More tools - Luthier, jeweler, fly-tying

[reklein]

Vossiewulf does not suffer from tool collecting, he enjoys it.

[Gaetan Bordeleau]

   Vossiewulf,

 

« A replacement Xacto knife with changeable blades from Ron Hock that are Rc62 and can be made much sharper than Xacto blades »

 

As sharp as scalpel blades? And there is no need to sharpen.

[CDW]

Excellent thread. Have made note of a number of items I want/need. Thanks!

[Jaager]

Vossie,

 

For ready tool storage I use brick size blocks of 2 inches of  Styrofoam

insulation.   PVA glue it to a bit larger wood base.  Here I had to glue

two 1 inch pieces - Home Depot sells 2 x 2 project sheets.

It does not take well to hot glue and I think contact cement melts it too.

[vossiewulf]

3 hours ago, Gaetan Bordeleau said:

   Vossiewulf,

 

« A replacement Xacto knife with changeable blades from Ron Hock that are Rc62 and can be made much sharper than Xacto blades »

 

As sharp as scalpel blades? And there is no need to sharpen.

Please tell me you have a decent knife or two and don't just use scalpel blades? Because in woodworking terms scalpel blades aren't particularly sharp at all, and worse whatever edge they do have disappears almost immediately because they are made of comparatively very soft steel. Scalpels are meant to cut human flesh and to last doing that only for one surgery, are designed to use with a slicing motion, and are therefore sharpened so the actual edge has a micro-tooth pattern. Used on skin in a slicing motion this works extremely well. Pushed through wood it doesn't.

 

Minimum woodcarver sharpness is the ability to cut basswood end grain at a 90 degree angle perfectly - every fiber cut, no tears or even bending visible. Go try that with a Xacto blade or a scalpel.

 

And as mentioned, that's not even their worst characteristic for woodworking, it's the fact that the steel hovers around Rc 54 which is extremely soft for a blade that is intended to be sharp, so their edge wears away very quickly. Xacto blades are so soft that you can make their bevels mirror-smooth in just a couple of minutes using a STROP and nothing else, I've done it. There's no point however, it will cut a bit sharper for only a couple cuts before the edge fails.

 

A good knife, either Japanese or made of western-standard quality O1 or A2 tool steels can be made to any hardness. As mentioned above because western knives are made of one homogenous steel and receive the same heat treatment throughout, they can't be made much harder than Rc61-62, but that is plenty hard enough to be able to easily pass the basswood engrain-cutting test. Ron Hock's knives are this hardness and are also cryogenically treated to increase edge wear resistance, and an edge on that type of blade will last several orders of magnitude longer than an edge on an Xacto or scalpel.

 

Good Japanese knives will have Rc63-64 edges and therefore can be sharpened to an even finer edge than Hock knives (assuming same steel quality, lack of inclusions etc.), but the tradeoff is increased fragility- you're unlikely to ever snap off a piece of a Hock edge but it's pretty easy with a Japanese knife.

 

Either type, properly sharpened, is much much sharper than brand-new Xacto and scalpel blades and can be kept that sharp for a couple of weeks of regular use with just a couple touch-ups with a strop. As such they're also orders of magnitude cheaper in the long run when you look at how many Xacto/scalpel blades you buy.

 

And finally, knives that sharp produce much superior results to disposable blades and do so with much less effort. I always feel badly for modelers who have never used something better than a disposable blade and have not yet realized how much their work quality will improve through simply using really sharp tools.

[vossiewulf]

2 hours ago, Jaager said:

Vossie,

 

For ready tool storage I use brick size blocks of 2 inches of  Styrofoam

insulation.   PVA glue it to a bit larger wood base.  Here I had to glue

two 1 inch pieces - Home Depot sells 2 x 2 project sheets.

It does not take well to hot glue and I think contact cement melts it too.

That's a very good inexpensive idea, although I like stiff regular foam more than styrofoam- the latter collapses and doesn't spring back. What I have used is that stiff gray foam used for packing electronics. I have one for a bunch of those (bad) harbor freight micro carving tools where I made a quick little open-topped box out of 1/4" plywood with a piece of steel as a base, and then cut out a thick piece of that gray foam to fit inside. I can pull those little carving tools out and stab them back in repeatedly and they always hold well.

