Winter 2013

Making your own hand tools that are useful and beautiful is a gift that you give to yourself. They will give you a lifelong satisfaction and you'll have some very useful tools for your bench and shop. Every time you go to do a job that only that tool does, you'll know you crafted it. This class will take you through the steps to design and build several important tools including a bench hook, a wooden hand plane, and two mallets, a wooden and a brass mallet.

Make your own bench hook that is useful for holding work to saw or plane or chop on. Building it accurately will also make it a great shooting board for trimming edges with a bench plane. Building this wooden mallet gives you great practice making through mortises. To make them even stronger, learn how to wedge a through mortise and tenon joint. You'll also get some great experience shaping your mallet handle to fit your hand exactly.

Designing and crafting a wooden hand plane is an astonishment. It seems so simple, but how could it possibly work? We take a chunk of laminated wood, saw it up, creating the bed for a thick hardened and tempered steel plane iron. Then it's glued back together and next shaped for your hands. Add a wedge and your iron and you'll be cutting shavings of wood with a tool so light and beautiful. Wooden hand planes are instruments as much as tools. And since all instruments need fine tuning, making a brass head tuning hammer has to be included in our tool list. This is a hammer you use for fine adjustments of your wooden hand plane to tap the wedge home but also to move the iron and set it for just the right kind of shaving.

Come join us for this great experience and design and build some fantastic tools. It will open new doors for you as you see some of the possibilities being a tool maker offers.