Recently, a friend who taught many of the photography workshops I’ve attended asked me to help him out with a woodworking problem: he has an antique workbench that he wants to put back into use, but he’s lost the knobs that went on the original tommy bars (handles) for the two wooden vises on the bench. He asked if I could reproduce them. I agreed, as I’d been thinking about building some things with wooden screws (e.g., nipping press for bookbinding) anyway, and wanted to get some of the tooling and skills needed for that. So I took on the project. We agreed that I’d build entire new handles, as matching the potentially unique screw threads on the original ones might be tough. The project has turned out to be an interesting journey…
OK, this thing is super ugly (‘rough hewn" my daughter said) but I wasn’t trying for finished surfaces at all; just wanted to go through all the steps to make a tenon, a knob, and to thread both to fit together. That having been achieved, it’s time to start on the real thing.