[vossiewulf]

2 hours ago, CDW said:

Excellent thread. Have made note of a number of items I want/need. Thanks!

Thanks, very glad to hear you say that - the entire reason I started this, as mentioned, was to bring the results of my (and anyone else's) endless searching for better tools to the attention of as many modelers as possible, so they get the benefits of those long searches also.

[Gaetan Bordeleau]

 Vossiewulf,

 

I do not agree with you. To make it simple an exacto blade is a a dull blade in comparison of a scalpel blade.

I work a lot  with scalpel blade  because it easier to cut and  less strength is required because it is sharper.

[vossiewulf]

3 hours ago, Gaetan Bordeleau said:

 Vossiewulf,

 

I do not agree with you. To make it simple an exacto blade is a a dull blade in comparison of a scalpel blade.

I work a lot  with scalpel blade  because it easier to cut and  less strength is required because it is sharper.

I will agree to disagree with you Gaetan  But unless you're using scalpels different than those I'm aware of, I think the metallurgy is on my side. 

 

I did this about 80% with a Hock knife and the other 20% with a Japanese knife - no scalpel I've ever seen could do this, particularly the cross-grain cuts with this cleanness. This sharpness is at the hairy edge of what an Rc62 edge can do, so demanding in terms of sharpness that even with a Hock knife I have to re-strop every 15 minutes or so.

[Gaetan Bordeleau]

Both are right. A scalpel blade cannot be use for everything, it is mostly for small jobs, smaller than what you show.

Metallurgy is not necessary on your side!  A dull hard blade is worthless.

 

I am only doing a comparison between scalpel and Exacto.

The subject of Exacto comes back often on this forum. Many peoples prefer Exacto.

I rarely use Exacto, I prefer scalpel blades because in comparison these are much sharper and I repeat sharper is easier to work.

 

 

[vossiewulf]

For anyone wanting good small ship-modeling planes at a reasonable cost, the Mujingfang planes are a good choice. I have a couple, the iron is plenty thick for this scale and is reasonably good steel. Only drawback for some is they are traditional wood planes that are adjusted by tapping, but that really isn't as hard as you might think once you learn how not to overshoot - that's when they can be irritating.

 

Anyway, almost all are $26 and considering mine work really well after some tweaking and sharpening, that seems to me to be a pretty good deal. One that I have that I find myself using frequently is the bullnose plane, its ability to get into corners is handy.

            

[vossiewulf]

Today's episode of Tools You Need That You Didn't Know You Needed....

 

CUP BURS! Here's a quick description of their "official" purpose, that of deburring, rounding, and finishing soft wire ends in jewelry. However, they work just as well on wood dowels, carbon fiber, plastic, polycarbonate, pretty much anything but hardened steel piano wire. And for that, you can find cup-shaped grinding burs in many types of grit.

 

Standard cutting-type cup burs look like this, this is on a 3/32" shank, I don't think I've seen them on 1/8" shanks but they probably exist for larger sizes.

 

Here I will demonstrate with a piece of (I think) .035" carbon fiber rod. I've intentionally cut it leaving a sloppy bad edge.

Hit it for like half a second with the cup bur though, and now it looks like this.

Square, clean, with a lightly beveled edge. Perfect!

 

Of course you can also do this with sandpaper or files, but nowhere near as consistently and ten times slower, at least. If you're cutting a wire or a dowel once a week you don't need cup burs, files and sandpaper will handle that.

 

However, if you have eleventy thousand treenail ends to prep for insertion or you're cutting lots of wires, go get yourself a cup bur or two. Best results are with a bur only slightly larger than the work piece but in my experience you can get by with just two or three sizes, buy a set of 8 if you want full coverage, or just one that's a bit larger than the largest size wire/dowel you typically work with and make do, it will still work much better than sandpaper and files.

 

[wefalck]

Yep, have a set of them and also use them on the lathe ...

[gjdale]

Jay - you're killing me! Stop feeding my addiction. No don't stop. Yes, please stop, No, don't stop...........................

