The making of a gouge, Episode I

Warning. This is a how-I-do-it post. It is a tutorial on how to do something. If you are not interested in actual craft work, you can skip this post. I will not be in the least offended.

What I intend to do in this post (and in fact at least one more) is to show you how to make a small gouge out of a hacksaw blade. Now, why would you want to do this? Simple. When you are carving out curves, you need a gouge of the same curvature as the detail you need to carve. Real carvers call the curvature a "sweep." OK, I have some gouges, all made here, but none of them will handle the curvature in the current project. So it's time for a new gouge. It must be rather shallow. So I set out to make one. First, the setup.
We have a pair of small vise-grips, a small hammer. It is a Warrenton pattern, a very useful pattern, because it has a flat head and a sort of chisel-like head, called a cross-peen. Also I have a a 50+ mm vise, (note the flat surface behind the vise; it's my anvil), a propane torch (invisible but off to the right; it's set up about 20 cm above workbench level) and a piece of tile on which to put red-hot objects. Do not set your workbench on fire! Now you need a piece of hacksaw blade. It does not need to be new, old and worn is just as good and really, really cheap. Like free. Our specimen is about 10 cm long. You can see it clamped in the vise-grips. Also in the picture, a plastic container with water in it. It is called a quench tub. It will reappear in Episode II, but ignore it for now.

So your first job is to anneal the hacksaw blade piece. This means, heat it up to carrot color. This will take all the spring out of it and that's just what you want. So hold it in the vise-grips, light off the propane torch and get the blade red hot.
Orange hot is better, and yellow better still, but this is a very small piece of metal and your heat source is very concentrated, and only about 600C. So you compromise. Heat it up, "red" hot will do, about two cm at a time. Then let the whole thing cool. After you have done so, it is time to grind off the teeth on the hacksaw blade.
As you can see, I use a Dremel-Type Tool (DTT) with a grinding wheel mounted. The DTT is held in a home-made stand. You could of course use a bench grinder. Or even a belt sander. Or a file. Whatever you do, get those teeth off! Otherwise your masterpiece will crack. Just where you don't want it to; Murphy is hovering over your shoulder as you do this.

Now we come to the fun part. We have to shape this animal. The front part of the blade must be shaped to a rather shallow curvature. What radius? Depends on the carving. This is up to you. The rear part must be completely folded in two, just as you would fold a sheet of paper in two. The folded part will be the shank of the gouge. Anyways, I have to start a curve in the work. My current method is to use a small machinist's V-block.

A bona fide blacksmith would use a swage for this. But I do not pretend to be a real blacksmith, just an artisan in search of a gouge. Now the above is a posed picture (I only have two hands). It illustrates the process, though. In practice I clamp the V-block in the vise. I heat the gouge boiled-carrot orange. This color will recur so often that I will abbreviate it as BCO. Quick as you can, transfer your gouge to the V-block and tap with the cross-peen of the hammer. Right in the middle. You will thus put a curve into your piece. It will take more than one "heat" to do this. The piece will cool off in about ten seconds. No mass, you see. You don't have much time to tap it before it is cool. So you do the whole length of your piece this way. Once I have started the curvature, I resort to long-nose pliers and start squeezing.

The object is to fold the upper part of the blade in two. It is the shank of the tool. Do not worry if it is warped at this point; just get it folded. Heat to BCO as often as you have to. Squeeze it! Also do not worry if it is twisted, bowed, or otherwise distorted. We can fix all that later. Just get the blasted thing folded. Then straighten it out. Here's what we're aiming at:
In order to do this I had to unwarp, unbow, and flatten. For this, it's heat it up to BCO, pound it on the anvil, heat it up to BCO again, use the pliers to unwarp it, ... and so on. It will take quite a number of heats. I cannot predict which way steel will warp and neither can anyone else. We have no complicated machinery at our disposal. But by George (II? III... VI?) we have a gouge blank, with a bit of work. I am into something like an hour and a half worth of work at this point; YMMV.

At this point the gouge might work on soft butter. It's almost time to heat-treat it. This will be the second episode in this drama. But before we do that I find it convenient to put a preliminary grind on the edge. At one time I did this with the Dremel-Type tool. No longer. Once I built the angulometer (see a previous post) I do it on my wet grinder, or TSO (Tormek-Shaped Object).
Now, gouges, chisels, and plane blades need a 25 deg angle. What I have done here is improvised a handle for the tool. Not, to be sure, the final handle. I am using this in a homemade jig to set the angle to 25 deg, aided by my angulometer. I grind up the first approximation to a 25 deg bevel. Next, I have to heat-treat this tool. But that will have to wait; this post is already too long. I really, really recommend wet grinders. They do not ruin tools, which a dry grinder will do at the drop of a hat.

