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…
When I first got into hand tool woodworking, back in the 90s, I started with nothing. To build up my working set of tools quickly, I started attending tool auctions, which in those days were mostly collectors with a few users, tools were fairly plentiful, and relatively inexpensive, which was good for me. In particular, I filled out my tool set quickly by buying box lots of goods, each of which had things I needed. Of course, I also ended up getting other odds and ends, things I didn’t recognize or didn’t need, or didn’t know I needed. Among those was a small spoke pointer and a hollow auger. This is the hollow auger, which shaves down the shoulder of a tenon in a circular fashion, leaving a round tenon behind. Once I cleaned it up, lubricated the squeaking handle, and sharpened the rather dull cutter (possibly for the first time in a century) it worked very well.