[vossiewulf]

1 hour ago, gjdale said:

Jay - you're killing me! Stop feeding my addiction. No don't stop. Yes, please stop, No, don't stop...........................

Although there are larger more expensive sets, in this case you should be completely covered by a 9 piece $15 Swiss set that is .9mm - 2.3mm. So this is more of a minor flesh wound

 

However since they're only $3-$5, I'd also add a couple bigger ones between 4mm and 10mm so you can rapidly finish even 1/4" ends

 

 

[vossiewulf]

On 4/26/2017 at 10:31 AM, vossiewulf said:

$19.45 delivered for 12 diamond-coated stainless steel strips, and they seem to be made well and should last quite a long time. I'm disappointed they're only on .007" steel, I was hoping for a bit stiffer. But if nothing else you can make lots of really useful semi-files out of these and that's what I intend to do.

 

I might pick up some of the wider 6mm strips also. BTW all manufacturers seem to sell coarse/med/fine grit but no indication of how that maps to normal diamond sharpening stones and the like.

 

        

 

Looping back to this subject - some time ago I received coarse grit full-diamond strips, and I put them together with the earlier Horico medium-grit strips (I hate it when companies use meaningless generic terms like that; I'm guessing the coarse is ~100 grit and the medium 320-400 grit).

 

I've glued them to a piece of .018" spring-temper steel. I've been using an identical tool for my planking covered in various grits of PSA, I'm going to try this version as soon as I finish the knives I'm working on.

I used this glue - anyone know about it? Besides scoring the "typo our own slogan on the bottle" achievement, as you see they claim to do better on unfriendly materials and combinations. However it seems to me to be just low-odor CA, although nowhere on the bottle or anything else I've seen have they said this is CA glue. 

[vossiewulf]

For anyone who has ever considered making their own knives with custom blade shapes, I just did this and the full walkthrough on how I did is in my build log starting here. I decided I wanted paired single-bevel knives for employment in the planking method I'm using; I have lots and lots of experience using knives for precision purposes. That said, if you like my planking results you can use the same method without doing the trimming via knife the way I do it, or at least not use them to trim quite as close to the mark as I do. 

 

Single-bevel knives for me immediately bring to mind Japanese marking knives. In traditional Japanese joinery these make not just a mark to cut to, their "marks" are actually the visible edge of the joint. So they are made single-bevel with the perfectly-flat back of the knife going against the ruler with the bevel facing the waste part that will be removed, and they are made in pairs so you can make the proper marks in both directions if needed.

 

And as is usual for Japanese knives, there is only a thin strip of very high-carbon cutting edge steel that is welded to very low-carbon steel or in some cases even plain iron to provide flexibility, and as a result the cutting edge steel can be extremely hard, typically Rc63-64. And that means they can be made extremely sharp and the edge will hold for a long time.

 

So I bought a pair of 1/2" wide marking knives from Japan Woodworker, I knew the steel quality would be very good even on a mid-price marking knife, and they were $22 each. If you follow the tutorial also, you'll see I ended up cutting them in half as I didn't need the full length for the final knives, so in effect I'm going to get two knives out of each of those $22 blades.

 

Blanks for the handles can be easily had by buying pen blanks use by pen makers, and you can get extremely nice wood for this purpose for $5-$10. In my case I used a single $10 amboyna burl piece glued to 1/16" castello boxwood sheet pieces to provide extra strength - you'll want to do something similar if you go with burl wood for the outer handle parts as all burl wood is inherently weak with lots of short grain no matter which way you cut it.

 

I also mitigate that weakness by soaking the handles for an hour at least in thin CA glue, which penetrates deeply and turns the whole thing into a composite material with considerable strength.

 

This is how I will be using the knives, one for each cutting direction to ensure the cut on the work side leaves a perfectly flat and vertical surface for the next plank (after a bit of sanding to finalize) - the method I'm using is to do the taper and beveling one the plank is already glued on the ship.

And this is the result so far.

 

In any case, this is what I started with -

And that was a mistake, at least on the width - I bought 1/2" knives when I really needed no more than 1/4". This led to lots of grinding I shouldn't have needed to do.

 

And this is the final result, a pair of amboyna burl pen-handled single bevel knives that I will be using from this point forward for all planking jobs.

