Sharpening II: a gouge

A chisel is perhaps the easiest thing to sharpen by hand. A gouge is an entirely different animal. Gouges are sort of like a pipe split down the middle and sharpened on one end. Here is an example:
The static picture of a gouge being sharpened is exactly the same as a chisel being sharpened. But there is one important difference. If you were to hold the gouge in one position, the rounded bevel would be flattened! This is not good. The bevel must be a perfect round. So you have to rotate the gouge as you rub back and forth on the stone. You must of course hold the gouge flat on its bevel. But don't hold it there too long. Slowly rotate the gouge. If you do this, you will get a nice circular bevel.

The question arises as to how you get the bevel in the first place. Well, if you have just bought a gouge, stick with the original bevel until you have got the rotation bit down pat. However, all bevels are not created equal.

Basically there are three kinds of bevels. Carpenter's bevels , carver's bevels, and turner's bevels. A carpenter uses a gouge to remove wood in a hurry. Typical carpenter's bevel is about 32 degrees. I have encountered 45 degree bevels on some specimens. Now, a woodcarver would be lost without a gouge. At least 90% of wood-carving is done with gouges. Carver's gouges are shallower bevels, say 25-30 deg and maybe even less. This is because a carver has to renove wood very carefully. Else he/she does not get whatever cut is wanted. You can always make another cut. But you can't ever put it back on . Basic rule of wood and, for that matter, metal working.

Turner's bevels are are a sufficiently complicated question to warrant a separate post. The matter is complicated by the fact that most of the turners these days use power lathes. I do not. So all the lore about fingernail grinds -- about which more later -- may not really apply to foot-powerd lathe freaks, such as myself.

Synopsis: sharpen your gouge on a stone. Preserve the original bevel. Above all, constantly rotate the gouge.

One or two posts down the road, I will get into the subject of establishing a bevel in the first place.

Sharp as a razor, part I

This week it has been raining. At best, completely clouded. I suppose this helps the garden. But I have been indoors a lot. I have sharpened a lot of tools; in fact I am currently making a gouge-sharpening jig. But that must wait. I am starting a series on sharpening. In the manner of all blogs, the threads get tangled. Bears get tangled up with axes, so to speak. So I have a new label or two for this thread.

All edge tools must be sharpened. If you neglect to do so, the tool will cut badly if at all. Worse, it will slip and possibly injure you. A dull tool is a menace. True even for kitchen knives. Now, on the market you will find many machines that you are urged to buy. But before you plunk down your cash for one of these things, I recommend learning to sharpen by hand. Japanese masters begin their day by sharpening all their tools. By hand, of course. It can be a Zen activity if approached in the right way. Let us start our Zen Journey.

We do need one bought-in item for this activity. A sharpening stone. There is a huge number of stones on the market: arkansas, ceramics, carborundum, diamonds, waterstones and no doubt Plutonium chromide by now. However, in my personal opinion there are only two. Diamond and Japanese waterstones. I use diamonds on the tools I make myself, to get a rough edge. I also use it on kitchen knives, which are stainless steel. After that, it's waterstone all the way, plus a leather strop. Every time I resharpen, it's waterstones. So what is a waterstone? You will find a picture of one in the Lee Valley catalog. The one I use is labeled "1000/4000 grit." So what's a grit? A measurement of average particle size in the stone. The larger the number the more particles per cubic whatsis in the stones, so the smaller the particles are. For practical purposes 1000 is medium and 4000 is fine.

Waterstones are used sopping wet. One stores them in a water-filled "pond." Some people will try to sell you one. Don't bother. Use a dollar store basin, or cut the bottom off a large plastic detergent bottle and use that. So we have a waterstone. We have a place to store it.

You have just bought a brand X chisel. Disappointed with it? Right. It ain't sharp. Now let's start sharpening. Look at the bevel on the chisel. You will see little scratches on it (unless you bought a really good chisel at a corresponding price). You chisel has been ground on a machine. But it hasn't been sharpened. Our objective is to get rid of the scratch marks. So we unlimber our Japanese waterstone.
Here you see the very same stone shown in the Lee Valley cite above, in a homemade holder. It is soaking wet. The 1000-grit (medium) side of the stone is up. Now, rock the chisel until the bevel is absolutely flat on the stone. Now all you do is press down on it and rub it back and forth. Use quite a lot of pressure, and whatever you do keep the bevel flat on the stone. If you go slow, this is easy. If you go fast it ain't. Go slow at first. You will see a blackish powder appearing. Good. This is called swarf. Means the stone is working. It is basically metal dust and some abrasive. Periodically you lift the chisel and wipe it off. Then you feel for the burr. It cannot be seen by the eye, but can be felt with the fingers. It is a slight irregularity on the back side of the edge, the side that is up in the picture. When you get the burr, you have gone far enough with that grit. Get rid of the burr by turning the chisel over so bevel is up. Lay back side flat on the stone and give it a couple of passes. You should not feel any burr after that.

