Sawing wood by hand - and a saw, of course! More wood joy and pain

 Wood for free?

 I've always liked the idea of using local wood from fallen branches etc and cutting this up and drying it. It is nice to make things from wood and be able to have in your minds eye where it grew. All it takes is some strenuous carrying, splitting and sawing and then waiting a few years and after that you have your own special wood - for free? 

Wood sawing woes

One of the biggest problems I have encountered during my wood gathering activities is difficulty when holding pieces of wood when sawing it into pieces ready to dry or use. Here I am just managing to  use an old Japanese Whaleback saw to divide a wide piece of dry sycamore intended for use as an archtop guitar back. My poor old vice is valiantly doing its best but the wood moved around a lot and things are not ideal for me or the poor vice!

Precision Hand Sawing!

 In the past veneers were sawn by hand. Here is an illustration of this process from the18th century French treatise on woodworking by Roubo (Image from Wikimedia Commons)

There is another illustration of French veneer sawyers in Diderot's encyclopedia where they have a slightly different but similarly sturdy bench/vice arrangement for holding the log while they are working on it. The skill of these workers who were expected to cut veneers of  an even 1/12 inch thickness from logs of very valuable wood is very very impressive! 

 

I decided that if  I was to lessen my wood sawing woes I needed to make my own bench/vice inspired by the designs from Roubo and Diderot

19th of March 2019

Hard 'won' wood for my Vice jaws

I needed some large pieces of hardish wood for my vice jaws. Several years previously (around 2005?) I managed to acquire part of one of the smaller branches of what had been the largest tree in the area, an old full crown beech, around 270 years old, that had been damaged in high winds and was then cut down. With quite a bit of a struggle I had split this in the field where it lay - having been made wary of a foal that may bite - into four  and carried it home in a wheel barrow in four trips of a mile each way. Actually I carried the first piece on my shoulder and found the weight and sharp corners quite troublesome so resorted to the wheel barrow for the next three. The pieces were different sizes and averaged around 8 stones in weight. These I left as you see them in the corner of the garage to dry until I might need a large piece of beech.

Having selected a promising quarter, after some careful consideration I started work, first sawing it in half

Then I started to square the pieces up first with an old ripsaw

21st of March 2019

After a lot of sawing, here the two roughly squared vice jaws can be seen along with the saws used and at the right the 'scrap' pieces from the quarter log. I had made up a design which had two large vice jaws, the rear one being longer than the moveable front jaw hence the size difference

22nd of March 2019

I had a while previously bought some steel and iron vice screws for this project and here I have them lying on the two jaws in an effort to visualise how thing will go together

23rd of March 2019

More work on the jaws with a scrub plane and as this was demoralizingly slow I was attempting to use a broad side axe in the squaring up of these large pieces of hard wood

25th of March 2019

I have got the two pieces about the same depth here. Sadly the during years the wood spent in the corner of the garage water had been seeping under the door and this combined with less than ideal drying conditions had cause the wood to have had some fungal attack. Luckily it still seemed to be sound and strong enough. The spalting from the fungus can bee seen here especially on the left jaw 

26th of March 2019

Some Axe experimentation

Here I am trying to use a broad axe to trim one of the remaining uneven surfaces. I have been trying to get the hang of using these axes over the last few years and have to admit to having a lot of difficulty. Part of my trouble, I think, is because I am neither wholly right of left handed so seem to work against myself in some way. I use an axe in an approximately right handed way but my dominant eye seems to be my left, I also seem to want to have my left and right hands the wrong way around when using an axe with two hands possibly because I write with my left hand and so it seems to be more 'accurate' and wants to be up the shaft near to and controlling the head, the wrong configuration for using a right handed side axe, but my right hand is stronger etc? 

 

Ambiundextrous Axe Eureka moment?

Today I momentarily seemed to get the hang of using my broadaxe. So, not wanting to forget what I had finally been doing right I wrote it in pencil on the wood. I hade been trying to watch the blade on the inside/left of the cut - possibly because my left eye is dominant - but this day I found things much improved by keeping my eye focused on where the outside/ bevel side or right of the blade contacted the wood surface in use

 

Here I note that it helps to steady the right or guiding hand (right handed broad axe) by resting the arm on the thigh and that for safety always keep legs out of the the axes swing or path. I read in a book on boat building that if possible when hewing with a broad axe keep the free end of the handle lower  than the head and it will avoid the axe swinging towards the legs if it glances off. This seems to work as it tends to direct the swing away from the user. Whatever you do, always work with safety in the forefront of your mind as sharp heavy axes can easily cause injury

After planing off the axe marks I started boring the holes for the vice screws

When boring fairly large diameter holes through quite hard wood the wide sweep "Wagon builders" brace is a great help. Here I have bored the holes through short, front vice jaw and am seeing how the screws look in place. The threaded 'nuts' which go with the screws are sitting on top of the jaw while I consider what I need to do to fit them in the rear jaw

27th of March 2019

Here I have used a large centre bit to bore two shallow holes of a depth appropriate to accomodate the square flange or shoulder on the nuts 

I used a smaller centre bit to continue the holes at a smaller diameter to create a stepped hole to accomodate the other part of the vice nuts. I held the nut next to centre bit and used a pencil to mark the depth I needed to bore  

Ideally I would have liked to square the wood off fully but I decided it was better to retain as much material as possible to maintain strength, this meant that the holes had to be of different depths. Here the stepped holes can be seen

Now it was time to complete the holes by drilling the holes for the screws to pass through. (This was done last as if it had been done first then the counterboring for the vice nuts, with the centre bits, would not have been possible) The holes were bored until the auger point emerged and then as can be seen here the jaw was turned over and the hole completed from the other side

One of the completed holes

The tools used

The counterboring for the square parts of the nuts then need to be chopped square to fit

After the rough shaping with the gouge a flat chisel completed the job. The gouge has also been used to remove some material from the hole to accomodate the slightly conical form of the circular part of the nut

One of the nuts fitted and screwed into place. To allow for possible wood shrinkage I made the excavation slightly wider than the size of the nut flange

28th of March 2019

With the screws fitted I tightened the screws to bring the jaws together so I could level the top and bottom surfaces. Here I am attempting to speed up things using a large shipwright type chisel or slick 

The leveling of the jaws is completed by planing

Testing the partially completed vice, it held this piece of wood nicely

4th of April 2019

For the tommy bars for my vice I took some pieces of sycamore log and chopped and planed them to produce two strong reasonably round sticks to fit the vice screws

I then started to make ends/caps for the wooden tommy bars

Taking a centre-bit of a suitable size, slightly smaller than my rounded sticks, I drilled partway through some small pieces of sycamore

 

I then used a saw to remove some thickness and then to separate them and make them roughly octagonal

 

 

I then used a chisel to round them off  and used a knife to whittle shoulders on my tommy bars

 

The caps in place, I will glue one on and will maybe use a coarse screw to hold the other on so they can be removed from the vice if necessary

Testing them in place

They should work quite well

16th of April 2019

18th of April 2019

14th of May 2019

16th of May 2019

21st of May 2019

As usual I managed to cut my hand which seemed to indicate it was a good time to stop work!

5th of June 2019

7th of December 2020

Hello, I will add to this blog again sometime but in case anyone is interested, I have been putting my violin making experiments and other woodwork stuff here (see below) for a while

Hans Kipferle's bench (Violin Cobbler) - Contemporary Maker's Gallery - Maestronet Forums