[michael mott]

Beautiful knives Jay.

[vossiewulf]

Thanks Michael!

[CDW]

Wow, that's awesome work.

[vossiewulf]

Thanks CDW! Hopefully people see that nothing I did should be beyond a decently-equipped shipbuilder's workshop, at least to create a basic knife - the brass balance pieces I make for my knives are in no way required, so no need for a lathe for someone to make a knife for themselves. The wood part everyone here should be able to make easily, and the finish is just thin CA glue that we all have on our benches.

 

That was the purpose of documenting making making those, to show people that if you have a bench grinder and standard ship modeler tools and equipment, you can do it too and in most cases make something much better than you can buy for maybe $10-$20 in materials. I know I can make a pretty knife if I want to, I don't need a bunch of pics to remind me

 

[vossiewulf]

An extremely precise and handy tungsten scriber. This is now my awl for all small drill holes and I've been using it for general marking on wood also, the consistent fine line can be highlighted if necessary by running a pencil gently down it.

 

 

[vossiewulf]

Jeweler's hand clamp. They come in several varieties and sizes, none more than $15 or so. This one is about 2" across and can handle a depth of about 5/8", so it can hold on to reasonably-sized parts. And it can either hold on gently or with a deathgrip depending on how hard you tap the wedge in. It's very good for filing brass/metal pieces and knife and carving work.

 

Only things I did to this one were 1) filing the top so it made a flat surface when clamped on small things, and 2) disc-sanded a flat into the wedge piece as otherwise it might drop out and roll all the way across the floor, not that I would know.

Edited January 26, 2019 by vossiewulf

[Bob Cleek]

I've tried to avoid this thread. It's "an occasion of sin," as my Catholic grammar school nuns used to say. Unfortunately, I continue to be tempted by all the goodies that keep being posted. (Thanks to all of you for sharing! This thread should get it's own category... a running "tools review" thread.)

 

Here's my contribution. It's a "Lowell pattern" jeweler's vise. I'd wanted one for quite some time, but never got around to it. I decided to take a chance on this one because at less than twenty bucks with free shipping on eBay, how bad could it hurt if it turned out to be junk?  I was pleasantly surprised when it arrived. It's a well-made hefty tool. I like the weight of it compared to my wooden one similar to the one pictured above, although the wooden one is easier on small parts perhaps.

 

It's main attraction is that the jaws tighten by rotating the handle and it has a hole running through the handle so that wire and rod of any length can be accommodated. Its primary use by jewelers is to pull wire through draw plates.  Details can be found on eBay at: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Lowell-Pattern-Hand-Vise-Wire-Working-Tool-Hand-Held-Vise-Hollow-Handle-Drawtong/202242174597?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2648

 

 

[pontiachedmark]

Gidday everyone.

As Bob says above, I too have been avoiding this post.

But gee, I really like the look of that Jewelers vise and the hand clamp from vossiewolf. 

I guess I'll have to make some room on my already cluttered work surface.

"I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it". Mae West.

All the best.

Mark.

[vossiewulf]

I am the angel of temptation, bow before my ability to cause marital strain

 

Actually I am in fact trying to help people by providing solutions to some problems that they're probably not familiar with because they're not someone like me who trolls through catalogs and sites for all sorts of industrial/professional suppliers. And anyone else is welcome to post things they find, too.

 

Bob, I have one of those too and I thought about making it into a hand clamp, but to do so I put leather over the teeth on the jaws, and that was a problem because much of the gripping power comes from those teeth, not how tight you can twist the handle. In other words it works well as a hand clamp, but only for things that don't require too much force to hold. The jeweler's wedge hand clamps can grip much harder.

[Bob Cleek]

7 hours ago, vossiewulf said:

In other words it works well as a hand clamp, but only for things that don't require too much force to hold. The jeweler's wedge hand clamps can grip much harder.

I just got it and haven't put it to use "in the field" as yet, but I noticed the same thing just fiddling with it. It's mainly for drawing wire or wood through a drawplate. It should hold small stuff as a vise, too, but I agree that you really can't clamp it down as tightly as a vise with a wedge or a bench vise with a turning bar on the screw.