I've been spending a lot of time in the shop lately and it's been fairly productive. I've completed a set of shelves for the laundry room, made a few spoons out of hard wood and I'm working on a Japanese toolbox commission.
More and more these days I'm choosing to pick up one of the hand saws that have come into my care rather than turn on the band saw or the table saw. I don't know who owned each of the hand saws. Some came from my dad and probably belonged to his dad. Some came from my mother's father and I know of at least one came from my father-in-law. I shipped the whole lot off about a year ago and had them sharpened. The steel in all was good and they sharpened up nicely.
I also have quite a collection of hand saws that I have bought seeking the perfect one. One was touted as practically idiot-proof. For me that was 'practically' with a capital 'P.' It's astounding the variety of curved cuts I can make with a straight blade. I shake my head, fix the inaccuracies as best I can and keep on using the hand saws.
Earlier this year I built a spoon mule using mostly hand tools. I chose to make the long rip cuts by hand. I've been watching a lot of Paul Sellers' videos and I'm amazed at how accurate his cuts are and how little fuss he makes of setting up a saw cut. Somewhere along the way I quit worrying about whether or not my cuts were perfect, because they never were. The long rip cuts on the wood to make the levers on the mule turned out straight enough to work well.
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| Pencil line in tact |
A couple of days ago I needed to break down a board for the Japanese toolbox. I don't have room to handle a whole sheet of plywood or any board longer than about 5 feet in the shop so I often reach for a hand saw. I own a circular saw but most of the time I'm too lazy to find it in the garage, blow the dust off, find a way to support the boards while I cut them, set the correct depth of cut and find an extension cord. It's easy to simply pick up a hand saw and make the cut and, I remind myself, it's all practice. I drew a line of the board square to the face and carried the line onto the edge of the board. Then I put the board on my saw bench, held it in place by putting my left knee on it and started the cut.
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| Hallelujah, it's square! |
When I finished the cut I looked closely at the piece I had cut off. The cut was straight and the pencil line was in tact. The next step was to see if the end of the board was square to the face. I held the board up to the light, set the square firmly against the face of the board and lowered the blade of the square onto the edge of the board. I couldn't see any light between the square and the board. I moved the square along the board. Still no light. The tiniest bit of light would mean the edge wasn't square to the face. I checked the entire length twice more because I didn't quite believe my eyes. It was square! I gave a little hop and a fist pump and yelled, "Yes!" to the empty shop and any squirrels that might be listening through the open windows. As I admired my handiwork something my mother said when I was frustrated came back to me. "Never mind," she would say, "One of these days it will just click." What a perfect description of the moment when, after a long struggle, things fall into place. Here's to celebrating every last click no matter how small.