Now turn the stone over, so 4000 grit side is up, and repeat. You know, back and forth, raise a burr, get rid of burr. When you are finished, strop it. This post has gone quite far enough, so I will defer stropping. All tools are done more or less the same way, but there are many innuendoes and tricks for different tools. Such as knives and gouges. Axes are a completey diferent animal. Get to them any time now.

At the end you may have some scratch marks in the middle of the bevel. This is acceptable. Reason is your tool was hollow-ground. But you should have no scratch marks at all at the ends of the bevel.

More (like the iceman) cometh later.

A garden grows apace

This is definitely garden week. First, a few pictures of the transplant activity. These were taken by my son and sent to me. So they did not make it into the last post. Here my daughter is struggling with lettuce. She seems unconcerned.
And more transplanters at work:
Now we have to do the seed stuff. There are some plants I start from seed, namely carrots and radishes. For some reason I have bad luck with transplants. So I seed them. Seeding is not a photogenic activity. I use my trusty Earthways Seeder. Amazingly it has not acquired a name.
This is an amazing contraption. It uses plates, circular disks sort of like a Ferris wheel. It is, in fact, a seed Ferris wheel. The seed is put in a hopper, and takes a ride on the Ferris wheel. When it gets to the right place it is ejected rudely, and falls down a chute. Meanwhile, a plow-shaped thing has cut a furrow. The seed drops into the furrow. A chain dragging along covers the seed. This gadget saves hours of time and backbreaking manual labor. So I did my seeding in 15 minutes, all I had to do was push. There is a caveat: you have to use the right plates for whatever you are planting. And you must adjust the depth of the plow thingie. But it is a wonder.

Next, the greenhouse. I transplanted the tomatoes and zucchini into GH 2.0.
The more I look at GH 2.0 the more I am convinced it is a Good Thing (TM) because it is structurally sound, zero cost (except for the plastic) and while all the greenhouses nailed together around here collapsed this winter, this one stood up. It wasn't covered, you see. It took John about 15 minutes to cover it, and that's what it takes to uncover it. So its snow load is zero. And now John covered it.
The temperature in this thing is amazing. Today was 15C but GH registered 31C. Tropical. Just what you want for the greenhouse crops. At night it falls, but it is (so far) always warmer than the outside, by at least 1C. I will admit it looks a little crude. A lot crude, in fact. But who cares? I don't. Wish I coul get clearer plastic, though.

OK, now the oats have to be sowed. So John took the tiller for a walk.
This is the oat field being tilled. Oats (grains, in fact) require a great many more square meters than veggies. We have to mechanize. Sometimes John looked a little concerned.
Nevertheless the whole thing was done in about 20 minutes. Another amazing contraption. Should you buy one, do buy a rear-tine tiller like this one. Front-tine tillers work, but they will take your teeth out along with the weeds and trash. Tomorrow I will sow my oats, wild or otherwise. Very tame, in fact. Saskatchewan oats. We have another amazing contraption for that. Stay tuned.

A garden grows, but you have to work for it

Up until May 17, if was below freezing every morning. After that it has been above 0C every day. Last frost? We don't know. But it is obvious that we had to do something about the garden. There was still snow on the ground when we went out last Monday.
This is a remnant from the huge berm made by snow coming off the roof. Anyway, we took spading fork in hand and went out to the garden.
The rows have to be spaded. Then some natural compost has to be added, and finally manure. It is not the spading that is difficult. It is extracting all dandelions! And they have very long roots, so I wind up bending over a lot, or crawling. Either way it is quite tiring! Above I am pulling one of the pesky varmints. Like vampires, they are hard to kill. They can, however, be eaten -- as long as you don't wait too long. Good in salads.
It is a good feeling, having a row done, but one is tired at the end of the day.

We will skip pictures of soil-building. We add "black dirt," my name for a pile of forest-floor organic matter where a bulldozer went. Likewise the add-manure step. I'm sure you can visualize it. Now on to the payoff. It is Memorial day weekend. This is the traditional planting date in Alaska. I'd like to start sooner, but this was out of the question with a severe winter. So I had some help, thank heavens. My daughter and her friend came up and helped. We did all the transplants.
There are a few more plants on my windowsill. They are a bit too young to be allowed to go out and play with the older boys and girls. But note the plastic cloches over anything that is liable to be lost to frost. I make these out of fruit juice containers by cutting off tops and bottoms. You could use glass jugs but it is much easier to make plastic ones. I can never have enough cloches.

