T Bridger asked:




To keep a chain saw sharp, you must sharpen it often. This is not as difficult as it sounds – all you need are a few simple tools and some practice. There are really only 2 steps to sharpening your chain saw. First, you need to file or grind the teeth on the chain to a razor sharp edge, and second you need to adjust the height of the depth guides that regulate the amount of wood taken by each cut.

You can imagine the teeth on the chain as small wood chisels, each one taking a small sliver of wood from the cut, every second tooth cutting from the opposite side. If each tooth takes a consistent amount of wood, at the same angle, and with same amount of effort or force from the saw, then we will get a nice clean cut with a minimum of struggle. When the chain saw doesn’t pull to either side and the saw cuts through the wood like butter you know you have a well sharpened chain saw.

When you’re learning how to sharpen your chainsaw it’s a good idea to tighten the chain so there is very little slack. This will keep the teeth straight and make it easier to maintain a consistent angle when stroking with the round file. You should still be able to move the chain around the bar in a snug fashion. Just remember to loosen the chain before using it again.

Pay attention to the cross angle of the teeth, as well as the upward tilt angle of the sharpened edge. Line up your round file so that it follows the existing angles on the teeth. Gently stroke the file towards the tooth’s point (away from the saw body). Watch the guide carefully so you can keep a consistent angle. Always count the number of strokes on each tooth – usually 5 or 6 strokes is enough. Then move on to the next tooth on the chain and stroke 5 or 6 times at the very same angle.

Repeat this pattern for all of the teeth that point in the same direction (every second tooth). Then flip the file guide around and repeat the process for every other alternating tooth pointing to the other side of the saw. Remember, it’s very important that every tooth is sharpened the same amount or the saw will pull to one side when you try to cut.

After several sharpenings you will have worn the teeth down slightly. The depth gauges must be filed down so they are no higher than the tops of the teeth on the chain saw. Many people don’t know about this step, but if you don’t maintain the correct height of the depth guides your chain saw will not cut properly.

All you do is set the depth guide on the chain straddling the teeth and a small notch on the guide will allow you to remove the correct amount from each gauge. Filing the depth gauges is easier than sharpening the teeth because you’re only trying to set the height of the depth gauges, not actually sharpen them.

Vince L. Paxton asked:




Jigs are essential for woodworking especially for repetitive pieces. When involved in complex projects jigs can make the work a little faster. Jigs can be purchased or made. They are typically very inexpensive however; to save even more money it is a good idea to make your own from scrap wood. A wide variety of jigs is necessary when involved in many different types of projects.

There are a few different types of jigs. Dovetails are used for making a dovetail joint correctly and accurately. These can be purchased or made from a template. The templates can be found in most stores as well as on the internet. The typical template will allow for twelve different sizes. For this, a router and a saw for dovetails are essential. Dovetail jigs can be used for cabinets, drawers, and boxes. Often bits and templates will come together for a project. This can also save money rather than buying these components separately. The dovetail saw is used to cut dovetails as well as fine joints. The thinner blade on the saw will allow for more accurate cutting.

Then there is a dowel jig. This is used for making dowels. A self centering woodworking jig should be used when thick timber is the wood of choice. The sizes vary from about a quarter of an inch to about half an inch. Again, kits are available with the dowel jig and hundreds of dowels of different sizes. The kits can even include glue.

The kreg jig is essential for cabinet making. This allows for drawers to slide flawlessly. They also save time because the drawer slides do not need to be measured and marked. Therefore, the metal drawer slides become easier to install. Although expensive, the equipment is essential for the making of drawers because it makes the process quicker and flawless. The tool can be used for center, bottom, or extension drawers.

When making your own jigs it is best to use inexpensive wood and materials because they are often not used for more than one project. Expensive wood would be a costly waste. Plywood is often used. However, if the jigs are going to be used for several projects, then it is best to make them from a harder and stronger wood. Instructions for jig making can be located in books, online, and even in magazines. The instructions found on the internet can be printed and then used with ease. It is good practice to keep all of these instructions in a binder or case so they can be used for reference material later on. A hint for this is to use plastic page covers to ensure the instructions are not damaged over time.

David Wegener asked:




Wood chisels, there are many types for many purposes but they all have one thing in common; they need to be sharp. With proper care and appropriate storage you can insure your chisels will last to the next generation. With regular sharpening you can guarantee your chisels are always ready when they are needed.

