An angle gauge for a wet grinder

I have always admired the Tormek (q.g.) wet grinders, made in Sweden. These things use a 25-cm synthetic sandstone wheel running in a water bath. The water makes it impossible to overheat the tool, which is the curse of the high-speed dry grinders. Tormek has an extensive online presence, with many useful instructional videos. They also have a large number of extremely useful accesories. The drawback is that they are extremely expensive.

So some time ago I acquired from Grizzly.com (q.g.) an Asiatic knock-off of the Tormek. I call this a TSO (Tormek-Shaped Object). It is about a quarter of the Tormek price. But their accesories leave something to be desired. Of all these accesories by far the most necessary is their angle setter. It is necessary to grind tools at precise angles. My grinder comes with a clever, but basically inferior, gauge, which broke when dropped, rendering it useless. The Tormek WM-200 (q.g.) is far superior. So I downloaded the instruction manual for the device, a PDF file, thinking maybe I could emulate it. Lo and behold, on page one of this PDF file is a full size (maybe) drawing of the thing. If it isn't full-size then it it close enough for Chalupy work. Hmmm. What have we here?
What we have is page 1 of the aforesaid instructions. Close scrutiny will reveal that the gauge is a sort-of rectangle with two moveable widgets. At right, the angle setter. At left, an extremely clever cam that allows you to compensate for wheel wear. As you grind, so does your wheel shrink. Do not be deceived by the knobs. They are not at the pivot point of either the setter or the cam. Obviously the widgets pivot somewhere else. You can find the pivot points with a ruler by very carefully extending the graduation marks on the drawing. You do this on the paper copy. So then you have a pivot point. Then you take some clear plastic which I happened to have, and basically trace the outlines of everything on to the plastic. Be sure to mark the pivot points on your cutouts. Cut it out any old way. I used a jigsaw. Cut oversize. Then I started filing. Note that the important things are (1) the angle setter point and the pivot point must be aligned. After that you can shape the angle setter any old way. (2) The cam profile is important. Trace it carefully. It may not be circular. Then drill holes at the pivot points, and use small screws (I used 4-40 hardware store screws) to assemble. By tightening up on these screws, I did away with the original's knobs.
When all was said and done I realized I had cut the angle setter undersize, so I remade it. Plastic, after all, is cheap; especially when it is found. I have traced out the angle and wheel diameter scales onto the plastic. So when you use it, set the cam to the measured dimension of the wheel. Mine is still at 250 mm close enough. Then set the angle to what you want. Here 25 deg.
And now it's all downhill. Set up your jig so it exactly coincides with the underside of the angle setter. Any questions? Refer to the WM-200 literature! It's online. Today I sharpened a rounding plane blade (25 deg) and an axe (45 deg). Without this gadget I would have been lost in space. Most useful gadget I have made in a long time.

And now, to forestall the patent Nazis: It is true that the WM-200 is patented. It is also true that under US patent law it is perfectly legal to make a copy of a patented thingamabob so long as you do not offer it for sale, i.e. for your own use. Please note that I am not in any way, shape, or form offering this thing for sale. So there.

But there does remain the question of what to call it. I don't want to violate trademark laws. So I will call it the angulometer.

The garden grows apace

The gardening season in Alaska is extremely short. End of May to somewhere in September. When the lower 48 is planting, we have snow on the ground. But there is a compensating factor. We have an enormous amount of sunlight. When it's dark in say, Iowa, we can still get around at midnight without a flashlight. So what we do is plant stuff that grows very, very, quickly. This year we planted (for instance) turnips from transplants. My daughter did the actual transplanting. She gets the Golden Turnip Medal.