It rained last night, saving me the trouble of watering. It rained all of today, too; no work possible. I have some seeding to do and the greenhouse. But the garden got off to a good start.

The moving of the tank

Back when the Village was young, in the mid-80s, there was no electricity, no gravelled road, no school. The pioneers used ATVs to get in and out (or snow machines in the winter), and cooked and lit their houses with propane. So when I came here I inherited an enormous propane tank. Eventually I was informed by the propane company that it was much too close to the house and would have to be moved. Furthermore I would have to replace the copper pipe that leads the gas inside the house. All this at great cost. No, said I and made other arrangements, at a tenth of the cost. But the tank was most inconvenient.
As you can see, the tank (a) is huge; it must weigh (mass) about 200 Kilos or 400 lb. as you prefer, and (b) solidly blocks the way to the woodshed. It had to be moved. So John and I started out on this odyssey. Regard the cable. What is it connected to? Why, my new come-along. This machine is indispensable for all bush Alaskans.

A come-along is a ratcheting winch. You connect the cable to an otherwise immovable object. You connect the other end to a really immovable object, such as a tree. You work the winch.
Observe the chain at the left of the picture. It is connected to faithful Vicky, my car, on her towing loop. One sweats. But the tank did move. Up to a point. You see, it has feet. The feet were set on top of concrete bricks. Came a point when tank would not move at all! The feet dug into the ground and would not budge. So after conferring, we connected tank direct to the car. Put car in 4WD compound low gear. Tank obediently rolled over and played dead.
The feet of the tank are now in plain view. If you look carefully you can see the concrete footings too, at the left. Once the tank was on its side we used the car to all the hauling. It was quite easy. We used rope rather than chain because we could lead the rope around trees to change the direction of pull, whithout mortal damage to the tree.

The tank now reposes at the regulation distance from the house. I don't need it at all, so if anyone wants a 300-gallon propane tank, you're wealcome to it. But you will have to come and get it and haul it off yourself!

My only complaint at this point is with the manufacturers of the come-along. They did not pre-stretch the cable, and dealing with it is like wrestling with an anaconda. Otherwise a fine piece of gear, much more solid than my previous come-along, which died in battle this winter. RIP.

The tao of tenons

Last post we made a mortise in a piece of 4x4. But something has to fit in that mortise, and that something is a tenon. A tenon is a tongue-shaped piece that goes at the end of a post -- or a brace. The easiest tenon to make is a post tenon. So let's look at it first.
Here is a post mortise. My standard post mortise is 6cm long. I made it just as I did the last one. Drill and clean. And there is Mr. Ferret, as I promised, sitting on top of the 4x4. Wonderful tool to clean out the bottom of a mortise. Better call it 88x88 mm, not 4x4. Got to watch the tricky gringos. They do you out of lumber at every chance. But note that at the right end of the mortise is a space. This is called the relish, for reasons that are obscure to me. So I am allowing a 2cm or so relish. Now we need to cut a tenon that will fit this mortise. This is a mark and saw job. You use the same marking gauge settings you used to do the mortise, but you saw inside the lines a hair. You want a looseish fit. Later you will drawbore the tenons. That is, you will put a peg through them. On the tenon you will offset the hole a bit (2-3mm) toward the shoulder. This will pull the mortise and tenon tight. So we saw out the tenon. It looks like this:
Now on to a more complex tenon. Since I did a brace mortise in the last post, it is only fair to show you how to cut one. A brace runs at 45 degrees between (usually) a post and the piece on top of the post, called a plate if it is a one-story thing, such as I want to do. Because things are at 45 deg the lengths of mortises are longer. For instance, the length of the brace mortise is 12.2 cm. Why? Well, Pythagoras. He worked the problem. Most things on a brace are multiplied by the square root of two. This is 1.4142... and on forever. I could do a whole post on the square root of two. But you may rest at ease; I won't (now, that is. I may still inflict it on you). However, to the nearest millimeter a 90-mm wide brace requires a 122 mm mortise. Slight error here, because "4x4" stuff is really 87-90mm wide, but it is better to overcut than undercut; it is very difficult to lengthen a mortise. So let's do the tenon.