One last item. When you sharpen a gouge on a grinder, you must rotate it. You can't just let the grinder go by itself -- that would put a flat in your gouge. So you gently rotate the gouge as the wheel turns. That way you get a nice even grind.

Enough! See Episode II for more. Coming soon at a blog near you.

Tiny Tools

Ah, winter is here. Your friendly mercury, or its digital equivalent, hit -22C today. So we go skiing, but that leaves a lot of hours in the day. So this sourdough makes, as you are well aware, miniatures. But making miniatures requires miniature tools. I have some I have bought; I could not survive without my miniature Japanese saws from Lee Valley. Mainly I have learned to make them. I have posted on miniature planes before, but here's a hitherto-unposted bunch.
You will recognize, in the northwest and southeast corners, the tiny planes. New fellows, on the SW-NE diagonal, are the try square, used of course to square things up. The blade is sheet metal, and the top needs some more filing to get it truly square, but it is already useful. Above him is a very small froe, used to split, for example, the ribs on Tip the canoe. The yellow thing is a 45 degree triangle, useful for the tiny planes, which are all bedded at 45 deg. Above that, an awl made from a broken needle (it broke while sewing up Tip Canoe, which prompted me to rebend a needle). Useful for clearing out Morse #50 drill holes, for instance. And above that, my pièce de résistance, the tiny clamp. It is made on the pattern of a machinist's clamp. The jaws are wood -- same wood as the plow plane in the SE corner. I found out that I could tap it as if it were steel! I went to our Willow hardware store and found some longish 6-32 screws; the nice circular handles are made on the Taig lathe out of hardware store rod. I drilled the the handles on the Taig with a tailstock drill, so they are concentric with the cylinder. Tapping small holes is a nail-biting exercise. Taps are very hard. Have to be; they are cutting steel most of the time. That's like glass -- very hard, but shatters on impact. So it is very easy to break a tap. The smaller the tap, the easier it is to break. But I tapped the handles. Now I need to find my thread locker goop so I can lock the handles to the screws (which are hardware store, beheaded). And this brings up al kinds of possibilities; I could use aluminum instead of wood to make clamps, for instance. We will see. It is fun to make a tool; you feel independent. But I'd love a micro bandsaw to resaw my planes. Proxxon makes one, but alas, it is very expensive.

Tool repair and Tool Make

I have all these projects that can't be shown. Expect a deluge after Christmas. I'll space them out. Meanwhile, with the house I got a wooden box with a partially carved lid. Inside were a bunch of cheapish carving tools. Now, sometimes these asiatic wonders are actually good steel; it is all roulette. But I paid nothing for them, so will they take an edge?
Yes, they will. Left to right, two tools from the microforge and Taig lathe -- more later. The third tool is microforged, from an oddly shaped thing in the box. It is now a V-gouge. It was quite difficult to make; getting a V shape into metal is not trivial. Furthermore, little pieces like Number three have no heat capacity. You get, as in baseball, three strikes and then you have to reheat. But eventually I did it. Further and furthermore, a propane torch will not get metal up to yellow heat, which all my books say you should do. I have to make do with "boiled carrot" -- bright orange. I may just try MAPP gas, although it is relatively expensive.

Anyway, all Numbers 4, 5, and 6 from the left needed was a good sharpening. I do this early in the morning, while I am still half asleep. That way it is soothing, rather than tedious.

On the far right is a knife made by Averky (there is a post, somewhere in here, about this episode). Taking advantage of a tool handle without a tool, I put a handle on it and le voilá, as the French say. I also did the edge for him. To his credit, he did a lot of the work. I think we tempered too hard. In the winter, I don't usually get kids. Too bad, in a way.

And so we come to the microforged tools. Both are made from a someone's junked screwdriver. I cut it in half and made a cold chisel out of one half and a pin punch out of the other. The cold chisel was forged; the pin punch I turned down on the Taig lathe, with some trouble because the piece was whippy. I couldn't do the job between centers because it was too short. I am only sorry I didn't take pictures, but I was much too absorbed to grab the camera, which was one meter away from the work. When you make tools out of scrap steel, you should make sure the steel is hardenable. Heat up to boiled carrot red, plunge in cold water (quench). If a file will skitter off it, it's hardenable. If the file cuts it, it's mild steel, no good for tools.

Making one's own tools is very, very satisfying. All you need is a scrap heap. Unfortunately the modern enviro craze has led to the demise of the good old junkyard. Too bad. However, plenty of people cast off perfectly good pieces of brass, copper and steel. You can make many a tool out of old valve springs, for example. Brass is harder to find lying about. I need a nice piece of 5 mm brass, about 26 mm long. Hmmmm....