Day before yesterday I was about my usual chore, weeding. If your plants can grow so can the weeds, so the chore is never-ending. Anyway I pulled off some weeds and beheld a turnip above ground! Large. I pulled it out and took it inside.
The knife blade in the picture is 25cm long, for a scale. With it is some Swiss Chard. Good stuff. Note to self: plant much more chard next year. Nice turnip, very tasty chard. Now today I completed some more weeding and found a lot more turnips.
I also watered the greenhouse. I have two small (and green) tomatoes. But I also found the largest zucchini I have ever grown. It is visible at the right of the picture. A monster. I have a lot of radishes, too, but I didn't pull any up today. Amazing. Chard and radishes can be seeded. Plant in May, ready in July! Cheers for chard and radishes.

On the debit side of the ledger, cabbage, cauliflower and broccoli seem slow-pokey this year. We shall hope, and make a few sacrifices to the Garden Gods. I am sure my neighbors would be highly offended if I suggested one of their goats might be a suitable sacrifice! Maybe I'll burn garbage instead. Two goals witn one burn.Got to get rid of garbage, after all.

A trip to Denali

I had a recent visit from a friend, and for the occasion we went up to Denali National park. Denali is an Athabascan word, meaning "big mountain," more or less. Your atlas refers to Denali as "Mt. McKinley" after a deceased U.S. president. But we do not use that term in Alaska, because we like Denali better. On a good day Denali, about 6000 m high, can be seen from Willow and indeed from Anchorage. On the event of the trip, we were clouded in (grrr) and did not see the mountain at all. Poets call this "veiled in cloud." I say fie on poets. I want to see the mountain.

When you get to the National Park, you proceed to the WACC. This is the Wilderness Access Center. You buy a ticket and you get on the shuttle bus. This is for all intents and purposes a school bus, painted green. It takes you where no private vehicle is allowed to go. The scenery is quite spectacular.
With any luck, you will see wildlife. In our case, we were lucky enough to see a bear. This guy was a real ham. He posed for us and thousands of dollars of expensive cameras clicked away. This is one of the times I wished I had something like a 600mm lens (in 35-mm format old film tech).. Old Ursus was most impressive.
A blond(e) bear, no less. This is a grizzly. Well, we went along. We were climbing the sidewalls of a canyon or valley and the scenery became even more spectacular.

There were times when the bus seemed to overhang the road. The drivers are very skilful, however, and we did not fall off any cliffs or I wouldn't be posting this. After a while you get tired of the ride. The complete trip is perhaps six hours one way, 12 hours total. After about 4 hours we got off, and waited for a bus in the opposite direction. Eventually we got one and rode back to civilization, encountering moose in the process. There are plenty of moose photos in this blog; I will not bore you with them. But Denali NP is really (as the younger generation says) awesome; I urge anyone and everyone to take the trip.

Disaster strkes again!

My son and I have a joint project. We will make custom picture frames. He will paint what goes inside. A Fair division of labor; beause I am not an artist. Oh, I will do a reasonably artistic carving. But that does not make me an artist! When we add computers into this mix of art and craft, we have a recipe for a disaster, and that's just what happened. I have no bones in telling you the whole thing. Someone may learn something from it, after all. The thing about our custom picture frames is that they should not be vanilla store-bought frames. They should be carved by hand. And shaped by hand. The latter idea is my contribution to art. So, OK, I have to make a frame for a picture, and I even have to carve it. I have been practicing the carving part . And making tools for it, because commercial tools fall far short. The carving is the easy part. Shaping the ground is the hard part.

So this is a very lengthy introduction to a new subject: making weirdly shaped planes. I have absolutely zero experience in the area. So please bear with me as I learn. Nowadays weird shapes are made with routers, but I defy any router user to make his own shaped bits. But before routers were invented people planed moldings with planes. So I have said, let us make two planes: a rounder and a hollow. Both semicircular. And here follows the tale of these two guys. Here's what I have learned. People have not done this for about a hundred years. Some have. But they are not easy to find. Furthermore, the ubiquitous router gets in the way.

First you make the blade. So I want one one blade that looks like a semicircle. I lay it out and I drill holes that match it.
Next step is to drill some holes close to the profile of the piece. There, I knew I could get a picture into this thing. After that it's all file work. Tedious. But art knows no limits. File away and you, too, may be an artist. Much more important yhat you understand what I am tryng to do than how I did it. After all I have yet to succeed. And that's where disaster comes in. I have so far ruined two hollows. More to follow.

