One of the tasks that a hand-tool woodworker will be sure to tackle sooner or later is re-handling a chisel. If you’ve caught the antique tool bug – and it is a sickness – then you’re going to get more than enough opportunities to practice this skill. The handle of my 2" firmer chisel has suffered a few splits over the years through all of this hard construction work we’ve got going on over here. I’ve glued it a few times, which works just fine for a while, but I decided to squirrel away a few minutes to get a better handle on this thing. I invested less than 15 minutes in the afternoon, and I’ve done everything except final fitting,...
The backs of these Boxed Sets we’re making are tapered and slid into a groove in the same way that drawer bottoms were often done in 18th-century cabinet shops. We plowed the 1/4" groove on the sides with a 7/8" groove plane (which was originally made to match a tongue plane). I prefer this tool for this task over the adjustable plow plane because fixed fences make the work consistent – all of my drawer bottoms are set 1/4" from the edge without ever setting a fence. The complication to backs being paneled into a groove is that the groove in the top board would be seen in the dovetails if it ran all the way through. In this case...
Building this staked Roman workbench was another opportunity to do one of my favorite woodworking operations: riving and paring wedges. I started with white oak that I’ve had sitting around since building my “Roubo” lathe (seen in the banister-back chair article) last year but any straight grain bone-dry hardwood would do. With a mallet and hatchet (a wide chisel also works), I split off several pieces about a ¼” thick. This only took one moderate ‘thump’ per piece. With my four pieces split, I placed each in my wedge shaping block. This is nothing more than a notched shelf on a block held in my front vise. I’ve seen Windsor chairmakers use a block like this but I’m not sure...
