Tools

It was my birthday recently, plus I had just been paid for one of my first commissions since I started Holden Concertinas, so I decided to treat myself to something a bit special. A new, high-quality hand tool that will be useful throughout my career as a concertina maker. After a lot of thought I settled on the Lie Nielsen 101 block plane.

It is very loosely based on the Stanley 101, which was apparently originally intended as a child’s toy but proved popular with modelmakers and was widely copied by other manufacturers. It features several improvements that elevate it to the level of a professional tool: a heavy, accurately machined, cast bronze body, fine screw adjustment for depth of cut, and a thick blade made from A2 steel. I normally prefer to save money by buying vintage tools and refurbishing them, but I think this is one case where the modern version really is a lot better (though if I’d had the option, I’d probably have chosen an O1 blade rather than A2 because it takes a slightly finer edge and is easier to sharpen).
Lie Nielsen advertise it as a violin maker’s plane, though I don’t think there is anything about it that makes it especially well-suited for the tasks involved in violin-making. It’s really just a very small, well made block plane. I can see it being useful for many kinds of small-scale woodworking: model boats, doll’s houses, jewellery boxes, musical instruments, etc.

My one complaint with it is that the blade was dull out of the box. The back and bevel appeared to have been surface-ground and perhaps quickly swiped across a medium grit diamond stone. The surface finish was relatively rough and unpolished, and there was a slight burr at the edge. It would cut if you forced it through the wood but it wasn’t a nice experience. I know people have different standards with regards to tool sharpness and my standards are fairly high, but I wonder how many hand-tool beginners buy a high-end tool like this with the expectation that it is going to work really well straight away. They will have a disappointing first experience of the product because it is basically horrible to use until you have learned how to sharpen the blade. Particularly since the instruction leaflet claims, “The blade comes ready to use. Slight additional honing will increase performance.” Really. It’s a bit like a high-end car maker like Mercedes selling a new car with an empty petrol tank and claiming, “The vehicle comes ready to use. The addition of fuel will increase performance.”

There is an interesting parallel between Lie Nielsen’s business model and my own. Most of LN’s tools are basically copies of vintage tools invented by Stanley and others with slight improvements to the design, improved materials, and modern manufacturing methods. The tools aren’t cheap but they are well-made (apart from the dull blade thing) and highly desirable, and as a result their business seems to be very successful.

 

Lately I’ve been adding to my collection of hand planes (I’m intending to mostly use traditional hand tools to produce the wooden parts of my concertinas). I picked up a cute little antique wooden coffin plane for a few quid in a junk shop this weekend. It’s a bevel-down smoother but it’s small and light enough to comfortably use in one hand. Here it is next to my Stanley no. 4 for comparison:

I lapped the sole flat using fine sandpaper on a sheet of glass. In this photo from half-way through the process you can see how they tend to wear most in the area in front of the mouth because of the way the wood you are planing is constantly being lifted by the splitting action of the blade. If this area of the sole is too concave you get excessive tear-out in the workpiece.

The back of the blade was very rough, probably hand forged by a local blacksmith from a piece of scrap tool steel. It seems nicely tempered though – it took a fine edge and didn’t show any damage after hitting a few hard knots with it.

It took me a couple of hours of tedious hand lapping on a coarse oilstone followed by running up through the grits to a fine polish to get the back to a decent condition. I ended up giving it a slight amount (a degree or two) of back-bevel to get rid of the deep pitting near the edge without removing metal from the entire length of the blade.

After sharpening and polishing the bevel and a coat of beeswax on the wood, it sizzled nicely through a piece of scrap pine, shooting nice curly shavings out of the mouth.If it has a flaw, it’s that it has a fairly thin blade and no cap iron, so the blade has a bit more flex than I’m used to, which means it doesn’t do very well on end grain and it has a tendency to dig in and stall when you hit a knot.

This was my Christmas present to myself.

It is a Schärf-Fix 2000 manual leather paring machine made by Teknomek HB in Sweden. I think the name means something like quick-sharp in German (presumably the model number ‘2000’ was chosen because it sounded futuristic when they were developing it!). It is used for easily and consistently thinning down leather in three different modes.

It is primarily intended for traditional bookbinders who cover books with leather, but it turns out that the construction of English-style concertina bellows has a lot in common with bookbinding. They are nicely designed and well-made machines but they are very expensive new, are highly sought-after by hobbyist bookbinders, and AFAIK no other manufacturers currently make a similar machine. I had to wait about a year for a second hand one to come up for sale on eBay. My backup plan had been to build my own by adding a roller and an adjustable blade holder to the frame of an old sewing machine.

The first operation mode is skiving. You turn the top knob to tilt the blade relative to the roller so that when you pull a piece of leather through it, it thins the edge of the piece to almost nothing at a shallow taper angle:

The reason for skiving edges is so you can glue one piece on top of another without a step, both for cosmetic reasons and so there isn’t an exposed edge to catch on things and come loose. This is what an overlapping joint might look like without any skiving:

And this is the same two pieces of leather but with the edges of both top and bottom pieces skived so the tapers match up. Looking at the vintage concertina bellows I have, joints made this way tend to be almost invisible. Unlike a butt joint, a skived overlap joint is air-tight and nearly as strong as the original leather:

The machine’s second mode is splitting: if you set the blade parallel to the roller it will pare the leather down to a controlled thickness. Although it can only pare strips 30mm wide, it’s possible to do wider pieces using multiple passes. There are two main reasons to split leather: to make it more flexible, and to compensate for variations in thickness in different parts of a hide. This photo shows a piece I split down to the sort of thickness that I think is normally used in bellows construction:

The third mode of operation is probably not very useful for concertina making. You can replace the standard parallel roller with one that has a raised portion and set the blade parallel, so it cuts a furrow out of the middle of a piece of leather, forming a more flexible area. I think bookbinders use this technique at the hinges of a book.