The summer of the scythe

The scythe is a very old tool. It probably evolved from the sickle. Egyptian pictures show people using sickles to cut grass or grain. Some genius figured out later that if you put a long handle on it you don't have to bend over. I do not know if the Romans had it (you can always consult Wiki) but by the middle ages it was well established. In the US it was used to cut wheat well into the 20th century, being eventually displaced by machinery. Scythes are now making a comeback, I am happy to report. Lots of scythe blogs and websites on the Internet.

There are two broad designs of scythes. The European and the American models. In my opinion the European scythe is much better. Maybe at one point, a hundred years ago, we made decent scythes. Not any more. Only Austria does in Europe, for that matter. The handle you can make yourself; it is not exactly rocket science and I intend to do just that any day now. The handle must be custom-fit. But I bought mine from ScytheSupply, a US supplier, as a kit, and I am glad I did. It cost no more than a midrange lawnmower. It included everything I needed.

Here's Maximilian the Scythe. Max has a brush blade. When I acquired it there was brush all over the place. Most of it is gone, thanks to Max, so I am thinking of acquiring a grass blade to supplement Max. I'll make the handle myself.
Maximilian is going into the shop for sharpening. This is, you see, really a sharpening post. A (European) scythe is sharpened like no other tool. It first must be peened. Strange? Read on. You peen once or at most twice in very heavy use. Attached to the scythe is my scything belt. It consists of a water bottle and two important implements. One is the square 6mm key used to get the blade off the handle. The other is the Steinfass. This is a tin swimming pool for a waterstone; it hangs diagonally from the belt. It is filled with water, and in it the sharpening stone is enjoying its bath. It is hot! 25C. The word Steinfass is German or Swiss-German, I got it from Drew Langsner's Handmade. It obviously means "barrel for a stone" and no Swiss farmer would be caught dead with a tin Steinfass. He would make his own out of wood, elaborately carved in the dead of winter. A nice project, by the way. Anyway, we ply our key, get the blade off the handle, and walk into the shop. We walk up to the peening station.
This is a stump of log with three things on it. The big round thing is the anvil. The two other things are collars. One of them has one groove cut into it, the other two grooves. One and two. Get collar number one. Squirt some WD-40 over everything. Slip the collar over the anvil. Find your trusty hammer. Any old hammer will do. Slip the stump between your knees. Hold it tight. Do not sweat how tight. This is not brain surgery. Just keep it steady.
Now slip the blade in between collar and anvil. The factory logo should be up. The edge should just kiss the center post of the anvil. Keep the blade perfectly flat on the anvil. Whack the collar with the hammer. If you did it right you will get a nice sharp ring. If it goes clunk, you were holding the blade off the anvil. If it went clunk, play it again, Sam. Now slide the blade over about 2mm. Repeat. Eventually you will get to the end of the blade. It takes me far less to do this than it does to write about it! About two minutes.

You are at the end of the blade, the tang end. Remove collar number one. Put on collar number two. Work your way back to the narrow end of the blade. Remember, listen for the nice clear ring. Anything that does not go ting! (but does go clunk!) means you were not holding the edge flat on the anvil. First time you do it you will have to tune your ear. By now I am on automatic.

The real pros do this with a hammer, freehand, on an old stump. Good on them. They are pros. I am not! I use the jig. That is why we have jigs. Four mintes flat; less if I am using the scythe frequently and am really movin' metal. And that is exactly what you are doing. As the scythe cuts the edge is worn away. The edge is very, very thin. You are moving metal from the unworn parts of the blade into the edge.