First job is to lay it out. All angles are 45 deg. I use a Japanese framing square. In a real Japanese square, one of the scales is in plain old centimeters. Another, however, is multiplied by the square root of two. Alas, I have a gringified Japanese square. Inches, so help me, on one side. Shame on Lee Valley tools. Here's the end of the layout phase:
All 45 degrees. Can be done with a framing square very easily. Now we have to lay out the amount we have to saw away from the tenon. We want the edges of the brace to line up with the outsides of post and plate. Many ways to do this, including YAMG, or Yet Another Marking Gauge (This is why I have so many marking gauges. Pain to set up, so you have many of them, because I set them up once. But then I have to select the right one. Sigh). This time, I used a vernier plastic calipers for the task.
I am using a pencil here because this is where I don't want mistakes. On the other stuff I used a felt-tipped pen. Not the best thing but it shows up very clearly in photographs. Remember, a pencil lead is 0.5 or 0.7 mm. A felt-tip is perhaps 2 mm so marking with a felt-tip is asking for imprecision. The Japanese framers use (traditionally) bamboo markers, chisel-tipped, and india ink. Modern Japan has ersatz markers, very nice. Unavailable in Alaska.

Now we take the saw to our layout lines. I use (natch) a Japanese Ryoba saw. I have a real affinity for Japanese tools. We cut the ends all the way through, but we have to be very careful with the depth we marked out with the vernier callipers. That's the one I'm sawing here. You must saw only down to the marked depth on this cut.
And now we have to get rid of the upper portion if the cut, where my right hand is sitting. Some people use a chisel for this. I find it easier to rip it out. Just turn the Ryoba over!

Now if you want to do this for real you need a book. A good book will tell you how to cut all these joints. It will tell you a lot of things that make your life much easier. My bible is called Build a Classic Timber-Frame House, by Jack A. Sobon, ISBN 978-0-88266-841-3. I invented none of this; the old Saxons did this kind of stuff a thousand years ago and some of their buildings still stand. Much more than you can say for basic California ticky-tacky, nailed construction.

The making of a mortise

Now we come to the point -- or is it the edge? of making mortise and tenon joints for timber-framing. We need to make a mortise. I hauled in a salvaged "4x4," a misnomer if ever there was one; 4x4" would be about 100+ mm and what you get, in fact, is about 90mm. Somewhere they have cheated you out of a whole centimeter. But let that pass; I am too tired to rant. You will recall, I hope, that a mortise is nothing but a trench in wood. Into this trench fits a tongue called a tenon. M&T joints were the standard practice in framing a house up to about the 1900s; after that nailing became the practice and collapsing houses the norm. Let's not go there, it's a rant. Instead let me show you how to cut a mortise. We begin by laying out the mortise. If I were making a mortise centered on the 4x4 I would use my new marking gauge.
Note how the wide Japanese style gauge rides over the irregularities in the wood. I have it set up to cut right in the middle of the timber. Also note the knives in the gauge cut the wood rather than scoring it. However, I am practicing brace mortises. These are mortises for diagonal pieces of wood that support corners, keeping them at right angles. So I have to mark out in a different way. So I used a commercial marking gauge, because it is easier to set than my version of a Japanese gauge. But it has a needle point, so it scores rather than cuts. We are, by the way, making 25mm/1" mortises. Since the needles score the wood, we now chisel the edge of the mortise to prevent tear-out in the next step.
So we have prevented the edge from tearing out, because the next step will be to drill out the major portion of the mortise.
We are using a brace and bit for this job. A boring machine would be much faster. Unfortunately they are no longer made, and I have not found one. Fortunately it is not too deep a hole, 6cm exactly. A mark on the drill bit is my depth stop. You have to be quite careful where you drill the holes. They should overlap. This means less cleanout work at the end. So when you are through it looks something like this.

Somehow I am a little off on the hole next to the bottom. This is why this is a practice piece. We learn from mistakes. I think I mistook a crack in the wood for the centerline! Now we clean (square up) the mortise with chisels.
For this I use three (actually four, Mr Ferret is not shown) chisels. Foreground a 19mm Sorby UK mortising chisel, a 1" gringo chisel, and a wide (38mm) Japanese chisel. Be nice to have a 25mm Sorby chisel, but I don't so I use what I have. I am partway through cleanup when the photo was taken. At the end of the day, we have a nice 12 mm x 25mm x 60 mm hole in the 4x4, ready for the tenon.
My mistake in the hole-drilling does not show up too badly. Now it is ready for the tenon. I haven't show you how to make the tenon. Do that later. But here is the trial fit.
Not quite right. Reason is that the bottom of the mortise is not properly clean. When I dug it out with a ferret it worked very nicely. I'll show you the ferret sometime. It is a hooked tool used for carving, and works like a charm for mortise bottoms.

So I am piling up an impressive assortment of marking gauges! Here's my indooor inventory:
The outboard gauges are miniatures, but they work quite well for the big stuff. The left inboard one is commercial, and you have met Mr Japanese before. I find it very convenient to have several, because it bypasses setting these things, so I can have a gauge set up for each kind of joint.

And next time I'll show you how to cut a tenon.