Care and Storage

The first rule in chisel care is don’t hurt the chisels. Although it may seam obvious, it is a point worth emphasize. Chisels can often be damaged when used on inappropriate materials. Always check that the material you are working on is free of nails, screws, and staples. Obstructions like that can easily put a nasty gouge in your sharp blade. Also make sure the materials surface are is clean. Dirt and debris prematurely dull an edge. Any time your blade is damaged it will manifest its self in the finished surface of your work.

Moisture is the enemy. There may be times when you can not avoid some moisture on your chisels. Simply wiping off the excess water helps to prevent corrosion. However there are other times when humidity and condensation can be a problem and a simple wipe with a towel will not work. The solution is simple. Just keep a slight amount of oil on the surface of the blade. The oil will prevent water from being in contact with the metal.

Do not store your chisels loosely in a draw or toolbox. This is because the chisels are able to move around and collide into one another. Again, this leads to slight damage and to the cutting edge becoming prematurely dull. Instead, hang them up, use draw dividers, or purchase a caring pouch.

Sharpening

A sharp edge is important for your chisels to perform properly. Without a properly sharpened edge you will take long to complete your work as well as the finished product will not be as nice. However, do not worry because sharpening is easy with the proper equipment and knowledge.

Materials needed:
Sharping stones (in several grades of finish) Slip stone Oil Leather Strop

Steps:
Lubricate the sharpening stone; put a few drops of the oil on one of the rougher graded sharping stones. Form burr edge; Hold the chisel at a 20 degree angle to the stone and glide the blade along the stone. Work both sides of the chisel evenly and gradually change to the finer grades of sharping stones. Check the burr edge; Lightly dragging your finger away from the cutting edge. Should you be able to feel a slight roughness to the edge. When you do then you know the blade is ready for the next step, else you need to continue to form the burr edge. Remove burr with slip stone; Using the slip stone like the other sharping stones hone away some of the burr so it is ready for the final polish. Use leather strop to finish the edge and polish the blade; draw the blade across the strop away from the cutting edge until the burr has been removed. Check for sharpness; rest the cutting edge of the blade lightly on your fingernail then if the blade catches slightly or feels sticky the blade is ready to use.

Your chisels are now ready for years of use. Although it is not necessary, it is often fun to check your work. Go ahead. Find some wood and check them out. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Vince L. Paxton asked:




Whether you are a professional handyman or craftsman, or if you do DIY projects on the weekend and woodwork for fun, chances are the Ryobi makes a tool that is on your wish list. Ryobi is a tool manufacturer that has all of the bases covered – their basic specialization is everything. What makes Ryobi tools like Ryobi planers and Ryobi drills even more popular is that they have a reputation for long lasting durability.

Just a Sampling of Ryobi Products:

Some of the many must have tools that fall under the Ryobi brand name are:

- Drills

- Saws (band, circular, scroll, jigsaws, miter, table, and reciprocating)

- Routers

- Grinders

- Wood biscuit joiners

- Buffers

The tools on that list are all of the corded tools in the Ryobi brand name, but Ryobi also makes a wide variety of cordless tools. Ryobi cordless drills and drivers let you take that Ryobi functionality on the go with you to all of your jobs and appointments.

Ryobi also have so called combination kits that combine several popular tools into one unit, like saw, drill, flashlight combo or a drill, double saw, flashlight and handheld vacuum unit.

Ryobi Outdoors

Outdoor projects like looking after lawns and gardens don’t always call for power tools, but they can definitely be made easier when you put them into action. Ryobi has a full line of outdoor tools just for this purpose, such as trimmers, log splitters, chainsaws, blowers, cultivators, and pressure washers, which are great for making vinyl siding look like new or prepping wood surfaces for painting. The pole pruner means you can put the ladder away and do your pruning with your feet firmly on the ground.

Cleaning up leaves just got easier with the Ryobi blowers, both handheld and backpack models for big jobs.

Ryobi’s electric log splitter has 1,300 watts of household current to give you 4 tons of RAM to split those logs. All of the splitting power comes with a two year complete warranty so you can split logs with peace of mind.

