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…
This is a scrap of pine I elected to try out my spoke pointer and hollow auger on first. I figured if I could cut threads in pine, I’d be pretty well set for hardwoods. If you think about it, you’ll realize that cutting threads at the end of a dowel is a more or less cross-grain cut, and pine tends to crumble rather than shear if the cutter isn’t very sharp. This took some doing, first on the spoke pointer, then on the hollow auger, then on the cutter that came installed in the screwbox This latter bit is essentially a small v-gouge, but came not really sharpened, or sharpened hamhandedly. Wouldn’t have worked right at all. Fortunately was warned about this and I spent an hour honing it until it was razor sharp and had the right shape at the vertex of the cutter’s V. Then it worked fine.