Miniatures again

Astronomically, winter is still some ways away. But this is Alaska. Early morning temperatures below freezing. Time to move indoors and do winter projects. It is time to work on Christmas presents. Unfortunately I cannot mention the subject in full, because the recipient is all too likely to be reading this. So let us say that it is a miniature of my future woodshed, which happens to be true! It is not the done thing to tell lies on a blog. The woodshed is held together by mortise-and tenon joints. So after some trial and error, I decided I needed a new mortising chisel.
So off to the microforge, and out came a 3.5mm chisel, seen stuck into a future mortise. The calipers at the left are 80mm long, to give you the scale. The chisel turned out at 3.7mm but I do not mind this; too loose is much better than too narrow!

I am using round pieces of wood for the woodshed. I could square them. That is a lot of work. The "logs" are prunings from my lilac tree (no bush, that one; it is as tall as the house!) and from ditto Japanese Maple. The lilac has a nasty pith; Japanese Maple is better. But one's prunings are what they are; selection is limited. Anyway, it is useful to have a centerline on the "logs" and thereby hangs a tale. In real life, you take a chalk line or a Japanese india ink line and snap it. I spent a whole morning trying to duplicate this system. I used sewing thread for a line, a pin to anchor the works, and tried inking and snapping. Alas, my ink is alcohol-based and dries much too fast. Plus snapping -- well, your fingers are not to scale. Very difficult to snap a 10-cm thread. In the end, I went to water color on the thread, and rubbed the thread with a chisel instead of snapping.
You can just see the thread, you can easily see the brush I used to color the line, and the line down the log. Now, I can line my tenons up. If you don't have a reference line it is all to easy to get the tenons out of line. Then they don't fit the mortises, or if they do, the thing ain't coplanar. The shed consists of two "sides" which are called bents in the trade. They will be tied together by two beams. I have to think as to how I will do this.

I microforged a couple of holdfasts, seen above, and cobbled up supports for the log from a split birch twig. I have to say that microforging is wondeful. Need a tool? Make it! Harder, of course, at full scale.

Microforging, part I

When I embarked on duck carving, I was aware that by and large, my tools were too big. Trying to carve a duck's bill with the tip of a Frost knife (wonderful tool, don't want to slander it, but it is too large for a 2mm duck bill). was very difficult. Providentially, I read an article in the Backwoodsman magazine, and I am at the moment too lazy to go thumb through back issues to give you the exact citation. The author forges his own tools with a propane torch, and uses Sawz-all blades as raw material. (N.B. a sawz-all is a reciprocating hand-held saw, beloved in the USA by the construction industry, and by me for the same purpose.)

After some hemming, hawing, and very bad expressions in four or five languages, I got my act together. Basically you need a propane torch, available at any hardware store or Wal-Mart, something to act as an anvil, and a light hammer:
Let's see. Along the top, a US$ 1.00 vernier calipers, useful for rough and ready measurement; a plastic tub (ex-butter substitute) with tap water, a lighter for the propane torch, and a hand-operated grindstone. The Warrenton pattern hammer is a gem; got it from Grizzly Industrial for a few bucks. At the bottom of the picture, a Dremel-type moto-tool (Taiwan knockoff for about US$ 12, cutoff wheel mounted) in a homemade stand, and finally my 2.5 inch ( about 60mm) bench vise and in it, clamped, a piece of bar which is the "horn" of the anvil. Observe the flat conveniently built into the vise. Not visible is the propane torch, just aft of the anvil, mounted as close to the vise as I can get it. The little vise-grip pliers in the middle are my substitute for tongs.

My raw materials are (a) a chainsaw recoil starter spring (b) sawz-all blades (c) used hacksaw blades (d) used utility saw blades (e) even springy wire will make a microtool.

When I started this business I was big on hook tools:
But I anve since evolved, and made gouges, carving knives, chisels, reamers, and, as they say "etcetera". However, note the knife at the top of the picture. It is a small chip carving knife. I love chip carving, a pleasant recreation. I have a commercial chip carving knife of German make, I can do 6mm chips with it. With the little guy I can do 2mm chips.

Once you have made the tool (more about that later) you have to make a handle for it. I use branchwoood whittled to shape, and cartridge brass for ferrules. I collect shotgun shells, rifle shells, pistol shells, you name it; nobody in Alaska heeds the admonition (drummed into me in the US Air Force) pick up your *#$ * brass! after target practice. So much the better for me. I cut the base off with a cutoff wheel on the moto-tool. Then force it on, whittle a bit, and eventually you have a ferrule. I find .45 ACP to be most useful, but .223 (5.56 mm NATO) is a close second.

Above, a marking knife and my chip-carving knife. Eventually I plan to do a tutorial on the subject. It is very liberating. Need a tool? Make it.