Chisel racks part deux

Last time, I posted about the chisel racks I made for safety Week. Since then I’ve built the accessory racks that mount on the front sliding dovetails. I could babel on about them, but they are pretty simple, so I’ll let the photos do the talking.

Chisel Racks

A few years ago Marc Spagnuolo came up with the concept of Safety Week, eventually one week a year, several prominent bloggers write about ways of staying safe in the shop. It’s not talked about much, but lets face it, woodworking is one of the more dangerous hobbies to get into. Careless mistakes in a woodworking shop, can easily lead to a missing digit, eye, or worse. Now I’m not known for being Mr. safety, some times I do stuff that would make most people cringe. One thing I take very seriously, is cuts caused by hand tools.

If you’ve done any amount of woodworking you’ve probably come to learn that hand tools make certain tasks very easy. You’ve also probably learned that  the sharper they are the better. In the grand scheme of things planes and back saws aren’t that dangerous. Your chisels and marking knife however are just waiting for you to let your guard down so they can slice you open and send you to the emergency room for stitches.

With all that being said, I decided to make myself chisel racks for safety week (yea I know I’m behind schedule). The requirements were pretty simple, the racks needed to be cheap, simple, fully cover the blade, and if possible stylish. What I came up with is below, It’s made from black Willow that I piked up at my local Rockler dealer for  $1.92 a BF. They mount to the wall with dovetails and they also have a dovetail across the front of them so I can make “attachments” to hold my marking gauge, rules, etc. The finish was BLO and paste wax.

 

My first hand tool experience

While researching chisels earlier in the week,I came across an image that took me back to my childhood. My dad didn’t do much woodworking when I was little, but he had enough tools to take care of odd jobs around the house. Among his assortment of tools was a 4 piece set of Craftsman chisels. I use the term chisels loosely, because the handles were way to big, and they had horrible balance to boot.  When I happened across the photo below it brought a smile to my face, as I  flashed back to a time when I could barely get my hands around the handles, and would routinely pound them into a random 2×4 with a framing hammer. Before anyone asks; Yes I routinely got into trouble for misusing and misplacing my dads tools.

Router Table (Pt. 7)

I’m behind on getting updates on this project published, the following photos are from last weekend. While I didn’t get much accomplished, it’s starting to look like a router table. The two main things I got done where mounting the drawers, & sizing of the on of switch mount. I did one thing I won’t soon forget, chopping a mortise in plywood, murders a chisels cutting edge.

Waterstone flattening

I finally broke down and purchased some waterstones so that I could take my sharpening skills to the next level. In my opinion the only real drawback to waterstones is that they don’t stay flat. Thus as soon as I placed my order, I spent a little time searching the net looking for the best flattening method. Lots of methods exist, but the two most common are: a coarse diamond honing stone, or sandpaper on a surface plate.

While diamond hones will do a great job of quickly removing material they are notoriously unflat, and thus in my opinion not acceptable. I have a surface plate, and while it is flat, I don’t like the idea of constantly having sandpaper glued to it. Additionally a 70 pound surface plate isn’t very portable. What I finally decided on (shown below) was a hybrid approach.

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