Getting Ryobi Parts

Since Ryobi is such a popular brand name, finding Ryobi parts is as easy as can be. They can be found in most of your local hardware stores, mega chain home improvement stores, and other authorized dealers. If you do need to get your Ryobi tools serviced, make sure you seek out one of those authorized dealers, otherwise, you may void your warranty.

David Savage asked:




In this article the last of the series of three, I am talking about the last section of tools that a young apprentice cabinetmaker would need to start off their collection of handtools. In previous weeks I’ve talked about planes and chisels, marking and measuring tools and all that remains now are two areas of hand tools that have changed most for the modern European cabinet maker – those of saws and routers.

There was a time when a cabinet makers toolkit would have half a dozen hand saws. He’d have two or three back saws, dovetail saw, a tenon saw, maybe a coping saw. He would also have several long saws, a rip saw, a cross cut saw, probably a couple of panel saws sharpened in different ways. Each of these saws had a different purpose and would be used for a different part of the job. Tool catalogues were full to busting of saw companies products boasting features like breasted tooth lines and taper grinding .

All this now is no more. In the modern cabinet makers workshop the bench saw has largely been replaced either by the small machine – like the table saw or the band saw, or by the portable hand tool such as the jig saw or contractors circular saw. I don’t propose to look at power tools or machines in this article but will still concentrate on what is left, for what is left is actually quite important. It will be a sad day when a cabinet maker can’t actually pick up a saw and cut a piece of wood dead straight, trim the end of a tenon or cut a mitre just shy of the line.

But sometimes it feels like that day isn’t too far away for so much of the sawing dimensioning of components is done nowadays on the small machine. It’s so much easier to potter off away from the bench, in our case go downstairs to a machine room and buzz that little bit of wood off on the table saw. Cutting it off by hand involves effort, energy and skill. It also involves a good saw. Now it saddens me that when I look in the tool catalogue these days, the saw section which used to occupy a whole chapter is now condensed down to two or three pages but it’s still possible to buy an excellent saw , the trouble is it comes from Japan.

Here at our Shebbear workshops I must admit that we have allowed the “tools of the devil” to take over. I’ve had Japanese chisels and waterstones in my workshop for 20 or more years but Japanese saws came when Nick Chandler and I got together 4 years ago. I had never really taken to Japanese saws but many of my students have used them with great success. Basically because when I started work I was lucky enough to find myself a really good dovetail saw. This was a saw made by Roberts & Lee and fitted with an open handle. For nearly twenty years I was advising students to buy similar Roberts & Lee, Dorchester, dovetail saws. Now lots of my students bought their 8 inch and 10 inch saws with beautiful walnut handles and lovely brass backs.

They paid something approaching £50 for each saw Just recently I decided to treat myself to a new 10 inch dovetail saw. A natural choice wasn’t a Japanese rubbishy thing but the £49 Roberts & Lee, Dorchester, 590 walnut handled whizzo dovetail saw. I thought it was British and I’ve had a saw like that for over 25 years. Fair to say I unhappy with my new saw I experienced myself the disappointment I had visited upon so many of my students. The thickness of the saw plate was roughly similar to my old dovetail saw. The quality and weight of the brass back was if anything a little heavier, which is probably appropriate for a slightly longer saw. The way that the handle was fitted to the back and blade assembly was loose and sloppy. Even with the blade tightened as much as I could there was a gap of a quarter of a millimetre on either side where my old saw was tight and snug. Why in this age when such wonderful feats of engineering can be accomplished as a manner of course by robots can we not make a back saw with a decently fitting wooden handle. When it came to using the saw I was prepared for a tussle.

Dovetail saws come with a crosscut sharpening and wide set that means they don’t really function very well especially ripping dry hardwood. What with all the saws I’ve helped students set up over the years I learnt how to get these little saws running reasonably well. It involves firstly taking a cloth soaked in thinners to the blade and removing most of the gunk that manufacturers leave on the blade to protect it from rust whilst it is in the shop. Once you’ve done this it’s necessary to slightly stone off some of the set applied to the saw. A dovetail saw is a precision instrument the way these saws are set in the factory is to my mind much too coarse.