We are almost through. Not quite. Go outside. With your key, put the blade back on the handle. Now buckle on the belt. Extract your stone from the steinfass. Not doubt the stone is annoyed at having to go to work on a hot day.
The stone is natural sandstone. It is used to hone the scythe. Holding the stone flat on the bevel, take about four passes. You will do this many, many times as you scythe, so pay careful attention now. You hone every five minutes or so. Four passes is ample. Now to work, Hi ho, hi ho....
My target is this dandelion-rich field. If not cut off now they will spread. It isn't very big. You might say I could drive Achilles the mower over it. But it is irregular. Mower will stall on irregular terrain. Not made for this kind of stuff; mowers are made for suburbanites. Much more fun to scythe it. So now we get into how to actually use the scythe. This is beyond the scope of this post. Later. Or go to YouTube. You will find a lot of videos of 12-year old girls and 80-year old grandfathers scything hay. But we did it.
With a scythe, you cut a semicircular arc. You swing right to left. Even I, a lefty, swing that way. At your left, end of swing, you pile up a windrow of mown stuff. This bit of field took far too long. But it happens every summer. I start mowing and it seems to take forever. It does. That is because I am not out of shape but out of practice. In winter a scythe is totally useless. So it takes me a few hours to get the rhythm. Why am I such a klutz? I am not. I just need to scythe some more. Never hurry when scything. Just enjoy it. Total Zen. Hint: if it seems like an effort you are doing it wrong.

I am almost ready to get a grass blade for the scythe, because I have cleared the brush out. Mostly. A grass blade cuts a wider swath than my 45 cm brush blade. Grass blades are typically 65 cm long, and much narrower than brush blades. But my 45 cm brush blade has served me well. I will make a new handle for the new blade and Max will enjoy his honored place of Senior Scythe.

Garden Update

We interrupt the sharpening thread to bring you news of the garden. For those of you who are not gardening fans, this must be just as boring as sharpening tools. But gardening is much more fundamental. It involves growing your own food. You see, we are all dependent on a very elaborate production and distribution systems to eat. Eating is the basic human activity. Without it we are dead. People simply go to the supermarket; an interesting term. Where did the food in Safeways come from? Neither you or I have the slightest idea. Even if you follow the precepts of health and avoid processed food, the cabbage you bought in Florida may well have been planted in California. Ridiculous? Not so much. It might actually be cheaper to grow it in Cal and ship it to Fla -- it fuel is cheap enough. And cheap is the name of the game. But if shipping costs rise, and fuel costs rise, then the whole system breaks down. Which is why I plant my garden. I wish, in a word, to be self-sufficient. But enough ranting. (Then again, it's my blog. I will occasionaly put in a rant. Else what's a blog for?)

Now gardening in Alaska is no mean feat. The growing season is extremely short. In Iowa they think of planting on March or April. Hah! In those months I have snow on the ground. But on the other hand, we have a lot of daylight. Just about 24/7. We must compensate. So we plant as early as we can. All a gamble. Most people (myself included) plant Memorial day, end of May, as you have seen from previous posts. I do a lot of transplanting. Stuff grows in my windowsills. I plant in March too. Only indoors!

This is today's picture. I put in the last transplants today, a bit late by my standards. But first I had to get rid of the weeds. An excruciating task. Now everything is in place. The radishes, the carrots.. . and so on. Now this brings up a point. Observe all the dandelions in the picture. Fortunately they are good to eat; they add spice to a salad (if young) and can otherwise be boiled up as a green. Roots are supposed to make a coffee substitute. The French jardins marechières (market gardens) used to grow them as a crop! But I have far too many of them. In suburban lawns, these things are regarded as pests. To me they are a potential resource. Another resource is the lovely wild rose:
You can make Rose Hip Tea out of them. Rich in Vitamin C. Do not neglect the lowly weed. Go read Euell Gibbon's books and see what you are missing.Mr. Gibbon's most famous book is Stalking the Wild Asparagus. There are other books. I no longer give citations, because if you Goooooogle on Euell Gibbons you will get all of them. Dear Suburbanite: do not sweat your dandelions. Eat them instead. You are actually growing an edible crop. But please, stay clear of pesticides. Pesticides are not good to eat at all.

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.