting a companion video version of my book, “Making and Mastering
Wood Planes”. There is no denying, when it comes to hands-on skills, actually seeing it done
generates insights and reveals nuances that reading alone cannot fully convey. Mr.
Esposito’s talents behind the camera and as an editor artfully realized the promise behind this statement. The video focuses strictly on the nuts and bolts of plane-making and use, while closely following the general outline and approach of the book. The book has proven its worth, aiding thousands of woodworkers in their plane-making, and meshes well with the video as a bench-top reference and self-paced instructional guide. Furthermore, it provides considerable instruction on related fundamentals of fine woodworking not found in the video. You might consider purchasing a video, book, and plane iron at the same time – with a combined order you save on shipping and you will have everything you need to dive in deep and learn to make and use this most wonderful tool, the wood hand plane — what James Krenov referred to “as the cabinetmaker’s Stradivarius.” Click here to order and for more information.
Buying Opportunities
I have newly focused on the Internet as my primary sales vehicle. This eliminates intermediaries and saves me on the costs and time commitments of shows. The savings allow me to offer these works-on-hand at attractive new pricing. Several pieces have sold already, below are what remain. Click on an image for more information.
Wall-mounted Jewelry Cabinet
Con-Sho Lantern
Pagoda Jewelry Box
I’d like to invite you to come and spend a day in my shop, or perhaps even a week. Lately, quite a few folks have decided to do just that. We’ve covered the basics like plane-making and use,Plane Auction
My alma mater, the College of the Redwoods Fine Woodworking Program supports deserving students through the James Krenov Scholarship Fund. Many years ago I held a sealed-bid auction of a plane I made during a plane-making workshop. A fellow went home with the plane, and the proceeds of the sale benefited the scholarship fund. I tried this idea a few weeks ago, simply advertising the auction with a small notice on my web site. This was also successful and resulted in the sale of a sweet little polishing plane and hammer for $276. If you wish to be notified when there is a plane up for auction, drop me an e-mail and I will put you on a notification list. Right now, I am offering the pictured 17-inch jointer-plane made of exceptionally dense red-oak. The wood came from a windfall on my parent’s WV property where I worked for many years. We processed this wood over 20 years ago, so it is very well seasoned! The plane has a wedge and cross-pin of applewood and is fitted with one of my 1-1/2″ wide A-2 steel cryogenically treated blades. I made a little adjusting hammer with a pearwood handle and brass head to go with it.
Here’s the plane in action, it really sings!
The bidding is now open with a starting price of $175. The auction concludes on Wednesday, April 25th at 9:00 PM EST. To join in just send me an email with your bid. I’ll keep the current price updated on my “News and New Work” page. In case of a tie, the plane goes to the first received of the high bids. Payment can be made by check, credit-card, or PayPal. Shipping is an additional $12.00. The winner gets a handmade plane and hammer. I donate the wood and my labor. The proceeds (minus the cost of the plane iron — $56) go to the scholarship fund.
I hope we may cross paths down the road!
David Finck
www.davidfinck.com
I want to apologize in advance having gotten pretty lazy with the camera-work as my time to work on the guitar has gotten pretty limited of late — lots of teaching, not as much woodworking! A fair amount of steps went unphotographed as I found a little time here and there to push the work along. I’ll document these steps more fully the next time around. I use the typical spliced neck joint and this is the glue-up:
As you can see in this shot, several steps have been accomplished:
First, the heel block was built up. I use a vertical seam with 2 pieces rather than stacking 3 or 4 pieces horizontally (in relation to the plane of the neck). The seam is aligned with the center-line of the neck and the visible end-grain is book-matched for an elegant symmetrical appearance. After truing, I cut the tenon on the tablesaw and rout the channel for the torsion rod which will be accessed through the sound-hole. Threaded inserts were also epoxied into the tenon for bolting on the neck.
You can also see that the fretboard has been slotted, shaped, and inlaid. I use two simple routing jigs (the fretboard is atop one of them) that help me produce the fretboard taper, neck taper, and also gives me bridge placement down the road. Small pins are used to locate the fretboard and neck to the jigs and to each other. The wider piece of ebony will cover the peg-head.
The fretboard is unglued, but properly aligned on the neck with the aforementioned pins. I am testing the fit of the tenon and making sure that the neck is aligned with the center of the body. If you are observant, you’ll notice a miscalculation with the rosette — I mistakenly stopped the ends short of terminating under the fret-board. They will need to be extended – a pain, but do-able (this comment applies to most errors a craftsman must fix!). The peg-head veneer has been glued on now and the peg-head rough shaped.
Next comes the heel-cap. I angle the end that butts against the body, prior to gluing, then glue it with the neck bolted in place to ensure a tight fit with no trimming necessary. This shot also nicely illustrates the book-matched end-grain of the built up heel block.
