Today I made a knob for the Handyman plane I’ve been working on, to go with the handle I recently made. Both are made from quite soft construction pine.
Cutting blanks from a big block of pine, I quickly realised my bandsaw was all out of whack. So I had to take a break to sort that out. Took a while! I needed to adjust pretty much everything! I even had to drill new holes in the fence clamp to help get the fence properly aligned.
The angle-grinder took the head off a long thin screw, so I could put it in the chuck of a drill. This then meant I could ‘turn’ the block, kind of primitive lathe-style, into a large tubular rod.
After this initial rounding stage, I took a lead out of Paul Seller’s book, and used a hand saw, followed by chisels/rasps, to narrow the circumference of the lower basal part of the blank. After that it was just a case of rasping, filing and so on, until I attained the desired curves.
Once I’d got a shape I was pleased with, I put the screw/shank in the vice and rotated the shaped knob off. Then the drill-press did the holes for the threaded-rod and fixing doodad.
In these pics my rather slapdash work looks ok. And I’ve learned lots. But one thing I’ve learned is I need to remake these in harder wood, and be more accurate and neat in doing so.
The day after making the front knob, I put this plane back together. Turns out it’s the scrub plane. I felt the handles I’d made weren’t seating quite right, so I made a pair of cork ‘gaskets’, using the footprint of each piece. I also had to add a bit of dowel back into the top hole of the ‘knob’. But all told, with the final bit of fettling, I’m actually quite pleased.
