Hand Tools

I don't know, maybe these are as common as dirt and I'm just blissfully ignorant, but I've not seen one like this before, and thought it was interesting enough to post here.

My brother showed up yesterday and gave me this tool, asking if I what it was.  I knew what it was for almost immediately, as there could only be one use for it.  It is from the estate of a local custom knife maker here in Idaho, but that's not the original trade it was made for...

I just brought his name up in my last post here, and now I see there is more on famed saw-sharpener Tom Law being brought up on the various forums.  It appears he's not doing too well. From a post by Dave Caudill on the WoodCentral Hand Tools Forum:

 I don't think there's been a decent saw vise on the market in decades.  Sometime in the 60's, most all hand tools went out of favor with the advent of portable, reliable, and relatively cheap electric motors for use in powered hand tools such as circular saws and the like.  Hand saws became so very old school and fell out favor, so the market for them - along with the tools for maintaining them - dried up.

But - because they were so commonly used before, there's been a plethora of old saw vises to fill the void.  With the old school methods making a comeback, and age or wear claiming the life of them more and more, those tools have been getting fewer and fewer. 

Someone has stepped in.  Gramercy Tools is introducing a new saw vise, one worthy of the vises of old.  It looks impressive. 

Based on an old Wentworth saw vise design from the late 19th Century and made from heavy bar (or sheet, depending on how you look at it)steel (not cast) the vise looks to be the only really decent vise available new today.  Certainly it's far above quality wise than any other new vises that I've seen.

One of the most common tools in the arsenal of pretty much every hand tool shop is a shooting board, a couple examples of which you can see illustrated in Fig. 1 that are based on illustrations from one of Charle's Hayward's writings, "The Complete Book of Woodwork".

I don't know how many of these I've cobbled together over the years. Usually from scrap, and often - because I'm usually more worried about the project than how I put together the shooting board - thrown away not long after because I don't take the time to make it properly.

Essentially, a shooting board (or 'chute' board in some lands) in its simplest form a simple fence that allows one to plane an edge or end on on a piece of wood to a known angle, commonly 45 or 90 degrees.  It provides a shelf to place the wood on to raise it so the blade of the plane used is fully exposed to the wood (if it isn't a rabbet plane, the blade doesn't go all the way to the edge of the plane).

 The plane used can be a specially made "miter plane", made just for the purpose - one such as Lie Nielsen's iron miter plane, but usually it is just a standard bench plane whose sole has checked to be perpendicular to its side. 

Rob Hanson (no relation) has come up with an interesting product - one he's been selling through his blog page at the Evenfall Woodworks web site.  You can see his version of a shooting board in Fig. 2 at work with a low angle bench plane.

If you look closely, you'll notice a series of holes in the body of his shooting board.  This is what makes Rob's product devilishly clever - its fully adjustable to different angles.

 I'm impressed.  It's bloody ingenius.