Spring clean up and fun projects

I have been able to spend a large amount of time in the workshop in the last two weeks, the result is that a lot of the projects I had on the back burner have been dealt with.

I have restored my 1871-1875 Disston and Sons rip panel saw, cleaned the plate, reassembled it with all screws aligned, jointed the teeth and resharpened it with a progressive rake. It rips like a champ and may have another century of service in it.

I have finally made a saw till to store my hand saws, which has created some space on the shelf under the bench. That space has now been taken over by bench planes, at least until I build a plane till.

I have built a new saw vise, which will be rebuilt in hard wood at some point in the future. It was a fun project that allowed me to practice cutting curved slopes with a chisel and blending curves with rasps, on top of half-laps, dadoes, larges bevels and rounded edges with planes.

I built a new square shooting board, laminated planks and a through dado to hold the stop. I incorporated a rounded gullet at the bottom of the fence so that the occasional dust wouldn't be a problem for the plane.

I disassembled, cleaned, lubricated and refinished my trusty old Ulmia dual marking gauge. It can now be operated without resorting to a mallet, which is a marked improvement. I also refiled the marking pins.

I fixed the old wobbly combination square... it was a combination of factors: the hook holding the blade needed some filing to re-establish a good contact and the skates needed some filing to realign.

I finally got around to fixing the spare #5 plane with the broken yoke... it took me days to chase the old pin out but only 10 minutes to put the new yoke in, lubricate all moving parts and resharpen the iron. I may copy Christopher Schwarz and engrave one side of that plane at some point... it isn't a priceless antique after all.

As I was in a sharpening mood and I was waiting for the glue to set on the tool chest sliding tray, I started sharpening and testing some of my wooden planes. My new sharpening setup works fine, usually taking a couple of minutes before I'm back to work... but thick old steel irons are a different beast. The ward skew iron from my panel raising plane took me the best part of half an hour... most of it at the grinding wheel to remove two chips. As it was so hard to grind, I don't expect that iron to require frequent maintenance.