The frets are installed while the board is supported by the routing template.
The file-holding jig in the background is used to angle the ends of the frets. The torsion rod is installed in the neck and then the fretboard is glued on. The holes for the tuners were also drilled.
Until next time!
df
It’s time to install the bindings on the guitar. I glued a veneer of red-dyed holly to a strip of thicker applewood for my material. The bindings are then cut on the band saw. This fence utilizes a magnet at each end to clamp to the table — twist to activate the magnet, reverse to deactivate it — very handy. A piece of 1/4″ plywood run through the cut and then taped in place creates a “zero-clearance” throat opening to prevent the thin binding strips from snagging in the throat opening.
After each cut, a couple of passes with a plane on the shooting board gives one smooth surface to each strip of binding.
I am also using some black/white strips for purfling on this guitar. They were too tall as supplied so I needed to reduce their width a bit. I did all at once with this little planing jig which is essentially a clamp that holds the strips tightly while supporting them for planing. The jig is two halves joined by a spline that aligns the two halves and creates a floor to support the purfling strips. Three screws supply the clamping pressure.
The bi-color shavings are sweet!
I use “economy” packing tape” (the thinner stuff) to hold the bindings in place while gluing them on the guitar. It has a nice stretchy clamping action to it and I like the fact that it’s transparent and I can see how tight the joint is. The guitar is supported by a vacuum clamping jig which holds the guitar steady for both the routing and gluing phases of binding installation, while also giving unencumbered access.
This view shows a bit more clearly what’s going on with the jig. Each suction cup is on a post that can be adjusted for height. This allows me to get the guitar sides as perpendicular as possible to the jig base. That will come in handy for routing the binding channels when I one day make another jig to hold the router that will slide around on the vacuum jig base
Coming down the home stretch here with the binding and trying out the binding tape supplied by Stewart-McDonald. It does the job well, but I still prefer my packing tape.
Here’s the completed binding and purfling job scraped clean:
Until next time!
df
I spent the day this past Friday with Mr. Chuck Howerton from over by Knoxville, TN delving into the topic of Band-sawn Veneers. That’s using the band-saw to to cut your own veneers from solid timber. Chuck is smoothing a back-panel he put together from veneers he cut from a board of curly maple earlier in the day.
We started by chatting about design aspects of using veneers, cores and glues and the use of internal and external edge gluings. The we spent some time discussing tuning up band-saws and choice of blades. From there, I demonstrated setting up and sawing veneers and then Chuck got in and sawed some of his own. It was challenging! His panel is made from cut down veneers, but we did not want to cross-cut his plank so he was sawing veneers that were 7″ wide and 40″ long in hard maple. That is no easy task when the goal is to get consecutive slices of wood that are a uniform 3/32″ thick, but he was up to the challenge. Then came edge gluing the veneers, preparing the panels for pressing and gluing the veneers to the core with a vacuum press. And finally, as pictured, cleaning up the panel.
I was able to support Chuck’s instruction with a veneering project I was working on myself — replacing a bathroom vanity in the “shop” bathroom. It has a veneered side and doors as well as the top, all done in pine and cherry. Here are some of the pine veneers waiting to be edge-joined.
And a door panel with an edge gluing applied and leveled prior to veneering it.
Until next time
df
I have in hand a test copy of the cover art and DVDs for the video version of Making and Mastering Wood Planes:
The artwork looks fine, so I’m in the process of running through the entire 2 DVDs and making sure everything has copied soundly before giving the go-ahead for duplication to begin. With luck, it should be available for distribution next week! Here’s the trailer if you haven’t come across it on my web site yet:
Coming up: more on guitar number 26
Until next time
df
In the last few years more and more folks have been stopping by to get one-on-one instruction and work on a project at my shop. While I make every effort to keep a safe environment, the thought of someone (or myself!) getting injured has always been a worry, and that great flesh-eater, the table saw, has always been my greatest concern. I’m breathing a lot easier now with the recent purchase and installation of a SawStop tablesaw. As most woodworkers are probably aware from Sawstop’s infamous hotdog video, the machine is capable of detecting contact with skin and instantly stops and retracts the blade when it does so:
And, like most people, I find this demonstration very impressive! Here’s the saw in its new home:
I dropped a Bench Dog router lift into the extension table and I am also impressed with this device:
It’s built like a tank, makes very precise height adjustments from above the table, and the router collet can be brought up above the table surface as well, making for very convenient bit changes.
I added on a good sized drop-down out-feed table to the saw. This design owes a lot to a post on youtube. I also made a standard table saw cross-cut sled — an indispensable table saw accessory
Here’s the out-feed table set for use. This makes one-man, large panel handling imagineable
And here’s a little detail of the drop-down leg:
Besides offering unmatched safety the SawStop is just a nicely made table saw. I regard it as a healthy step up in quality from the Unisaw that it replaces in my shop. Of course, it offers no more protection than a conventional table saw from kick-backs, but your chances of walking away intact from an encounter with the blade of a SawStop are much improved.