A good dovetail saw should cut a nice fine kerf and you can only achieve this by stoning off some of the set by running a fine stone down either side of the blade or as I used to do tapping the set back with a small hammer on an anvil. This can get the saw running reasonably well but what it really needs is a full re-sharpen and that’s best accomplished by taking a small saw file and filing a 90 degree to the saw blade just one stroke per tooth. I think that dovetail saws when sharpened new are sharpened in cross cut fashion when really most of the action, certainly in our workshop, a rip point seems to work much more efficiently.

Now you can be patriotic and you can go on supporting these old saw makers but there comes a day when somebody puts a saw in your hands that works so much better, costs less than half as much, you have to think why am I beating my head against this brick wall.. Perhaps I should not continue to advise you go on paying nearly £50 for British saw when there’s the Japanese equivalent for £17.79 that does the job rather better straight out of the box. But then I remember what they did to our motorcycle industry.

Now the difficulty with these Japanese saws is they require a different technique. They cut on the pull stroke whereas European saws cut on the push. But don’t they work beautifully. Two saws that seem to have found a home in our workshop are the Doutsuki-Me which seems to be the equivalent of the European dovetail saw and the professional Ryoba saw. The Doutsuki-Me saw is a very fine light back saw with a long handle which makes the control relatively straight forward. But the problem everyone had a few years ago with these saws was sharpening the wretched things. That has been overcome recently with the introduction of the replaceable blade. Nowadays the Doutsuki-Me saw is sold complete for just under £18 and a spare standard blade for just over £10. I think Nick tends to replace his saw blade maybe two or three times a year which makes this quite an expensive saw, but for the cabinetmaker this is a very important tool and one would spend whatever is necessary within reason to achieve these results .

The Ryoba saw also has a replaceable blade, but don’t confuse replaceable in this context with the cheap throw away blades found European saws. This is a saw made for the professional market. The saw has two cutting edges. The top edge has rip teeth with a finer set of teeth adjacent to the handle for starting the cut while the other edge has cross cut teeth which gives a very smooth clean cut. The centre of the blade is scraped out in the same way that old fashioned panel saws had tapered round blades this is done to help prevent the saws sticking in a deep cut. I must admit that these “tools of the devil” have taken a long time to arrive in my very conservative and chauvinistic workshop. Even given my support for the British motorcycle industry I can’t go on supporting Messrs Roberts & Lee when the design and construction of their best saws seems to have deteriorated over time rather than improved.

Now we come to routers. The second area I want to look at is the single tool that has changed cabinet making in the last 25 years – that of the router. I must admit that I **** routers. Not for what it’s done to cabinet making but for the bloody noise and mess they make. They are filthy tools that create a fine dust that covers the whole workshop in brown snow and admit a scream that would drive a Methodist to drink. As far as I’m concerned the only good router’s a dead router. However they are incredibly useful. A router is essentially a small portable machine centre, infinitely versatile, used in a myriad of ways depending on your tooling and ingenuity. We have five routers in the shop at the moment and probably two are in if not constant then in intermittent use most of the time

The most useful is a small router and I think the small router would be the only I would recommend a beginner to buy first. The large router is a bit of a brute but eventually you will need a large router as well as a small one. Of the small routers today available on the market the choice in the professional workshop seems to be between the Dewalt DW6201K and the Trend T5. Both these routers have variable speed and a proven track record. I think the Dewalt weighs in at £212 while the Trend costs £159 including a metal box. I think if I were buying a new router today I would probably go for the Trend T5 but then this is because it’s so similar to my old Elu router that I would feel at home and comfortable with it.

A new router in the larger category which found a place in our affections most recently is the Freud FT2000VCE. This is a half inch router with loads of grunt but it comes equipped with a very accurate and nice to use fine depth adjuster which makes it very useful for fitting underneath a router table. This is one of the major uses in this workshop of this kind of big router. This place isn’t really the place to discuss the merit of each particular model of router. One point I would like to stress is the way a small hand held router usually with a quarter inch collet has really become a key hand tool in the cabinet makers tool box. Rather than filling his tool box with half sets of molding planes, the young cabinet maker will be gathering together assorted set of router bits of different sizes and shapes and qualities.

Our toolkit series is complete but this is just the start of the process of assembling your set of tools . It seems to me that the professional is always seeking to have the best tools available not the most tools. We always seem to seek to replace that irritating plane with a better one or with something that will do the job better. Like a better dovetail saw.