Update: the video version of “Making and Mastering Wood Planes” is at the duplicator’s facility. I’ll receive a review copy latter in the week and if all is good I should have the first copies available for shipment the following week. Everything was going on schedule until we got to the review stage of the post-production process. It’s just very time-consuming to review and tweak over 4-1/2 hours of video!
Until next time!
df
“Making and Mastering Wood Planes” in HD video format is just about ready for release! The production company, Agricola Media has done a masterful job of putting the video together. It’s running about 4 hours and 40 minutes on 2 DVDs and presents the topic with great clarity. The masters are being prepared for reproduction and the artwork for the DVD case and discs is all but done. Turnaround at the duplicator is pretty quick so I’m hoping to see it available by early in March. That’s only one month later than I originally hoped for, which really isn’t too bad for the first time around. Drop me an e-mail if you wish to know as soon as it’s out, but of course, I’ll be mentioning it here as well.
Until next time,
df
The idea for producing musical sounds using a bow fitted with horsehair is thought to go back at least a thousand years to the nomadic horse cultures of Central Asia, while the modern violin bow was perfected in the mid-to-late 1700′s. With this rich history, bows are a fascinating mix of engineering, material, and refined craftsmanship and an essential element in bringing any great violin to life. And why this interest in bows? With two dedicated teenage violinists in the house, bows are just a part of my life. From replacing or repairing the protective bone tips, to re-gripping the leather holds, to regular re-hairing, I’ve gotten to know and appreciate the intricate beauty and engineering of this amazing bit of of woodworking. Anyhow, I recently re-haired both girls bows and thought you might enjoy a peek into what this is about.
Well, here’s a bow and a very handy fixture for securely holding the bow while it’s being worked on. It’s made to gently clamp the bow at the tip and frog end (the ebony grip is called the frog) and accommodate various length bows.
After inspecting the bow, I remove the frog from the stick and fold back the hair at the tip end in order to remove the small wooden plug that secures the hair to the bow tip. The plug should not be glued in. It’s unique compound wedged shape allows it to lock in place due to the pulling action of the hair. Sometimes, however, it takes a bit of digging to remove the plug. If it stays intact then I may reuse it.
The plug is quite small as you can appreciate in this picture
!
Once the plug is removed the bundled hairs are pulled out of the mortise. Now it is time to remove the old hairs from the frog.
The metal ferrule is a tight fit and needs to be pulled off carefully. I use a piece of rubber and a small vise.
The small triangle of wood is called the spreader — it serves to do just that — spread the hairs into an even band. A drop of glue holds it in place and as a result they often get ruined during removal. I always replace these anyhow to ensure a proper fit with the new bundle of hair. 
Next the abalone slide is removed. It has angled edges that fit into the channel creating a dovetailed way. These also can be recalcitrant due to tight fits and rosin buildups!
Fold back the hairs and the frog-end plug can be seen and then removed.
The frog is carefully cleaned, metal parts polished, and the channels for the slide are lubricated with graphite (pencil). After selecting and measuring a new hank of hair I tie the end off tightly with very strong thread. I use three clove hitches — a self binding knot – finished off with a reef knot
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The end is then dipped in powdered rosin.
Then the rosin is melted into the hair, using an alcohol lamp, while the heat also serves to swell the hair ends, locking them firmly in place. All of these efforts are taken to prevent hairs from pulling out while the bow is in use.
You can start attaching the hair at either end, but I prefer to begin at the tip. Insert the hair so the knot is settled at the bottom of the mortise and then takes a bend to come up the back wall.
Then insert the plug to capture the hair bundle. I reused the old one which was made of hard maple and still seemed serviceable despite the small chip in the corner. I always give firm pressure on the hank of hair at this point, simulating use, to be sure that the plug is working properly and will hold the hair in place.
After a bit of preliminary combing to straighten and spread the hairs evenly, I use a rubber band to pull the hairs down tightly at the tip.
Next, I wet the hairs, comb and tension them and tie off the frog end. Now is the time to thread the ferrule onto the hank. Slide it up out of the way. Then the plug is inserted to capture the hank in the frog.
The frog is installed on the stick. The abalone slide is slipped into place and the ferrule is put back on — it goes on easily without the pressure of the spreader clamping it. Here is some mahogany that has been shaped for a spreader. I insert it as is and mark and score it a little oversize for length.
Finally, a dot of glue goes on the tip that will be against the ebony of the frog. the spreader is inserted into the ferrule, separated at the score mark and the hairs carefully fanned out and evenly distributed. Then the spreader is pushed all the way home.
It’s a good job if the bow hairs all tighten up evenly when the bow is tensioned and all the hairs are properly aligned.
Until next time!
dF
